a700hitter

I don't want anything to do with that 33%.

Tonight is a rare no lose situation as far as I am concerned. If the Sox win, great! We get to see our guys play some winning ball. If we lose, we will help the Angels pull out of their tailspin, right their ship and be a big threat to the Yankees in the Playoffs.

So, he needs an operation to restore his weak-ass arm?

Today people drug the kids to shut them up. Anyone who has had dogs knows that if you don't run certain breeds, they will chew up everything in your house. If kids sit in school and then the house, they will act out, but thousands of medical professionals will prescribe mind altering drugs to modify their behavior on the theory that they have chemical imbalances or diagnosable conditions. In my generation in Brooklyn, our parents sent us out to play and we didn't come home except for meals. All that energy was expended outside the home to the point of exhaustion. There were plenty of games, arguments and fights, but no one shot up their school and slaughtered their neighbors. I realize that it is not as simple as that, but a friend pointed out to me that in almost all of these shooting rampages by young adults there was a history of prolonged treatment with a cocktail of mind altering meds. There is certainly a use for those medications, but IMO it has been terribly over-prescribed as a sort of panacea.

Good points about the texting and driving. In some ways it is more menacing than drunk driving. Drunk driving can occur at anytime, but it predominantly happens in the evening hours and very early morning hours. You can reduce your risk of encountering a drunk driver by not venturing on the road at those hours. There is no such pattern for these idiots texting. There is nothing anyone can do to limit their risk of encountering one of these *******s. The accident we had with the texter was at One O'clock in the afternoon. Then of course there are the drunk texters, who should be put to death. Occasionally, the system works. A good family friend lost a brother to a drunk driver. Her brother was in his late 20's or early 30's and left 4 little kids and a wife, a mother, father and a sister. That guy went to jail. I am not sure about the length of his sentence. That was more than 25 years ago, and although there is more public scrutiny of the drunk driving today than back then, it doesn't seem like many of these killers go to jail today.

Yep. Even if Bard had become a decent starter, the move blew a hole open in the late inning pen that needed to be plugged. It made no sense that he took a guy who was a high performer in qa certain role and moved him to another role where he had no track record of success to fill that hole while creating a need in the pen. We needed a starter. He should have obtained a starter. If Bard had been terrible in the bullpen as DLowe had been in his last season as closer, I could see him getting moved to the rotation as a last ditch effort to save his career. He was building a good career in the bull pen, but the FO made a last ditch effort to ruin his career, and they succeeded.

It's an overriding theme. The guys is a major jackass, and we know that they never punish anyone until they take a life. They guy that nearly killed my wife was on a cocktail of Prozac, Xanax and Vicodin and he topped that off by getting blind drunk. I know this because I heard him being interviewed by the doctor in the emergency room. He was on the other side of the curtain from my wife, who was strapped to a board. If he hadn't been guarded by an armed State Trooper, I would have exacted my own measure of justice. He couldn't understand why he was under arrest, because he felt that he had done nothing wrong. He had prior convictions for leaving the scene of an accident and another DIWI. The DA called us about the case, but my wife was never asked to testify, and I am pretty sure that he got off with no jail time. BTW, he didn't have a scratch on him. They never do. Not enough attention gets paid to the texting while driving problem. That is every bit as bad as the drunk driving. We got hit by one of those jackasses too-- a young girl returning to college who totaled 2 vehicles other than her own and sent 4 people to the hospital strapped to boards including me and my wife. Penalties need to be harsher, and fame should not be a ticket out of the penalty. Can I go back to bashing the Red Sox FO now?

Let's not fall into the trap of blaming Yankee money. The Red Sox are not poverty stricken. They have more money than almost every other franchise not named the Yankees. Unfortunately, our ownership and management has squandered hundreds of millions of dollars. The Pineda problem was a trade not a big money acquisition.

