Red Sox shoot for another sweep of Blue Jays

Baseball Betting Lines

09/05/2007 - (Sportsbook Betting Lines) - The Boston Red Sox try and complete their second three-game sweep of the Toronto Blue Jays this season when the two AL East rivals conclude their set at Fenway Park.

Boston won its fourth straight game on Tuesday, as Jacoby Ellsbury finished 3- for-3 with a two-run homer to lead the Red Sox to a 5-3 win. Kevin Youkilis was 2-for-4 with a key home run for the AL East-leading Red Sox, who also swept the Blue Jays from May 8-10 at Rogers Centre.

Josh Beckett (17-6) allowed five hits and three runs over eight innings to become the first 17-game winner in the majors. He has gone at least eight innings in eight starts this season.

Toronto starter Roy Halladay (14-7) took the loss by yielding nine hits and five runs with seven strikeouts and a pair of walks in eight innings. The hard-throwing right-hander has not won in his last four starts.

Matt Stairs hit a three-run homer for the Blue Jays, who have lost two in a row after a three-game win streak.

Hoping to complete the sweep for the Red Sox this evening will be veteran right-hander Curt Schilling, who was a hard-luck loser in his last trip to the hill on Thursday. Schilling gave up two runs and six hits over seven innings to the New York Yankees in that one, but was outdueled by Chien-Ming Wang in a 5-0 shutout.

Schilling, who is 8-6 with a 4.02 ERA this season, has struggled against the Blue Jays over the course of his career, going 3-6 with a 5.68 ERA in 15 games, 11 of which have been starts.

Getting the call for the Blue Jays this evening will be right-hander Shaun Marcum, who is 12-5 with a 3.75 ERA. Marcum won his second straight start and picked up his seventh win in his last eight starts on Friday against Seattle, surrendering four runs and seven hits in five innings.

Marcum has faced the Red Sox seven times (two starts) and is 2-1 against them with a 2.57 ERA.

Boston holds a 9-5 edge in the 2007 season series with Toronto, but the Blue Jays have split their eight meetings at Fenway Park.

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FOOTBALL TRASH TALK

NFL Football Trash Talk

Trash talk has a place in every competitive endeavor (except baseball; those stirrup-wearers are too busy chewing on their sunflower seeds and their supplements to worry about what their opponents are doing).

Fantasy sports is no exception. Any intelligent discussion of the subject would probably start with a thesis statement or a definition of terms. Thankfully, this wont be an intelligent discussion.

Let me just say that I am happy to take a place in this space alongside my talented colleagues, even our commissioner. (You should see how she bleats like a demented paper boy about league fees on our fantasy site).

Trash talking, I would argue, is primarily about amusing your friends, their sheeplike demeanors and sloping foreheads notwithstanding. The best place I have found for football trash talking is at www.SportsAlarm.com.

Beyond the entertainment factor, though, I would recognize that the sophomoric ritual has one advantage, when properly applied. It magnifies your fantasy triumphs and mitigates your fantasy failures by transforming the eventual point total into an afterthought. Winning makes it seem like your opponent really is a truss-owning, lapel-pin-wearing nitwit. And in defeat, trash talk can be the air bag to break the fall from your hyperbolic heights. The plug-necked yahoos on your team, you can say, will be sacking groceries by the end of the season.

The best trash talk, in my view, is layered and nuanced. And it doesnt focus only on your opponents team. It picks apart your opponent. The idea is to create a shock-and-awe-scale blizzard of nonsense, and the goal is to make your opponent drop his hands from his keyboard in exasperation.

What team does your opponent root for? Accuse a Giants fan of having a Joe Namath pillowcase. Wheres your opponent from? Give a look of concern no matter his reply, then say, I'll try to type slower for you next time. Is your opponent into politics? Label everyone a tax-and-spend corporate shill.

Cap all that with a liberal application of irrelevance. For instance, dont just conclude by saying your opponent is a twerp who drafts like my grandmother. Say that your opponent is a sweater-wearing, eyebrow-plucking twerp who drafts his team about as well as Zsa Zsa Gabor gave acceptance speeches at the Oscars. By the time your foe makes sense of that, his starting running back will have had puppies.

But what about you? Hmm? Recall a memorable slam? Have a tried-and-true technique? Know someone who seems impervious to insult? Take a moment and tells us about it. Put together some (fit-for-publication) thoughts. You wont be too busy returning phone messages from your friends, Im sure, to reply.

In addition to the trash talking, the Sports Alarm has a huge gallery of high resolution pictures of beautiful women and models in bikinis. The most popular models are: Lindsay Lohan, Carrie Underwood, Alessandra Ambrosio, and Paris Hilton.