Late September, Sox Win, Life Good

A good start to a long trip. Those first few miles of highway always seem to set the tone, and the Sox put them happily in the rearview with an efficient 3-1 win. Young Buchholz continued his progress, improving to 6-3 on the season, going six strong and giving up only 5 hits and one run, a hanging change to Luke "I've hit how many home runs?" Scott. Tonight marked Buchh's fourth win in five tries. During that stretch of five games, he's thrown 34 and 1/3 innings and given up only 6 earned runs. If that's not a case for the third playoff start, I don't know what is.

The Sox just seem to click in Baltimore - despite lingering under .500 on the road, they're 6 for 7 at the Inner Harbor. Tonight they only got three runs on the board, but they pieced together eleven hits and seemed in control on offense throughout the night. No surprise that it happened in Baltimore - Camden has uncrowned Coors Field this season for the highest stadium batting average, coming in at a cool .288 (Angels Stadium is 2nd at .282, followed by Kauffman and Coors tied at .277).

Jacoby and Kotchman provided much of the evening's firepower, along with a home run from Jason Bay, who swung his bat like it was a hot potato. Seriously, one second it was on his shoulder, the next it was halfway flung to the dugout and the ball was sailing into the bleachers. (A personal aside - I've watched many games from the Camden bleachers, but by far the best moment was when I offered my then-girlfriend to warming reliever Rich Garces, if only he would get three outs. El Guapo, as only El Guapo could, looked her over, opened the gate, turned back, shrugged, and hollered "okay." I rushed her to the train after, looking over my shoulder all that week.) Bay later left the game with flu-like symptoms, meaning no more crab cakes before tomorrow's games.

All in all another chilly victory. Someone should measure the correlation between cool-evening baseball and life happiness. Right now I'm thinking the numbers are gonna be off the charts. Another month or so of this and I might just be ready for the first three quarters of Patriots football and some Rasheed Wallace antics. I'll be a calm man. Autumn baseball is just good for the soul.