V for Victory

Part of Curt Schilling's horoscope yesterday said: Mars, as it forms an opposition to Pluto, suggests that almost anything that you start now will take root and develop into something significant. It seems that my fellow Scorpio had a very successful outing yesterday. We saw shades of the old dominant Curt. He didn't throw a cornucopia of pitches yesterday - he didn't have to. No split finger fastball. No need. He kept the Texas Rangers at bay, throwing 119 pitches, 79 for strikes. This is what we needed to see, Red Sox Nation. The cool thing is he did it right in front of Roger Clemens.

And the bats! The bats! Papi, Lowell, Loretta, Crisp, Trotter, Tek ... we definitely had a rhythm yesterday. A steady, cranking rhythm. Coco's ninth inning catch earned best defensive play of the game. Does he have eyes in back of his head or something? That was spectacular.

Pap was lights out, which is not only good news from the "yesterday's game" side of things, but if Foulke has a number of these pooper outings, he might be sharing the closing role with Timlin. It breaks my heart a little. I know Foulke isn't the most popular guy with the media (sort of the Greta Garbo of baseball), but I sort of like the dude. And his smile is burned into my memory after the last out of the game was recorded for the WS victory in '04, so I would like to see him shut down some mofos this season.

Hey, Kevin Millar had 2 key hits for the O's yesterday. Maybe he just needed a change of scenery. Perhaps orange does more for his game than red?

Man, Coco Crisp is going to be huge in RSN. Huge. Not necessarily for numbers people, but from a fan's perspective. A million bucks says that the Dunkin Donuts marketing people are drafting commercial scripts right now with Crisp in the starring role. He's a great player with a great smile and a hell of an awesome name. And he's a lot smarter than a certain former center fielder.

Oh, and Theo, if you are reading this, for the love of Pete, SEAL THE EXTENSION OF DAVID'S CONTRACT. Don't wait another day. I don't want the Cashman to ever dream - even for a millisecond - that Ortiz could possibly be available to him in '09. I guess we've got Ortiz through '07, with an option for '08.

[Original title of this post was 1-0, but I then noticed that Andrew titled his opening day post "1-0". Doh. It's the equivalent of going to a restaurant with someone and ordering the same thing. Well, kind of.]