« Baseball Today: Tuesday, September 18
Main
Sox-Jays lineups »
September 18, 2007
Click here to listen to today's edition of projo SoxTalk with Sean McAdam. Today's topics: Dustin McGowan's shut-down effort last night; Frank Thomas' three home runs; facing A.J. Burnett tonight; pressure on Jon Lester; keeping the rust from Clay Buchholz; extra rest for Daisuke Matsuzaka; Kevin Youkilis' wrist injury; and the Indians and the Angels now just one game behind in the loss column.
Here are some excerpts from Sean's comments.
Tonight's pitching matchup: "Burnett's stuff, people in the game will say, is as good as anybody's in the game. He has the ability to shut you down when he's on, and he's been on one of those rolls. ... For Lester, the issues really aren't very different for him as he develops. It's keeping his pitch count down, being aggressive, being able to throw strike one."
Buchholz, poised to start tomorrow after a long layoff: "They've had him throw a number of side sessions -- either during the afternoon or, as was the case last night, while the game was going on, he threw about 25 or 30 pitches in the bullpen. Of course there's no replicating game conditions, and the tempo and the challenges that come with facing major-league hitters, but they've tried to work out a routine for him where he's at least throwing on a regular basis, every couple of days, and there's some structure to it. And they hope that he's going to be able to kind of flip the switch here, having not pitched in 10 days and having not started a game in a few weeks."
Youkilis: "He's still very sore, three days removed from being struck on the hand by a pitch from Chien-Ming Wang on Saturday. And there's still a lot of swelling, so that makes it difficult to really evaluate what the issue is here. They did take an x-ray almost immediately, which revealed no broken bone, but there's a lot of small bones in the hand, and it may take an MRI to reveal one of those. But because there's swelling in the area, they can't do that yet. ... I'd be surprised if we saw him in this series. I think he's probably going to need until Friday, anyway, before he can get back and swing the bat the way he would like."
Posted by Mike McDermott 
at 10:39 AM | Permalink
