2011-2012 Offseason Thread

[seabeachfred]

To be positive about the team after 2011 would constitute denial. Last off season' date=' I was very positive about Theo and the organization. Memories are short.[/quote']

 

Hey 700 Hitter---for what it's worth I think you and Jung are pretty much on the stick with respect to where the Red Sox are right now. He believes the team's focus shifted after our second WS Title in 2007, and you are facing reality that there nothing to be positive about after our miserable and disastrous 2011 season. I can't see where the opposition to those beliefs are founded upon. This past season was a bitter disappointment incarnate....I'm convinced Francona lost his team with his milk and cookies approach, his refusal to establish any kind of discipline, along with his strategical blunders we all got used to during his tenure. We have a lot of work to do to get up to speed and some serious decisons to be made with regard to personnel. These next few months will tell all of us just how serious Henry and Co. are in restoring our greatness, or whether the ride down the elevator will continue unabated. Hint....we can't keep doing things the same way we've done the past three seasons.:thumbdown:thumbdown:thumbdown:thumbdown

[seabeachfred]

Thats unrealistic.

 

Re-sign Pap and Papi.

 

Get Sizemore. A good choice for RF, and hes cheap.

 

Bring in a complementing piece for the bullpen, or even two. Wood, Broxton (off of surgery, he would be a steal if the Soz were willing to take the risk), or Saito.

 

Go in hard for Buerle. If we dont get him at least it cost whoever gets him (most likely the Yanks ATM), a few Million more.

 

We should also make a bid for Hiroki Kuroda

 

Sorry Nirvana but what's unrealistic are some of your suggestions. Resign Papi and then sign Sizemore? We are already too lefthanded to begin with and that automatically makes us susceptible to left hand pitchers. Besides, Sizemore can't stay healthy; his knees are shot and Papi is 36, and we cannot sign both him and Papelbon. And stop with Broxton right there. He is about the biggest choke-up there is; cannot take pressure anymore, and he would get killed in the AL East. We need a RH hitter for the outfield, and pitching is what we need more than anything. Sign Papelbon? Yes, but nyet, nein, no mas, no to Sizemore, Broxton and Ortiz.

[seabeachfred]

I disagree with all of this except Buerhle. You're suggesting we re-sign our expensive free agents that have already peaked' date=' pick up Sizemore who is yet another broken LHH RF, those relievers are big names who will get destroyed in the AL East, and Kuroda refused to leave the Dodgers last year.[/quote']

 

Thanks Palodios!!!! Another reasonable voice of sanity. Nirvana's suggestions went over with me like a lead balloon as well. Living in the Los Angeles area, take it to the bank...Broxton would get killed in the AL East because he is a choker to the core, and we don't need another LH hitter; we're already overloaded in that regard. Ortiz should be allowed to walk, and, here we may disagree, but we need to resign Papelbon. To me, no matter how you slice it or dice it, pitching is the name of the game and we need a good starter, two relievers and a RH hitting right fielder.

 

Again, though, this thread is for those of us who want to persude different ideas of what would make us a better team, but I had to answer Nirvana as you did because those suggestions from him would be doomed to failure in my opinion.

[seabeachfred]

I only would trade Ells for a guy named Kershaw/Felix/Shields/Cain and in a heartbeat.

 

Well we ain't getting Kershaw; I can tell you that living out here in So. Cal. No way that happens. He is fast becoming the best in the NL League, and if you have any history of the Giants-Dodgers rivalry you would understand that since the guy is a confirmed Giants killer. As for King Felix, he makes me drool all over and that would be the guy I would take above all others, but try and get him. He's not going anywhere either. Shields? I don't think the Rays would trade him to an AL East rival. Now Cain!!!!! He might be the one we could get, but trade Ellsbury for him???? I don't know if I would. Maybe is all I could say. The Giants could use some young hitters. Perhaps a Reddick-Lowrie combo along with a Doubrant could net him. Maybe, maybe not.

