Roll with Dice, K?

As much as we hate to bury one of our favorite posts in months, there's a ballgame tonight that's worth a pick. That's the Red Sox against the Tampa Rays tonight at Tropicana Field in Game 1 of the ALCS. We appreciate the comments to the Biden piece below, and tomorrow we'll respond to the more thoughtful comments that we didn't get to today.

More importantly, tomorrow brings a tantalizing slate of college football action that we'll be here to discuss before the games start. To the extent we don't get back in time for the start of the first one, the NCAA action for tomorrow is as follows if you don't hear otherwise.

Texas +6.5 over Oklahoma
Northwestern +1.5 over Michigan State
North Carolina -8.5 over Notre Dame
and Florida -6 over LSU

Now for tonight's baseball game: We think it's a good story if either team wins this Series (especially if the Dodgers come through on the other side), but we're picking the Red Sox tonight because we think there's great value in backing Red Sox starter Daisuke (say, Dice-K) Matsuzaka in a championship series game -- particularly one played in a dome.

Matsuzaka arrived in America from Japan last year with much fanfare and hype. The Red Sox paid close to $50 million just for the exclusive rights to negotiate with him. While Dice-K had a nice year for the World Series Champs, he was not an All-Star, and did not pitch well in the particularly well in the playoffs. This year has been different, with Matsuzaka racking up an 18-3 record, with a 2.90 ERA and 158 strikeouts in 167 innings. Moving to the US to be a baseball superstar when one has lived his whole life in Japan is a big deal -- especially with the unprecedented hype surrounding Dice-K. We'll chalk last year's substandard (for Dice-K) results as a result of a necessary adjustment period.















Matsuzaka has considerable Championship experience that goes deeper than just last season with the Sox. He pitched for the Seibu Lions against the Yomiuri Giants in the 2002 Japan Series (where his team lost), and led the Japanese National Team to the title in the 2006 World Baseball Classic -- winning MVP honors in the process. And Matsuzaka should be comfortable pitching in a dome, because much of his Series against Yomiuri was played in Japan's venerable Tokyo Dome, home of the Giants, who are something like the Yankees of Japan. We've seen the Giants play in the Tokyo Dome, and can assure you that whatever the Rays fans bring tonight, they won't bring anything close to the noise that Giants fans bring. The Japanese take baseball fandom to a level that we'll describe briefly as at least "more intense" than it is here in the States.

Both teams have excellent lineups, and the Rays have the "playing with house money" factor that might balance out Boston's playoff experience, but it's the particular depth of Matsuzaka's post-season experience, particularly when compared to Tampa starter James Shields, that should give the Red Sox the edge tonight.

The Pick: Red Sox +112 over the Rays