Yesterday I said that the Red Sox needed to step it up on defense and that they wouldn’t be able to get away with 4 errors again. Well, apparently I was wrong. Yet again the Red Sox made four errors — three by Bill Mueller alone. And yet again, the Red Sox escaped unharmed with a 6-2 win to go up 2-0 in the Series. Miraculously, only one of the errors contributed to a run — Mueller missed a play at third in the 4th inning and Albert Pujols scored. Once this series heads to St. Louis and David “Mr October” Ortiz puts on a glove, who knows what will happen in the field.
But the real story of last night belongs to Curt “My Red Socks Are More Hardcore Than Yours” Schilling and his bloody ankle. He’s either the stupidest man in baseball, or the bravest. I haven’t quite decided. Either way, with six solid innings, he’s definitely The Man. You also have to give him credit for wearing his cause on his shoes — “K ALS” which translates to “Strikeout Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.” Curt’s Pitch has raised millions of dollars to help those living with Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
Offensively, The Man is turning out to be Mark “Who Wants to Bench Me Now?” Bellhorn, who came through with another pair of RBIs off a double in the 4th to put the Sox up 4-1. Including games 6 and 7 of the ALCS, Bellhorn, who practically couldn’t get a hit in the first 5 games against the Yankees, suddenly has 11 RBIs in his last four games. For Whom The Bell Horns, indeed.

And now for more random baseball history trivia…
Last night, Tom “Just How Many Movies Have I Peed In?” Hanks sat in the Green Monster seats and was asked by a FOX reporter, “Are you a Red Sox fan?” Hanks responded with “I’m an American.” Besides apparently being raised an Athletics fan, Tom Hanks’s most famous tie to baseball comes from his role in one of my three favorite movies of all time, A League of Their Own. Hanks played Jimmy “There’s No Crying In Baseball” Dugan, the fictitious manager of the Rockford Peaches in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.
To bring this back to the Red Sox, Dugan is supposedly loosely based on Hall of Famer Jimmie “The Beast” Foxx who played from 1925 to 1945, spending 1936 to 1942 with, you guessed it, the Boston Red Sox. Often overshadowed by one of his contemporaries (some guy named George Herman Something-Or-Other), Foxx hit 534 career home runs, 217 of them with Boston. After he retired, he spent a season managing the Fort Wayne Daisies in 1952.