BOSTON — There is an image, of the American League in general, and the Boston Red Sox in particular, of a big, slow team that would rather wait for a three-run homer than play the kind of baseball thought to be the province of the National League.
To be sure, with boppers like Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, the Red Sox are capable of going yard with anyone. But if the 2007 playoffs have proven anything, it’s that the squad facing the Rockies in the World Series can also beat you with patient, grind-it-out baseball.
“They were patient; they didn’t panic when they had two strikes,” Rockies first baseman Todd Helton said about Game 1 of the World Series. “Obviously they had a lot of two-strike hits, a lot of two-out hits. They had a lot of professional at-bats.”
Boston’s approach includes laying off borderline pitches, which in turn not only forces opposing pitchers to deliver the ball closer to the middle of the plate, making them much more hittable. It also serves to build up the hurler’s pitch count. Jeff Francis, Colorado’s Game 1 starter Wednesday, had 103 pitches in just four innings. Similarly, in the American League Championship Series, C.C. Sabathia and Fausto Carmona of the Cleveland Indians, both 19-game winners and Cy Young contenders, made it as far as the sixth inning just once in four combined starts.
Much of that damage, as was the case in the Red Sox’s 13-1 Game 1 rout, was done by first baseman Kevin Youkilis. Actually, Youkilis’ 2-for-5 effort Wednesday was something of a comedown – the 28-year-old set an ALCS record by batting .500 against the Indians.
In just his third full major-league season, Youkilis has found a niche in Boston by relentlessly battling pitchers. In the 2006 season, Youkilis saw 3,004 pitches, more than any AL player except Cleveland’s Grady Sizemore. That season he averaged more than 4.4 pitches in 680 plate appearances.
“He takes every at-bat like it’s the last; that’s part of the reason he’s good,” Red Sox manager Terry Francona said Thursday. “Youk’s ability to never give at-bats away is phenomenal.”
Helton said Thursday that is a quality that is particularly hard to maintain, given the rigors of a major-league season.
“You can get out of that; you can get out of rhythm,” Helton said. “You can start to feel like you’re panicking a little bit when you’re not seeing the ball as well, so you try to jump on the first pitch because you don’t feel as confident with two strikes.”
Strike one, strike two, it hasn’t mattered for Youkilis, who had a nine-game postseason hitting streak entering Game 2 and had reached base in 12 of his past 20 plate appearances.
“You’re more comfortable in the fact that you just have more (confidence) at the plate,” Youkilis said after Game 1. “But other than that I think I just go up there and just try to go pitch-to-pitch.
“I know I can’t get two or three hits in my first at-bat. I’ve got to go up there, have a good at-bat and get on base for David and Manny behind me.”
Youkilis, who bats second for the Red Sox, hit just 16 homers in the 2007 regular season. However, his ability to consistently get on base in front of Ortiz, Ramirez and Mike Lowell, the Red Sox’s big RBI producers, has also belied another one of baseball’s chestnuts – that a team’s first and third basemen have to be among its best home run hitters.
“You need to have power in your lineup; Youk isn’t the prototypical corner bat,” Francona said. “But he’s got about a .400 on-base percentage, he works pitchers. You can have your corner guy hitting second if you have somebody else in the middle and we have David, Manny and Lowell.”
