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I think there's always reason to be anxous about pitchers Lackey's age. At the same time, there's no anxiety about him transitioning from the NL to the AL and there's no question about his toughness or ability to perform in big games. If he were coming from an NL team or a non-perannial contender then we would worry about those things. What the Lackey move does is assure good pitching depth with a very high ceiling. The way I see it, if the Red Sox get two really good seasons (5+ WAR) from their starting five they will have a good chance of making the playoffs. If they get three really good seasons from their starting five they will contend for the division.

If you will take your ball and go home otherwise, I will agree with you at 3 but wouldn't be surprised if it was more. I would be surprised if it is less.

3 guys from the whole system? 5 years? I'll take the over. The Sox have had a run of success with their prospects over the past 5-6 years and I expect that to continue if only because they cast such a wide net for talent. They spend as much money in the talent acquisition process as anyone in baseball, and if they hit paydirt with 3 impact players (say, Iglesias, Kelly and Westmoreland) they could be perennial AL favorites for the next decade. I can't help but think that the FO would consider putting Casey Kelly into the #5 spot in 2011 if he has a great year in 2010. He would be an alternative play to resigning Beckett, and that would only work if Dice-K rebounds and Buchholz puts together a complete season on impressive work. If that happens though, I imagine they will think hard about whether they want to commit a huge amount of money on Beckett.

Yeah, I was being sarcastic. The Sox will be in great shape moving forward.

That article is a rant of epic proportions and doesn't seem very well thought-out.

You guys are all drinking the kool-aid that the FO is selling you. Just because they are on this list doesn't mean these players will do anything at the MLB level, there are no guarantees. They should trade them for an established, more expensive star before we realize that the emperor has no clothes. Or something like that...

I think this is a good thing. The Expos are not a team anymore, but they were at one point, and the HOF is about both achievement and history. The Expos were always my second favorite team as a youngster and I went to a number of games in Montreal. For a relatively obscure franchise, a number of very good players played there, including Gary Carter, Tim Raines, Dennis Martinez, Andres Galaraga, Larry Walker, Moises Alou, John Wettland, Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez and Vlad Guerrero. Having them represented a bit in the Hall honors the fact that they were a team in Major League Baseball for 35 years. Interestingly they were the Expos for 10 years longer (1969-2004) than the "Dodgers" were Brooklyn's team (1932-1957). Of course the Dodgers were more influential.

The rotation should include some combination of the five pitchers we all expect: Lester Beckett Lackey Matsuzaka Buchholz Start Wakefield in the pen and plan for him to get maybe a start or two every month to take a load off the starting staff.

I addressed virtually every one of these points in my last post. Gammons' disclosure was shoddy at best. If the Red Sox are so well run why would they have him go on NESN only to have Heidi say that the Sox only offered 2 years and that ended the discussion? Why wouldn't Gammons bring up their final 3 year offer, or any of the specifics of the deal. It sounds more like someone gave Gammons limited information and he went with it. Given how quickly Bay opened his mouth two days later when asked by Bradford, it seems just as plausible to me that Bay himself was the source of the information and then went back to clear up his own disclosure. Your faith in your own thought processes and ability to fill in gaps that you acknowledge you don't know is pretty sad, hoenstly. As far as Bay not wanting to damage the Mets, how is it damaging to the Mets if their doctors found nothing wrong. He has 3 doctors saying there's no issue, one saying there is an issue. I think he's got a pretty firm leg to stand on and that his disclosure only looks bad for the Red Sox. That's why he had to 'get it off his chest'.

This is actually my major contention. When I hear "leak" in a discussion in which the word "smear" and "always" is being used (not by you necessarily), I assume the "leak" is like an intentional attempt to release information meant to injure, based on a command or decision from on-high. I don't think so much of the "leak" that is water (s***-talking)slowly dripping out of a hanging bucket which manages to hold most of its water (the FO). In your context it is more benign. I think either someone spoke off-message and gave Gammons only a small piece of the story, or that Bay spoke with Gammons and it didn't go as planned. Gammons' report was not Bay's part of the story, and it wasn't really the Red Sox part of the story. The part I find hard to believe is that the Red Sox would intentionally release a shoddy, half-told story to Peter Gammons of all people. He doesn't mention anything that makes the Red Sox look good, and to me he sounds like he's defending Bay's camp more than the Red Sox camp. In the Bradford interview he says that Bay's wife encouraged him "to get this off his chest" in the Bradford story. Honestly, getting that type of peace-of-mind is motive enough to leave doubts in my mind. For all I know, Bay could have told Gammons two frustrated sentences-worth when asked for a quote about the negotiations. That would explain both why Gammons could have told it wrong or incompletely and why Bay felt obliged to tell the story in full while defending much about the Red Sox.

