GhostofMalzone

Malignant...a obsolete : MALCONTENT, DISAFFECTED b : evil in nature, influence, or effect : INJURIOUS c : passionately and relentlessly malevolent : aggressively malicious 2 : tending to produce death or deterioration ; especially : tending to infiltrate, metastasize, and terminate fatally Benign......1 : of a gentle disposition : GRACIOUS 2 a : showing kindness and gentleness b : FAVORABLE, WHOLESOME 3 a : of a mild type or character that does not threaten health or life; especially : not becoming cancerous b : having no significant effect : HARMLESS ign It's not a wonder that most people who talk Red Sox, when asked about this site just laugh and comment about the rudeness of the posters. Yes you people do have a reputation and for a long time I didn't think it was deserved. Guess what? I was wrong and they were right. Live and learn.

NO s***!! Do You know the difference between Benign and Malignant???? What she was saying was.....That three quarters of ALL Americans are dehydrated Athletes included. We live in a COKE and PEPSI culture and most people don't drink nearly the amount of water they should. Sorry you thought that was funny.

My wife is a emergency room RN and she said, "if it was anything serious they would never have let him walk". They probably ran an EKG on him and kept him till after a Cardiologist and team Doctors had looked at the results. He played a day-night double-header and something as simple as a low potassium level could have easily caused it. Like she said to me: "Papis a big man and my guess would be...stress and dehydration, three quarters of Americas dehydrated and they don't know it, athletes aren't any different. If it was anything serious they would never have let him walk."

As far as pitching is concerned I think Tito was kind of lost without Dave Wallace. I don't think he entirely trusted Al Nipper, not the way he does Wallace and that reflected in some of the pitching moves Tito made or didn't make. Now with Wallace back I think you're going to see this staff handled differently and for the better. Al Nippers a good guy. But, hes not a Dave Wallace. I wouldn't give up on this staff quite yet. I've got a feeling he (Wallace) might be able to turn our pitching problems around.

Are the shirts going to be available to everyone or just contest winners?

Now I get the picture.........Wow!

"Sarcasm".........Yeah, but only a bit, lets try an be real here, Lester winning the Cy Young this year is more then just a starch...... it's crazy! He's only got 16.1 innings pitched, I find it hard to believe that anyone who has any kind of baseball knowledge at all would make that kind of a statement. (even taking the most youthful optimism into consideration)

Jesus! This kid only has 16.1 IP, hes given up 13 hits, 5 ER and 9 BB, granted he has 19 SO. But, don't you think it's just a little premature to be mentioning his name in association with the Cy Young Award. I can understand setting your expatriations high, but a Cy Young for Lester in 06 is a little over the top. I don't want to rain on your parade buddy, but you need to click your heels together and try an get back to realityville........Fast.

This is cool and it's free...........THANKS :thumbsup:

The Sox fans I hang with here in Florida call him "The Iceman" because, "He'll Freeze Your Ass At The Plate" Welcome!

Kubek getting the "Rookie of the Year" for 57 has always been one of the great injustices in baseball history. He got it solely because he was a Yankee and for no other reason. Look at the numbers, Kubek, G-127 AB-431 HR-3 RBI-39 BA .297, Now look at Malzone G-153 AB-634 HR-15 RBI-103 BA-.292 clearly who deserved it more. Out of 24 votes for Rookie of the Year, Kubek got 23 and Malzone got 1. From 55 through 64 the Yankees were in every World Series except 59 and only lost twice to Milwaukee in 57 and 58. Mantle was the MVP in 57 and the Yankees had the highest profile manager in the game at that time Casey Stengel. From coast to coast the newspapers sports page's were saturated with Yankee press and all Boston had at that time was an aging Teddy Ballgame, Jackie Jensen, and Jim Piersal and Piersal was about at the end of his wire, a scrub manager in Pinky Higgins who got the Sox to 82-72 16 games out. So the only press Malzone was getting was local. The name Yankees got Kubek his "Rookie of the Year" because it certainly wasn't his numbers that got it for him.