It's so hard for me to fathom that this team has not played any meaningful games for so long. I believed at the start of the season that we did not have enough pitching to see us through a successful season, but I fully expected that they would have been competitive at least until September before the lack of pitching separated us from the pack. We started the season with 3 starting pitchers. Doubront was an unknown quantity and Bard was a complete gamble. You can't break camp with that and think you have enough pitching. There were no contingency plans, none that instilled any confidence. I have heard all the arguments about foreseeability of the under performance of the so-called "big three". All that did was accelerate the fall into hyper-speed. We had 3 established starters when we broke camp. That is not a recipe for success. We're officially out of it now. The ownership made that official when they sent Crawford for surgery. Many of us have known we were done long before this. People who thought we had life at the All Star break were desperately clinging to false hope. The FO has known that this was a lost season despite their public face. Their actions hollered out that the team was toast as they didn't lift a finger to reinforce the team pitching over the course of the entire season. They sacrificed the season as they pimped the 100th year anniversary celebration and bricks and so forth fully knowing they had fielded a very inferior product. What is left for us as the fans? All that is left for me is hoping that the Sox can play spoilers. Knocking the Yankees out of the playoffs would be sweet, but it is a bit of a long shot. Knocking them from the division lead is not such a long shot. If the Angels and Detroit don't make the playoffs, the Yankees will have an easier path. I'd like to see them make the playoffs. We could help them by knocking out Baltimore. That would be a measure of revenge for last year. Maybe we could celebrate like unprofessional *******s like they did when they knocked us out. I'd like that. We play the Angels this week, who are in a tailspin of their own. While I always root for the Red Sox, losing to the Angels and setting them back on the winning track may not be a bad thing in the big picture.

There will be no torches and pitchforks. There won't be many fans either.

I never expected it to be this bad either.

Maybe the FO will do nothing again this offseason. Maybe they will tell us that good health will be the key, and a full season from Franklin Morales as a starter and Bailey in the pen, and Middlebrooks and Lavarnway and we will be on our way back to the top. I wouldn't put it past them, but if they tinker around the edges in the off season, I will pursue a different hobby, because they will be competing for last place again. Well, we should be able to beat up on the Astros who will be in the AL so maybe we will get back to.500.

We suck so bad that we will not even be a worthy spoiler team down the stretch. We will revive the Angels chance this week.

4 games under .500 on August 19th-- a disgrace.

Great minds. You and I took a lot of abuse because we thought the starting pitching would not be good enough.

The ownership can't spend that if the fans aren't putting it in their pockets. I wasn't taking anything personally. Pinning any of the incompetence, poor decisions and inaction on the fans or press is just absurd. The organization from top to bottom owns the blame for this monstrosity of a season.

You remember the Big Cat?

I always maintained that Cashman ate Theo's lunch, and he did outclass Theo on negotiating trades and acquisitions. Theo played into Cashman's hands time after time. Bumbling Benny doesn't even realize that his lunch has been eaten.

He's an All-Time great who was bored stiff on a crappy team in Seattle -- a team that plays in a pitcher's ballpark. The Yankees got him for nothing and don't even have to pay his salary. It was a typical smart move by the Yankees taking a chance that a playoff bound team would rejuvenate the guy. It has. He can still run, field and throw with the best, and now he is hitting too. Edit: Our GM brought us Marlon Bryd. Jacked up on PEDs he still sucked.

Ichiro was a terrible pickup for the Yankees. If Dice K was japan's National Treasure, what are Kurodo and Ichiro?

Kuroda was a real nice pick up.

Surgery doesn't make the guy like new. His power stroke has suffered. I think it is because he has a bum shoulder.

Maybe it should have hurt his trade value. Gonzo has had a power outage in 2012-- could be his shoulder?

First, how are fans pummeling them... by packing Fenway every game? The only guy to get booed in any significant way has been Beckett. Bobby V actually got a bit of a positive chant from the fans not that long ago. The assertion of pummeling by fans is just nonsense. The pummeling by the press has to be expected when you are fighting for last place. If they are waiting for the press to get off their backs before they can "act rationally", they will be in last place next season too. The way to get the press off their backs would be by giving them something positive to write and report. If there is nothing positive, they still have to get people to read their columns and listen to their shows. The stuff about Fans and the press feeling that they have a "god given right to a contender every single season" is patent nonsense. Stop blaming the press and the fans for the failure of this organization. The fans are not to blame. The only thing positive about this franchise right now is that they have one of the most loyal and passionate fan bases in sports that provides the franchise with tremendous resources to run their organization.

Based on Lester's last 2 seasons, i would slot him in as a number 3 even if he does well down the stretch.