Franklin Morales

[Brennan]

Look out spankee$, we are gonna take the next few seasons and see if we can make Andrew Miller into a Cy Young starter. And if that doesn't work we will teach Lavarnway to pitch!

 

 

Who's your Daddy now bitches?

[a700hitter]

Look out spankee$, we are gonna take the next few seasons and see if we can make Andrew Miller into a Cy Young starter. And if that doesn't work we will teach Lavarnway to pitch!

 

 

Who's your Daddy now bitches?

But we will be stocked with value players on that last place club.

[Brennan]

But we will be stocked with value players on that last place club.

 

 

September 8th and in LAST PLACE.

 

 

And only the third highest payroll in baseball.

 

If I ever hear Cherington say the word "value", I'll personally choke him.

[Brennan]

I think it was Jung who said it best when he said that people here are trying to re arrange deck chairs on the Titanic.

[Orange Juiced]

Ellsbury got injured and missed most of the season. Lester has been healthy. His game has been slipping for the last 2 years.

 

His rate stats have been awful compared to last year.

 

AVG: .321 vs .257

OBP: .376 vs .300

SLG: .552 vs .354

OPS: .928 vs .655

TB/AB: 0.55 vs 0.33

 

Even when playing, he's been far, far worse this year compared to last. Obviously with the injury nobody expects his counting stats (hits, homers, etc.) to be the same. But the rate stats have taken a huge hit.

 

I don't think either of them are that good. I don't think they are part of the short or long term solution. These are bottom of the rotation guys at best. They don't project any higher down the road. Most likely, Morales cannot hold up physically over the course of a season as a starter. Even if he can, he's just a bottom of the rotation guy. He's already 26 years old with no track record as an MLB starter. I'm not getting my hopes up.

 

That doesn't answer my question. Please try again.

[Orange Juiced]

And only the third highest payroll in baseball.

 

Not anymore.

[a700hitter]

His rate stats have been awful compared to last year.

 

AVG: .321 vs .257

OBP: .376 vs .300

SLG: .552 vs .354

OPS: .928 vs .655

TB/AB: 0.55 vs 0.33

 

Even when playing, he's been far, far worse this year compared to last. Obviously with the injury nobody expects his counting stats (hits, homers, etc.) to be the same. But the rate stats have taken a huge hit.

When a player misses so much time, it can be very difficult to find his groove.

 

 

That doesn't answer my question. Please try again.

I answered your question. Now, knock it off.

[Orange Juiced]

I answered your question. Now, knock it off.

 

No you didn't. My question was whether or not the "solution" has to result in a playoff appearance in 2013, or would you be willing to give it another year if that is what it took to be a great team in 2014.

[Brennan]

Theo: Okay Ben, my sabotage uh I mean "plan for a winning future" is in place. Pass me the gorilla suit and remember, don't waste money on pitching, shortstops or catchers. You win by signing really expensive first basemen and outfielders to long term contracts that give Scott Boras wet dreams.

 

 

Ben: Here is your latte Theo. Will we still play catch on Sundays?

 

 

Theo: Not now Ben, I'm going to see if I can cause a world record mass suicide in Chicago.

[Dojji]

I'll answer it. After three straight years of no playoffs and you want to wait another year to see if Doubrant and Morales MIGHT pan out to be what we need to win in the AL east?

 

You're just arguing for the sake of arguing at this point. When did Franklin Morales become Stephen Strasburg?

 

Holy hell.

 

Do you really think anyone here WANTS to wait? Do you think the decision not to win is based on a conscious determination to try and lose for a change, just to see what it's like? Do you think that the ownership has a magic fix-the-team wand that they're only refusing to wave out of sheer masochism? Are you really that stupid?

 

This team is broken. Fixing the problem is not a matter of adding two starters and a power hitter. THE KANSAS CITY ROYALS are two bigtime starters and a power hitter away from the playoffs. Every team in this league would be a playoff team with two more bigtime starters and one more power hitter. If that's what it's going to take to fix this team then it's well and truly dead and should be ripped up and rebuilt properly. Something that you and your ilk will only tolerate with the worst of bad grace, kicking and screaming and trying to lynch all and sundry for doing what every baseball team in history -- even the Yankees -- have to do when the core starts to age and weaken.

 

WHen you're in a position like the Red Sox are in right now, you have two choices:

 

1: The sane choice: Consciously work to restructure the team into a long term winning mode with an eye towards developing your talent streams, promoting worthwhile prospects, and making smart, precise acquisitions. Doing it this way, you can return to relevance in short order -- as little as 2 or 3years of real futility as contracts expire and prospects advance.

2: The insane choice. Flail desperately around buying everything in sight to make one last, or one more, halfhearted grab at glory, get yourself strangulated financially, and watch the core collapse into ruin leaving you nothing to work with and a 5-6 year rebuild process to undergo in the best case scenario.