Welcome!

In 57 Malzone wasn't "Rookie of the Year" Tony Kubek of the Yankees was. But, your right about Hatton and Lepcio, Hatton's best years were with the Reds and they weren't even that good, Lepsio was a second basemen, No bat...good glove. In 56 the Red Sox were trying everyone at third, Malzone was up for awhile and they tried Milt Bolling a second basemen and Billy Klaus a short stop at third. Malzone got the job in 57 and the rest is history. Malzone was up in 55 but only for a cup of coffee, 4 games I think?

"By Gordon Edes, Globe Staff | May 26, 2006 Do you think Terry F. is the right fit for this Billion dollar Team? what I mean is he is a players manager instead of a managers manager (ala Joe Torre, Lou Pinella, Tony La Russa) these guys are chess players and they are looked up to and there is a professional separation. They also do the little things consistently no matter who or what ego is asked to do it. Am I the select few who think he should be coaching in Single-A Port ST Lucie Mets where its warm and he doesn't have shake, pace and rock back and forth and wonder what to do. thanks Christopher J. O'Connell A: Christopher, I'm not sure how many folks share your thoughts, but I'm always left to wonder what it would take to make you happy, other than maybe Joe. Terry Francona's fit for this team, in my estimation, was demonstrated in 2004 and last year's return to the playoffs merely underscored that. I think the players respect Francona, play hard for him, and he is very well prepared. And he wins. What else do you want from a manager? Believe me, every manager makes strategic decisions in the course of a game that are open to debate-that's one of the reasons why we all love the game as much as we do, because we all believe we know something about the strategy of the game, and we don't have to wait to "watch the films" to know what happened. Where we laymen and fans are so often wrong is that the manager often is equipped with an entirely different set of information at his disposal than we have when he makes a decision. He may know who's hurting, who's unfocused, who's confidence is flagging, who needs a blow, who needs the chance to prove himself when it might make more sense to hit someone else, who needs to play, what pitcher-hitter matchup might come up three innings from now. Managing the game is only a small part of being a manager; managing 25 men is the far more demanding task, and I don't know how you can conclude that Francona has done anything but an exceptional job. And guess what: In the Yankees' clubhouse, I'll bet the players would tell you Joe is a players' manager, too."

I assume I'm the "firey Francona fanatic" your referring to? In 1956 I started following the Red Sox religiously from then tell now I've seen a parade of managers pass by, Higgins, Runnels, Zimmer, Houk, Hobson, Kennedy, Williams, Little, and with all the new managers came new players and with every year came new hope. Hope that one of them could pull it all together, and most of them had great players, Williams, Malzone, Jensen, Fisk, Evans, Rice, Boggs, Greenwell, Clemens, and some managers didn't even come close, and some others came close ( Kennedy, Jimy Williams, Little,), and a few came so close you could taste it, (Dick Williams, Darrell Johnson, John McNamara) but the story ended the same way every time, The Red Sox just went home. In 48 of the 50 years I've live and died with this team no manager was ever been able to get it done. "Terry Francona got it done". In my life time I've seen 18 managers try, but only one succeeded. Yeah, he may not be the best manager in the majors, he's probably not the best manager the Red Sox ever had, but he's got something 28 other Red Sox managers don't have, a World Championship with The Boston Red Sox. But, the one thing Francona has in common with 41 other Red Sox managers dating back to 1901 is they all made mistakes, each and every one of them, Hell, I'd be willing to bet that every manager that ever managed a game at any level has made mistakes, and if your a manager in the majors with any time in, I'd say the number is in the hundreds per manager, sometimes it's your fault, sometimes it's not, but your the s*** magnet no matter who's fault it is, it comes with the territory. I don't know what you expect from Francona? You called him a "Field General" that's a football term. I have never heard of a baseball manager referred to as a field general, Skipper..yeah Maybe, you just flat out don't like the guy? Maybe, if he won 162 games the ALCS and the World Series you'd still think he was a bonehead? But give the devil his due....he got it done. You should be ecstatic that Tito's going to be around for awhile. Now you'll have something to occupy your mind after the nice man in the white coat comes and takes the scissors away.

