Sports Redux: The Rest of the Kids Are All Right

Never go on stage after the banjo act, they say, and try not to pitch the day after your teammate throws a no-hitter. There's really nowhere to go but down.

Aubrey Huff singled in the second for the Orioles. That right there is a letdown after Buchholz' masterpiece on Saturday. But the Red Sox - well, actually, the PawSox mostly, since the average age of the guys in the lineup yesterday was 15.4 - recovered and got Jon Lester his third win of the year and his first at Fenway.

The kid who stepped up the most yesterday was fleet-footed Jacoby Ellsbury, who hit his first major-league homer, ably covered the 450 acres of the outfield that Coco Crisp usually handles, and fixed the left-field scoreboard after a number got knocked off of it. If you call for tickets (which you won't get), there's a good chance Ellsbury will answer the phone.

Other youngsters who performed well, even if they look like grizzled vets next to the n00bs, were Okajima, who got out of a tight spot in the eighth with two strikeouts, and Papelbon, who did his thing in the ninth and sent a sad Birds team off to the airport.

Meanwhile, the Devil Rays were doing unto Andy Pettitte what the Sox couldn't, knocking him around and handing the Yankees a loss. So the lead is back up to six, the magic number is 20 (we've kept track all year, but didn't want to make a thing out of it until September), and the Yanks have a critical series with the Mariners coming up to try to lock down the wild-card spot. Go M's!!!

Dan Shaughnessy discovers that managing the Sox is a tough job. It's an interesting read, but hearing it from Dan is kind of like the older brother's reliable "Why are you hitting yourself?" trick. Negativity in Boston, Dan? O RLY?

Yesterday, in the afterglow of the no-hitter, when we asked who cares what was going on with the rest of the sporting world, we should have mentioned that Rodney Harrison got suspended for four games for taking a banned hormone. Frankly, we didn't want to think about it yesterday. Frankly, we still don't.

Sox-Jays tonight; Daisuke Matsuzaka against Jesse Litsch.

Image from the PawSox store.