Youkilis gets day off for LaRoche debut

Interesting note from ESPN's Buster Olney today:

(Tony) La Russa made what I think was a smart decision Friday. With the addition of (Matt) Holliday, it appears the odd man out is Rick Ankiel, with the bulk of the outfield playing time expected to go to Colby Rasmus, Ryan Ludwick and Holliday. Ankiel probably went to the park wondering how much of a place he'll have with the Cardinals for the next 10 weeks. But he was in the starting lineup, as it turned out. Look, in the end, Ankiel probably is going to lose at-bats, but this was a good way to remind Ankiel that he is part of the team and is valued, a carrot for him to chase.

The Holliday-Ankiel situation seems particularly relevant given the way the Red Sox lineup looks for Saturday's game against the Orioles: LaRoche playing first base, Mike Lowell playing third base and Kevin Youkilis on the bench. It will be Youkilis' first day off since he returned from the disabled list on May 20.

This is not a harbinger of lineups to come, something Red Sox manager Terry Francona made sure to emphasize during his pregame meeting with reporters.

"This isn't going to be, like, a rotation," Francona said, the implication clearly being that Youkilis is not going to lose regular playing time to the new arrival.

Youkilis will be right back in the lineup and playing third base, Francona said, for Sunday's day game. That appears to indicate that Mike Lowell will take a seat on Sunday.

You have to wonder if Francona might have been doing for Lowell what LaRussa did for Ankiel, sending one of those actions-speak-louder-than-words messages: Hey, look, the new guy is in the lineup, and so are you. You still matter. But based on health and quality of production -- both offensive and defense -- it appears that Lowell is the far likelier candidate to lose playing time to LaRoche if indeed the former Pittsburgh Pirate ends up playing four or five days a week.

Youkilis, for his part, didn't particularly want a day off -- "I just had an off-day," he said with a wry grin -- but took it in stride.

"They told me that today was my off-day," he told a group of reporters circled around his locker. "You guys know just as much as I do."

The goateed infielder is hitting .229 and OBP'ing .299 in July and has seen his OPS slip below 1.000 for the first time all season. (It was 1.031 on July 1 and now is .972.) He fanned three times against the Orioles on Friday night and has struck out 43 times in 44 games since June 1.

But a day off, he said, isn't exactly the cure.

"I don't get too many off-days," he said, "so I don't really know how to deal with them."

The plan for today?

"Root my teammates on," he said. "A lot of high-fives, hopefully. A lot of runs scored. Other than that, there's not much you can do but eat seeds and chew gum."

***

Jeff Bailey took some swings before the rest of the team took batting practice on Friday. No problem.

Bailey then did some throwing in the outfield. No problem.

Bailey then did some sprinting on the infield, running from first to third with a turn at second base. Problem.

The Red Sox first baseman rolled his ankle in a collision at first base on July 3 and hasn't played since. He has remained with the team -- in a weird twist of fate, he's accruing major-league service time now he wouldn't have had he been optioned back to Triple-A Pawtucket like Aaron Bates was -- but still is a week or two away from returning to any kind of action.

"It's taking a little longer than I thought," he said. "I don't really want to push it too much because I want to be 100 percent when I'm playing again. At the same time, I want to play, but I know I probably shouldn't because I know I'll just hurt myself again. ...

"It's just the running. Hitting is fine, and fielding seems to be fine. It's going straight ahead and starting and stopping. Today, when I was trying to go around the bases, that didn't feel very good."

Said Francona, "He actually got his ankle rolled over pretty good. He's doing everything. He's just not doing it to the point where we can go let him play. It just needs to heal a little more. The good part of that is he's able to swing and take grounders. We just can't let him go play in a game. It might be another week, 10 days, two weeks -- we'll have to see how he does. ... He's doing all his baseball stuff. It just hurts."

Bailey, Kotsay could form effective platoon

There's always, always, always a danger with small sample sizes. But the way Jeff Bailey hit over the last two days in Baltimore makes you wonder if he's capable of playing a more-than-capable first base in the absence of Mike Lowell -- particularly if it's as part of a platoon with Mark Kotsay.

Bailey was hitting just .259 at Triple-A Pawtucket but had an on-base percentage of .373. He was -- is -- the only PawSox player to have drawn more than 20 walks while striking out fewer than 40 times. His ability to stay patient and work the count manifested itself in the ninth inning on Wednesday when he worked a five-pitch walk from Orioles closer George Sherrill that moved the runners along; he scored the game-tying run on Rocco Baldelli's seeing-eye single.

But Bailey has some stark left-right splits both in the major leagues and the minor leagues. With the PawSox this season, he had an on-base percentage of .358 against righties and .419 against lefties. With the Red Sox in his career, he has an on-base percentage of .309 against righties and .400 against lefties. The split is even more glaring in a small sample size this season: .262 against righties and .538 against lefties.

