Daniel Bard

Heading into Monday’s early Patriots’ Day matchup at Fenway Park are two pitchers with wildly different track records against their opponents. Boston’s Daniel Bard is making only his second career major league start and has only pitched 18 career innings against the Rays. Meanwhile, Tampa Bay’s James Shields comes in as an established starter coming off a career year and has made 21 career starts against the Red Sox.

The Red Sox will be going for the four-game sweep of the Rays as they finish up the first series of their nine-game homestand. The stretch is a welcome change for the Sox after their calamitous 1-5 start, when the Sox struggled offensively and on the mound. The stretch raised serious question marks over the back end of the Red Sox bullpen and whether or not Bard should be moved into the closer spot following the injury to Andrew Bailey and early ineptitude of closer Alfredo Aceves and setup man Mark Melancon.

Now making his second start, Bard will enter the game with slightly less demand from the fan base that he be returned to the bullpen now that the Sox have started to right the ship. However, he will still have to prove with his performance that he belongs in the rotation. Fortunately for him, if past performance is any indicator, he is in good position to have success against the Rays.

During his limited experience against the Rays, Bard has been dominant. In his 18 appearances, Bard has recorded a 1.00 ERA, his fourth-best ERA against any AL team, while giving up just nine hits and six walks while striking out 17 over 18 innings. Of the nine current Rays he has faced, only Evan Longoria has multiple hits, while five other are hitless.

However, Bard’s past performance against the Rays will have less impact on the game than his abilities as a starting pitcher. In his outing against the Blue Jays last week, Bard went five innings and gave up five runs on eight hits and a walk. After the game, though, Bard received rave reviews from manager Bobby Valentine, who claimed Bard was the victim of some tough hits dropping and some bad luck.

On the other side of the matchup, Shields has history with the Red Sox in spades. The 30-year-old right-hander comes in making his third start of the season, looking to follow up his stellar 2011 season when he went 16-12 with a 2.82 ERA, led the league with 11 complete games and four shutouts, made the All-Star team and came in third in AL Cy Young Award voting. Against the Red Sox in 2011, Shields was slightly less effective, going 2-3 with a 3.29 ERA, although he did have two complete games, including one shutout. Outside of last season, though, Shields’ numbers against the Red Sox are far less impressive.

Over his first six seasons as a starter, Shields has gone 7-12 with a 4.61 ERA against the Red Sox, his third-worst mark against all AL opponents, trailing only Chicago and Minnesota. At Fenway Park, Shields’ numbers only get worse, as his record drops to 1-9 and his ERA balloons to 6.75, with the lone win coming in 2010. In fact, Shields’ ERA is higher at Fenway than at any other AL ballpark.

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The Rays picked up the options on starting pitcher James Shields and reliever Kyle Farnsworth on Monday, while declining the option on catcher Kelly Shoppach, according to Tampa Bay Online.

The 29-year-old Shields led the league in complete games with 11 this past season. He also recorded a career-high 16 wins to go along with a 2.82 ERA and 225 strikeouts. His option for the 2012 season is worth $7.5 million.

“I’m glad the waiting is over,” Shields said. “I had a feeling they were going to pick it up, but it’s good to know.”

Farnsworth had a career-high 25 saves in 2011 and will make $3.3 million in 2012.

Shoppach’s $3.2 million option was decline for next year, as the Rays paid the catcher a $300,000 buyout, but Tampa Bay may still consider resigning him.

Josh Beckett

After dropping the first of a crucial four-game series with the Rays, the Red Sox will try to bounce back Friday night with their lead in the wild card standing at three games. Josh Beckett will return from a right ankle sprain that held him out of his last start, while Tampa Bay will counter with James Shields in a marquee pitching matchup.

Beckett (12-5, 2.49 ERA) suffered the sprain in a Sept. 5 start at Toronto. Prior to that start, Beckett had struggled a bit in August, posting a 3.89 ERA in the month, his worst month of the season. Nonetheless, Beckett has been fantastic through the entirety of 2011. The All-Star right-hander’s 2.49 ERA is the lowest of his career as a full-time starter and third in the American League this season.

