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BOSTON-The Sox pulled off their first 3 game sweep of the Oakland A's since 1999, and it couldn't have come at a better time with the Sox still 6 games back of the Yankees and in a tight race with Oakland in the Wild Card race. It wasn't all easy though. The Red Sox outslugged Oakland the first two games of the series 22-3, and had brooms in their dreams on Wednesday night. Their dreams came true Thursday evening when they squeaked by the A's, 8-7, in ten innings on a Bill Mueller, two-out double that scored Johnny Damon from first base.
Justin Lehr started the 10th for the A's. He struck out Jason Varitek and got Mark Bellhorn to ground out. Damon then singled to left to extend his hit streak to 13 games. Mueller then lined a ball to the left-center field gap that was bobbled by Mark Kotsay. Damon who never slowed down, beat Bobby Crosby's throw to the plate to score the winning run.
Things looked good for the Red Sox early on as they jumped out to a quick 4-0 lead after three innings, and greatered that gap in the fifth inning making it 7-1. Curt Schilling, the starter for the Red Sox, ran into some lengthy innings early on, which forced him out of the game with some struggles after 119 pitches in 5 1/3 innings. Mike Timlin came in for relief after Alan Embree pitched 2/3 innings of perfection. Timlin surrendered 3 runs on 4 hits in 1 1/3 innings. Keith Foulke came in and surrendered the tieing run, only to be relived by Curtis Leskanic who pitched 23 innings to get the win.
Oakland scored three runs in the eighth inning to tie the game 7-7. Marco Scutaro led off the inning with a single. Adam Melhuse, pinch hitting for Ramon Castro, drove home Scutaro with a double. Embree, who entered in relief of Schilling in the sixth, retired Kotsay. Foulke came on to strike out Eric Byrnes. But Scott Hatteberg singled to score Melhuse and Jermaine Dye tripled to score Hatteberg and tie the game.
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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way -- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
To deem the 2004 Red Sox season to this point a roller coaster would be a severe understatement. The intricacies of every twist and turn can be explained best only by the best, in the opening passage of the late Charles Dickens’s famed novel, A Tale of Two Cities. Sure, it was the best of times; they were 15-6 and had taken six of seven from the dreaded rival New York Yankees. Sluggers Nomar Garciaparra and Trot Nixon hadn’t even returned from injury yet. Heading into May and a doubleheader with the “lowly” Texas Rangers, the Sox were merely looking to pad their growing lead in the dominant American League East. Pedro Martinez was on the mound for one of the two games, and the Sox had just swept a doubleheader from the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, why couldn’t they do it again?
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