[Laser Show]

Well we ain't getting Kershaw; I can tell you that living out here in So. Cal. No way that happens. He is fast becoming the best in the NL League' date=' and if you have any history of the Giants-Dodgers rivalry you would understand that since the guy is a confirmed Giants killer. As for King Felix, he makes me drool all over and that would be the guy I would take above all others, but try and get him. He's not going anywhere either. Shields? I don't think the Rays would trade him to an AL East rival. Now Cain!!!!! He might be the one we could get, but trade Ellsbury for him???? I don't know if I would. Maybe is all I could say. The Giants could use some young hitters. Perhaps a Reddick-Lowrie combo along with a Doubrant could net him. Maybe, maybe not.[/quote']

 

Would the Giants trade Cain now that they've traded Sanchez for a CF?

 

I'd be willing to give up the farm for Felix.

[seabeachfred]

So what should Cherington do? Pick a manager with a roll of the dice, so that if that manager fails, the same fans and media who are asking for quick action hastily move on to crucify him?

 

Is there some type of situation where you can be satisfied in this instance? Picks a bad manager by rushing the search, he's an idiot, takes his time picking a manager, he's an idiot.

 

Can't have it both ways.

 

No, you can't have it both ways--I'll give you that. However, give me my point that it's been well over a month since our disastrous season ended and we still haven't selected a manager. What's that, five and a half weeks? At that glacial pace, by the time we get that starting pitcher, RH hitting right fielder and a couple of relievers it will be around the 4th of July. I just think things should be moving faster than they have. No team finished the season with a worse September record than the Red Sox, so it would seem to me that we have more work to do than some of the other teams that ended on a semi-high note.

[seabeachfred]

Would the Giants trade Cain now that they've traded Sanchez for a CF?

 

I'd be willing to give up the farm for Felix.

 

The Giants are still very deep in pitching and have a couple of prospects banging at the door. Their scouts have done a magnificent job of spotting good pitching talent and they are loaded there. Keep in mind Laser that Sanchez lost his starting role this past summer so the Royals took a chance that the guy just had an off season. Keep also in mind that now there is another left hand starting pitcher in the American League, a warning if there ever was one that the Red Sox have got to become more right handed than they are.

 

As for King Felix, I tend to agree with you.

[User Name]

No' date=' you can't have it both ways--I'll give you that. However, give me my point that it's been well over a month since our disastrous season ended and we still haven't selected a manager. What's that, five and a half weeks? At that glacial pace, by the time we get that starting pitcher, RH hitting right fielder and a couple of relievers it will be around the 4th of July. I just think things should be moving faster than they have. No team finished the season with a worse September record than the Red Sox, so it would seem to me that we have more work to do than some of the other teams that ended on a semi-high note.[/quote']

 

How much of that time has Cherington spent on the job?

 

Also, the offseason just started, and this is a very important decision. How you think things should move and the way things need to realistically move are different things here.

 

He can continue the managerial search while keeping in contact with FA's and negotiating other transactions. If he can't, he should not be GM.

 

Let's keep things on a realistic perspective here.

[a700hitter]

The managerial search is no big deal. Take your pick from a pool of idiots and dunces and find one that can handle tjhe press. It's not a critical decision. It rarely is. A new manager is not going to come to Fenway and crack the whip on a bunch of veteran stars. It ain't gonna happen. The days of Dick Williams, Leo Durocher and Billy Martin are long over. Get a FO yes man who can make out a lineup, count pitches and give some vanilla answers at the post game press conference. That's who they are looking for and that's who they will get. There are plenty of them available. It's no big deal.

[seabeachfred]

700, for the first time I have to disagree with you. What you're describing as our next manager sounds an awful lot like the one we just got rid of. We need a much tougher manager than that, and not one who is little more than an errand boy for the GM. If the front office learned anything from our bitter 2011 pratfall that should be it.

[jung]

I agree about the managers job and posted a few days ago that I thought the technical aspects of the managerial job are overstated. The guy needs to set the tone for the team more than dictate one way or the other. This is surely the wrong mix of players if you want to get dictatorial.

 

I am more concerned about things like Maddux just taking his name off the list and to what degree guys are a bit shy of coming here at this stage of the game. I was thinking that Maddux may have already committed to the Cubs but I guess we would have heard more about that if that was the case. So, if not isn't Maddux just removing his name because he is just flat not interested? We always think about the Boston job as one of the most coveted in baseball and with good reason. But I do wonder if that is just not the case right now and maybe there is more than one reason for that.

