Sports Redux: A Nice Party, Spoiled

It started off well. #14 was unveiled in right field, the man of the hour got to speak, and everyone was happy. On Jim Rice Day at Fenway, what could go wrong?

Well, it's 2009, so there's no simple answer to the question. The starting pitching had been settled by Beckett's gem on Monday, and the offense had found its groove again with the arrival of the Oakland A's. So it fell to relief pitching and defense to screw up the festivities last night. The Sox hung a 5 on the board in the third and gave Clay Buchholz a 6-2 lead when he departed in the sixth. But Okajima gave up a run, Papelbon got in trouble, and two throwing errors by Nick Green, on two consecutive batters, allowed Oakland to turn a 7-4 9th-inning lead into extra innings. Manny Delcarmen was charged for two runs in the 11th, and the Sox could only get one of them back in the bottom of the inning for a 9-8 loss.

"Things like that happen. It is what it is," said the Zen master Papelbon afterwards. "Neither one of those [plays] was easy...I didn’t physically mess them up. I mean I did, but the one play was mental," said Nick Green on his fielding woes. "The game got away from us late," summed up Terry Francona.

The Summer of Love gets better and better; not only do we have a troubling and flawed team, but we have controversy! Bostonist noted yesterday that Daisuke Matsuzaka has been grumbling to the Japanese press about the team's training regimen. (He says that he pitched well for two years because of the savings in his shoulder he built up while training in the proper Japanese style.) Yesterday, Francona and pitching coach John Farrell got in their rebuttals, saying they wish Dice hadn't taken private gripes public. Farrell got in a pretty good zinger: "It’s one thing to say that, ‘OK, we’ll let you go 125 pitches.' But you know what? You’ve got to go out and be effective. We’re not just going to let someone sit on the mound and throw 125 pitches and be down, 10-0." How do you say "burned" in Japanese?

With the hint of turmoil in the clubhouse, you know Dan Shaughnessy won't be far behind to lovingly blow everything out of proportion. Luckily, the Internet was up early today to pick Dan's column apart. Now Dan can go back to saving his shoulder for the next Manny story.

Tampa Bay beat the Yankees, so the Sox remain 2 1/2 out of first (and now 1 1/2 up on Texas and 4 up on TB for the wild card). Elsewhere in sports, Mark Buehrle had things a little uncomfortable in the Vander Meer home, taking a perfect game into the sixth before blowing up and losing to the Twins. And Brett Favre decided he wasn't going to play this year, after all, for the moment, anyway, which has to be great news for the Vikings, who were no doubt basing a lot of their offseason plans on him deciding he did want to play, for them, for one year, this one last time.

And the Bruins are saying "Hej då!" to P.J. Axelsson, who's going to play in his native Sweden. His agent says it's nothing personal and he loved his time here, adding, "Figuratively speaking, he has that Bruin logo tattooed on his butt." Two words make all the difference in the world. The longest-serving Bruin on the team, P.J. goes back to the days of Ray Bourque and Teddy Donato. That honor now passes to Tim Thomas.

Photo by Elise Amendola/Associated Press.