All Boston. Chowwwwwwwwwdah. In tennis, Game 1 was an ace. A blowout. A dramatic entrance. The Red Sox rode a Mike Napoli three-run double and Jon Lester's arm to an 8-1 victory over the St. Louis Cardinals.
The game was Lester's second appearance in the World Series for Boston. He closed out 2007's Game 4 against the Colorado Rockies, when the Sox won their second championship since 2004.
"What makes this team so good is that we're patient," said Boston's David Ortiz, who cracked a two-run home run in Wednesday's World series opener. "We know how to stay away from chasing pitches out of the strike zone, and we swing at strikes. That went against (Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright) tonight."
As noted by CBS Sports, the team that has won Game 1 has won 14 of the last 16 World Series – one of those 14 cases was in 2004, when Boston swept St. Louis for their first championship since 1918.
The Cardinals, meanwhile, are writhing along with their slugger Carlos Beltran, who is day-to-day with bruised ribs after injuring himself tracking down an Ortiz fly-ball at the wall.
"Word is, Beltran has badly bruised ribs and a sadness that could be felt and seen, even if he didn't appear afterward in the postgame clubhouse session," wrote CBS Sports' Jon Heyman. "He wasn't talking, and after a few minutes with his teammates, you knew why. He was too sad to speak."
"Beltran waited 16 years to finally play in a World Series game, seeing and surviving just about everything in the game he was born to play. He performed through multiple trades, and many more rumors, through two big free-agent paydays (one much bigger than the other), through heroics and near misses, through nicks and bruises and one devastating knee injury that soured his time in New York at the end.
"He played on the East Coast and West, and now again in the Central time zone, where he started and played twice before. He has flashed his immense ability in every corner of the country. He's hit 16 postseason home runs (the same as David Ortiz in far fewer at-bats), but until now he never could quite lift his team to the World Series."