Sox Drawer: What happened to the offense?

A perplexing lack of runs has left the Sox searching for their lost offense

It started, as most streaks do, innocently enough, with a 2-0 loss to Oakland and old friend Lenny DiNardo on June 4th that seemed more like a minor aberration than the beginning of a disturbing trend.

Suddenly, eight games later, Boston's power outage has gone to infuriating, perplexing and epic proportions as what was once one of the highest scoring teams in the league now can't buy any runs.

As pointed out in today's Globe, six times in the last eight games the Sox have been held to two runs or fewer (two wins), a feat it had accomplished prior to this stretch six times in its last 32 contests, and two of those were wins.

So what's the deal with the sudden drought?

Many factors have to be considered to figure out the reason behind this annoying occurrence, and but the good news is the condition would appear to be temporary, influenced by a number of factors.

1. The Bullseye Effect-- when you're as good as the Sox are and own of the best record in the game for over a month, teams want to take you out, and not just the rival Stanks. Therefore even though the list of hurlers who have tossed gems against the Sox in the last two weeks isn't Hall of Fame-caliber,(DiNardo, Kennedy, Blanton, Cook, Fogg, Randy Johnson-oops), every night Boston faces teams that want to knock off #1 and pitchers who want desperately to defeat a heralded rival like Schilling, Beckett or Dice-K; it's all part of being the best team in the majors (sigh!)
2. Scheduling Quirks-- whoever decided to have Boston play a weekend series at home with the hated Stanks, capped by a Sunday Night ESPN game that ended past midnight EST, and then have them take a red eye to the West Coast that landed in San Fran at 4:30 am PST should be shot, hung, and forced to watch Wild Hogs 478 times in a row. Needless to say losing that Sun. nite game on A-Rod's homer combined with serious jet lag might have had something to do with the 0-3 start to the WC swing and led to the drought
3. Sudden slumps-- remember when Pedroia & Youk were smoking hot and Lowell and Papi were driving in a ton of runs? Me neither. Most of the team has fallen victim to Slumbering Bat Syndrome, a condition that has certainly been influenced by the rash of hot pitching they've faced, but considering the quality of said hurlers, the situation is that much more vexing.

To that end, let's take a look at how the hitters have (under)performed over this eight game famine:

Julio Lugo	4-32, 1HR, 1BI
Kevin Youkilis	7-22, 0HR, 2BI
David Ortiz	9-24, 1HR, 1BI
Manny Ramirez	6-18, 0HR, 2BI
J.D. Drew	7-21, 2HR, 8BI
Mike Lowell	5-27, 1HR, 3BI
Jason Varitek	5-24, 1HR, 3BI
Coco Crisp	4-30, 0R, 0BI
Dustin Pedroia	3-17, 2R, 0BI
Alex Cora	2-12, 1R, 0BI
Wily Mo Pena	2-9, 0HR, 1BI
Eric Hinske	2-4, 1R, 0BI
Doug Mirabelli	2-8, 0HR, 0BI

Throw out the J.D. Drew 1-game explosion and this team just hasn't been producing from top to bottom. Although guys like Manny, Papi and Youk are hitting, they are not driving in any runs, probably because guys like Lugo, Crisp, Pedroia haven't been getting on base.

It's the old cart before the horse theory; are the Sox not scoring runs because no one's on base, or is no one on base because they have been facing hot pitching?

I don't know the answer and frankly all this talk about it is making me a little upset, so I'll end this exercise right now.

But if Boston doesn't explode for some runs tonight, when the king of run support Josh Beckett takes his perfect record to the mound, and with the Stanks reeling off eight straight wins while scoring 7RPG, well then this could get real ugly real fast.

Who knows, maybe Tito will even make another lineup change.

Hint: Coco (.277 OBP, .324 career) isn't leadoff material, either; try Youk or keep Pedroia there, but not Coco or Lugo, m'kay?