Hate to say it but if there were ever a team Terry Francona were ill suited to manage, it’s this Sox team with its thin bullpen.  I understand that Earl Weaver and Ozzie Guillen’s hypothetical love child himself couldn’t will this Sox bullpen into a useful one but I bet that volatile little fella could at least optimize.  The blueprint should be scrapped, stomped on and burned.  The Red Sox no longer have the luxury of using a closer.  They just need pitchers - pitchers capable of getting outs and pitchers capable of doing so without yielding exorbitant amounts of runs. 

Last night the Sox lost a game by one run in which Jonathan Papelbon did not pitch but Kason Gabbard did.  Papelbon saw all of two innings in the Sox weekend sweep at the hands of the Yanks. There is no excuse for not using Papelbon at all when he is rested in these types of contests.  He needs to be leaned upon down the stretch, as he is one of very few reliable pitchers that the Red Sox employ. 

Of course check out the local writers these days or flip on sports radio and guess who public enemy #1 is?  You guessed it, Manny Ramirez.  Ramirez, who is hitting .329/.445/.635 this season and is more responsible for what success the Sox have experienced this season than any of his teammates is again being called out because he disagreed with an official scorer over the weekend on a call, according to Sean McAdam.  Somehow writers are taking liberties now and assuming that his hamstring is not in fact sore but that he is just pouting.  Whatever.  Since I do not know what happened with this situation and I certainly do not know that Ramirez is not hurting, I refuse to speculate.

What I do know is that, unlike the racist, bloviating Boston mainstream press I am not going to pin the current Red Sox plight on the one guy that had the balls to show up over the weekend against the Bombers.  Ramirez hit .727/.850/1.455 against New York over the five games and was more or less the only reason Boston had even a crack at any of the games.  Oh an by the way, he ranks among MLB’s top 20 in games played over the last five seasons. 

Manny Ramirez is having one of the best seasons a Red Sox slugger has ever enjoyed and yet he has to endure this shit.  Meanwhile, media darlings Jason Varitek and Trot Nixon, when not on the disabled list, underperform, putz and stumble through 2006, each as responsible for Boston’s diappointments this season as Ramirez is the squad’s successes.  But there’s a difference between those two and Ramirez, isn’t there?