Red Sox odds and ends

A couple of odds and ends.

I really dislike the West coast road trips. Baseball is a major part of the rhythm of the summer for me, to have a game every night. It's part of life. The last 7:00 game that they played was on Tuesday of last week, over a week ago. I miss it. They're still playing (most days), but it just doesn't feel right.

It goes without saying that yesterday afternoon wasn't pleasant for the Red Sox or Red Sox fans. It happens. The problem is that it comes at the end of a stretch where they've played 6 games in 7 days, and 4 of them have started at 10:00 at night. The only two games that many people have had a chance to see in the last week were the Sunday loss at Seattle and the debacle yesterday. Not that anyone in Red Sox Nation would overreact, of course, but maybe it was just one game yesterday...

There's a lot of dissatisfaction with David Wells this morning. Understandable dissatisfaction. But the people slamming him as selfish for not having taken a rehab start strike me as classic 2nd guessers. Yes, he hadn't started a game in 23 days. But last year, he took exactly the same break with a hand injury. 23 days after his last start, without a rehab start, he took the mound and shut out the Red Sox for 5 2/3 innings. In the light of what happened, we can all wish that he hadn't started in Oakland yesterday. But there was no good reason to expect what happened to happen, and I don't think that there's legitimate criticism that can be made of the move today.

The Red Sox have a team that thrives at home. Thus far, no other team in Major League Baseball has played as many road games (24), as few home games (16) or as great a percentage of their games on the road (60%) as the Boston Red Sox. After coming home for 3, they're going back out on the road for 6 more next week. At some point, their schedule is going to get very home-heavy. Division opponents New York and Baltimore, on the other hand, have played two of the three home-heaviest schedules in baseball so far.

At 23-17, they're on a pace for 93 wins. However, if you look at their home record (11-5) and road record (12-12) and extrapolate those percentages for the remaining games, they're on a pace for 96+ wins. And they're on those paces without any (positive) contributions from Schilling, little from Wells, and bad starts for Foulke, Bellhorn, Millar, Renteria, Ramirez and Ortiz.

As bad as the road trip was (and it was bad - losing 4 of 6 to those two teams is a bad thing), there was at least one positive, as Mark Bellhorn had a great trip. He hit .350/.480/.750/1.230 on the trip to raise his season line to .239/.350/.402/.752. There will be people amazed by this, but that gets him right back into the top 3rd of Major League 2nd basemen. People like to complain about him because of the strikeouts, but he's been far and away the most productive hitter in the Red Sox infield so far. (Talk about damning with faint praise, but still...)