Welcome to the pitching duel that didn’t happen

BOSTON – Well ? this was disappointing – strictly from a baseball purist point of view, that is.All week long, we read, and heard, all kinds of things about what would happen last night when Josh Beckett and C.C. Sabathia took the mound. Hits would be scarce. Whichever team scored first would be at a huge disadvantage because the last time either pitcher faced the other team, they only gave up one run (and lost).So, when Travis Hafner took Beckett deep three batters into the game, there was a momentary gasp. That’s what happened the last time Beckett faced Cleveland ? on July 25 at Jacobs Field, when Franklin Gutierrez went yard on him and Fausto Carmona made it stand up.But something happened on the way to the mano-a-mano pitchers’ duel. One of the manos didn’t show up.Sabathia just didn’t have it. For the second game in a row, Sabathia didn’t get out of the fifth. He was just as bad against the Yankees last week, but his teammates bailed him out with a 12-run offensive barrage.There was no such barrage last night. Sabathia may have needed directions to find the plate (he walked five batters in four-and-a-third innings), but Beckett knew the way. For the second straight game, he was lights out for the time was in there. It wasn’t a carbon copy of Game 1 of the Los Angeles Angels series, when he was as dominating as any post-game pitcher has ever been. But he was still better than anything the Indians had to offer.Beckett went through six innings and gave up two runs. One of them was on Hafner’s home run. The other came in the sixth, after Beckett had sat and watched long Red Sox offensive innings in the fourth and fifth in 40-degree cold.Manager Terry Francona knew Beckett had his stuff, but he also knew that – especially after those long half-innings, his ace almost had to reinvent himself every time he went back out to pitch.”I though every inning he went out – I don’t think ‘struggle’ is the right word, but that first hitter of every inning he had to kind of refine himself, and once he did, he got into the flow ? and he was very good.”Beckett got into some long at-bats too, none of them more stressful than Hafner’s second time up, in the third. There was one out and nobody on, and it was 5-1, Red Sox, at the time, but Hafner, well, is one of the league’s most dangerous hitters. The at-bat took forever, with Hafner fouling off pitch after pitch, before Beckett threw him a nasty changeup that had him lunging for strike three.”Hafner ? that 3-2 changeup,” Francona said. “He threw some good balls tonight. But it seemed like he needed a hitter or two to get dialed in.”Sabathia, who gave up a run in the bottom of the first, sailed through the second inning before Julio Lugo led off the third with a ground rule double. Dustin Pedroia bunted him to third – obviously with the feeling that runs would come at a premium – and many felt he did that on his own.”You can assume that if you want,” Francona said. “We were trying to move the runner along in that situation.”It turns out that wasn’t necessary. Sabathia internally combusted from thereon out.”He didn’t have it,” shrugged Cleveland manager Eric Wedge. “”It was just one of those nights for him.For his part, Beckett just kept going out there and sticking to his game-plan ? such as it was.”We’re just trying to go out there and execute pitches,” he said. “There’s a lot of media stuff that goes on around these games, and if you guy into it, it gets to be a distraction. So you can’t buy into it.”Steve Krause is sports editor of The item.”I