Two previous games, two total runs. Thursday night, runs were scoring every time you turned around. 14-9 Red Sox. Such is baseball.

Recapping all the runs chronologically would take forever, so let's look at a few highlights. Like Manny Ramirez: Two home runs, including a bomb in the second that landed near Akron. Mike Lowell: three-for-five. And (sit down) Wily Mo Pena (!), who went 4-for-5 (!) with a 3-run home run that blew the game open in the seventh. We couldn't have been more surprised if Wily Mo pitched three scoreless innings.

The beneficiary of this? Unfortunately, not starter Kason Gabbard, whose road woes continued; he left with a lead but struggled enough that he couldn't go the five innings needed to claim a win. So the win went to Julian Tavarez in relief, despite giving up a three-run shot to Ryan "Don't Call Me Donnie" Garko (all unearned runs).

Tonight, it's on to Tampa Bay, where Tim Wakefield tries to continue his career-long dominance of the Devil Rays, against Jason Hammel.

The Royals finally stirred last night, shutting out the Yankees and raising the Sox' lead back up to 7 1/2. The Yankees question tonight is: when is 500 not 500? Alex Rodriguez officially has hit 499 career home runs, but he also hit one in a game at Baltimore that was suspended and will be finished tonight. So, unless Baltimore is washed to the sea and the game is never finished, he's already hit #500 and not gotten a chance to celebrate. Ha ha.

Mike Reiss at the Globe will be in Foxboro all day, updating the first day of Patriots' training camp. You could read Dan Shaughnessy's column about camp opening, but you can probably guess 97% of it. Yes, he includes 65 pounds of Grade-A Hyberbole. Yes, he slams Randy Moss. Yes, he includes a Steppenwolf lyric. Mad-Libs, anyone?

Manny photo from Flickr's Giberson.