 

For the last 3 years, the Sox have made the insane choice. They're at the cusp of the point of no return and have made decisions that more closely resemble the sane choice -- for which people like you want to tar and feather them.

 

So be it. I'm honestly beginning to hope we get to see what the fallout of the insane choice looks like. Fans here are absurdly spoiled, and a little dose of harsh baseball reality -- a bit of real, honest extended futility -- would clear a lot of dead weight out of the bandwagon. Maybe people will start appreciating regular season ball for its own sake again.

[Brennan]

No you didn't. My question was whether or not the "solution" has to result in a playoff appearance in 2013, or would you be willing to give it another year if that is what it took to be a great team in 2014.

 

 

 

Not if it means wasting another year trying to groom two number 5's.

[a700hitter]

No you didn't. My question was whether or not the "solution" has to result in a playoff appearance in 2013, or would you be willing to give it another year if that is what it took to be a great team in 2014.

I gave you my answer. The premise of your question IMO is completely unrealistic. I was being nice by not saying that. Since you are being obnoxious, I'll be brutally honest. It is a stupid question. I don't answer stupid questions. I discuss things that have a chance of happening.

[a700hitter]

Holy hell.

 

Do you really think anyone here WANTS to wait? Do you think the decision not to win is based on a conscious determination to try and lose for a change, just to see what it's like? Do you think that the ownership has a magic fix-the-team wand that they're only refusing to wave out of sheer masochism? Are you really that stupid?

 

This team is broken. Fixing the problem is not a matter of adding two starters and a power hitter. THE KANSAS CITY ROYALS are two bigtime starters and a power hitter away from the playoffs. Every team in this league would be a playoff team with two more bigtime starters and one more power hitter. If that's what it's going to take to fix this team then it's well and truly dead and should be ripped up and rebuilt properly. Something that you and your ilk will only tolerate with the worst of bad grace, kicking and screaming and trying to lynch all and sundry for doing what every baseball team in history -- even the Yankees -- have to do when the core starts to age and weaken.

 

WHen you're in a position like the Red Sox are in right now, you have two choices:

 

1: The sane choice: Consciously work to restructure the team into a long term winning mode with an eye towards developing your talent streams, promoting worthwhile prospects, and making smart, precise acquisitions. Doing it this way, you can return to relevance in short order -- as little as 2 or 3years of real futility as contracts expire and prospects advance.

2: The insane choice. Flail desperately around buying everything in sight to make one last, or one more, halfhearted grab at glory, get yourself strangulated financially, and watch the core collapse into ruin leaving you nothing to work with and a 5-6 year rebuild process to undergo in the best case scenario.

 

For the last 3 years, the Sox have made the insane choice. They're at the cusp of the point of no return and have made decisions that more closely resemble the sane choice -- for which people like you want to tar and feather them.

 

So be it. I'm honestly beginning to hope we get to see what the fallout of the insane choice looks like. Fans here are absurdly spoiled, and a little dose of harsh baseball reality -- a bit of real, honest extended futility -- would clear a lot of dead weight out of the bandwagon. Maybe people will start appreciating regular season ball for its own sake again.

Who in our system will make it to the Big Club in the next 3 or 4 years that will form a solid top of the rotation? In 4 years, Lester will probably be toast, so we will need these guys to be top of the rotation types.

 

How long will your "sane" option take to return this team to prominence?

[Brennan]

Holy hell.

 

Do you really think anyone here WANTS to wait? Do you think the decision not to win is based on a conscious determination to try and lose for a change, just to see what it's like? Do you think that the ownership has a magic fix-the-team wand that they're only refusing to wave out of sheer masochism? Are you really that stupid?

 

This team is broken. Fixing the problem is not a matter of adding two starters and a power hitter. THE KANSAS CITY ROYALS are two bigtime starters and a power hitter away from the playoffs. Every team in this league would be a playoff team with two more bigtime starters and one more power hitter. If that's what it's going to take to fix this team then it's well and truly dead and should be ripped up and rebuilt properly. Something that you and your ilk will only tolerate with the worst of bad grace, kicking and screaming and trying to lynch all and sundry for doing what every baseball team in history -- even the Yankees -- have to do when the core starts to age and weaken.

 

WHen you're in a position like the Red Sox are in right now, you have two choices:

 

1: The sane choice: Consciously work to restructure the team into a long term winning mode with an eye towards developing your talent streams, promoting worthwhile prospects, and making smart, precise acquisitions. Doing it this way, you can return to relevance in short order -- as little as 2 or 3years of real futility as contracts expire and prospects advance.

