Angels 5, Red Sox 4
By Steve Yanda
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 6, 2008
BOSTON, Oct. 5 -- On a chilly night at Fenway Park when a restless home crowd expected the affair to play out as some sort of formality, nothing seemed quite right. The Boston Red Sox, the American League wild card, held a 2-0 series lead on the Los Angeles Angels, the only team in the majors to have won 100 games in the regular season. But that was merely the most obvious clue.
Rather, Red Sox shortstop Jed Lowrie officially declared Game 3 of this division series a starkly unusual narrative when he popped out to right field with two outs and the bases loaded in the bottom of the 10th inning. No mystical Boston postseason heroics? Something truly was afoul.
In the top of the 12th, Angels shortstop Erick Aybar lined a single to center off Javier Lopez that scored Mike Napoli from second base. Los Angeles pitcher Jered Weaver, making the first relief appearance of his career, recorded the final three outs of a game that lasted 5 hours 19 minutes.
The Angels won, 5-4, to extend this series, and their season, one more day. Though Manager Mike Scioscia correctly predicted before the game that his team would not be eliminated that night, the victory was far from preconceived.
Boston's postseason ace, Josh Beckett, labored through five innings of inconsistent effort. Gold Glove third baseman Mike Lowell toiled to make accurate throws. Game 2 hero J.D. Drew was out of the starting lineup with a sore back.
Los Angeles -- a team Scioscia said before the game was not built to survive off home runs -- proceeded to survive off home runs. The Angels also made a critical and uncharacteristic fielding blunder.
Napoli tied the game and later provided the Angels a brief lead with a pair of home runs. The Angels had gone 68 postseason innings without a home run prior to Napoli's two-run shot in the third. Napoli, who batted seventh in the Angels' lineup, poked another Beckett offering over the Green Monster two innings later.
"Hopefully, about a month from now we'll talk about that 3-2 breaking ball that [Napoli] hit off one of the toughest pitchers ever in a playoff environment. That was big," Scioscia said.
In addition to Napoli's two blasts, Beckett allowed four walks on the night. He had not handed out more than two free passes in an outing since May 30. Beckett struggled especially in the first, when his performance necessitated three visits to the mound by catcher Jason Varitek and his pitch count rose to 30.
Whether Beckett would even make this start was in question prior to two days before the game. A strained oblique prohibited Beckett from starting Game 1, and only after a successful extended bullpen session Thursday did Manager Terry Francona give the right-hander the go-ahead.
Without his top stuff, Beckett lasted just five innings, the shortest postseason start of his career. He allowed nine hits -- also a career postseason high -- and four earned runs.
On the other hand, Angels promising youngster Joe Saunders (West Springfield) knew since the postseason began that he would take the mound on Sunday night. After the Angels dropped both decisions in Anaheim, Saunders's task grew more crucial, but his 17-7 regular season record and accompanying all-star selection suggested he was up for the challenge.
Saunders breezed through the first five outs, toeing the far right edge of the rubber as his smooth wind-up delivery relieved batter after batter. Then he sandwiched walks to Lowrie and Coco Crisp around a Varitek single. With two outs, all Saunders needed was a popup, and he got it on his seventh pitch to Jacoby Ellsbury.
He pointed his left hand to the sky, turned and waited. Each of the three Red Sox base runners had taken off before Saunders released his 3-2 pitch to the plate and were circling toward home. That didn't seem to concern the Angels' southpaw, though. Surely, one of the three Los Angeles fielders ranging toward the descending ball would nab it. Inning over. Scoring threat extinguished.
And then, one by one, Saunders's lieutenants stood down. Aybar slowed to a trot. Second baseman Howie Kendrick came to halt. And center fielder Torii Hunter watched Ellsbury's three-run single drop right in front of him.
Saunders's left hand crammed down upon his cap and his face scrunched. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, it was the first three-run single in postseason history. Saunders left after 4 2/3 innings of work, having allowed five hits and four runs.
Four hours before first pitch, a handful of Red Sox fans lined up outside the will-call window near Gate A. They had tickets for Game 4, they said. How should they go about trading them in for American League Championship Series stubs, they wondered.
For a franchise that went 86 years in between World Series titles before claiming two in the past four seasons, the first two wins of this first-round matchup against the team with the best 2008 regular season record in baseball came almost too smoothly. Poised to watch their Sox sweep the Angels for the third time in as many postseason meetings, Boston fans allowed their collective hubris to swell.
Matters were similarly off-kilter on the field. Lowell, who sat out Game 2 to rest a right hip injury, gingerly planted off his right foot on throws all night. When Juan Rivera struck out in the fifth, Varitek began the around-the-horn toss to Lowell, who then bounced his throw to Lowrie into left field.
Indeed, nothing seemed quite right Sunday night at Fenway Park.
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