Dojji

We may not be the Orioles, but to be quite honest, the financial advantage the Red Sox once enjoyed is now no longer anywhere near as absolute as it was. Managing our young assets gives us the financial pull we need to make sure we keep them after they get expensive, which is going to make it a lot easier to build this team for the medium to long term. Bradley's a fine prospect, and he looks really good right now. In the spring. Despite not having taken a single hack at a single big league pitch ever. Or even against AAA competition. And despite putting up relatively modest numbers last year against AA level competition (at least compared to what he'd done in Salem prior to his promotion). I'm not seeing a guy who needs to be rushed to the big leagues here. I see a talented player who in a couple years is going to be something, or we can turn him out of the oven half-baked and enjoy the consequences. I'd say it's your call, but TBPH I'm glad it isn't. There is no need to go overboard here. It's not like one Bradley at bat in April more or less is going to make or break our season. And if you ask me there's more than enough reasons to slam on the brakes against the everpresent prospectophiles that always demand the rookie play no matter what. There's nothing Bradley does that he wouldn't benefit from another entire year in the minors learning to do it better.

Given the choice between Overbay, Carp and Gomez, I still take Rolen.

That's the truth.

This is OUT HOUSE! I miss HFBoards. Stupidest thing I've done in a long list of stupid things is managing to get banned there.

Don't talk like its completely implausible with an older player favoring one leg to keep playing despite an injury to the other. I mean mostly I agree with you and the panic mongering is frankly hilarious, but let's be reality.

Christian Vazquez has an arm. Could easily see that kid becoming a longterm backup for us.

oh so what you're saying is that the franchise should have squeezed Ortiz harder and risked not having him at all in order to get a slightly better deal.

Couple really sparkling defensive plays in a row by Tyler Seguin last night to preserve Tuukka's shutout. Tuukka came out of his net to knock the puck out of danger and prevent a shorthanded 1 on the goaltender, but pushed the puck to Maxim Talbot, who drove past him to the net, but Seguin, soon as he saw his own net was open, was flying in to cover, and was able to "stack the pads" and make a save, That puck was going wide unless it changed direction, but with a couple Flyers around the net and pretty much only Seguin back (Krejci is in the picture, but did not seem to anticipate Talbot intercepting Rask's clear and is trailing the play), he still needs to stop that puck or change its direction or it's going in. Then when a Flyer recovers the puck, Seguin, still on his knees, is able to get his stick in there and slow him down, prevent a wraparound second chancer and allow Rask time to get back into his crease. Kid's really starting to put it together defensively, Would not be surprised to see him centering his own line in the near future. He's maybe still got some polishing to do, but this kid gets it. Did he definitely prevent a goal? I'm not 100% sure of that, but he definitely took the edge off of 2 potentially glorious scoring chances and in my book that still rates some serious props.

If he misses a couple weeks at the start of the season I'm not going to sweat it. Historically Ortiz tends not to show up those 2 weeks anyway, in uni or not.

He works in a Chinese restaurant? Dangit, someone beat me to it. Although really, it might just mean he likes to cook Chinese at home.

Agreed. Even if it was only 95, if he's recovered his command, I'll take that. 95 is more than enough to allow a power reliever to set up his slider, and that's all we're asking for from Bard. Heck, Papelbon could get it done dealing it in at 92, 93 because his command was all that. Bard hasn't got that level of control, but if he really is hitting in the mid to high 90's and he's gotten over his case of the yips, that's plenty of reason to rejoice.

Ease up there, champ. There was plenty of room to hope it would happen, but nothing guaranteed. Fans had plenty of reason to be worried.

Please let him start to do that consistently. I don't care about the ST strikeouts, but getting his velo back consistently would be huge for the team.

I'm glad that he was able to come back as far as he did. And I'm glad he tried to come back. Better to answer those questions once and for all before you have to put professional ball behind you.