2: The insane choice. Flail desperately around buying everything in sight to make one last, or one more, halfhearted grab at glory, get yourself strangulated financially, and watch the core collapse into ruin leaving you nothing to work with and a 5-6 year rebuild process to undergo in the best case scenario.

 

For the last 3 years, the Sox have made the insane choice. They're at the cusp of the point of no return and have made decisions that more closely resemble the sane choice -- for which people like you want to tar and feather them.

 

So be it. I'm honestly beginning to hope we get to see what the fallout of the insane choice looks like. Fans here are absurdly spoiled, and a little dose of harsh baseball reality -- a bit of real, honest extended futility -- would clear a lot of dead weight out of the bandwagon. Maybe people will start appreciating regular season ball for its own sake again.

 

 

 

 

 

You are preaching to the choir. I know it will take years to fix this mess, I'm saying you start by having higher goals than praying for two AAA pitchers turn into aces. You go out there and collect some good prospects and save all that money that the Dodgers helped you out with and start over less the crap that helped out with the decline.

[Dojji]

Who in our system will make it to the Big Club in the next 3 or 4 years that will form a solid top of the rotation? In 4 years, Lester will probably be toast, so we will need these guys to be top of the rotation types.

 

How long will your "sane" option take to return this team to prominence?

 

Less time than your denial-ridden high roller strategy will.

 

We've painted ourselves into a corner and we're left with two bad choices. Failing to acknowledge that and trying to pretend we can buy our way back to prominence in short order is, in this case, the worse of two evils.

[Dojji]

as for who will come up through the system that can help lead us to prominence -- Middlebrooks, Bogaerts, Lavarnway, a few other interesting position players. Pitchers are a little light, but we don't have too many other options than to fly with what we have for awhile. Greinke is the only so-called frontliner on the market and he's a horrible fit for Boston. Unless they manage to make the kind of blockbuster trade I don't see us having the pieces for, or one of those two pitchers we got from the Dodgers makes good, I'm not sure what's going to happen there. If Lester stays on form next year though, things start to look a lot better.

[Dojji]

You are preaching to the choir. I know it will take years to fix this mess, I'm saying you start by having higher goals than praying for two AAA pitchers turn into aces. You go out there and collect some good prospects and save all that money that the Dodgers helped you out with and start over less the crap that helped out with the decline.

 

I don't agree with that necessarily. A lot of these guys are salvageable. But you need to fix the culture, and that's going to take some strength from the ownership. If you can keep the talent and jettison the culture that led to the debacle, a lot of these guys will perform better.

[a700hitter]

Less time than your denial-ridden high roller strategy will.

 

We've painted ourselves into a corner and we're left with two bad choices. Failing to acknowledge that and trying to pretend we can buy our way back to prominence in short order is, in this case, the worse of two evils.

"denial-ridden high roller strategy"? With what suggestion of mine do you disagree with?

 

As far as denial, I was on record pretty darn early (actually before the season started) that the current team was not going to be very competitive.

[a700hitter]

as for who will come up through the system that can help lead us to prominence -- Middlebrooks, Bogaerts, Lavarnway, a few other interesting position players. Pitchers are a little light, but we don't have too many other options than to fly with what we have for awhile. Greinke is the only so-called frontliner on the market and he's a horrible fit for Boston. Unless they manage to make the kind of blockbuster trade I don't see us having the pieces for, or one of those two pitchers we got from the Dodgers makes good, I'm not sure what's going to happen there. If Lester stays on form next year though, things start to look a lot better.

Pitching is this team's biggest problem, and I agree with you that the system is light on good pitching. If we don't have it in the system, I don't see there being an alternative to getting it elsewhere through trades or other acquisitions. I'm not reading anything hopeful from you with regard to the pitching. Hitting has not and will not be a problem.

[Dojji]

Pitching is this team's biggest problem, and I agree with you that the system is light on good pitching. If we don't have it in the system, I don't see there being an alternative to getting it elsewhere through trades or other acquisitions. I'm not reading anything hopeful from you with regard to the pitching. Hitting has not and will not be a problem.

 

Unfortunately I don't see what constitutes a good source of pitching from ''elsewhere'' either.. The demands for pitchers in boston are pretty high and there aren't a lot of guys you know will dominate here. and most of those are premiere frontliners that you might not be able to get if you offered your entire top 10.

 

That's one of the big reasons I suspect this will be an extended process whether we like it or not.

[a700hitter]

Unfortunately I don't see what constitutes a good source of pitching from ''elsewhere'' either.. The demands for pitchers in boston are pretty high and there aren't a lot of guys you know will dominate here. and most of those are premiere frontliners that you might not be able to get if you offered your entire top 10.

 

That's one of the big reasons I suspect this will be an extended process whether we like it or not.