 

I am not sure I would be real thrilled with the way every manager is run out of this town on a rail without fail. It is clearly a very intense baseball environment and I could see guys not really being very interested in being around that. There might be guys thinking the same thing we are about the corner the Sox have sort of painted themselves into and thinking that they would have a better opportunity to succeed elsewhere.

 

Now that we have fully understood the real dollars available to make changes I am in complete agreement with those suggesting that we say goodbye to Wak, Tek, Drew and Ortiz and we pick up a decent RH bat to play RF, get a starter for the back of the rotation and spend the rest of what money we have on pitching depth. Now that is not a lotta' money to go around for folks that have not been following the thread where we went fully through this but it is what it is. We do what we can do for a year and hopefully can hit the jackpot on a serious SP next year when so many more come available and we get another year to catch up on the Luxury Tax Limits.

 

As to the question of busting the Luxury Tax Limit, I don't think there is a team in baseball other than the Yankees, who regularly generate over $400M in revenue per year, that can afford to seriously consider crossing that line. By the way I think the 2011 revenue projection for the Yankees was $430M and I think the Sox projection was something like $240M. In fact while I think the Sox have been very focused on revenue generation in recent years it sort of fell flat in 2011 with revenue growth projections at only about 2% over 2010 numbers.

[a700hitter]

700' date=' for the first time I have to disagree with you. What you're describing as our next manager sounds an awful lot like the one we just got rid of. We need a much tougher manager than that, and not one who is little more than an errand boy for the GM. If the front office learned anything from our bitter 2011 pratfall that should be it.[/quote']I don't like it, but that's just the way it is today. Tough managers don't exist anymore, and their act would never work with a team full of veteran stars.

[jung]

I don't like it, but that's just the way it is today. Tough managers don't exist anymore, and their act would never work with a team full of veteran stars.

 

What a baseball world the CBA has given us. No wonder the Players Association is so proud of the damn thing. It has made millionaires out of mediocre ballplayers and has really shaped what managers can do what owners can do, what players will do etc. It just about makes it so that the only control you have is in the balance of long term, big money contract stars vs guys trying to get there that you have on your team. If you have too many of the former and too few of the latter you better make damn sure that the former are guys that have a baseball agenda beyond that paycheck. It would not surprise me that if I were to read every page of the CBA eventually I would find out exactly which urinals an owner can or cannot use on game day.

 

Not saying they should go back to the kind of control a team had over a player in the old days but gosh it would nice if they had settled somewhere closer to a middle ground.

[seabeachfred]

What a baseball world the CBA has given us. No wonder the Players Association is so proud of the damn thing. It has made millionaires out of mediocre ballplayers and has really shaped what managers can do what owners can do, what players will do etc. It just about makes it so that the only control you have is in the balance of long term, big money contract stars vs guys trying to get there that you have on your team. If you have too many of the former and too few of the latter you better make damn sure that the former are guys that have a baseball agenda beyond that paycheck. It would not surprise me that if I were to read every page of the CBA eventually I would find out exactly which urinals an owner can or cannot use on game day.

 

Not saying they should go back to the kind of control a team had over a player in the old days but gosh it would nice if they had settled somewhere closer to a middle ground.

 

This year's disastrous season was further aided by the ineptness of Francona in the dugout. He was never a good field manager and, in fact, he was a pretty weak strategist that some people thought he actually cost us between eight and ten games a year. Whether you buy into that or not the fact was he wasnot a good field skipper. When stories started erupting that there was beer drinking in the clubhouse during games and that players were sending out for fried chicken as well, you wonder you was running what was becoming an asylum. Surely we can get a manager who can control things like that and also one that is more adept in game to games situations. I was astounded how Joe Maddon kept outsmarting Francona game after game. We can do better in that regard; that I'm sure of.

[example1]

Just so I can understand the language that's being used here...

 

2011 was "miserable" and "disasterous" and there is "nothing to be positive about" according to SBF.

 

What adjectives would you use if they, say, finished in 4th place, or had a .500 record, or had results like the other 70% of teams?

 

"Nothing to be positive about" is absurd. The Sox still have an ownership group that wants to win badly. They still have a core of young players that other teams would be envious of. According to Baseball Reference they had the 2nd, 4th and 5th most valuable offensive pieces in the AL in 2011, and ALL 3 WON GOLD GLOVES.

 

Christ, none of us like how the team collapsed, but to continue with the "woe is us" attitude is just tiresome. This isn't the Kansas City Royals. Don't cry too much. They will be just fine moving forward.

