Whoa. That was quite a start to the season. Who would have thought that in a game started by Josh Beckett and CC Sabathia, the most important pitches would be thrown by Scott Schoeneweis and Chan Ho Park?

Both pitchers had pretty poor command, in my opinion, with each guy throwing at least 40 pitches that were called balls. Now each guy goes into his next start with an ERA over 8.00. Neither starter exceeded 5.1 IP and both allowed 5 ER.

Here are the previous occasions (within the years included in the Game Finder searches) in which both starting pitchers failed to go more than 5.1 innings and allowed at least 5 earned runs, limited to just the first game of the year for each team:

Counting last night's game,the Red Sox have now been involved in 5 of the 18 such games from 1920-1939 and 1952-2010. They are followed by the Reds with 4 such games and the Cubs with 3 (including 2 games between these latter two opponents.)

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