You can thank Smithsonian magazine for me knowing anything about GH Thomas. And I was amazed how no one knew of the guy after I read the article about him. re: Hood. To be fair, not too many Confederate officers would have done much better against the likes of WT Sherman and George Thomas. That said that leadership advantage was offset by the fact that Hood had Nathan Bedford Forrest, possibly the best tactical cavalry commander of the war, supporting his force. Apologies to JEB Stuart, but Forrest has him edged out in a few key areas, most notably his ability to act with complete independence while still serving the best interests of his CO. Stuart had that little hiccup in Gettysburg that knocks him down just a bit, and in a comparison with with Forrest, that's all it takes. The point being, Hood knew more than the Union commanders he was facing even if you ignore the fact that he was fighting on home ground, his field intelligence was second to none throughout his defence of the Confederate central front, and he had the ability to use Forrest to strike at will along the union supply lines, harass their rear, menace the Union lines from multiple angles, and even snuff out opposing scouts to permit a sneak attack. And he used those advantages rather poorly on the whole and lost ground again and again despite really not being that badly outnumbered by what the Union was throwing at them. (not compared to Lee anyhow)

Lots of pitchers use different arm angles to create a different look. Nothing particularly unusual about it. It's one weapon in some pitchers' arsenals to make it harder to pick them up.

Could a mod please lock this thread? Nothing more is going to happen here aside from a few spiteful efforts to get in the last word. Might as well just let Yeszir have it.

You know the guy that impresses me more and more the more I dig into his legacy, is President Andrew Johnson. That's a man that tends to be overshadowed by the greater men around him, but he played a huge role in the aftermath of the war in making sure it was Lincoln's policies rather than those of the Radical Republicans, that dictated the South's reentry into the Union, and probably helped ensure that everything didn't fall right back apart a few decades later. I'd like to hope that in the same situation Johnson found himself, I'd have the cojones to stand up for what's right as consistently as he did, and play it my way right up to the brink of disaster the way he did. He might not have been one of our great Americans, but that was a real man, in every sense of the word.

Agreed. Until they prove otherwise, all of de la Rosa, Webster and Barns are more than a year away from pitching in the big leagues, and probably more than that in terms of actually coming into their own. And the closest guy to being "ready" is the guy you absolutely go kinda careful with. Blowing out de la Rosa's arm is not an option.

As a confirmed Buchholz skeptic, you're selling him a little short. He's had great years before. He needs to be more consistent year to year but there's no reason Buchholz can't turn it on. My issue with the arrangement is more that the team is desperately counting on him to do it when he MIGHT not.

OJ, you've effectively described Andrew Miller. Who at the right price has matured into a fine power lefty reliever, but I'm not paying $10M for that. It takes the thing that ultimately saved miller -- a bullpen role -- effectively out of the picture. If Miller had managed to mature properly as a starter the sky was the limit. Unfortunately the command and consistency never came together. Now he's in his role and I'd want a good reason to take him out of it. Which is fine in Miller's case because he's not expensive, but if we're talking about picking up a guy who would be, I want more guarantees that he'll actually be effective. I'd be fine with taking the same flier on the same guy Miller was, but I'm not paying big resources, either cashwise or prospect wise, for the privilege.

Anyway, to get back to the point, if you wanted to know who I'd compare Britton too, it wouldn't be Burnside, it'd probably be John Pope. Burnside at least had endearing traits. Pope was a complete idiot who bragged of victory before he'd fired a shot and wound up with a conga line of humiliating defeats from the trio of Lee, Jackson and Stuart. The other good candidate is John Bell "Dumb****" Hood.

Fair enough Whoops, it was Thomas not Thomson. The Rick of Chickimauga. I was going from memory there and got that one thing wrong. And yeah, the political nature of the war is hard to ignore. Political appointees were a mixed bag. Some of them were beyond awful, and had no business on a battle field. Dan Sickles got a lot of men killed in that orchard for disobeying orders and putting his men in an awful position just because he wanted to meet the enemy first. Cost him a leg too IIRC. On the other hand, Ben Butler was flawed but very successful, especially when you used him right (put him in charge of something administrative, give him an opportunity to display both his aggression and his compassion in about equal measure, and for the love of all that's holy, don't let him open his mouth!).

