Schedule settles down for Boston

MLB. A little bit of normalcy has finally crept in for the traveling band otherwise known as the Red Sox.

After the barnstorming tour through the Far East and a journey back to Boston with stops in two different time zones, the Sox enjoyed their initial six-game homestand at the Fens and now embark on a brief four-game road trip.

The Sox understand the challenge will be a difficult one through a pair of American League powers in Cleveland and New York, but the road-weary bunch is happily back in the familiar pattern of the baseball season.

Baseball players are notorious creatures of habit and repetition, and — much to their delight — everything on the Sox’ schedule has become familiar again. Older veterans like 42-year-old Tim Wakefield and 36-year-old Jason Varitek are back to normal sleeping and training patterns, and youngsters like Jacoby

Ellsbury and Dustin Pedroia were finally able to take a breath and simply focus on baseball.

“Personally, I’ve just had to listen to myself and listen to what my body is telling,” said Varitek, who reportedly had some trouble with his sleeping patterns during the exotic experience on the long and winding road through Tokyo. “[The travel] is inevitable with what we do, but it’s also inevitable that we’ll start to settle in now.”

The Sox are coming off a solid 4-2 homestand against highly-rated competitors in the Tigers and the Bronx Bombers, and Sox manager Terry Francona is happy that questions about travel fatigue and difficult April schedules are slowly fading into the background.

At this point, it’s all about the day-to-day grind of big-league baseball, and that’s just the way Francona likes it.

“We’re getting ourselves into the grind of the season,” Francona said. “It doesn’t mean we’re going to win every game, but we can see how good we’re going to be. We did what we wanted to do [at home], and now we go out on the road against another good team.”