No Fish Tale: Dice-K Delivers Again

It wasn't an Instant Classic, but Daisuke Matsuzaka earned his sixth win of the season on Saturday night in Minnesota. If you were watching the game on the MLB Game Plan and were forced to listen to Minnesota play-by-play men, you might not know that. But he did.

However, the opening of fishing season is evidently a much bigger deal in Minnesoata than a matchup between the Twins, featuring a young, promising home-town pitcher making his first start, and the defending World Champion Red Sox, who threw one of the most expensive imports in sports history out on the mound.

Amazingly, the pitching lived up to the billing for the most part. Outside of a dodgy second inning that was entirely too remiscent of 2007, Matsuzaka danced around the strike zone, got some batters to hack at good pitches and some, like shortstop Adam Everett, to hack at horrendous dropping off-speed magic that left him looking like an eighth grader. All-in-all, it was a positively serviceable performance.

Luckily, it was also backed by four - count them, four - solo homers as the Sox patched together a 5-2 win. It may not have been a victory with a vintage appropriate of Bordeaux, but it had positively French wine-level moments. A pair of strikeouts were chalked up to the emergence of Matsuzaka's magical changeup dubbed the "gyroball" afterward, and Dice-K wasn't counting out that possibility. The homers from Coco Crisp and Jed Lowrie in the seventh hit almost identical spots in the left field stands, and that's all Boston needed to do with Hideki Okajima and a truly, furiously pissed off Jonathan Papelbon waiting in the bullpen to close things out.

As they say in Okie and the Dice-man's homeland, that means sayonara.

Of course, all of this was overshadowed by creatures that were nowhere near the Metrodome ... fish. The Saturday morning opening of fishing season in Minnesota was first referenced in the second inning, then followed up with a strong plug for the Metrodome smoked whitefish and its role in the team's new "all you can eat seats" promotion that gets unveiled during the team's next homestand. Then, after the whole "hey, we can all go out on boats and go fishing at 5 a.m. tomorrow!" concept was fully established, the Minnesota dynamic duo officially switched over to ice fishing references in the fourth and fifth innings.

Clearly, WMYM has underestimated just how strange and solitary Minnesota can be. We'd dwell on it some more, but hey, we've got some smoked whitefish spread to get to.

STARTING PITCHING: √+
There were moments early when it looked like it was going to be a - in this slot, but as he has all season, Dice-K struck his way out of jams. He walked in the first run and gave up a second later, though that might have been avoided if Coco Crisp hadn't been in center with his pee shooter of an arm unable to throw out anyone this side of Jason Giambi when they're trying to score from second. To keep it to that point Dice-K dazzled, leaving Joe Mauer shaking his head twice and other Minnesota hitters looking truly foolish at times. Needless to say, those seven Ks helped make up for the two costly walks in the second inning and the two runs, and that paved the way to 6-0/

MIDDLE RELIEF: N/A
It's getting almost eerie that all of Boston's pitchers keep working until the eighth inning, isn't it? We're going to go ahead and pinch ourselves now so we don't ruin it before tomorrow. Yikes.

SET-UP RELIEF: √+
Okajima did it again. It's amazing. And as bad as he's made a lot of team's hitters look, Minnesota might have looked worse than any other on some of those hacks Saturday night. It was downright belittling, and that's a great thing for the Boston bullpen.

CLOSER: √+
Finally, a return to normalcy, even with the flukiest hit you'll ever see - Mike Lamb's 200-foot pop-up that hit a speaker above the infield - mixed in. And while it may have looked almost like a sigh of relief when he pumped his fist and trudged to meet Jason Varitek, there's little doubt that the game-ending strikeout helped re-establish some of Paps' luster and bluster, commodities that are as important to the Red Sox' success as anything else.

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