Thank you, Toronto!

As I mentioned earlier, good things happen when we play the Blue Jays.  Not only are we now on a 3 game winning streak (after having only 2 wins in the first 11 games), but some individual players have broken out too.  Most importantly, was Dice-K going from being on the edge of Sayonara, to looking like a Cy Young candidate with his 7 IP, 0R, 1 BB, 1 H performance today.  As well, even though Youks had been getting on base, he wasn't showing any power, and a couple of home runs against the Jays has hopefully helped him break out of his hitting slump.  Jed Lowrie is hitting the ball like an MVP candidate, instead of a backup middle infielder.

Ellsbury is showing the kind of power that is usually reserved for people who are candidates to get 50 game suspensions (note: I'm not implying nor do I think that he's on PEDs).  Crawford is still slow coming out of the gate, but hopefully his RBI double today will propel him to start hitting again.  Sooner or later he will come around - even the best players go through hitting slumps.  It's just easier to hide it in the middle of the season than at the start, but I'm not worried.   The pitching had me worried, but with Beckett and Dice showing they can still pitch at ace like levels, and Lester being the ace we can count on I think Red Sox Nation can collectively relax.  John Lackey has looked shaky, but if he ends up being the 5th best starter on the team, we don't need much more.  Buchholz hasn't duplicated last year's unsustainable success, but I didn't expect him to.  He just has to be good, not great.

Not to be lost in all of this, is that this resurgence coincided with the first ever official Red Sox Nation international event.   There are many more Red Sox watch parties already planned, I will post a schedule of these on this blog soon.  Hope many of you local readers can come out and join us, as the next one is against the Yankees, and after seeing what we did against the Jays, would love to see how we handle the Yankees.