Boy did I pick the perfect time to go out to dinner tonight. I had the ESPN Gamecast up during the 6th and top half of the 7th before we left for the local Mexican restaurant, things weren't looking so good so I didn't even bother checking the score when we got there (I found a good score app for my Blackberry earlier in the day, gives me scores across sports in a single app, updated in real-time, and best of all it's free).
Anyways back to the game, Scutaro's 3 run homer in the 7th looked very close to being touched by a fan in the monster seats to me. I only saw one replay of it so hard to say with any certainty, but it was close. Varitek continues to amaze, 4 HR already when only playing part time? I'm trying not to get too excited by this since it's so early, but it would be a great development for the Sox if Varitek could really shine in the backup role. It would give them more flexibility for the DH role to wait out Papi's struggles as well give them a defensive upgrade behind the plate more often than they were expecting. I know Varitek wasn't necessarily great at preventing opponents' baserunning, but can't be much worse than Martinez (who has only caught 7% of runners this year, and 14% last year between Boston + Cleveland), and we all know how much pitchers like to throw to Varitek.
I actually found it interesting that Martinez has put up some pretty 'caught stealing %' good numbers over the years, in 2008 he caught 37% of runners and in 2007 the number was 32%. It's entirely possible that Martinez is suffering from the Red Sox pitching philosophy, which has always been to focus on the man at the plate at the cost of the baserunner, but I know there's always been some talk about Martinez being a bit of a defensive liability at catcher (talk that's backed up by baseball-reference.com's defensive stats on Victor), but apparently its less about baserunning and more about the other facets of catching.
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