Veteran Mark Kotsay, on the other hand, has a better career on-base percentage against righties (.340) than against lefties (.326). So far this season, he's only got eight at-bats agianst lefties -- he's 1-for-8 with no walks -- but has a .389 on-base percentage against righties.

The Red Sox don't need the duo to hit 20 home runs or be capable of hitting fourth or fifth in the lineup. But if Lowell is able to return at some point this season -- be it immediately after the All-Star break or shortly thereafter -- it seems to make no sense to trade a pitching prospect for Nick Johnson or Adam LaRoche when a platoon of Bailey and Kotsay might do the job just fine.

Tough at-bats spark Red Sox rally

"If you're going to walk people," Baltimore manager Dave Trembley told reporters after Wednesday's game, "it's not the time to do it in the ninth inning."

That's true. But if you're going to draw walks, the ninth inning is precisely the time to do it. Red Sox hitters drew three walks in Wednesday's ninth inning, and all three proved critical as the Orioles got a taste of their own come-from-behind medicine.

"Good hitters get on base, grind out at-bats, and you have a lot better chance going forward and scoring runs and having innings like we did late in the game here," said outfielder Rocco Baldelli, whose pinch-hit single tied the game with two outs in the ninth inning. "At no point have I ever seen us in a game where we've just folded up and gone home. We've won some good games. I don't know if any of them were more spectacular in the late innings than this one.

"It's something you don't necessarily expect to happen, but we expect ourselves to try to make it happen."

It started with Dustin Pedroia, the scrappy second baseman whose 10-pitch at-bat against CC Sabathia turned the tide in a come-from-behind win against the Yankees three weeks ago. Pedroia drew a five-pitch walk from reliever Jim Johnson to get himself on base in front of Kevin Youkilis -- and Youkilis hit a fastball into the right-field bleachers to cut the deficit to two runs.

Orioles closer George Sherrill, summoned in a hurry, then fanned Jason Bay and David Ortiz before surrendering a soft single to center field to Jacoby Ellsbury.

First baseman Jeff Bailey reached base in four of his five plate appearances on Tuesday, and he came to the plate for the first time on Wednesday representing both the tying run and the potential third out. It was his chance to be a hero or a goat. He didn't take the bat off his shoulder. Sherrill threw a curveball for a strike on the first pitch but missed the strike zone with each of his next four pitches. He didn't miss by all that much -- Bailey looked back twice at the home-plate umpire on his way to first base -- but he missed just the same.

"I thought Bailey's at-bat was as tough an at-bat, considering the circumstances," Red Sox manager Terry Francona said. "You have a righty that's running it in on his hands. He knows he's got to move the runner, and he found a way to do it."

Catcher Jason Varitek then saw a 3-0 count turn into a 3-2 count and almost took a hack at a hellacious curveball that looked good for a while only to dive down toward his ankles. He checked his swing. Ball four. Bases loaded.

"(Sherrill) made a bastard pitch on 'Tek," Francona said.

Baldelli then came to the plate, pinch-hitting for Nick Green. He took two curveballs -- one a strike, one a ball -- and then went after a fastball up and in that he somehow punched into center field for a two-run single that tied the game.

"It wasn't like he hit a pea," Francona said, "but he fought it off and stayed in the middle of the field. It looked beautiful."

The Red Sox mustered nothing against the Baltimore bullpen on Tuesday and nothing against rookie starter Brad Bergesen through eight innings on Wednesday. In the ninth inning, though, the plate approach that has so permeated the Red Sox clubhouse paid off in a huge way.

"This is not a team that's going to roll over," said shortstop Julio Lugo, who chopped the go-ahead single through a drawn-in infield in the 11th inning. "We'll never roll over. They've got to get 27 outs, and we proved that. We've got a group, guys that work hard, and you've got to get 27 outs on this team."

The speed of Mike Lowell and the clutch hitting of Jeff Bailey

First baseman Jeff Bailey came into Tuesday's game hitting .182. Third baseman Mike Lowell came into Tuesday's game with a 40 time that could be measured by sundial. But it was Lowell's decision to try to steal third and Bailey's sharp single to left field that plated the key run in Tuesday's 2-1 win over the Blue Jays.

"Speed never takes a day off," Red Sox manager Terry Francona deadpanned after the game.

It wasn't speed, of course, that gave Lowell the confidence to try to steal third in that big spot in the second inning. Lowell now is 35 years old and coming off hip surgery and runs like he's dragging Santa's sleigh behind him. But when you've been around as many years as Lowell has, you pick up on a few things.

