Ah, another cheery day at the game thread. Let me occupy my, really, usual middle ground between the tenor of the majority of the thread and the stolid optimism of Arod's final post. Lugo is what he is. We succeeded with him last season because of who was around him. MDC was in the set-up role because of a dominant month. Hansen had pitched reasonably well, though not as dominantly as MDC, over much of the same period. It seems fairly clear that they may both be running out of gas at this point, because they are being asked to do things that they haven't done before, either recently or at all, at the major league level. Lowell and Varitek pulled the ill-fated miss and trot because Youk just missed the big momentum-turner, Francona decided to go with his captain and with him up and Lugo and a currently cold Ellsbury on deck Francona probably felt that rolling the dice was his last shot to salvage the game. Maybe Francona's thinking was that he would PH Casey for Lugo -- I don't know. With a bench of Casey, Cora, and Cash he didn't have many options. As for the rest of the season?? The Sox can still win the Division of course, but it's going to be a struggle. As I've said before, I think it will be a struggle because last season took a toll on some of our aging core players, and maybe a few others, that is showing itself the following year. After 2004 I suspected that we'd seen the last of the best of Schilling and Foulke. After 2007 I wonder if we've seen the last of the best of Varitek, MannyR, and maybe Papi. Injury and gradual deterioration to core players is a tough hurdle to overcome, but this team has a lot of character and can do it. For me, a key now is getting enough out of the rotation to give the pen relatively consistent rest, and thus its best chance to succeed. Dice-K, this means you. As others have suggested, Theo is going to earn his money this coming offseason. Some potentially momentous decisions to be made, and he might end up "blowing it up" relatively speaking.