The Sox continue to frustrate recently. They split a four game series with the Blue Jays this weekend. It could have easily been a sweep for Boston, as both losses were by one run. On Friday night, the Sox had two men on with one out in the 9th and Ortiz and Ramirez coming up. Neither one could get a hit to tie or win the game (although Manny hit a drive to right that was caught on a nice play by Alex Rios).

Yesterday was even more frustrating as the Sox wasted another excellent pitching performance by Josh Beckett (8 innings, 2 runs). Despite getting 11 hits, they could only squeeze across 1 run (on a Papi double).

The Sox have lost six straight 1-run decisions in what seems to be a pattern lately - they lost winnable games in the sweeps by Seattle and Detroit before the All-Star break as well. Let's hope they can beat up on the Royals for the next few days. I don't think that a sweep at Fenway is setting the expectations bar too high here.

On a completely different note, the Phillies lost the 10,000th game in team history, becoming the first professional franchise in any sport to lose that many games.

This is what happens when a team is pretty much relentlessly mediocre (or worse) for decades. The Phillies came into existance in 1883 and have won only one World Series (1980) in their entire history. All the other teams who have won one or fewer World Series were expansion teams and have been around for a much shorter period of time than the Phillies. Teams that have never won a World Series include Houston, Milwaukee, Washington, San Diego, Seattle, Tampa, Texas and Colorado. The three that have matched the Phillies in winning one Series include Kansas City, Arizona and the LA Angels. All of these teams entered MLB in 1961 or later, which means the Phillies had at least a nearly 80 year head start on them.