BY FRANCIS FLYNN
CARVER, Mass. – Look, I don’t wanna make accusatory statements against Miguel Pineda any more than the next guy. But something was up. Remy spotted it a mile away. And Johnny Farrell just sat on his hands while the game got outta control. I started getting some phone calls about it around the fourth inning. What’s that on his hand? Looks he’s been fisting a crank-shaft! Et cetera et cetera et cetera.
Then all of a sudden he comes out for the fifth and it’s gone?
Let Clay Buchholz greaseball himself up like that and I can’t even imagine what he’d of done with it. Probably a no-hittar. Definitely a shutout and about 17 strikeouts just like Pedro back in 1999 in Yankee Stadium.
Just to be clear…I’m mainly insulted because “Pin-head-a” there had no sense of true espionage. Classless, brainless, but worst of all completely imaginationless.
So before you get your undergarments up into a big needless bunch of fabric, I’ll acknowledge the fact that yeah I’m sure some Sox pitchers have dabbled in the ol’ pinetar on the fararm bit before. Alls I’m asking for as a fan is some semblance of an effort to cover it up. That’s it. Otherwise, let’s just make it legal and stop with puttin on all these airs. You know what I mean?
Georgie Brett isn’t coming charging out of any dugouts these days. Nobody gives a damn. So let’s ALL bathe ourselves in pinetar and stick to everything and let the game be the game again.
Because let’s be honest with ourselves here. Buchholz lost it after the third inning. He didn’t have his A game. And Grady Sizemore’s chicken arm cost the team another run in the fifth inning. Jeter would have been gunned down by a mile with two outs on that single otherwise if he were tested by anything resembling a real throw.
But really, it didn’t matter. Pineda was better than Clay tonight. With substance or without (but, obviously with, OK?). So his wrist is all slippery and disgusting for no real good reason now. I ain’t all that sore about it honestly. Dan Nava hit a homer after a tough start to the season – I’ll take the moral victory where they come.
Next time out, let’s see what gives when we let both guys sprinkle his magic pixie dust on the ball and see how it plays out. That’s alls I’m saying from this neck of the woods.
Ed. Note: Carver man and friend of the site Francis Flynn is an avid Red Sox fan, Boston-born and bred. Flynn’s day job is maintaining a 10-acre cranberry bog and tract of farmland that has been in his family for three generations. But his passion is following his region’s most beloved baseball team. Flynn recently agreed to provide Fenway Pastoral readers with his own recaps throughout the 2014 regular season. All we had to do in return was promise to publish his pieces unedited and to send him a case of Miller High Life (bar bottles were specified) every week.
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