a700hitter

Fred, I share your hope that their will be a marked improvement in our starting pitching in 2013. I have to have hope. My hope lies in that Salty will get jettisoned. Couple that with a healthy Lackey and Buchholz and there should be improvement. I have much less hope if Salty stays and we have the same group of guys except Dempster and Lackey are added and Beckett subtracted. I don't hold out a lot of hope for Dempster, but nobody else is singing his praises, and a post-op Lackey replacing Beckett is not encouraging ether. Salty leaving could raise everyone's performance.

I never said that I was looking for a real number 1 this off season. My proposal was to improve the bottom 3. Dempster was their attempt, but he would not have been my choice. I would have tried to add 2 guys to solidify the rotation, neither of which would have been #1's. There were plenty out there that moved this off season. Our starters have been stinking up the mound since September 1, 2011. Since then, we have traded Beckett away and brought in Dempster. I do think it is folly to expect a big improvement with essentially the same crew. Your opinion is different. I have said it over and over that the one hope that I hold out for a marked improvement from this group is a trade of Salty. If they keep him and he catches the majority of games for essentially the same pitchers since 2011, the starting staff will perform poorly.

Yes, those are the ones that I remember. Those statements concerned me a great deal, but I was hoping that he just was not tipping his hand. Based on his actions, I guess he was being honest. Up to this point in his tenure, I have found Cherries to be very honest. Unfortunately, I think that his assessment is a huge crap shoot that can flame out in an ugly way.

I wish you had a little more imagination. You'll never be successful as a GM with that kind of defeatist attitude. I was hoping that you had some good ideas to discuss.

What do you think they should have done?

Due to high volume, I have instituted a 250 post minimum limit for members before I will consider a reply post. Get back to me with this question when you hit 250 posts. Welcome to TalkSox, but only established members can troll me.

Me too. I have been trying to make sense of what they have done in the off season. I am having trouble seeing a cohesive plan. I can't tell if they are trying to be competitive this season or if they are looking more with an eye to the future. The payroll is bloated with uninspiring low profile positional acquisitions, but almost nothing was done for the starting pitching currently or for the future. In a prior post, I said that I believe that the explanation of their off season plan is one of three possibilities: I would add by way of explaining the third possibility that Cherington has several times said that he thinks the starting pitching is improved, and he said this before they got Dempster. I just don't see how he can believe that with much confidence. It's just my opinion, but others disagree without being specific about what they think the off season plan is.

I don't believe that I weighed in much on Sanchez. Very few deals are perfect slam dunks. If they are waiting for perfect deals, they will never make a deal. Arguments can and have been made against each of the deals where we signed positional players. There can always be arguments both pro and con made with regard to any acquisition or trade. It's not an excuse to do nothing.

I have been addressing the deficiency in our starting pitching. What do you think of Dempster? Do you think that he fixes the problem? Weren't there better options?

Bells, look at how many major league pitchers and prospects were traded and or signed by teams this off season. The list is pretty long. To say that there were no opportunities there for the Sox is beyond belief. I didn't expect them to make the number and magnitude of moves made by the Jays, but we almost nothing for today and zero for the future. Why didn't they try to pry away a pitching prospect or 2 for the future? I think the answer lies in Cherington's statements that he believes that our pitching is improved over last year. He thinks that our major league starting pitching is solid right now and he feels no pressure to build it for the future. He said the same things last year, and look how that turned out. He wasted 86% of the money spent this off season on old position players who are not that good. That is not a drop in the bucket, and it makes no sense if people here are telling me that the FO isn't trying to be competitive this year. Napoli, Drew, Gomes and Victorino are not guys that will send fans rushing to the box office. If they are not going to help the team win this year, what is their purpose. I think the FO thinks the pitching will be good and he got these low profile veterans to help him win this year. I don't think he has built a winning team as it currently stands, but he must think they can compete if he ran the payroll up to $170 million.

Good luck to your boys, coach. Hopefully, one of them will make a name for himself and you'll be able to work for a baseball program that makes more than one of the peanut vendors at Fenway.