The belief in luck is nothing more then superstition, baseball is a game that has always been chuck full of superstition, "a pitcher wins 11 successive games because he hasn't washed his jock in two months", "a hitters on a hot streak because his right shoe has a double knot in the lace", why do players never step on the baseline when going from or back to the dugout? Do you believe Rally-Caps really work? It's superstition! The pitchers winning because, his mechanics are right. The hitters on a hot streak because, he's seeing the ball better. Some people attribute success (at a certain moment in time or in general) to something beyond their own ability, some call it, Luck, Divine Intervention, what have you. If Papi's facing a pitcher he's 2 for 25 against and that pitcher throws a pitch right into Papi's kitchen and he cranks it out of the park, was Papi lucky he hit that pitch? or was it skill? was the pitcher unlucky on that pitch? or was it a mistake? Papi made his own luck, he took advantage of the pitchers mistake. If Papi swings late on that same pitch and misses it, was Papi unlucky? or did he make a mistake? was the pitcher lucky on that pitch? or was it just a good pitch? The pitcher made his own luck. "If "good" and "bad" events occur at random to everyone, believers in good luck will experience a net gain in their fortunes, and vice versa for believers in bad luck. This is clearly likely to be self-reinforcing. Thus, although untrue, a belief in good luck may actually be an adaptive (meme)." (Jean Paul Sartre) I was not aware that Mooki Wilson had any kind of cult status anywhere on this planet let alone NYC.

Not one living thing on this earth has or ever will have been allotted anything in the way of luck, the only luck anyone ever has is the luck they make for themselves. I have a real hard time understanding or agreeing with people who have a bitch with Francona. This guy comes to The Red Sox and in his first year as manager he helps the team win a World Series, then in his next year he helps the team win 98 games and if he had a bullpen maybe more? What the f*** do you people want from this guy? Do you have nothing better to do then to nitpick his every move? To dissect every miscue that's made in every game and to hold in your memory insignificant s*** that happened two years ago. It's BASEBALL....It's a GAME, that's all it ever was and all it ever will be.....a GAME. If your that unhappy with Francona then just hang around awhile, I'm sure there'll be another bandwagon you can jump on passing by shortly, and with any luck you just might find that perfect manager your seeking. I'm sure being the prognosticator that you are, you should have no problem finding the next hall of fame manager somewhere out there in the baseball cosmos. With such insight into the future, I hate to see a person of your talent and skills wasting his valuable time on a team that most certainly is going to go down the tubes do to the incompetency of it's manager. The madness Francona must cause you must be unbearable. So I ask you, Why suffer anymore with The Red Sox? Save yourself....move on....don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out!

Why would you not "Trust" a manager for bringing in a pitcher(Leskanic)in a series that we end up WINNING? That's incomprehensible. If we had lost that series then you could look back on that decision as possibly a contributing factor, and then make a case for Franconas lack of managerial skills. But, we humiliated the Yankees and went on to sweep the Cardinals and bring home a Championship that eluded us for 86 years and all you can say about Francona is "He lost me in 04" for bringing in Leskanic. After helping the Red Sox win a Championship why in the f*** would a forgotten moment in Franconas 04 managerial season even matter? He got a contract extension for winning the World Series, that is the stupidest notion around, he got a extension because, he's a good manager, the players like him, and he wins, in 04(Tito's first year with the Sox) an 05 Franconas, 192-W 131-L, Joe Torre for 04 and 05 is, 196-W 127-L, We're talking "The Exalted Joe Torre" here, in the last 2 years he's won only 4 more games then, as some like to call him "Francoma" and Tony La Russa has won only 6 more games then Tito in that same time frame. Keeping up with The Torre's and The La Russa's isn't bad company for a guy in a "Francoma". But, he did put in Leskanic......Unforgivable.

