Wasn’t that such an excellent pun! Man, I crack myself up! ;-) Anyway, I don’t want to throw around any “I told you so’s”, but that was a good one from Schilling, eh? Aside from a solo home run by his arch-nemesis Frank Catalanotto, Curt held the entire Rangers lineup in perpetual check. Wiping the taste of Opening Day from his mouth, Schilling rolled through seven innings on 102 pitches. At one point, he retired 10 batters in a row. After some theatrics in the 8th, Papelbon came in and nailed down the last 5 outs on 15 pitches, to save the 3-2 win for the Sox and Schilling. Oh yeah, remember that Ortiz guy? He remembered he was an awesome baseball player and hit two home runs in his first two at-bats, accounting for all of the Red Sox runs. Next up, the Sox return home to Fenway for the first time in 2007. Mariners beware.

Both The Boston Globe and Boston Herald were thinking along the same lines in both headlines and photographs. “Dice-KKKKKKKKKK” screamed both papers on their main front pages, posting a ‘K’ for each of his 10 strikeouts.
[. . .]
The Herald’s sports page on the back employed the headline, “The Dice Is Right!”
— Mike Petraglia / Special to MLB.com

How original! In other news, the Sox fell 2-0 to the Rangers today, after a lot of bad first-pitch swings. The offense will eventually come around in a big way, just wait for it.

The Sox have officially won their first series of the season, mirroring the 7-1 score last night and beating Kansas City 4-1 tonight. Schilling stumbled out of the gate, but Josh Beckett and Daisuke Matsuzaka both jumped out to lead the race for ’07 staff ace. I’m sure Schill will be fired up for his next start to show he can still hang. The offense is slowly coming to life (the bottom of the order being especially slow to come about), but I’m not too worried. J.D. Drew has gotten his Red Sox career off to a great start. I said it before, and I’ll say it again, I think this is going to be a really good team. Onward to Texas!

The Sox got their first big stinker out of the way today, in the form of a 7-1 drubbing by the Kansas City Royals (yes, those Kansas City Royals). Gil Meche justified his contract for at least a day, and Schill had pretty much nothing good to throw for hopefully just a day. Now that they’ve gotten it out of their system, let’s get a nice win streak going! Unfortunately, I didn’t get to watch most of it, so you can read better recaps from Schilling himself and/or Rob Bradford. Time to look toward Wednesday…