BOSTON—Well, all those gloom-and-doom weather forecasts can be wadded up and recycled at this point. It’s still sufficiently foggy that the buildings downtown are obscured, but there’s no rain. The tarp is off the field and rolled up and the radar looks completely clear.

So, we should be good to go for Scott Kazmir’s first start of 2008. Once again, he’ll be limited to about 100 pitches, but if he gets in a mess like Shields did yesterday, throwing around 30 pitches an inning, he might get cut short. The only problem is there is no obvious long man available tonight. Jason Hammel has thrown a little over 100 pitches in the last five days and J.P. Howell went a while last night, so it may be a combo of Kurt Birkins and Scott Dohmann if the Rays need to fill, and that probably wouldn’t be a good thing.

Perhaps the Rays can summon a bit of offense with B.J. Upton back in the middle of their order for the first time in this series. We shall see…

Rays
Iwamura 2B
Crawford LF
Upton CF
Pena 1B
Longoria 3B
Gomes DH
Hinske RF
Riggans C
Bartlett SS
Kazmir P

Red Sox
Crisp CF
Pedroia 2B
Ortiz DH
Ramirez LF
Lowell 3B
Youkilis 1B
Drew RF
Varitek C
Lugo SS
Lester P