a700hitter

Injuries is just a whiny excuse, We came out of the blocks in last place. We've had no injuries to our starting staff of any significance. The pitching has no excuse for being at the bottom of the league. Oddly, the injuries to our OFers have not hurt our offense. Nava and Pods and Sweeney stepped in admirably to replace the production of Ellsbury and Crawford. Our offense has been second in the league. It's been the starting pitching that has been the problem. Injuries have not been the issue with them. Let's not start with excuses. going into the season, most people knew that there was very little room for error for this roster to be successful. Bard blew up spectacularly. Beckett and Lester have pitched like back of the rotation guys. Buchholz has been horrible except for his June starts. Our starting depth was expected to be Dice K. Look at the ERA's on these guys: Beckett 4.06 Lester 4.33 Buchholz 5.53 Bard 5.24 Doubront 4.42 Dice K 6.65 There's the reason for this team's failure. Compare that to the Yankees and Tampa starters or the Angels who have 2 stoppers with ERA's under 2.50. Pitching is the reason, not injuries. Edit: the biggest challenge for our offense in 2012 has been the disappearance of AGon as a premier hitter. He has become Casey Kotchman.

Yes, as he was rehabbing from the thumb, his arm started to hurt. Who would have expected that?

Injuries are not the reason. Our competition has also had key injuries. Tampa has been without its best player Longoria for more than 2 months. He hasn't played since April 30th. Desmond Jennings missed a month and their closer coming into the season was Farnsworth. He missed 3 months and just returned. Tampa had far less talent to start with than the Red Sox. The Yankees have been without their #3 starter Pineda for the entire season. They lost Mo, the best closer in baseball history. Joba got done in by a trampoline. Brett Gardner has missed the entire season thus far. It's not the injuries that have done us in. That's just a convenient excuse that the FO will promote and too many fans will accept. Edit: The Rangers have lost 3 of their 5 starters to TJ surgery.

He'll make $4 million in 2012, and he'll probably make close to that in arbitration for 2013. What a bargain! Plus, we had to trade Reddick for him.

I'll be glad to get Pods back in place of Iron Glove Kalish. Pods is a solid professional, who gets on base. He has good speed and he's a good fielder. Plus, there is the added benefit that he gives VA the vapors.

He was interviewing last season, and he was there for the taking. He's a proven guy doing the job with a very small budget. I'll never understand why they did not scoop him up at the time.

If we ran this team, with our combined skill sets, this would have been a much better season up to this point. They have a light weight running one of the premier franchises in all of sports.

and Ben Cherington is not up to the job of rebuilding this organization. He was Duke's gopher and Theo's apprentice. He's not qualified to do this job. Neither was Hoyer who s*** "l over himself in SD and ran back to hide behind Theo in Chicago.

I don't wish him any bad fortune. He was a great pitcher for us. He was a foul tip away from the save last night, and he lost the game on a bloop to RF. I like the Mets so I was rooting against him last night, but wish him the best. He was the greatest Red Sox closer of them all. Also, think about this. If he was our closer this season instead of Aceves with his 6 losses and I don't know how many blown saves, we'd be right there challenging the Yanks. The FO decided that Paps wasn't worth it and Instead, we're in last place on July 4th.

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.