[jung]

Yea I never thought Tito's in game managerial skills where that great. He was not what I would call a situational manager. He seemed to have a particular viewpoint and he never seemed to let the situation complicate matters as that viewpoint was always his guiding light.

 

As for where the team is, if they are smart for a change they can sneak their way out of this current situation. They simply don't have much wiggle room for additional stupidity and will have to be more reliant on luck next year than anybody will like. There is simply not much they can do stupidly this year anyway as it turns out. They don't have any money with which to be stupid. So as long as they can get some kind of manager, get rid of the right guys (no longer hard to identify under the financial constraints) and get themselves a RH bat to play right field, a reasonable SP for the back end of the rotation just ahead of what looks more and more like Aceves and then spend the paltry remains on pitching depth that is just about all they can do for this year anyway.

 

Next year there is a bevy of good pitching talent coming on the FA market and they will have much more opportunity to either distinguish themselves or step into a few more land mines.

[a700hitter]

Just so I can understand the language that's being used here...

 

2011 was "miserable" and "disasterous" and there is "nothing to be positive about" according to SBF.

 

What adjectives would you use if they, say, finished in 4th place, or had a .500 record, or had results like the other 70% of teams?

 

"Nothing to be positive about" is absurd. The Sox still have an ownership group that wants to win badly. They still have a core of young players that other teams would be envious of. According to Baseball Reference they had the 2nd, 4th and 5th most valuable offensive pieces in the AL in 2011, and ALL 3 WON GOLD GLOVES.

 

Christ, none of us like how the team collapsed, but to continue with the "woe is us" attitude is just tiresome. This isn't the Kansas City Royals. Don't cry too much. They will be just fine moving forward.

Of course they weren't the worst team in the league and they did have plenty of talented players, but they also had one of the highest payrolls in baseball and they have the highest ticket prices in baseball. I can't buy 4 tickets, 4 hot dogs and 4 sodas plus bring my dog like I can in KC and some other MLB cities. No, I have to go for my lungs to get 2 tickets and often times the seats are not side by side. For all this investment by the fans and the team, the 2011 team managed to pull off the biggest September collapse in history. No small market team has done that. Taking into consideration the investment in the. 2011 team and the high expectationsn the resulting collapse made the season something we'd all rather forget-- a collosal failure. If you want to celebrate such miserable underperformance, good for you. Many others live in the real world and acknowledge that 2011 was disastrous. Proof that things really were bad is that the FO and coaching staff has been almost entirely replaced. That doesn't happen when you have had a successful season. It happens when there is a crisis precipated by failure.

[Laser Show]

Of course they weren't the worst team in the league and they did have plenty of talented players' date=' but they also had one of the highest payrolls in baseball and they have the highest ticket prices in baseball. I can't buy 4 tickets, 4 hot dogs and 4 sodas plus bring my dog like I can in KC and some other MLB cities. No, I have to go for my lungs to get 2 tickets and often times the seats are not side by side. For all this investment by the fans and the team, the 2011 team managed to pull off the biggest September collapse in history. No small market team has done that. Taking into consideration the investment in the. 2011 team and the high expectationsn the resulting collapse made the season something we'd all rather forget-- a collosal failure. If you want to celebrate such miserable underperformance, good for you. Many others live in the real world and acknowledge that 2011 was disastrous. Proof that things really were bad is that the FO and coaching staff has been almost entirely replaced. That doesn't happen when you have had a successful season. It happens when there is a crisis precipated by failure.[/quote']

 

It doesn't help that we only have capacity for ~38000. If we had 50000 seats, tickets would probably be cheaper. I love Fenway and all, but it's really not the greatest place to watch a game. Seats are cramped, obstructions in sight lines, parking sucks, press boxes are tiny. They should revisit the idea of a new park.

