Mientkiewicz, although not used as an everyday player by Terry Francona, has played solid, unflashy baseball for Boston, and no surprise there; as a Minnesota Twin he’s played on plenty of contending teams, and he’s used to the pressure. Cabrera is a different story. Players who come from forgotten teams (and surely the Montreal Expos are the forgotten team) either blossom or shrivel when they come to contending teams and pressure-cooker venues like Boston; Cabrera has so far done the latter. The press has been patient with him, but you’d expect that; in Boston most of those guys shill for management, and while they have no problem making Nomar look bad, they’d love his replacement to look good so they can say, “See? He’s great. Toldja.”

More interesting to me—also more surprising and endearing—has been the fans’ patience with Cabrera…who probably helped himself enormously by hitting a home run in his first at-bat in the Red Sox uniform. None since, though, and his Montreal batting average of .246 has shrunk to something like .225. Worse, he hasn’t looked like anyone’s idea of a Gold Glover at shortstop. Last night, in Boston’s game against Toronto—the first of a three-game set—Cabrera racked up a pair of RBIs, one on a base hit and one on a sac fly. Then, in an agonizing, rain-soaked seventh inning that seemed to go on forever, he gave them both back plus one to grow on with two box-score errors and a third, mental, error that allowed a run which should have been kept right where it was, at third base.

Cabrera’s hitting in the clutch has been nonexistent. In the game previous to last night’s—the final game of the Red Sox–White Sox series—Cabrera ended things by grounding softly back to the pitcher, leaving the tying run stranded at third after the Red Sox had battled back from a multirun deficit. So in last night’s game I was a little saddened but not really surprised to hear the first scattered boos in the rain-depleted crowd when Cabrera came up following his seventh-inning follies, which turned a 5–1 Red Sox cruise into a 5–4 nail-biter against the American League’s bottom dogs. The crowd wants him to be good, and I have no doubt that he is—no doubt that Terry Francona is exactly right when he says that Cabrera (who, unlike Mientkiewicz, plays every day) is pressing at the plate—but I also have no doubt that the Nomar trade has already cost this Red Sox team at least three games it could ill afford to lose, and that it will quite likely cost them more unless Orlando Cabrera quickly finds his stride.