Sox Lose. Eck Swears.

Sox: 3 Mets: 5

If the Sox had to lose tonight, it might as well be to one of the best pitchers in the game. Hey, at least they scored some runs off of him. Granted, not all of them were earned, but it was great to see Tek take him deep in the second. Tek drove Santana and the Mets crazy the better part of the game, with the homer and then two liners that were mishandled by the Mets' second-string shortstop. One of those two errors caused two runs to score, but since it was ruled an error, Tek got credit for only one RBI.

Dice-K, while he took the loss, didn't do all that bad in his first post-DL start. He sailed through the first three, with the only blemish being a homer by Gary Sheffield in the second. In the fourth inning, after allowing a one-out double and then a walk and an RBI single to score the Mets' second run, his defense burned him when Lugo couldn't turn a double play on a ball hit to Pedey. Murphy's law of baseball says that when an inning-ending double play is botched, you will pay dearly and they paid to the tune of two more runs. Dice-K also got burned by the home plate ump when the 1-2 pitch he threw to Santos was ruled a ball, even though the pitch tracker showed it was clearly a strike. Santos went on to single and then Ramon Ramirez (no, not our ace reliever) also singled. Had that critical double play been turned, Dice would have been out of the fourth only having allowed one more Mets run instead of three. Had the ump correctly called that third strike on Santos, Dice-K would have also been out of that inning with only one run.

Now for the Eck swearing part. It's the bottom of the fifth with two outs and no one on, thanks to Papi grounding into a double play that was not flubbed. Santana drills Youk in the hand and words are exchanged between the pitcher and batter as Youk takes his base. Youk mouths something that Eck interprets out loud as "sh!t". Oops! Tsk tsk, Eck! The FCC's gonna slap ya for that one. Back to Youk and Santana: fortunately the umps intervened and no fracas took place.

Tomorrow night, Beckett faces Mike Pelfrey. The Sox need to win these next two games, as a road trip which includes two domes starts Monday. Domes, like the west coast, have not been kind to the Sox. First comes the "Homerdome" in Minnesota, then the Rogers Center in Toronto. The Sox would have to be very lucky to miss Halladay again. After Toronto, they head to Comerica in Detroit, which is, thankfully, not a dome.

LET'S GO RED SOX!!!!