Burnside wasn't a bad man, and he was apparently an affable and charismatic leader, but the command of a major army was too much to ask of him, and he was insecure in his command, leading to several abrupt and rather arbitrary decisions that cost him men. And several times Burnside was let down badly by the incompetent subordinate officers the Union Army hadn't managed to weed out yet. The army Grant took over a couple years later had had a baptism by fire that swept a lot of the incompetents and political appointees out of positions where they could do damage. That hardening, begun in places like Fredericsburg and probably brought to a head at the Battle of Gettysburg, combined with Grant's frankly brilliant masterstroke of continually probing Lee's left, forcing the master maneuverist to stretch his lines until he could neither maneuver nor retreat without losing Richmond, were why the war went the way it did. See here's the thing Grant did that no one else did when fighting the South: Most battles looked like this: 1: You bring up your tropps, you prepare attack Lee. 2: Lee establishes defensive positions until you commit to preparing to attack, which can take a long time since you have a lot of men and a huge supply train. 3: Lee then pulls a general and hundreds to thousands of men out of his butt from a completely random direction and attacks you on multiple fronts long before you're ready, doing massive damage and disrupting your attack 4: If you attack anyway, it's with troops demoralized from the surprise attack, and frequently right into the teeth of an outnumbered but highly experienced force that's very ready for them 5: when, not if, that attack doesn't work, you retreat beyond the Potomac and lick your wounds, and allow Lee to do the same. Grant got surprised plenty by Lee, but what Grant did that no one else did, was that he failed to retreat beyond the Potomac. He'd get stumped by some new trick of Lee's, then roll out to the left of the confederate line, forcing Lee to block his path to Richmond along a new front, then re-engage, reattack, get whupped again, and repeat the whole process the next day, no matter how many men he lost. He never got by Lee, but the strategy paralyzed the last best hope of the South for most of the last year of the war. Then with Lee stretched impossibly thin along very heavily fortified lines and unable to do much more than glare at the vastly outnumbering force still in front of him, Grant just waited him out while Will Sherman, George Thompson, Phil Sheridan, David Farragut, and the controversial but effective Ben Butler. rolled the South up along the other fronts where the Union had always had somewhat of an upper hand. Lee only abandoned the defense of Richmond when Richmond was an island in a see of Union flags, and by then, of course, it was far too late anyway. On a completely unrelated note, I find it somewhat ironic in all this that Grant or no Grant, Lee or no Lee, the man who saw most clearly what the beginning, middle and end of that war was going to look like was probably General Winfield Scott, right at the beginning of the first campaign.

Seeing you got very neatly made a fool of, not surprising that you'd be more than willing to get in one last word, then hope the thread dies. Very much within my measure of you. As for the bolded, I don't know about specifically Rolen's case, and neither do you, but your statement is spectacularly wrong in many instances. Not all, but a significant number, of veterans are quite willing to put themselves on a big league bench in the right situation. Especially if it's the best way to make sure they're still in the big leagues at all. If Rolen is one of those, then bringing him to this team very likely makes it better. Quite bluntly, I also want insurance against another Middlebrooks injury, that has a better chance to be a productive 3B than Brock Holt. Right now that guy is nowhere on our roster. I want that fixed. That's more important in my mind than either an LHH platoon partner for Gomes or massaging WIll Middlebrooks' poow widdle feewings and making sure he knows he's the 3B. And if there's a park anywhere in the world that might be able to bring the righthanded Rolen back for one last year of productivity, it's Fenway. There's a certain natural logic to the move that intrigues me, whether it happens or not, and whether you are paranoid about Middlebrooks losing playing time or not.