a700hitter

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.

How many wins do you think it will take to win the ALE?

You are 100 percent right. There is a convincing other side of the argument. I have always been predisposed to make these deals under the old format. That has always been my inclination, and I was willing to pay the price in prospects/cash. This new format makes me less inclined unless the player will help us compete for the division. There's no science involved here from me-- just a personal preference.

We have been so desperate for starting help that many of us were looking to him as a reinforcement. That really shows the lousy state of our rotation. Dice K has done nothing for this team since 2008.

The offense has been good prior to this last road trip. It is not a Fenway effect. Our record at home has not been great. What has happened on this last trip is that Nava has finally cooled off. Aviles has been slumping and WMB cooled off and got injured forcing Punto into the lineup. Until recently WMB had been productive and Nava, Podsednik and others have made up for the absence of Crawford and Ellsbury and we have scored plenty. With those guys cooling off and Gonzo turning into a singles hitter, it is very obvious that opponents are not going to let Papi hurt them. He is not getting challenged, because he is the only deep threat in the lineup. They will continue to pitch around him until Ellsbury and Crawford come back and produce offensively. The biggest problem for our offense is the continued ineffectiveness of Gonzo. He's just a big slow singles hitter. He's what's wrong with the offense. He should be anchoring our lineup, but he is sinking it. Pitchers have no fear of him. They actually intentionally walked Cody Ross recently to face Gonzo. What is wrong with this offense is not the Fenway effect, but rather the AGon effect.

Youk was under contract until the end of the season. We are still paying him. If he was on our bench, he would have been a nice insurance policy. Right now, he'd be playing, because the kid is injured. It would be much better than Punto. Today, we have some minor leaguer playing 3rd, and I think he is a first baseman. Youkilis was not going to burn down the clubhouse if he was on our bench. There simply was no rush to get rid of him.

^Give it up. You are on ignore.

An oversimplification, but the still the team's main deficiency. If our starters had been in the top half of the league, we would be right at the top with the Yanks despite the OF injuries. Nava and Pods have hit better than Crawford would have hit. We were very lucky to have them fill in. Our biggest offensive problem has been AGon. That has nothing to do with injury. He is a main cog and he has been all but absent. I am sick of whiny fans whining about injuries. Our starting pitching has sucked-- the Bard experiment was a complete abortion. Dice K stinks. Lester and Beckett have underperformed. Our best hitter AGon has been terrible. We are where we are because of execution not injuries.

Paul Blair may have been the best CF that I ever saw. I didn't see Mays in his prime. I can't remember Blair having a bad collision in the Outfield. That being said, the collision with Beltre was Beltre's fault. He was out way too far for that ball. He should have expected Ellsbury to be there, and had it not been for Beltre, Ells would have been able to catch that ball without going into a slide.