a700hitter

If they lose this series and drop another 2 games in the loss column, the division will no longer be in play. There are too many teams to climb over in the division and none of them are patsies. You don't want to hear it but the are not going to play .660 ball for the last 76 games. I don't know how to fix this team right now. I don't think a big pitcher fixes things, when we have our big guy Gonzo with a complete power outage, with Pedroia injured and under performing, with just too many game playing sacks of garbage like Punto and Gomez in the lineup, with Lester and Beckett pitching like end of the rotation guys, and with Aceves blowing game after game. How do you fix such a mess? A little tinkering at the trading deadline will not help, and there will not be enough time after the TD to catch the Yankees. With 2 wild cards in play, there is a chance to get hot enough to win one of those spots, but getting to a 1 game playoff doesn't justify moving top prospects for a 2 month rental. They could take their chances with what they have got, but unless they start making a move before the TD, even a wild card spot will be very difficult to capture. If they are in the same position at the TD, the smartest move would be to come up with a good plan to break up this team and sell off the parts to start over. That would mean trying to shed as many contracts as possible. Gonzo's and Crawford's contracts can't be moved. Plus, we would be selling low on them. However, Beckett and Lester could be moved. They still have value. I think Lester should definitely be moved, because his performance has declined for a second year in a row. He's still a valuable commodity and he could bring a nice return. The 2012 team was doomed from the start. You never never ever start a season with two untested commodities in your starting rotation unless one of them is a Strasburg-type prospect. That had zero chance of working. We were lucky in that one of the guys worked out. Doubs has been a fine back of the rotation guy. Bard, on the other hand, blew up in spectacular fashion. Two rookies in the rotation is too much risk. I said it in the off season and during Spring Training. Dice K as the fall back plan if 1 of them flopped, was a terrible idea. He has sucked since 2008, so that just made no sense. They made no bold moves, other than firing Tito, to move past the negativity of the 2011 season. They opened the season with the same crew that crumbled from apathy and expected things to be different. They needed to make some bold moves. Yes, it might have required going over budget, but it was necessary to change course. They didn't, and this was the very predictable result. I feel like 2012 has the feel of September 2011 part II. People look for explanations that do not lead to the harsh truth that (he 2012 team never had a chance. People will look to blame injuries. It wasn't injuries. The team was poorly constructed. It had major flaws in the rotation. The starting pitching is near the bottom of the league. The good pitching on the last road trip was an aberration. We were facing two of the worst offenses in the league. Is the season over? Is all hope lost? No, this is baseball. In 45 years, I have learned that anything can happen. But things are not going in the right direction. There is little hope that things will turn around before the TD, and time is running out.

I am starting to think that those who said he was toast are turning out to be right.

Does Pedroia's injury dampen your enthusiasm?

Downward spiral on its way.

Yes, he has been placed on the DL. That should be great for the weekend.

I am sure a lot of Cubs fans felt the same way after 2011.

Yep, there is no reason at this point to think 2013 will be better. We thought 2011 would be better than 2010, and we had reasons for that. We thought 2012 would be better than 2011, and we had no reason for that. At this point, we have no reason to think 2013 will be better than 2012. Mere hope is not enough.

I suspect that the Yankees signed McDopey to get his daughter to do some segments on YES. She is a very cute kid who did some entertaining player interviews on NESN. Her dad is useless, but the kid has a future.

If this kid and Renaudo don't make it, I think we will be able to conclude that the only thing Theo knows about pitching is that he can't hit it. I am paraphrasing Bob Gibson who said something similar to Tim McCarver when he visited the mound.

I haven't been able to access the site this weekend from my home laptop. I have been posting from my work blackberry. Yeszir is working on it.

Yep. It's time for new blood in the FO. Cherries getting promoted to GM is the Peter Principle in practice. Let's not delude ourselves thinking that we have such an influx of young talent coming in the next year or two. If things work out, Middlebrooks will step in and become what Youk had been not that long ago, but I am not expecting him to be a cleanup hitter with a .900+ OPS. Iron glove Kalish will probably step in and take a starting spot in the OF, but will he be more valuable to the Sox than Ross has been this season. Iglesias still can't hit and the FO knows that so they drafted a SS in Marrero. Finally, when will we see some top pitching coming up? Barnes is 22. He hasn't yet dominated in AA, so it's premature to tag him with the label of "phenom". In the meantime, our good players like Ortiz and Ellsbury are aging or getting ready to move on. This organization has a lot of challenges ahead. They had better be damn sure that Cherries is not over his head. When a top organization unravels, it can take some time to rebuild it.

Yes, the Yankees lineup will show the true state of the Starting pitching. I am very hopeful about Morales prospects. I think they may have stumbled upon something special. I wish he was pitching the second game on Saturday, because I will be at that game. Beckett gets to set the tone on Friday night. He and Lester have been huge disappointments this season. There's no other way to view it. They need to have big second halfs. I think Lester is losing it. He declined last year and he is declining further this year. Unless he figures things out in the second half and has a lights out ace-like second half, I would trade him while he still has good trade value. I don't need to see stats to see that his effectiveness is declining. I am sure that the stats bear out that observation. When a pitcher tells you that he feels good and he is throwing well, but he's giving up runs, it is probably time to bail on him.

I don't think any members of TalkSox at the beginning of the season expected that the Sox would own a share of last place on the 4th of July. It's really sobering when you think that the results have been worse than had been predicted by even the biggest pessimists.

Since the Red Sox are still paying him, he could have been sitting on our bench as insurance for the rest of the year, and he could have moved on after the end of the season. There was no emergency to trade him.

He has 6 more seasons under this contract, so he has plenty of time to prove himself, but it will be hard for him to have a representative 2012. If he hits like crazy and goes on a power tear in the second half knocking out 20 HRs, he'll still only have 26 on the season, which would have been below most expectations for him coming into the season. FHe has a big uphill battle to salvage 2012.

I think we have to look at our starting pitching with clear eyes. Neither Lester nor Beckett have had anything close to ace-worthy seasons. Heck they have not even had good seasons for a #3 starter. We can't evaluate these guys by saying if you drop this start or that start or a certain month, they are having good years. That just doesn't fly. Buchholz was horrible until June and after a handful of good starts, he goes on the DL with a mystery condition. Look at his overall numbers, not the last month. Look at the whole body of work. It sucks. Bard was a disaster. There's no good way to spin that experiment and anyone that spins it positive risks any shred of credibility. Doubront has exceeded expectations, but those expectations were extremely low. He has been an average #5. Dice K, whose return was eagerly anticipated, is still the same garbage that we remember from the past 3 years. We are left pinning our hopes on a lefty specialist reliever (Morales)and a soft tosser with a long medical history (Cook). Step back and look at the whole picture, not some trends or the last road trip. It is an ugly picture.

Going into the weekend series against the Yankees, the Red Sox are 8 games behind them in the loss column, but only 1/2 out of last place.

Playing .636 ball for a 44 game stretch is much different than plan playing .654 ball for 81 games-- that's sustained excellence. There will be ups and downs in those 81 games-- they will have to play over .700 ball for periods at a time to balance out the down periods. Just to put it in perspective, not a single team played to such a winning percentage in the first half of the season-- not a single one. I don't think you are being realistic if you think this Red Sox team can get to 95 wins just by getting healthy.