BOSTON -- With the Red Sox closing in on another postseason appearance -- if Boston were to finish 9-10, Texas would need to finish 15-3 in its final 18 games to surpass the Red Sox -- don't be surprised to see Boston give its starters an extra days rest before the end of the season, a club source said.
Daisuke Matsuzaka has already been penned into start Sunday's series finale at Baltimore, but with the Red Sox holding such a strong lead in the wild-card standings, the club is leaning toward giving its other starters an extra day of rest.
The likely scenario would be to insert Tim Wakefield, who is trying to come back from a strained back, or Junichi Tazawa into the rotation and allow every other starter to rest an additional day without skipping anyone.
Francona on the DH
The designated hitter became part of Major League Baseball's landscape on April 6, 1973. The debate on whether the DH should be a part of baseball began raging on the same date and hasn't dissipated since.
Terry Francona spent 62 games as a designated hitter during his playing career, but the Red Sox manager says he's all in favor of making the designated hitter a part of both leagues, not just the American League, as has been the case since its inception in 1973.
"It needs to happen,'' Francona said before Wednesday's game against the Angels. "There are so many great hitters."
Francona realizes that his DH, David Ortiz, may be part of a dying breed -- the full-time DH. He looks around the American League and doesn't see the full-time DH's like there were 10-to 20-years ago when players like Edgar Martinez, Harold Baines, Paul Molitor, Dave Parker and Reggie Jackson rarely, if ever, played defensively.
"I think fans come to see pitchers pitch and hitters hit,'' Francona said. "There's not a lot of good hitting pitchers."
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Pedro Gomez
ESPN's Pedro Gomez covered the Oakland A's from 1992 to 1997 and then became the national baseball writer and later a general columnist at The Arizona Republic before becoming an ESPN bureau reporter in 2003.
