Sunday Night Baseball on Five – Angels versus Red Sox

Presumably, tonight’s game on Five will be the Angels against the Red Sox.  That’s the only game of the three being played today that takes place at night in the States, but first pitch (00.27) is scheduled for half an hour before Five’s coverage begins (00.55).  They may join the action late and recap what has happened prior to that point, or they might start from the beginning and broadcast ‘as live’.  Either way, it should be a great game. 

Series so far

The Angels were the first team to clinch a postseason spot and their 100 regular season wins led the Majors.  Meanwhile Boston made it through to October via the wild card, having been beaten in the AL East by the upstart Rays.  Those facts would make you think that the Angels were favourites for the series, but not many people saw it that way.  The reigning World Series champs are formidable opponents and fans in L.A. would have been desperate for a home sweep in Anaheim to give them the best possible chance to knock them out.

Instead, the Red Sox went to L.A. and swept the Angels to give them two chances at Fenway to make it through to the ALCS.  Things were going well for the Halos in game one, with their ace John Lackey holding the Red Sox scoreless through the first five frames, while Torii Hunter singled in a run in the third inning.  Mid-season acquisition Jason Bay turned the game on its head with a two-run homer in the sixth and the Red Sox tacked on two insurance runs in the top of the ninth to pad the score to a final of 4-1.

When the Red Sox smashed four runs off Ervin Santana in the first inning of game two, including another two-run bomb by Bay, a rout appeared on the cards.  The Angels showed their fighting qualities by coming back and levelling the score 5-5 in the bottom of the eighth, only for J.D. Drew to smack a two-run jack off closer Francisco Rodriguez as the Red Sox won 7-5.  Trudging off the field in front of a subdued Anaheim crowd, the Angels looked like a team that had well and truly had the stuffing knocked out of them. 

The question now is whether the Angels have been able to use the travel day to re-group?

Starting pitchers

If the Angels are going to fight back, they are going to have to do it against a pitcher who has been little short of sensational during his postseason career.  Josh Beckett would have started game one had an oblique injury not kept him on the sidelines.  Instead, he has the chance to win the series for the Red Sox and he has proved in the past that he relishes such big occasions.  It has been a solid rather than a spectacular year for Beckett (12-10, 4.03 ERA in the regular season), but there’s no one the Red Sox would prefer to have on the mound tonight than the former Marlin.

Joe Saunders is the man tasked with keeping a lid on Boston’s offence tonight.  When the Angels began the season with John Lackey and Kelvim Escobar on the DL, they needed other starters to step up and fill those sizeable holes at the front of the rotation.  Alongside Ervin Santana, Saunders did just that.  Building on his eighteen Major League starts in ’07, Saunders made a big jump forward in his first year as a full-time regular, finishing the season with a team-leading seventeen wins and a 3.41 ERA.  He doesn’t have over-powering stuff, but he has good command of a solid four-pitch repertoire.