Abraham On Toucher & Rich: Will Loss Bother Uehara Moving Forward?
The Red Sox had a chance to put away the Rays on Monday night, but they just couldn't hold on.
The Sox jumped out to a 1-0 lead early and added two more runs in the fifth, but the Rays tied it up in the bottom half of the inning and scored again in the eighth to take a 4-3 lead. The Sox tied up in the ninth, but then Rays backup catcher Jose Lobaton hit a solo homer for the 5-4 win.
The two teams meet again tonight as the Sox try to close out the series and move on to the ALCS.
Red Sox insider Peter Abraham joined 98.5 The Sports Hub's Toucher & Rich to discuss the game, John Farrell's decision to pull David Ortiz for a pinch runner and Koji Uehara giving up a game winning homer.
Farrell pulled David Ortiz in the eighth inning for pinch runner Quintin Berry, who successfully stole second, but should have been called out. It didn't result in a run and Ortiz's spot in the lineup did come up again. Fred wonders if it was a smart move at the time to take your best bat out of the game.
"If you're going to keep Quintin Berry on the roster that's definitely the time when you would use him. So once they decided to keep Berry around, then yeah that's when you need to put him in there and he did what he was suppose to do."
"I think at that point you got to look to try to score the go ahead run then and not think about, Ortiz's spot could come up again. If you look at it that way then you would never make any moves if you were a manager."
Uehara has been so good for the Sox the second half of the season, but last night he got the loss giving up a solo homer. Closing games is mental as much as it is physical, could this loss hurt Uehara in the future?
"If this was a younger guy I'd say sure that's definitely a possibility, but this is a guy who has been a closer before. He did it in Japan for a couple of years, he did it for Baltimore when he first over got over here, he's had this happen before, he had this happen for the Red Sox obviously, but it's happened plenty of times before and he's bounced back from it just fine. I sure the Red Sox would love to have a situation where he's coming in to save a game tonight and put him right back out there, once he takes care of Tampa Bay it all goes in the past."
The guys also discussed the mistakes that Tampa Bay and Boston made during the game and Will Myers leaving the game.