Are you a GM of team that produces financial reports for it's investors? You are a coach. They typically have a very high business acumen and even higher intellect.

It is never about doing nothing when your business is deficient in a critical area. You may not be able to fix the problem right away, but doing nothing is not progress. You really have never had a responsible position, have you?

UN, you didn't set the parameters of your question. You didn't come close to defining the most important term in your question. I'm not throwing stones, just pointing out the flaw in your question. Boy, I am glad I have you on ignore. You really are not worth reading.

My guess is that neither of you has a real job in a real business responsible to management or stockholders. Just a guess. Doing nothing when your business has deficiencies is not progress. You would get fired.

Business is not about doing nothing, especially when your business is very weak or deficient in a critical area as is the Red Sox pitching. If they don't want to improve the major league staff then they should be improving their pitching on the farm. It's a completely unrealistic to think that there were no opportunities to improve either their current or future pitching. You are entitle to your own opinion, however, I am free to view them as lame ass excuses.

It's a record of negative accomplishment. That escaped you? Really?

I have UN on ignore, so I don't see his posts, but now that you have quoted it, I'll answer. First of all, every one and every organization makes mistakes. His question is moronic because he does not even define the terms of his own question. What constitutes "a lot of mistakes"? Two, three, more? So, how does one answer that? I will venture to say that examples of teams that have done a good job are the Giants and Cardinals. It would be hard to criticize them. There, I just squashed the crickets.

So, no ownership group has accomplished what the Red Sox have done-- spent $170+ million and finish last. That is just a fact.

You really can't grasp anything today. In fact for the last couple of day, I hope that you understand yourself.

I am sorry, but in my business, not doing anything is not making progress toward a long term plan. Saying that not going for Greinke, Hamilton et. al. is an implementation of their plan for the future is a stretch. I wish that I could sell that to my boss-- that my doing nothing was progress, because at least I didn't make any stupid moves. They didn't blow up Fenway either. Was that also part of their implementation of their long term plans?

And I am not at all proposing a short term approach. What I am saying, and I'll spell it out very clearly for you is that this off season they have made only 1 move to improve the starting pitching in the near term and none to improve the future of our pitching. Doing nothing in an entire off season to address future needs is not the best way to meet your long term goals. Long term goals don't get addressed at the end of 3 or 5 years. They get addressed throughout the period. You don't take a year off. That's not the best way to achieve the long term objective.

Every team has an off season plan. Your inability to understand that is astounding. That doesn't preclude it from being part of a 3 or 5 year plan. Are you in business? Have you ever seen your Company's financial plan and it's goals? Businesses have annual and even quarterly objectives which fit with long term goals. It sounds like you need some business training from iortiz. He's very proficient with that stuff.

This is just stupid. The possibilities that I see at this point are: 1. they have not completed their off season plan yet, 2. they were unable to implement their off season plan, or 3. they formulated a poor off season plan. I am hoping that #1 is correct, because 2 and 3 give us little hope for the upcoming season. I don't see any other possibilities, because they have done very little to improve our current starting pitching and nothing to improve our future starting pitching. Starting pitching is this teams biggest need.

This is the off season thread. I have said over and over that they have done nothing this off season to improve the starting pitching in the short term or the future. They have done less to build the future of our starting pitching than the present. I am assuming they acquired Dempster for the present. I don't think his acquisition will help much. They have done nothing with an eye to the future. As for your assertion that they might have made an offer of Ellsbury for Bauer and other trades, I don't care. Results count. Cleveland got the deal done and got back a nice young arm plus a replacement CFer in Stubbs. We didn't. If they were trying to move Ellsbury, they should have made a more compelling argument, because Ells is a more talented player than Choo. If they questioned his injury-proneness, they should have made the case that he is fully healthy and that those injuries were freak incidents. They should have brought a DVD showing Ells doing his off season training. They didn't get the deal. That's all that matters. We don't know the effort so we can't judge it. There is a possibility that there was no effort. We can only judge results, because we don't know what efforts are being made. Other teams are improving their weaknesses. We have not.