Play It Again, Cam!

All September, we were waiting to play a meaningful game. Well, on Tuesday night, that meaningful game arrived, but the Sox approach didn’t seem all that different from what we have been seeing from the “Sleepy Sox.”

Cam Schlittler was as dominant as we expected him to be, shutting out the Sox for 6.1 innings, allowing only two hits and one walk while blowing ten of them away.

The game was progressing pretty much as expected. Cam was going to deal, and it was incumbent upon Payton Tolle to match that electricity for as long as he could to try to give Boston’s offense a chance to catch a little lightning in a bottle and experience a moment of glory.

Unfortunately, Tolle wasn’t entirely up to that task. The young lefty pitched alright over the 4.2 innings he toed the rubber in the Bronx, but he wasn’t the force that Chad Tracy was hoping for.

From the start, it looked very touch and go for Tolle. He allowed a one-out double to Ben Rice in the first but was able to strike out Heliot Ramos and get Cody Bellinger to line out to end the threat.

In the second, Tolle surrendered hits to two of the first three men he faced but again appeared to be set up to get out of the inning unscathed when the nine-hole hitter, Austin Wells, came to the plate with men on first and second and two outs. Wells is a nice defensive catcher with a little bit of pop, but he was batting a dreadful .122 against left-handed pitchers and appeared to be just the guy Tolle needed at the plate at that time.

Unfortunately, Tolle threw a 1-0 sinker middle-in at only 92 MPH, and Wells cleaned it out for a base…