Dojji

Define "legit." He probably has a shot to wind up as a solid roleplaying catcher. Maybe a poor man's version of the skillset Yadier Molina brings, but with nowhere near Molina's upside. I see his ceiling as somewhere in the .260/.320/.380 range with respectably solid D (but nothing the world has never seen before). Some people are going to prefer that over whatever we expect to get out of Salty, some aren't. If the cards fall right for Vazquez, he probably winds up replacing David Ross, in other words. Which is fine, we could use a guy who can be that kind of catcher to play behind our starter. Just don't expect a starting caliber catcher out of Christian Vazquez himself.

Is it not?

To quote Lou Brown, "against a guy who'll be bagging groceries in a couple weeks."

Disagree. Oh, he'll have a good season. I agree with that, but the serial offenders will still find a way to say he sucks, no matter what inconvenient fact has to be downplayed to do it.

Nice to hear from a pitcher as intelligent as Pedro. I've said this before, but one of my fondest hopes is that a kid like de la Rosa can absorb some of Pedro's experience and wisdom about how to pitch and become the best pitcher he can.

No. If we have a guy who is going to do the relief ace thing, it's probably going to be Tazawa. Count on nothing from Bard. Nothing.

I disagree. There's some numbers that say that a closer of sufficient talent derives a consistent benefit to his team in terms of wins. If a manager trusts that predictable benefit more than his own ability to pick and chose 2 PA's ahead of time which spots to insert a guy into, which is what it takes to give that guy a chance to warm up in the bullpen, that in itself is a strategic decision, and one that has some merit.

I don't see why a manager making his own decisions easier in the game is a problem to be perfectly honest. The man has enough to do just getting 25 ridiculously overinflated egos through 9+ innings at a time. If you can find a guy who thrives in the 9th inning role, what's the problem? Most of the real arguments I've seen centered around the closer's role v relief ace argument miss the point. That point being, it's always going to take more than 1 bigtime arm to make a good bullpen. It doesn't matter if you use your sole reliable arm in the closer's role or in a more freewheeling relief ace role. Whichever role he's not playing is going to result in the team getting exposed. in other words, if you can't fill your staff with enough talented roleplayers to fill multiple high-leverage roles, it doesn't matter much which role isn't filled. If, on the other hand, you have a number of viable options, it doesn't matter which guy fills any given role. There is therefore no situation in which this debate is significantly meaningful.

I can't find a game log of his fielding. Can anyone find a source to help me confirm (or refute) Spitball's main claim, that Middlebrooks' errors all came pretty early in his time at the big league level?

If ifs and buts were candy and nuts... Seriously. Take Bard as he comes. Even if he comes out of the gate a lot stronger than I actually expect, I don't want him anywhere near high leverage innings until halfway through the year or later. I'd like to give him a full year to recover his stuff and confidence if it's possible to do it.

Are we just going to pretend 2012 never happened? Right now, Bard is lucky to be a 6-7 inning guy. We'll see what he earns his way back to. It's by no means a lock that he's even a major league pitcher anymore, much less just blindly assuming that he's good as he was before he exploded on the runway last year.. Pretending that he'll just go back to where he was just because he's now back in the bullpen is just as delusional as the people who kidded themselves last year that he'd be fine if he was converted back to the pen. Someone wand to remind people how that worked out? And in AAA ball no less? Until Bard shows otherwise, I maintain that the kid was done in September of 2011, and that everything after that has just been the consummation of the same downward spiral. Rotation, relief, don't matter. That whole debate was a complete red herring and the kid was cooked the year before.

Cleaned that up a bit for ya.

I agree with that. Little to lose by finding out gently if the kid has anything left, and if he does, huzzah. Counting on him for setup innings out of the gate is delusional.

Right. WMB has to work on his accuracy, but that's not a problem with his mechanics per se.

I wouldn't say it's that clear at all. The word "clearly" doesn't apply to a guy with that few games in the big leagues. He needs to improve. That's literally all we can say at this point.

