a700hitter

Lazy Lars finds a home.

Let's hope he can regain that movement. Losing that much movement is huge.

The biggest drop in his k's was from 2010 to 2011. It's been a 2 year trend. It's taking him an awful long time to correct this mechanical flaw.

The defense wouldn't knock down Lester's k's by 25%.

If Overbay doesn't make the opening day roster, he has an opt out clause in his contract. He will not be our AAA first baseman.

We are staking our season on Buchholz and Lester having big seasons. After taking a look at Lester's numbers, I am not very confident that he will rebound to his 2010 form. In two seasons, his strikeouts have dropped from 225 to 166. A drop off by 60 strikeouts in the same number of innings sets off alarm bells to me. I know that someone posted a list of guys who had improved their ERAs by a run or more from one season to the next. I wonder how many of those guys had experienced a 25% drop off of strikeout effectiveness.

As disappointing as our last 2 off seasons have been, I haven't gotten to the point where I judge a move to be a success, because it will not hurt us. I look to see if a transaction will make us better. Overbay doesn't improve this team. I disagree with your assumption that anyone better than Overbay would get a better deal than being a part time first baseman. If we got a guy who could play the OF and 1B, we could offer him significant playing time and we would fill 2 of our needs. This move doesn't help the team and it probably puts either Nava or Sweeney on the opening day roster to fill the OF spot. Both of them stink.

I think it is more a function of seeing our pitching a lot plus other than Lester in those last few years we had no effective lefty starters. Did we have any lefty starters in those season. We also had very few lefties in the pen. Did the ballpark also factor into it? Maybe, but remember that in 2 of the 5 season his OPS was higher against us at home than on the road, so I don't think any Fenway effect is enough to justify signing an over the hill substandard offensive first baseman. They should have looked to get a little more pop.

I am not sure what point these stats make. He raked our pitching for those 5 years. In each of those 5 years, he hit Sox pitching for the highest or second highest OPS of any team that he faced in 10 or more games. In 2 of the 5 seasons, he hit Sox pitching for a higher OPS at home than at Fenway. Are you trying to make the point that he didn't hit Sox pitching well?

I believe it was a joke.

Maybe we are collecting knucklers so Wakefield will have something to do.

Wow, he lost almost a mph since this morning. This guy is on a fast decline.

That means much, because he will not be hitting against our pitching. He is JT Snow with less power. He was a good glove man and an average stick, and like JT Snow, we are getting him when he is at the end of the road. We could have done better than this. I am not sure that this is an upgrade over moving Nava to 1B.

Yuk!

They had better get a special shoe for him to help prevent any recurrence of this injury.

Maybe he injured Kalish with one of those bullets.

I was just going on my personal observations, almost entirely in the second half of the season. He wasn't throwing hard at all in my recollection. Hopefully, I am wrong about that.

I hope Middlebrooks is okay. The Sox need him to be a power bat. Plus, I just picked him up in a pre-draft fantasy trade where I parted with Machado. Middlebrooks looks like an imposing specimen. He must have been able to rifle the football.

But on the bright side, we have him for 2 seasons.

I don't understand the compulsion to disagree with me. After all, we are diehard fans of the same team, and we both know a lot about baseball. We are bound to agree with each other at least occasionally. We have withstood the test of time on this forum. Many have gone by the wayside voluntarily and involuntarily.

And you will have every right to gloat and I for one will be very happy for you. You will not get any snide remarks from me like even a stopped clock iis right twice a day, nor will there be any references to blind squirrels and nuts. Those are the things that I hear from some asshats even though I am right much more than I am wrong. You are a knowledgeable guy and you have been right about a lot of stuff. You may be the only guy who saw something positive in Miller at the start of last season, and he was a pleasant surprise. I hope you are right about our pitching this year, because last year was torture. BTW I am still mad at you for ruining Kalish's season.

I guess they were registering his other puff balls as offspeed pitches. I watched this guy in particular at the trading deadline to see what he had. The games that I watched he was sitting 84-87. I remember thinking that his velocity had dropped off considerably from what he had been. My recollection could be faulty, or maybe he was starting to wear down by then, but I think we will not see a guy sitting at 90 unless Fenway juices its gun.

I am not going to jump on SFF, who is a nice guy, but I will jump all over the FO. Last year, they had an obvious need for 2 starting pitchers. They did nothing, made Bard a starter picked up some guys off the scrap heap for minor league contracts and crossed their fingers. Those who defended the FO reasoned that getting rid of Wakefield and Lackey was addition by subtraction and that our pitching couldn't get worse than 2011. That argument was made all over the pages of this forum. Alas, things got much worse. Even as things imploded and we were subjected to the torture of 2012, people pointed out that they had no payroll flexibility as they were already over the 8:14:52 AM cap. They purged themselves of a ton of payroll in August and they had a ton of payroll flexibility going into the off season. I thought surely they would strengthen their pitching. Tomorrow is February 1st and all we have added is a soft throwing Dumpster who was mediocre in his NL career. Are you kidding me? This is way below any reasonable expectations. I am not interested in hearing the excuses that no real aces were available or that the market was over priced an yada yada yada ******** excuses. As usual, a long list of starting pitchers changes laundry in the off season, and many will be very productive for their new teams. Even a team like the Mets, with little prospect for success in the NL East and an austerity payroll landed Marcum who many of us wanted. The O's got Jurjens for $1 million. These guys would have helped us. Pitchers were available. We had the money and we did nothing. What about trades? People criticize the Blue Jays, but are you kidding me? If we added Dickey, Buehrle and Josh Johnson to our staff, we would all be tickled pink. On the offensive side of the ball, they added Reyes and Melky. We got their loser manager. WTF! Those same people who said that losing Lackey and Wakefield after 2011 was addition by subtraction are now trying to sell me on the return of Lackey being a good thing. He's in great condition. He's going to be the Lackey who pitched for the Angels etc. Etc. Make up your minds. Is having Lackey a good thing or is losing him a good thing. Talk about a severe flip flop. To sum up, our starting pitching has little hope of being productive. We have to get rid of Salty. That should help. The strengthened bullpen should be able to salvage some games in the early part of the season before they get worn out, and we have to hope that all of our starting pitchers are juicing HGH so they can stay healthy. Those are our chances.

It is beyond me how Cherries can look at our starting pitching and see a big improvement over last year. I read SFFs posts over and over, but all I see is the same guys plus a mid 80s Dumpster and Lackey taking Beckett's spot. It doesn't inspire confidence.

Dempster was throwing in the mid 80s last year. I don't think we can expect a lot.