[iortiz]

Of course they weren't the worst team in the league and they did have plenty of talented players' date=' but they also had one of the highest payrolls in baseball and they have the highest ticket prices in baseball. I can't buy 4 tickets, 4 hot dogs and 4 sodas plus bring my dog like I can in KC and some other MLB cities. No, I have to go for my lungs to get 2 tickets and often times the seats are not side by side. For all this investment by the fans and the team, the 2011 team managed to pull off the biggest September collapse in history. No small market team has done that. Taking into consideration the investment in the. 2011 team and the high expectationsn the resulting collapse made the season something we'd all rather forget-- a collosal failure. If you want to celebrate such miserable underperformance, good for you. [b']Many others live in the real world and acknowledge that 2011 was disastrous. Proof that things really were bad is that the FO and coaching staff has been almost entirely replaced. That doesn't happen when you have had a successful season. It happens when there is a crisis precipated by failure.[/b]

 

+1

 

2011 season was a failure. There is no other way to see it. It was the result of 3-4 years of bad planing and horrendous execution in both sporting and managerial aspects.

 

IMO TB made an awsome season (recurrent) and KC (solid offense) and the Pirates (at 2011 mid-season they were fighting in their division) showed interesting things according with their payroll vs expectations.

 

BTW We struggled against TB, KC, and PIT, didn't we?...

[a700hitter]

+1

 

2011 season was a failure. There is no other way to see it. It was the result of 3-4 years of bad planing and horrendous execution in both sporting and managerial aspects.

 

IMO TB made an awsome season (recurrent) and KC (solid offense) and the Pirates (at 2011 mid-season they were fighting in their division) showed interesting things according with their payroll vs expectations.

 

BTW We struggled against TB, KC, and PIT, didn't we?...

As usual, you state the case more clearly and succinctly than I.

 

[seabeachfred]

Just so I can understand the language that's being used here...

 

2011 was "miserable" and "disasterous" and there is "nothing to be positive about" according to SBF.

 

What adjectives would you use if they, say, finished in 4th place, or had a .500 record, or had results like the other 70% of teams?

 

"Nothing to be positive about" is absurd. The Sox still have an ownership group that wants to win badly. They still have a core of young players that other teams would be envious of. According to Baseball Reference they had the 2nd, 4th and 5th most valuable offensive pieces in the AL in 2011, and ALL 3 WON GOLD GLOVES.

 

Christ, none of us like how the team collapsed, but to continue with the "woe is us" attitude is just tiresome. This isn't the Kansas City Royals. Don't cry too much. They will be just fine moving forward.

 

Ex---just so you can understand where I'm coming from let's look at the season before it began. Just about every writer, every publication, every TV pundit either had us winning the WS or getting into it. Almost everyone predicted we would win the AL East. We accomplsihed none of those things, and, in fact, we had the worst record in baseball that last month of the season. The club was in turmoil, the manager had lost control of his team, and we blew a nine game lead in the WC chase the last few weeks. To me that was DISASTROUS!!!!!!!!!!

 

We were in first place on September 1 and by the end of the month we had played our way out of the Playoffs while beer drinking, chicken eating, managerial blunders, and lazy and uninspired play let the fans down and pissed many of us off. To me that was MISERABLE!!!!

 

You ask what adjectives I'd use if we finished in fourth place with a 500 record. There are many I could use but let's settle on putrid and pathetic. There is no "woe is us" attitude here; I'm just stating the facts and you would have a good deal of trouble putting lipstick on that pig of a post I've written. You want positive??? Well maybe if you're an optimist we could believe that better days are ahead, and that's what we all want to badly believe, but some of us have begun to doubt just how committed Henry and Co. are dedicated to winning titles and whether making money and spreading the Red Sox money making machine is more important to them. That we will see in the coming months when they pick a new manager and retool the team for the 100th Anniversary of Fenway Park. That alone should make us optimistic and believe they want to make that anniversary something special. The 2011 season wouldn't be it.

 

As for individual awards, that's fine and good....UP TO A POINT. Sorry Ex, but to me there is only one bottom line and that's WINNING!!!!!! And we didn't do that this season and the end didn't even come close.:thumbdown:thumbdown:thumbdown:thumbdown:thumbdown

[seabeachfred]

Yea I never thought Tito's in game managerial skills where that great. He was not what I would call a situational manager. He seemed to have a particular viewpoint and he never seemed to let the situation complicate matters as that viewpoint was always his guiding light.

