There's magic in the air

After pounding the Yankees yesterday, the Red Sox magic number stands at nine with two weeks to go in the regular season. Any combination of Sox wins and New York losses totaling that number will give the hometown team their first division title since 1995 and set us on course to the post-season.

Of course, Friday night's loss was quite disheartening. More than blowing a 7-2 lead in the eighth inning -- which all by itself is something that the team with the best record in baseball should not be doing with the playoffs so near -- the Sox had their two best relievers roughed up. Ouch.

However, putting things in perspective, we already knew that set-up guy Hideki Okajima was having serious problems. The lefty, a big part of the team's success over the first few months of the season, seems to have run out of gas. There's a Globe story today that details his sliding numbers.

As for Papelbon, he gave up a couple of hits as well, but if we can just chalk that up to one bad outing then the big picture of this weekend series so far is that the Red Sox have pounded their opponents' pitching. Excluding the Yankees big inning on Friday, the visitors have been outscored by Boston 17-3 in two games.

Today is another interesting pitching match-up, with Curt Schilling taking the hill against Roger Clemens on ESPN at 8 p.m. Neither of the two know when to keep their mouth shut, but each had some great moments in Red Sox uniforms.

Go Sox!