Against Tampa Bay this year, Beckett has been brilliant. In two starts, Beckett has pitched 17 innings while allowing no runs and striking out 12. In fact, Beckett has given up just two hits total in those two games.

The current Rays lineup has a .222 batting average against Beckett. Evan Longoria has had the most success, hitting .325 with two home runs and eight RBIs off the Boston starter.

Shields (15-10, 2.70 ERA) has had the best season of his career. He has posted career bests across the board, including ERA, wins, and strikeouts (210). Perhaps most impressive is Shields’ 11 complete games, the most in the majors.

Shields was just two outs away from recording yet another complete game in his last start against Boston on Sept. 11. Shields tossed 8 1/3 innings, giving up just one run in the Rays’ win. In four starts against the Red Sox this season, Shields is 2-2 with a 2.87 ERA.

The Red Sox have a .227 collective batting average against Shields, with David Ortiz hitting .286 with three home runs and 13 RBIs off the right-hander.

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Jon Lester

It was one thing for the rest of the Red Sox rotation to fall short. At this point, expectations were already measured for the likes of John Lackey, Tim Wakefield, Andrew Miller and Kyle Weiland.

But Jon Lester was another matter. He is the rock of the Red Sox rotation, and at a time when the rest of the team had been sagging, the left-hander had been willing to shoulder the load to give the Sox at least one day out of five when they would feature reliable starting pitching. He had gone five straight starts in which he’d allowed no more than one earned run, tied for the longest such run by a Sox left-hander since at least 1919.

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But on Sunday, that changed. In the course of a 43-pitch first inning, the Rays pushed three runs across the plate. They would tack on one more against Lester, who lasted just four innings, before continuing to do damage against the Boston bullpen in an eventual 9-1 smackdown.

And so, the Red Sox lost their buoy. The Rays and James Shields concluded their three-game sweep over the Sox, and suddenly the Sox’ safe passage into the postseason seemed dramatically imperiled.

On Aug. 7, the Rays were 11 games behind the Red Sox in the AL East, and 10 games behind the Yankees in the wild card standings. Now, with their three-game sweep in Tampa Bay, the Rays have slashed their deficit to the Sox — now in the wild card race rather than the division standings — to 3½ games, punctuating a stretch in which the Rays have gone 22-10 and the Sox have stumbled to a 15-18 mark.

Tampa Bay outscored Boston by a combined 22-8 score, and the Sox enter Monday’s off-day having lost five straight, 7-of-8, and 9-of-11. They are in their most pronounced state of crisis since their 0-6 start in April.

WHAT WENT WRONG FOR THE RED SOX

– The Rays worked over Lester as never before. For the first time in his career, on a day when he threw more than 100 pitches, the left-hander could not work his way into the fifth inning. Instead, he allowed four runs on eight hits in just four innings, striking out two and walking three. In the first inning alone, the three earned runs permitted by Lester matched his total yield from his previous 30 innings.

– Lester’s dreadful outing continued one of the worst turns of the rotation by the Red Sox in years. The team has now had five straight starts of no more than five innings, the longest such stretch by the team since Sept. 21-25, 2001, when Casey Fossum, Derek Lowe, Hideo Nomo, David Cone and Frank Castillo taxed the Sox bullpen.

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Jon Lester

The Red Sox have received exactly one quality start in their last seven games. That came on Sept. 6, when Jon Lester delivered seven dominating shutout innings in the Sox’ last win.

Now, a team that is spinning through a 1-6 stretch and that has last four straight is hearing footsteps or whatever sound it is that the motion of Rays makes. Tampa Bay has crept within 4½ games of the Sox in the wild card after taking two straight games to start the series, and the Sox will ask their ace to clot the wound.

Lester is 15-6 with a 2.93 ERA, 167 strikeouts and 63 walks in 173 innings this year. Against the Rays, he is 1-1 with a 2.57 ERA, 16 strikeouts and three walks in 14 innings. He is 10-4 with a 3.65 ERA against Tampa Bay in his career.