What Lowell picked up on in the second inning was that Brian Tallet (a) wasn't paying any attention to him, and (b) was going to throw a changeup down in the zone with two strikes, the perfect pitch on which to run.

"He's been talking a big game about doing it at some point," left fielder Jason Bay said, "and he finally did it. ... He just says, 'One of these days, someone's going to not be paying attention to me at second base, and I'm going do it. I'm going to take third.'"

Bailey, for his part, was just trying to make contact with two strikes and get a hit to score a run. Last year's International League Most Valuable Player been handed the full-time gig at first base when Kevin Youkilis was placed on the disabled list but hadn't exactly seized his opportunity; entering play Tuesday, he hitting .195 in the two weeks he'd had the job. Other than the solo home run he'd hit on Saturday in Seattle, he'd gone two full weeks without driving in a run.

"You're hitting under .200, and you know it," he said. "You get in your own head sometimes. You've got to fight that and take on the task at hand and go pitch-by-pitch, whatever you can do."

About all he'd done well was hit lefthanded pitching. Going into Tuesday night, he was hitting .400 (5-for-16) against lefties and just .100 (4-for-40) against righties.

That specialty, though, might come in handy if Terry Francona opts to begin platooning David Ortiz in the next few weeks. Bailey could get a spot start at designated hitter if the Red Sox have to face lefties like the Yankees' Andy Pettitte or the Phillies' Cole Hamels; he also might get a pinch-hitting opportunity or two against Mike Gonzalez, the Braves' lefthanded closer.

"The one positive that I'm taking out of all this is that I'm still hitting lefthanders decent," he said. "That's what I'm here to do. Anything extra off righthanders is a bonus. I'm still feeling good against the lefthanders, and they know it, too, so that's one positive for me to go off."

With Youkilis due back from the disabled list on Wednesday, Bailey was far from oblivious to the fact that Tuesday's game would mark the end of his run of 12 straight starts at first base. He's not about to be shipped back to Pawtucket -- not with Mark Kotsay still hitting speed bumps in his road back from offseason surgery.

But unless someone else gets hurt, he's not going to get the chance to play every day the way he has over the past couple of weeks.

"You just keep working, and you do what you can," he said, nodding toward the sign on the whiteboard that read Extra hitting Wednesday: 3:00. "Three o'clock tomorrow, extra hitting, I'll be there for that. I'll take extra swings in the cage. That's all you can do -- try to get better. It's always about trying to get better."

Bailey already wasn't exactly swimming with confidence. It didn't help matters when Tallet's third pitch, a fastball, nipped the outside corner to push the count to 1-2. Entering play Tuesday, Bailey was 1-for-13 when facing a 1-2 count and had struck out nine times.

As Tallet went into his windup, out of the corner of his eye, Bailey suddenly saw Lowell breaking for third in one of the most surprising attempted steals anyone will ever see. Tallet had thrown over to first base during J.D. Drew's at-bat; that, though, seemed more like a formality than anything else.

After Drew walked, Tallet barely glanced at Lowell again.

"I think maybe (Lowell) saw something, like a grip, like he knew he was going to throw a changeup," Bailey said. "(Tallet) had been keeping it down for the most part, and if the ball's in the dirt, he's got it easy. I think that's what he's thinking right there."

Lowell actually has stolen third base five times in his career -- and four of those steals of third have come since he was traded to Red Sox, including two just last year. Both of those steals of third also came when he was on second and another runner was on first -- but both of those also came with righthanded pitchers on the mound and lefties at the plate, increasing the degree of difficulty significantly.

Since then, though, Lowell has undergone hip surgery and has lost quite a bit of whatever speed he had to begin with.

"I know I'm not a burner on the bases," Lowell said. "but you don't have to be fast to be able to see things and maybe try to take advantage of a situation."

It almost backfired on him, though.

"I actually was a little bit scared because I thought Tallet was a little quicker (to the plate) on the ball I decided to go on," he said, "so I was really hoping Jeff would make contact. I'm not sure the likelihood of me being safe was very high."

Bailey made contact. He saw Lowell out of the corner of his eye, but he still jumped on a changeup that in the middle of the strike zone and laced it into shallow left field for a base hit.

"He hung a changeup," he said. "I probably should have hit it harder than I did. But a hit and an RBI is a hit and an RBI."

Lowell scored easily, and Drew cruised into third. If the runners hadn't been off with the pitch, neither would have had a chance to advance more than one base. George Kottaras then followed with a sacrifice fly to score Drew, and Tim Wakefield had the two runs he'd need to win his fifth game of the season.

But this wasn't about Wakefield. This was about Bailey and Lowell.

Bailey got the game-changing hit for which he'd been searching for two weeks.