One Red Seat was the only one who mentioned Jim Palmer in his career 19 years he won 20 games 9 times and ended with a 2.86 lifetime ERA. Roger has played 22 years and has won 20 games 6 times and up to this point has a 3.12 ERA. Pedro has played 14 years and won 20 games twice with a 2.72 ERA. Why didn't Palmer make the cut..........just wondering?

Shouldn't this thread have been "Who's Greater Rocket or Pedro?" and as far as "The Last 40 Years" goes...you guys are only going back 25 to 30 years if that long. How about some other fairly good pitchers in the last "40 years", guys like, Sandy Koufax, "Catfish" Hunter, Don Drysdale, Vida Blue, Bret Saberhagen, Ron Guidry and if it wasn't for his addiction he probably could have been the best of them all "Doc" Gooden.

I don't know about you guys, But, didn't that article sound like they might be a little (or a lot) afraid of "PAPI"? I don't know what you think?....but it sounds like fear to me.

If you hit a double when I was in high school (back in the sixty's) Coach Reed would always call it "Slapin' the Deuce" its a term you hear when your young and it stays with you the rest of your life.

How about "Pepper" or "Deuce"

from The Knuckleball Handbook "Objects moving through air produce drag. Air doesn't want to slide along solid surfaces very well, but air readily slides over pockets of air moving in other directions. This is the key to the knuckleball. The stitches on a baseball act like the air dam underneath the front of your car. The air dam pushes the air aside and forms a swirl ("vortex") of air that moves in all kinds of directions around all the car parts hanging under there. Without the air dam, the air would want to drag across all those parts and add drag. The stitches on a baseball act to push the air flow away from the leather surface just enough to form a tiny swirl of air just behind them, which most of the air happily slides past. Where the airflow moves across smooth surface, it can't move so fast. Knowing your high school science, you know that air moving across a surface produces a lower pressure than air moving not so fast on the same surface. An airplane wing works that way: Air pushed aside by the curve on top has to move fast to meet up with the air moving along the bottom, so pressure is lower on top and the wing has lift. Low pressure draws the object towards it, so wherever the lowest pressure is on that object from moment to moment, that's where it will want to drift towards. This is known as the Magnus effect. However, since the stitches are so small and acting on such a heavy object, this effect is minimal on a baseball. The airflow across smooth surface at one point and stitches at another is uneven in speed and strength, so it trips and triggers shifts in the formation of the turbulence behind that ball. What most affects the movement of a baseball is the size, shape, and location of the wake behind it, which causes enough drag to determine the path of the ball. Rapid rotation allows this wake to fill, keeping it relatively small, but being established in a particular location behind the ball, it may develop some lift, as on a four-seam fastball, slightly less as on a two-seamer (which doesn't present as many seams to keep this wake as small), or some drag to one side as with a curve ball. This is greatly apparent on a rapidly rotating ball, as you see here: This ball is rotating rapidly from right to left across the top, and it appears that this is pumping air across the top, driving the wake downward, and filling the space behind the ball with smooth-flowing air. That's an easy way to understand it. The action of the knuckleball, however, takes into account the fact that some stitches are moving towards the flow of air in front, and others are moving away, at a very slow speed. The fact that the stitches move around the ball in quite a complex curve on a knuckleball and the ball may rotate at different rates in different ways causes these swirls behind the ball to change size and direction, form and disappear, and move location on the ball, producing changing locations and strengths of low pressure that really can't be predicted. The wake behind a knuckleball at various points in flight may look like these: It's fast rotation that can partially counteract gravity. A hard-thrown fastball rotating front to back over the top produced lift just behind and slightly above the center of the ball, tending to hold it up so gravity doesn't drop it so fast. A ball with little, if any rotation doesn't generate that lift, and it produces a larger wake, so it naturally falls away, maybe a foot or more. This explains the drop of a knuckleball (and similarly, the forkball or split-finger fastball). The air pressure around the outside of the ball is greatest, so that's where the airflow is tripped and shifted to deform the large wake behind the ball. It's thought by some that this is enough to kick the ball this way and that, but the little amount of pressure there does