Red Sox 07 Game 16

Saturday, April 21 Fenway Park | 3:55 PM ET
NYY Jeff Karstens, RHP (0-0, -.--) Yankees (8-7) @ BOS Josh Beckett, RHP (3-0, 1.50) Red Sox (10-5)

Boston 1 1/2 games ahead Baltimore, 2 Games ahead of NYY and 2 1/2 games ahead of Toronto. 2nd game of 3 game series Boston leads 1 - 0.

ESPN.Com preview should be here.
Yahoo's preview should be here.
The recap after the game will be here.

From MLB.Com Scouting Report:

Red Sox: Beckett has started out the season red-hot, winning his first three games. The right-hander has set up his success by commanding his fastball and going more to his offspeed stuff. After allowing 36 homers last year, Beckett has surrendered just one thus far, and it was a solo shot. In his last start, Beckett held the Angels to six hits and a run over six innings while registering five strikeouts. Beckett had mixed results against the Yankees last year, going 2-2 with a whopping 9.45 ERA.

Yankees: Karstens is a likely candidate to be activated in time for this start against the Red Sox. The right-hander, who has been on the disabled list with right elbow tendinitis that developed late in Spring Training, pitched four scoreless innings for Class A Tampa on Monday. Karstens likely would have been New York's fifth starter to open the year and could need one more rehab start, but with the Yankees in need of pitchers, an activation is possible.

As usual all statistics were found at the day by day database at Baseball Musings and this year at Baseball Reference.

Expected Batters vs opposing starter
Has never faced any of the batters.

Historical Pitching lines

Pitcher	GS	W	L	Sho	IP	H	ER	HR	BB	K	ERA
Beckett	4	2	2	0	20	24	21	5	16	14	9.45
Karstens	---	---	---	---	---	---	---	---	---	---	---

Beckett had two quality starts against the Yankees last year, his first one on 5/9/2006 and his last one on 9/16/2006. In those two starts he went 13 innings giving up 5 runs, 2 HR's and 5 walks to go with 11 K's. The walks were the killer and both of these starts were in Yankee stadium. His only Fenway start last year was the 3rd game of the 5 game series and he was atrocious. He will have his hands full because:

• A-Rod is still smoking hot at the plate.
  
• The spankees have a .304 batting average against Josh (for some reason unable to pull up player stats).
  
• Beckett has to forget Hard, Harder and Hardest and go with the flow.
  
• Is Coco out of his slump?

Since Karstens has never faced the Sox and since Beckett was atrocious last year against this team I give it a 50 /50 chance for a win. See you later my friends as its time for me to try to get some sleep.