"Yeah, it's good to -- well, I wouldn't say go out; I don't think I'm out of here yet," he said with a chuckle. "But when you're struggling, you try to just get one hit, and then you get the one hit and you go from there. Unfortunately, that's all I've been able to muster in the past few games, but one hit helps the team, and you do what you can do."

And Lowell got to act like he was capable of stealing third base without actually drawing a throw down to third base.

"I'm just curious, had Bailey not swung at that ball, what we might have seen," Bay said.

Said Lowell, tongue firmly in cheek, "As you can see, Jacoby (Ellsbury) got thrown out at third (in the eighth inning), so only the really elite runners would have been safe."

Bailey, Kottaras get things rolling

There's a school of thought that goes like this: When a new pitcher comes into a game and there are men on base, you take a pitch or two to gauge his stuff -- lest you get burned by a first-pitch breaking ball and bounce into a rally-killing double play.

There's another school of thought that goes like this: When you're 3-for-22 on the season and not getting any kind of regular playing time and you get a first-pitch fastball over the plate, you jump the heck on it.

"To be honest with you, sometimes you sit offspeed -- but in that situation, I said, 'I'm just going to sit fastball,'" said first baseman Jeff Bailey, whose bases-loaded double in the sixth inning broke Thursday's game wide open. "That's a situation where it's going to be one or the other. They're trying to get a bad swing, a double-play ball, something like that, and I guessed right. It was middle-in, and I got the head out -- I didn't crush it, but it was enough."

Bailey was part of a makeshift lineup cobbled together in spite of injuries to Kevin Youkilis, Jacoby Ellsbury and David Ortiz -- the latter of whom discovered during batting practice that he couldn't turn his neck to face the pitcher without feeling pain.

Since Tim Wakefield was pitching, George Kottaras was behind the plate -- meaning the Red Sox were only playing four regular starters in the field plus Julio Lugo at designated hitter.

"We were scrambling," manager Terry Francona said.

But after starter Jeremy Sowers pitched five solid innings, the Red Sox started to get things going in the sixth. The first six batters of the inning, in fact, all reached before Sowers could record an out. Jason Bay's double to left scored a run to tie the game at 2, and Rocco Baldelli's single to right-center field plated two more to give the Red Sox a 4-2 lead.

When J.D. Drew walked on a slider outside, Cleveland manager Eric Wedge called upon Masa Kobayashi to face Bailey with the bases loaded and no outs.

It was certainly still a game at that point. If Kobayashi could have gotten Bailey to hit the ball on the ground, he could have wiggled out of the jam with no further damage -- and Bailey had hit into double plays in back-to-back games.

Not Thursday, though.

"I was just looking fastball," Bailey said. "He started it in the middle and it ran in a little bit, and I got my hands through."

The result was a double to left field that scored Baldelli and Mike Lowell to push the Red Sox lead to 6-2 -- and also push Bailey's batting average up above .150 for the first time in almost a week.

"You never want to go under .100," he said with a wry grin.

Two batters later, it was Kottaras' turn. Nick Green had just beaten out an infield hit; Kobayashi failed to cover first base on a slow roller to the right side of the infield, and that loaded things right back up for a catcher who had been having a similarly tough time in limited action.

Heading into Thursday night, Kottaras' batting average was .143; he'd then popped to center and popped to short in his first two at-bats. That's how it sometimes goes, though, when you're a backup catcher who plays once or twice a week.

"It's not easy, but on the days when I'm not playing, I do as much as I can to keep my rhythm going," he said.

Just like Bailey, Kottaras didn't wait around for Kobayashi to get ahead in the count. He got a first-pitch fastball up and away and lifted it into center field for a two-run single.

"You're just trying to be aggressive in the situation and take what you can get," he said.

With that hit, he lifted his batting average back above .150, higher than it's been since April 22. He also knocked in more runs on that play than he had in his first 23 at-bats.

"It's great getting a hit anytime," he said. "I just went up there and tried to simplify what's going on."

Julio Lugo followed Kottaras with an infield hit, and Dustin Pedroia then singled home two more runs before Jason Bay hit a three-run home run over the Red Sox bullpen. This all, of course, came before the Indians had recorded an out.

It made for quite the memorable inning.

"It's always great to put some runs on the board," Kottaras said. "Guys had some great at-bats and hustled some balls out. We just went out there and made things happen."

Said Bailey, "It gets crowded at the helmet rack, I know that. Everybody wants to get up there."

And don't think their contributions got lost in the onslaught.

"On a night when David doesn't play, it's very satisfying getting guys involved -- getting George to stay on a pitch long enough to get it over the infielder's head, and Bails had some real good at-bats," Francona said. "Right in the middle of that big inning, it's great."

Said Baldelli, "It's a good-hitting team over here, and I think everybody knows that. Especially when the bottom of the order is really contributing like they did tonight, good things are going to happen."