not explain some balls suddenly "hitting a wall" and diving hard. Wind tunnel views as you see above show that it's the deformation of the low-pressure turbulence behind the ball that knocks it around. Because of the low rotation, the ball already wants to fall away, but if this vortex suddenly swells, it can cause the ball to suddenly brake and cut hard off-line. There is no other way to explain the unpredictable and drastic darting of a five-ounce sphere propelled at speeds of 60 mph or better. It's also said that the ideal rotation of a knuckleball is one half turn. Others have said one quarter turn. The problem with either of those is this does not take into account the end points that this measurement is taken: release to front edge of plate, or to a point first within reach of the bat, or the catcher's mitt? Also, considering the complexity of the curve of the stitches around the ball, any shift of the angle of rotation will produce an entirely different presentation of the stitches to the airflow, producing an entirely different action. Furthermore, what if you want to just get the ball to sink a few inches at the last moment, which maximizes the effectiveness of any pitch? How do you orient the ball and how much do you rotate it and in what direction? On top of that, if you were so good at throwing this that you could exactly reproduce some so-called "ideal" rotation, you now have a predictable and therefore eminently hittable pitch. What is observed in the lab as a theoretical ideal may not translate well to real-world situations. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now, there's one effect that nobody talks about that I've observed that explains why a non-rotating knuckleball may still swoop all over the place. I call this the Ferris Wheel Effect. Ride one and notice that although you always face forward, the air comes at you from above as you rise up, then it shifts to the front as you reach the top, then from below as you ride down the front. A non-rotating knuckleball, thrown slow in a big arc, "sees" the wind from slightly above the front-center, then directly in front, then slightly below front-center. This movement of the "relative wind" (as skydivers call it) along the front of the ball will naturally produce shifts in where and how those stitch-produced swirls ("vortices") are produced and therefore how the wake is shaped and sized. It's known by wind tunnel tests that only a small rotation of a knuckleball can produce a huge change in this wake, so practiced knuckleball pitchers who can keep the spin off experiment with different orientations of the ball in their hands to produce the ideal action for them personally. Some settle on a "horseshoe" facing front, others prefer the point where the seams come closest together, and others try variations on those. I have no hard figures, but it seems that a thrown ball begins to react to the wind at speeds around 50 mph or so. Non-rotating balls thrown at, say 90, have much less time to move much. The tradeoff seems to be around 70 mph, fast enough for some Little Leaguers to try their hand at one at major-league distances. You can see how helpful it may be to intentionally change speeds on your knuckleballs. Throwing some in the high 70s and low 80s will cause them to move little, but they'll still likely shudder and shake enough to knock that very small sweet spot off-line enough to make a clean hit all the harder. However, if it doesn't move at all, it's essentially a BP fastball,which may make it all-too easy to hit deep. If you have an insufficient number of them sinking the way you want (sinking being the best way to miss the bat) your option's there to change velocity of each pitch on your own, further adding to the batter's confusion. There is something to be said for having the command of the knuckleball so as to produce a lot of strikes and produce enough difference from one to another to have a good day on the mound, whether the ball does it all on its own, or if you have some say in what it does. It has been found, though, that if the ball rotates slightly clockwise or counter-clockwise and the stitches are aligned properly from the start, there may be some lift produced to follow, producing a ball that actually corkscrews! I've thrown them-- tough to do all the time, to say the least. This may be what Hoyt Wilhelm called it his "spinner". It rotates about an off-center axis pointing generally towards the plate, gradually sinking on the way in, making it relatively easy to catch and to throw for strikes but completely unhiuttable except with blind luck. Also throwing into the wind produces more air speed. Over the same distance, the ball may move a LOT more, compressing its action into a much shorter distance. A REAL catcher's nightmare!"

The humidity and the heat rising from the ground make the knuckle ball dance. It has no spin so wind would just push the ball around. (not dance) A hot humid day with no wind is perfect for a knuckle ball pitcher.