Boston has ordered up a win in all three playoff starts from Beckett, who has fanned 26 while walking only one. Damian Strohmeyer/SI

Other than the phantom winning run scored by Matt Holliday in the wild-card tiebreaker game on Oct. 1, Colorado largely has dispensed with drama and oddity, building its streak on the kind of baseball that would serve well for an instructional video. The offense blends speed, power and a nice balance of lefthanded and righthanded hitting, but pitching and defense have carried the club. The staff ERA during the 22-game run is 2.80, with 10 pitchers getting wins, and only two of the runs allowed were unearned. The Rockies have trailed in just three of their 65 postseason innings.

"They're young, talented, athletic, have some pitchers we're not familiar with, and they can hit good fastballs with any team out there," Boston pitching coach John Farrell says. "Plus, like Cleveland, they have a bunch of players who came through the minor league system together so there is a lot of organizational pride there. We'll have our hands full."

The Red Sox are hot in their own right, outscoring the Indians 30-5 to win the final three games of the ALCS. "It all started in Game 5 with Josh Beckett," Boston pitcher Curt Schilling says.

Beckett owns the best postseason ERA of any starting pitcher in history with at least 50 innings (1.78). He turned around the series with his 7-1 Game 5 win in which he struck out 11 over eight innings and, in a moment that typified his bravado, shouted down Kenny Lofton for flipping his bat after what the Indians' leftfielder thought was ball four. Lofton cursed back at Beckett, prompting both benches to clear, but the game proceeded without further incident, especially from the Cleveland offense. Beckett, who had barked at Lofton for a similar offense in 2005, does not so much pitch postseason games as much as he enforces them. "A lot of pitchers would want to do what Josh did there," Schilling says. "Josh just did it. He's a guy who never backs down from a challenge. In fact, he looks for a challenge."

Says Beckett, when asked about facing other teams' aces, "Nobody wants it more than me."

Beckett's personality calls to mind coarse sandpaper on a blackboard. Most of the time he could strip paint with his mug alone. Such a nasty streak serves Beckett well in his attention to his work. He takes his between-starts bullpen sessions so seriously, for instance, that he cranks his fastball into the mid-90s even then. And the Red Sox so admire his work ethic that manager Terry Francona has arranged to send the club's top two young starting pitchers, Clay Buchholz and Jon Lester, to Beckett's Cotulla, Texas, home this winter to observe his workouts and model themselves after the young ace.

Though Beckett threw 109 pitches in Game 5, and though he has thrown a career-high 223 2/3 innings, he told Francona he would pitch whenever he might be needed in Game 7. (If closer Jonathan Papelbon had been brought in in the seventh inning, Francona had Beckett lined up to close.) A 20-game winner, Beckett is peaking in October: a 3-0 record and a 1.17 ERA, with 26 strikeouts and only one walk in 23 innings. "If you could pick one guy -- among anybody in baseball -- to start against a hot club like Colorado," Epstein says, "it would be Josh. Easy."

Not only must the Rockies see Beckett twice in the first five games, but they must also deal with the now-serendipitous culture of Fenway Park. After a history rooted in an expectation of doom, Red Sox Nation has gained Most Favored Nation status. Beginning with Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS, Boston is 9-2 in postseason games at Fenway. Not since 1918 have Red Sox fans found themselves back in the World Series after a wait of only three years.

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