King Kaufman's Sports Daily
World Series: Beckett 1, Momentum 0. Red Sox ace mesmerizes the formerly hot Rockies in a blowout. Plus: "The epitome of our culture."
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Oct. 25, 2007 | A 13-1 win doesn't count for any more than a 2-1 win does, and that's about all the Colorado Rockies can take from their waxing by the Boston Red Sox Wednesday night in Game 1 of the World Series. That, and they probably weren't going to beat Josh Beckett anyway.
Beckett was his habitual dazzling October self for seven innings, a few of which took place after the Sox had salted the game away with two runs in the fourth and seven more in a fifth inning that lasted longer than some of George Steinbrenner's managers did. If you had Little League flashbacks watching Rockies reliever Ryan Speier walk in three straight runs, you weren't alone.
This wasn't what you might call your ebb-and-flow kind of game. Beckett struck out the side in the top of the first and Dustin Pedroia hit a home run off Rockies starter Jeff Francis to lead off the bottom half. That's about as good a start as it's possible to have in baseball, or as bad a start, from the Rockies' point of view. And it sort of went downhill for them after that.
Francis and reliever Franklin Morales had nothing. They served up a hearty mix of meatballs and more meatballs that the Red Sox turned into eight doubles to go with Pedroia's homer. The head groundskeeper had a double. Carl Yastrzemski had one.
The Rockies came into this game having won 21 of their last 22 games and they looked like a Double-A team, a junior varsity. Was that National League MVP candidate Matt Holliday gingerly stepping over David Ortiz's -- what else? -- double on the warning track? So much for momentum.
It could have been the record eight-day layoff that did the Rockies in Wednesday. It could have been Game 1 jitters, though it's hard to picture a team that has essentially been playing playoff games for a month suddenly getting all squirrelly in the klieg lights.
It may have just been one of those nights. Those nights can happen to hot teams, cold teams and teams in the temperate middle. On May 19 the Red Sox beat the Atlanta Braves 13-3 in the first game of a double-header for their third straight win, their sixth in seven games and their 13th in their last 16. They were smoking. They lost the nightcap 14-0. Happens.
If there were Game 1 heebie-jeebies, they may have been coming from the dugout. I don't know that big-league ballplayers get the yips for a big game, but I'm sure that some managers do, and I think Clint Hurdle of the Rockies did Wednesday.