I don't think we need guys who will dominate, just guys that can keep us in games consistently and go into the late innings with some consistency. This would prevent the weaknesses in the pen from getting over-exposed and it would help to keep the good bullpen arms fresh. The last few years 3+ innings from the pen has been commonplace at least 4 out of 5 games. This has resulted in leaving starters in games for 7 or more runs too often, because the pen can't handle long stints with an already heavy workload. I don't think we need to get 2 studs, but rather1 good innings eater like a Mark Buerhle and 1 stud. Pitching will be available in the off season. Every off season very good pitchers change teams. :ast off season, I felt strongly that we missed the boat on Gio Gonzalez and I felt even more strongly after he signed his very reasonable 5 year extension. That guy is a tremendous value with his current contract. Instead, we decided to go pick from the trash heap.

[v2freak]

If they got rid of Lackey and added a stud starter (crazy trade for Felix Hernandez, say), and their rotation was:

 

1. Felix

2. Lester of 2008-2010

3. Buchholz

4. Morales

5. Doubront

 

That is a 4th place team? I don't think so. It would be the best 1-2 punch in baseball, followed by a potential Cy Young candidate in Buchholz, giving them one of the best 1-2-3 SPs in the sport. That team could very well live with an above-average-starting-pitcher in Morales in the 4-slot, and a below-average SP in Doubront in the 5-slot.

 

Obviously they wouldn't do much if they didn't score any runs, but that's a different part of the equation entirely.

 

The point is that you're talking about the 4-5 spots in the rotation in isolation of everything else. It all depends on what else they do.

 

EDIT: One other thing. The "solution" may be a long-term fix, not a fix for 2013. If Doubront and Morales both needed one more year of experience before budding into really solid MLB starters, would it be worth it to you to let the Sox go through one more year of growing pains in order to see the fruit of that in 2014? Or does the "solution" need to mean a playoff appearance in 2013?

 

Projections are never accurate. I would have said the same thing about Lester, Beckett and Buchholz being on par with Halladay, Lee, Hamels before this season but it did not pan out.

 

I feel like a fool for saying how Lester, Beckett, Buchholz, Lackey and Dice-K would be one the greatest starting rotations ever.

 

Back on point, without the benefit of reading through 6 pages of people arguing, Morales has shown flashes of brilliance but like everyone else on this team, cannot seem to pitch past the 5th inning. But I think he's done better than Doubront. Would Doubront work well out of the pen?

[jacksonianmarch]

You guys keep pining for the Jon Lester of 2 yrs ago. It's gonna take some work to get him back. You might have to face reality that Lester really is a mid 4's ERA pitcher at this point. Look at his splits from this yr. Coming into July, he had 3 straight months of ERA's in the 4's, then exploded in July with an ERA of 9.36 then had a solid month of 3.59ERA in August. Lester hadnt had one month this yr that rivals his ERA from 2010, when he threw to the tune of 3.25. That Lester may still be there, but there is absolutely no indication that he exists in this current flesh and blood version

[Dojji]

I don't think we need guys who will dominate, just guys that can keep us in games consistently and go into the late innings with some consistency.

 

You've proven that you'll have no patience with exactly this kind of pitcher in the past, a700. A starter who goes 200 innings with an ERA in the high 4's will keep us in the game for the most part, and we'd benefit a great deal from a guy like Jeremy Guthrie, (or at least like Guthrie was 2 years ago) but if we actually got a Guthrie, then if not you, certainly other fans would accuse them of squandering resources on Guthrie we could have saved for a front line man. You've done this from time to time, IIRC.

 

For that matter, Justin Masterson would have looked really good in a Boston uniform this year. Years later I'm still rueing the VMart trade. We spent too much for a short term solution there when we needed a long term answer.

[a700hitter]

You've proven that you'll have no patience with exactly this kind of pitcher in the past, a700. A starter who goes 200 innings with an ERA in the high 4's will keep us in the game for the most part, and we'd benefit a great deal from a guy like Jeremy Guthrie, (or at least like Guthrie was 2 years ago) but if we actually got a Guthrie, then if not you, certainly other fans would accuse them of squandering resources on Guthrie we could have saved for a front line man. You've done this from time to time, IIRC.

 

For that matter, Justin Masterson would have looked really good in a Boston uniform this year. Years later I'm still rueing the VMart trade. We spent too much for a short term solution there when we needed a long term answer.

Give me examples where i have been short on patience for these types of pitchers. We need 1 front line guy and 1 innings eater. But according to you, I don't really mean it.

[Behindenemylines]

I agree we need starters to go deeper in the games or the BP will get gassed again and we will have a repeat of 2012. We had too many 5 inning starts and ask too much of the bullpen. We were able to stay a float for awhile, but when the pen started to struggle it was because they were asked to do too much earlier in the season.