 

As for where the team is, if they are smart for a change they can sneak their way out of this current situation. They simply don't have much wiggle room for additional stupidity and will have to be more reliant on luck next year than anybody will like. There is simply not much they can do stupidly this year anyway as it turns out. They don't have any money with which to be stupid. So as long as they can get some kind of manager, get rid of the right guys (no longer hard to identify under the financial constraints) and get themselves a RH bat to play right field, a reasonable SP for the back end of the rotation just ahead of what looks more and more like Aceves and then spend the paltry remains on pitching depth that is just about all they can do for this year anyway.

 

Next year there is a bevy of good pitching talent coming on the FA market and they will have much more opportunity to either distinguish themselves or step into a few more land mines.

 

Agreed Jung---if the Red Sox brass are smart and make the right moves this fall and winter there could be a pleasant revival next season. No, they cannot afford to be stupid again; they must be smart. It is going to be the 100th Anniversary of Fenway Park and as I mentioned to Example in a previous post, for that reason alone we ought to be feel optimisitic that the right moves will be made. I just want to hold up my enthusiasm until I see it. As with you and others, this season was very hard for us and for any Red Sox fan to take.

[iortiz]

As usual, you state the case more clearly and succinctly than I.

 

 

I admire how E1 defends this team and specially Theo even after this disastrous season; I mean, everybody around here loves this team, no doubt about it, and somehow we want to show all the positive aspects, but sometimes you just can't continue sugar coating what is obviously wrong. If we were a +-40 MiUSD payroll team like KC, TB or PIT I'd accept and deal year after year with "failed seasons" but we are a 180 MiUSD for God's sake, our expectations are abysmal different than KC, TB or PIT. (I think that they don't even plan their seasons in order to make the POs, their plans and goals are quite different than ours; ex. develop the farm, make an acceptable +-.500 season, etc.). Said that, when I see a team like TB competing shoulder with shoulder, IMO in the toughest division of baseball is very admirable. Their plan and execution is not a fluke anymore but the result of 6-8-year of outstanding planing and execution in all levels, specially in their farm.

[seabeachfred]

Of course they weren't the worst team in the league and they did have plenty of talented players' date=' but they also had one of the highest payrolls in baseball and they have the highest ticket prices in baseball. I can't buy 4 tickets, 4 hot dogs and 4 sodas plus bring my dog like I can in KC and some other MLB cities. No, I have to go for my lungs to get 2 tickets and often times the seats are not side by side. For all this investment by the fans and the team, the 2011 team managed to pull off the biggest September collapse in history. No small market team has done that. Taking into consideration the investment in the. 2011 team and the high expectationsn the resulting collapse made the season something we'd all rather forget-- a collosal failure. If you want to celebrate such miserable underperformance, good for you. Many others live in the real world and acknowledge that 2011 was disastrous. Proof that things really were bad is that the FO and coaching staff has been almost entirely replaced. That doesn't happen when you have had a successful season. It happens when there is a crisis precipated by failure.[/quote']

 

Bravo 700!!!!! Does Example really think we enjoy running our team down? Look, we are all in this together and from where I sit this season turned out to be a complete waste and not only for the things you mentioned, which was an indictment indeed, but also for the fact that writers, TV announcers and pundits and the so-called baseball experts all predicted us to either win the WS or make it into the Fall Classic, not to mention winning the AL East. How much of that did we accomplish? For that answer we realists can rest our cases.

 

Oh sure, every evening I pop in a DVD of a playoff or WS game from 2004 or 2007 and get transported back in time to happier events, but when it's offer I'm just as miserable about what happened to our team as I was before. Better days ahead? I hope so, but this off season will tell us a lot in that direction.

[seabeachfred]

Of course they weren't the worst team in the league and they did have plenty of talented players' date=' but they also had one of the highest payrolls in baseball and they have the highest ticket prices in baseball. I can't buy 4 tickets, 4 hot dogs and 4 sodas plus bring my dog like I can in KC and some other MLB cities. No, I have to go for my lungs to get 2 tickets and often times the seats are not side by side. For all this investment by the fans and the team, the 2011 team managed to pull off the biggest September collapse in history. No small market team has done that. Taking into consideration the investment in the. 2011 team and the high expectationsn the resulting collapse made the season something we'd all rather forget-- a collosal failure. If you want to celebrate such miserable underperformance, good for you. Many others live in the real world and acknowledge that 2011 was disastrous. Proof that things really were bad is that the FO and coaching staff has been almost entirely replaced. That doesn't happen when you have had a successful season. It happens when there is a crisis precipated by failure.[/quote']

 

Bravo 700!!!!! Does Example really think we enjoy running our team down? Look, we are all in this together and from where I sit this season turned out to be a complete waste and not only for the things you mentioned, which was an indictment indeed, but also for the fact that writers, TV announcers and pundits and the so-called baseball experts all predicted us to either win the WS or make it into the Fall Classic, not to mention winning the AL East. How much of that did we accomplish? For that answer we realists can rest our cases.

