Another fewer than five inning outing from Dice-K, and guess what, I’m not going to rip him. In fact, I’ve got to give him some props. After last-night’s 13 inning marathon, coming back out to pitch after an hour-plus rain-delay between the 1st and 2nd innings is downright gutsy (there’s an adjective I’ll probably never use to describe Dice-K again). I’m sure he knew the bullpen was spent, and the fact that he was able to give the team more than a single inning went a long way to helping the team win.

Now that said, I’m a little disappointed by the rules of baseball. According to rule 10.17, if a starting pitcher doesn’t complete five innings, he is ineligible to be named the winning pitcher. In 99% of cases, this is the appropriate thing to do. But considering that the rule gives the official scorer the power to choose the relief pitcher who he feels deserves the title of “winning pitcher,” I’m surprised that it doesn’t also give him the discretion to credit the starting pitcher as the “winning pitcher.” If you include the 60-70 warmup pitches that Dice-K had to make after the rain delay ended, that’s a total of 151-161 pitches on the day. For Dice-K that should at least be worth, what, 5.1 innings? He gets a lot of crap from me, but in this situation he got robbed.

The Sox also couldn’t have won without the three errors from H1N1E6 and four hits from Jimmy Rollins. What? Wait, you’re telling me that H1N1E6 got four hits and the Phillies made three errors? Clearly this rain is making your head all foggy. You’d better get under the umbrella with Papi before you really lose it.