a700hitter

These are marginal major league arms, except for 3. What stat is there for that?

He has been off all year long.

Idiot Cash doesn’t even know the rules and apparently neither did the umpire crew. What an embarrassment. LOL

A lot cooler than Texas in August.

Some people that weren’t acquired have failed? Not a strong argument for anything.

Pure arrogance ^

It’s not that our pen isn’t as strong as the Yankees pen. Our pen is awful and barely MLB competent. You can’t hide a pen like that no matter how good your starters are unless you go back to the days when complete games were common.

Unbelievable back and forth game in the 8th and 9th innings with the Twins.

Maybe your boy, Cora needs to stop babying Price, or is he going to have to stage a mutiny like Sale did tonight to throw more than 100 pitches?

It not an awful deal where DD rolled craps. That's what he got with trading Shaw. That's what Ben got with Panda, Rusney Castillo, and Hanley.

I am not seeing that. He was an overpay, but he is still a top quality starter over his tenure with the Red Sox thus far except for the season cut short by injury.

Travis Shaw was a very bad deal.

There were many other options. DD missed many boats.

Biggest problem with the starters has been tha black hole in the 5th spot and Porcello (who is normally a reliable innings eater) is not doing the job. I don’t care about how they spend their resources. All I know is that this is an inferior pen and in today’s game you cannot play sustained winning ball with a pen like this.

i agree, but modern day managerial philosophy removes starters at the end of 6 innings despite the fact that the starter is destroying opposing hitters. So while I agree that it would be helpful, I don’t think the manager will let them go deep into games. The 4th and 5th spots are problems. Porcello needs to get straightened out, and Cashner is better than the black hole. I don’t know if Eovaldi is enough to cure a Bullpen that has very little talent. Everyone that the Yankees trot out of their pen could close for us. The difference in talent level between the 2 pens is enormous.

The team desperately needs for this move to work.

You would have to work for the new owner of your farm.

I am worried about Porcello and whether Cashner can stabilize the 5th spot in the order. I am not concerned about Sale, Price and ERod each who are pitching significantly better than the league average ERA for starters. Also, they are each elite talents. We just don’t have that talent in the bullpen which has nothing more than marginal major league talent. You are so fixated on arguing with me to prove me wrong that you are blind to the glaring deficit of talent in the pen.

If the manager is going to stick to a strict pitch limit or an orthodoxy that doesn’t let a starter face an order the 3rd time through, you will need the bullpen 3 innings or more in most games. As such, the argument can be made that the bullpen is just as important as the starters. A starter can only affect the team once every 5th day. The bullpen guys pitch several times a week. Currently, 5 of our Bullpen guys are on track for 60 plus appearances and Hembree might also make that mark. Each of these substandard major league arms will influence team’s fortunes in twice the number of opportunities as any starter and the number of innings that the Bullpen has to eat is not insignificant. The days of starter going 8 innings and handing the ball to the closer are over. The pen needs to handle about half the innings of the starters and the drop off in talent from the starters to the pen is enormous. The importance of the pen is not so much less than that of the starters as you think. Today’s starters who rarely are pushed beyond 6 innings can’t mask a weak pen.

Thanks JH for firing Ben albeit too late.

I am not seeing that.

Cash brings in a position player with an 8-3 score. What a buffoon!

He becomes the closer. LOL!

I think that he is still capable of pitching to his career ERA of 4.25 while eating innings.

He is in the midst of the best season of his still young career.