 

Oh sure, every evening I pop in a DVD of a playoff or WS game from 2004 or 2007 and get transported back in time to happier events, but when it's over I'm just as miserable about what happened to our team as I was before. Better days ahead? I hope so, but this off season will tell us a lot in that direction.

[VA Sox Fan]

So what should Cherington do? Pick a manager with a roll of the dice, so that if that manager fails, the same fans and media who are asking for quick action hastily move on to crucify him?

 

Is there some type of situation where you can be satisfied in this instance? Picks a bad manager by rushing the search, he's an idiot, takes his time picking a manager, he's an idiot.

 

Can't have it both ways.

 

From Peter Abraham in today's Globe:

 

• As of today, the Red Sox have been looking for a manager for 40 days. Better to take your time and find the right man than rush and end up with the wrong man.

[Palodios]

I admire how E1 defends this team and specially Theo even after this disastrous season; I mean' date=' everybody around here loves this team, no doubt about it, and somehow we want to show all the positive aspects, but sometimes you just can't continue sugar coating what is obviously wrong. If we were a +-40 MiUSD payroll team like KC, TB or PIT I'd accept and deal year after year wit "failed seasons" but we are a 180 MiUSD for God's sake, our expectations are abysmal different than KC, TB or PIT. (I think that they don't even plan their seasons in order to make the POs, their plans and goals are quite different than ours; ex. develop the farm, make an acceptable +-.500 season, etc.). Said that, when I see a team like TB competing shoulder with shoulder, IMO in the toughest division of baseball is very admirable. Their plan and execution is not a fluke anymore but the result of 6-8-year planing and execution in all levels, specially in their farm.[/quote']

 

I wouldn't necessarily say its sugarcoating it. This team simply has so much talent on it. This team is one of the winningest teams over the last decade. 2011 sucked, and we all have to accept that. But it doesn't make a guy largely responsible for two WS rings and many playoff runs a bad GM. Even if he is a B-, that's still above average. And it doesn't make the Red Sox a bad team either... they still could win another ring in the next three years, and absolutely no one would be surprised.

[seabeachfred]

+1

 

2011 season was a failure. There is no other way to see it. It was the result of 3-4 years of bad planing and horrendous execution in both sporting and managerial aspects.

 

IMO TB made an awsome season (recurrent) and KC (solid offense) and the Pirates (at 2011 mid-season they were fighting in their division) showed interesting things according with their payroll vs expectations.

 

BTW We struggled against TB, KC, and PIT, didn't we?...

 

iortiz, you said it all in much less time that I did, but like 700 and I, I'll wager that you didn't enjoy posting that any more than we did ours. The season made us all feel rotten, especially when you consider how optimistic and buoyed up we were going into Spring Training. If ever there was an under achieving team, the 2011 Red Sox were it.

[RonVermette]

Desperate attempts to explain the unexplainable. I watched every pitch of every game this year; I didn't see any player not doing the best he could. Making a big deal out of pitchers drinking beer on days they weren't going to pitch, etc.

Our pitchers lost it in September. No one really knows "why".

[VA Sox Fan]

Just so I can understand the language that's being used here...

 

2011 was "miserable" and "disasterous" and there is "nothing to be positive about" according to SBF.

 

What adjectives would you use if they, say, finished in 4th place, or had a .500 record, or had results like the other 70% of teams?

 

"Nothing to be positive about" is absurd. The Sox still have an ownership group that wants to win badly. They still have a core of young players that other teams would be envious of. According to Baseball Reference they had the 2nd, 4th and 5th most valuable offensive pieces in the AL in 2011, and ALL 3 WON GOLD GLOVES.

 

Christ, none of us like how the team collapsed, but to continue with the "woe is us" attitude is just tiresome. This isn't the Kansas City Royals. Don't cry too much. They will be just fine moving forward.

 

:thumbsup: