Krause: This can’t happen again … can it?

BOSTON – All right. Enough is enough. Sooner or later, teams have to stop making painfully easy for the Boston Red Sox in the post-season.And no team should know that more than the St. Louis Cardinals.This isn?t to say that the Red Sox ? or their fans ? should want the Cardinals, or any team, really, to all of a sudden put on their capes and become Supermen. It?s just that at some point, this incredible streak they?ve had is going to come to an end.This is the ninth World Series game in a row the Red Sox have won. Since the ignominious defeat of 1986 at the hands of the New York Mets, the Sox have swept the Cardinals in ?04, and the Colorado Rockies in ?07. They have won slugfests, pitchers? duels, sloppy games, tight games, and every other kind of game. But the bottom line is they have won.In this particular post-season, the Red Sox have been challenged minimally. The Tampa Bay Rays offered token resistance, winning one game out of four on a night when manager John Farrell might not have had his best game in the dugout. They were challenged by all of three players on the 25-man Detroit Tigers roster: Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander and Anibal Sanchez. Beyond that, the Tigers showed all the consistency of, well, paper. Bad defense ? worse baserunning ? and an embarrassingly ineffective bullpen made the recently-completed American League Championship Series much easier than it should have been.All the Red Sox had to do was wait out the starters until they could get to the bullpen, and then start mashing. It worked beautifully.Along come the Cardinals ? advertised everywhere as a real team. No out-of-shape sluggers here. No wretched defense. No combustible bullpen. They?re just a solid baseball team that?s not going to beat itself ? and is going to make you earn every run.Except for Wednesday night. Those Cardinals forgot to show up.What we got instead was an extension of the Tigers. Their shortstop (Pete Kozma) made costly errors in each of the first two innings, and the Red Sox ended up scoring five runs and jumping out to an early lead in their 8-1 opening-game victory.Where the Red Sox took advantage of every opportunity, the Cardinals couldn?t do a thing with theirs. They had bases loaded and one out in the fourth before David Freese grounded into a 1-2-3 double play. An inning later, with runners on second and third and two out, Boston?s Jon Lester got John Jay to ground out to short.?I fell out of my rhythm in those two innings,” Lester said. “I was getting a lot of quick outs early, and I had to throw a lot of pitches in those two innings.”After that, though, he settled back in.?I got a first-pitch out there in the sixth,” he said. “First-pitch outs ? they?re huge.”After missing on those opportunities, the Cardinals pretty much called it a night. But for good measure, David Ortiz hit a two-run homer and then Xander Bogaerts knocked home the final run on a sacrifice fly.By the time Matt Holliday lofted a homer off Ryan Dempster in the ninth, it was way too little ? and way too late.The Cardinals may have lost more than the game. Carlos Beltran, who has been huge for them in the post-season, hurt his ribs catching David Ortiz?s sacrifice fly in the second. The ball took Beltran to the bullpen, where he made another catch to prevent another Papi grand slam.This isn?t 2004. The Cardinals are not the pawns in the region-wide passion play the way they were that season. Once the Red Sox beat the Yankees, coming back from three down to win the pennant, there was a sense of inevitability about the World Series. And when Mark Bellhorn clanged one off the foul pole to account for the winning runs in Game 1, it was pretty much all over then.This cannot happen again. There is no sense of inevitability. There are just two good baseball teams, each of which won 97 games, playing for a world championship.There?s still a lot of baseball to go.