Among members of Tampa Bay’s lineup, Johnny Damon (.296, .863 OPS) has enjoyed the most success against Lester, followed by Evan Longoria (.256, .822). But on the whole, Lester has had his way with members of the Rays, who own a collective .222 average and .672 OPS against him. Read the rest of this entry »

Say this much, Carl Crawford has already proved he can overcome a hideous slump in a Red Sox uniform.

After all, he started the season batting .155 for the month of April. He had just a .234 mark heading into June. It appeared he was ready to break out in June before pulling his hamstring running out an infield grounder in an interleague game against the Brewers on June 17. He would miss the next month.

But he and the Red Sox had 142 million very good reasons not to give up on their star left fielder and so they were rightly rewarded when he found his groove immediately after a two-game rehab in Pawtucket.

When he came back, he came back on fire. He had two hits on July 18 in Baltimore, a stretch that began nice run to lift his average to .260 on Aug. 7, culminating with nine hits in 12 at-bats over three games against the Yankees.

But then came the latest road trip. He went 4-for-22 in Minnesota and Seattle. He came home and went 0-for-9 with three strikeouts against the tough Tampa Bay trio of James Shields, Jeff Niemann and David Price.

“Yeah, it’s tough to generate offense when you have three guys coming in pitching as well as they did in this series. They did a good job of pitching their game,” Crawford said.

All of a sudden, here come the questions again after four hits in 31 at-bats to drop his average to .249.

“I was feeling good and this series, for some reason, I just wasn’t myself, whatever the reason was. I struggled this series. I guess I’ve just got to go back and watch some video and start from scratch again.”

But then asked to clarify what he meant by starting “from scratch,” Crawford explained that he just needs to simplify things at the plate.

“Not scratch, but you know, trying to simplify things and get back to the base of everything and just kind of go from there. sometimes you get out of whack a little bit and you’ve just got to make those little adjustments to get back to where you were at.” Read the rest of this entry »

With two All-Stars on the mound in Jon Lester and James Shields, Tuesday’s opening game of a doubleheader between the Red Sox and Rays promised to be somewhat of a pitchers’ duel.

It ended up being more than that.

The two teams scattered only six hits and four runs combined Tuesday afternoon at Fenway Park, but ultimately it was Lester who got the better of  Shields and the Tampa Bay offense in the 3-1 Boston win at Fenway Park.

The 27-year-old lefty was the best he’s been since returning from the disabled list on July 25. Over seven innings of work, Lester (12-6, 3.22 ERA) allowed just the one earned run (which came in the first inning) on three hits, one walk, one hit-by-pitch while striking out eight Rays batters. After giving up the lone run in the first, Lester allowed just three more baserunners to reach the rest of the way and retired as many as 12 Rays in a row at one point.

Shields (11-10, 2.83 ERA) was nearly as masterful as he too scattered just three hits over eight innings while walking one and striking out six. However, a couple of missed locations in the third inning led to his 10th loss despite the strong outing. Following two singles by Josh Reddick and Mike Aviles, Jacoby Ellsbury sent a three-run bomb over the Rays bullpen in right field – his 21st home run this season – to give Lester all the run support he would need. Despite pitching well, Shields’ record in Boston moved to 1-8 while his ERA improved to 6.99 over nine outings at Fenway. It was the first time that Shields had gone more than seven innings at Fenway Park.

Here’s what else went right in the Red Sox win Tuesday afternoon as well as a few things that went wrong:

WHAT WENT RIGHT

–Lester’s biggest strength was his ability to get the K. After striking out just four Twins in his last outing, the lefty ace rebounded in that department to strike out eight Rays Tuesday afternoon. At one point between the third and sixth innings, he went on a run in which he struck out six of the 11 batters he faced, including the fourth where he struck out the side for the first time since May 3 against the Angels. In that one 11-batter stretch, Lester struck out more hitters than he had in 11 of his 23 starts this season. Read the rest of this entry »