So if Nomar (or anyone) is telling the press that he's shocked to be out of town and that he always told management that he wanted to stay, and that isn't true, then the Sox telling the truth is actually smearing? I see your logic, but I disagree with it. We agree that the Bay situation wasn't a smear.

Is there any precedent in major league baseball of this type of suit paying off? If all three doctors had agreed, would there be a problem, given that the Mets undoubtedly would have seen the same thing, and thus lowered their offers? What proof would there be to say that Bay would have made 'X' if the tea hadn't said 'Y'? Seems flimsy to me, but I'm not a lawyer.

Okay, I dare you to find me proof that the Red Sox released the MRI. I dare you.

Read this paragraph again. You use the words "almost certainly" but show nothing to prove it. You dont prove that it was the FO. You don't prove that if it was the FO it was anyone with authority in the FO or an intentional/organizational decision, rather than a maverick with a big mouth. Your belief that the Sox FO spends considerable energy spinning the details of departing FAs has colored your view of the facts. Your story is plausible but you admit there is doubt because you are deducing what happened, rather than knowing. As far as why they waited until now, I don't feel I need to answer that since I disagree with the premise of the question. If the Sox didn't release the information officially then they haven't changed their approach from the previous 6 months. If there were a pattern of tarnishing departing FAs and Theo didn't want it to happen, it would stop. Organizational discipline is not a problem for this FO. You know this. The Sox don't discuss negotiations as a general rule. Their silence in this case is not indicative of having released the first part of the story.

Can you prove that it was the Red Sox who released this information? It wasnt a lab tech, somebody who types dictation for the doctor, one of Bay's friends or somebody who knew the 3rd doctor who checked Bay's knees? You've checked these sources? You asked Gammons? I love it. You and a700 are sure that your powers of deduction have squarely pointed the finger at the Sox FO because it wouldn't be in anyone else's interest to do so. For you, this fits into a narrative about the Sox trashing every notable FA who comes out of the there, so despite facts you will point your conjecture in that direction. That's fine, but you need to realize its different from proof.

You're right. I have my head in the sand and you have presented irrefutable facts about how things went down. What did you think of the Bradford interiew, BTW? He spoke personally with Bay, and wrote the full article. Did you download it? Or do you know the facts already?

This question summarizes the whole argument. I haven't seen anything suggesting that Gammons' sources were in the FO. Have you? As far as I can tell, Jason Bay is talking about it now very openly and the FO is taking their usual stance of not discussing negotiations. Unless I see someone saying "a source in the FO told me..." I'm going to assume it is coming from Bay and his camp and that it simply coincides with increased questions about why he didn't go to the Red Sox... you know, now that he's not going back to Boston for sure. For the past 6 months that has been up in the air, now it isn't, and so what all parties are willing to talk about has changed.

This is just false. The terms of the deal would have been based on the health of his knees, just like Drew's was based on his shoulder and Lackey's 5th year option is based on a pre-existing elbow injury. You're right, because I don't think it does surprise anyone. At the same time, I don't think that means that every pro-Red Sox/anti-ex-Sox player's health story must immediately be seen as Sox propaganda. In the instance above I'm hearing that Jason Bay is more than happy to talk about it himself. But now you've been shown to be wrong. Bay himself told Bradford that despite his frustration that the Sox asked him for surgery, he was very impressed that they didn't tell the press as this would have impacted his ability to sign elsewhere. Bay is the source of Bradford's information and he seems to know just about every detail. Furthermore the story doesn't even paint the Sox in a good light. The knee issue that the Sox saw was not the same as what the other two opinions saw. Of course they have every right to believe whatever they want, but it does bring into question either their enthusiasm about having Bay back at all, or at least shows that once they had that info they were willing to draw a harder line for Bay given what the other available options were. I agree with you that teams release info to the media. They have done this numerous times. HOwever, that doesn't mean that everything the media writes that is disparaging of a player is released in some covert way by the team to 'smear' or 'promote' particular players. As in this case, sometimes the information is released by the player and his representitives. IMO the Sox don't need to do a lot to justify this move. I would have traded Jason Bay for John Lackey and Mike Cameron, no question. Add in the fact that they get draft picks out of it and that they will be going into the 2010 draft with a fair amount of top picks and I think overall it seems like a sound strategy. That's not Theo telling me to write that, it seems like common sense.