Come to that, Youk tended to submarine a bit when he played third as well, and no one had a problem with it. I think Lowrie did too. It seems to be a way to put a bit more leverage on your throw and maybe get some height on it so it gets there on the fly (bounces slow down the forward momentum). Third basemen can't all be Mike Lowell. I think after him, any other 3B we had is going to look like he has a weak arm.

I can see why they did this, but... meh.

Depends on what you mean. Modesto has him on versatility for sure. Carp's a pretty much full time below replacement level LF, Wily Mo could butcher all 3 positions

I'm guessing not actually. There seems to be a general consensus that if you can play SS, and your arm isn't on the light side for short, you can play third. Heck we had no compunction about trying Lowrie out there at the big league level despite the fact that his arm wasn't well regarded and he'd never played the position before professionally (and despite the fact that we had the opportunity to play the more experienced 3B Youkilis at third and Lowrie at first, if we'd really wanted to play it safe). I don't think the franchise is in any doubt at all that, if they absolutely had to, they could ask Bogaerts to play third defensively.

solution in search of a problem if you ask me. The infield we have is not our biggest problem. Gathering talent for the outfield and rotation are where our Gm has struggled the most.

If you have to go back to the 50's to find that example, it's not the sign of a strong argument. The Sox play it safe with their rookies. This much is a fact. Whether it's "too long" is a judgment call, and the only way to really tell is in retrospect. A number of the players they "held onto too long" flamed out, yes. Lars Anderson is probably Exhibit A. Now, would those players have flamed out in the majors, to an even more disastrous result, if the team had had to try and win with them? Hard to say, but they couldn't stay consistent in AAA doesn't speak well in their favor.

Why would we want Mike Carp? He plays a role we theoretically need, sure, but the man is not good at that role. If we really need a guy to platoon lefty at first base, I'd almost rather let Salty do it. He's more productive offensively than Carp has been anytime in the last 3 years. Between Salty's ability to show up at first base occasionally, and Nava's platoon lefty ways, we probably don't need that role filled badly enough to take a Carp-sized risk. I think Carp is too unlikely to be a meaningful upgrade over Mauro Gomez, even with the technically favorable platoon handedness going for him, for me to be interested in seeing the Sox make that move.

This point is no point at all. He was sent down to Pawtucket in favor of Drew. He got hurt. These two incidents have no causative relationship whatsoever, and in fact as I recall, Kalish got hurt very early in the year and may have been "playing through the pain" since Spring Training or before, if his batting line before he went down is any indication. If you want to play the woulda-coulda-shoulda game, you need to have a stronger "coulda." In an alternate universe where Kalish doesn't get hurt, he also comes up with the team at about the same point Reddick did or before, and probably outperforms his final season numbers. But there was nothing wrong with stashing Kalish in the minors when it was done. Nearly every team in baseball will do it that way, and the kid usually winds up winning the job in the end. For it to play out that way though, it was up to Kalish to make that situation temporary and he turned around and did the exact opposite. Few to no teams will fail to favor a veteran in April. The vet has to play his way into a competition in order to bring the kids into play, that's how it's always gone, whether the veteran ultimately won the competition or the kid did. This time, ultimately, nobody won the competition, since the closest thing to a winner was shipped out of town at the first opportunity. You can't divorce the situation from Kalish's responsibility to make the most of his chances. Now maybe it isn't his fault, but that doesn't make those chances magically seized, any more than it did with Jed Lowrie when it was his turn, or a number of other injury prone "potential stars." If Kalish wasn't in a position to push for a starting job for whatever reason, it's hard to fault the GM for not handing him one.

The team has to give young players a shot. It's then up to the players to do as much as they can with that shot. That's the difference between a player who is touted, but never really gets more than an inning or two, like Michael Bowden, and the much less talented prospects that occasionally crack the big leagues over them like, say, Kason Gabbard back in 07. Gabbard made the most of his chances and wound up sticking in the majors, at least until he got hurt. Bowden really didn't and now he's a reliever with the Cubs organization. Point being, there's a responsibility on the player to make it easy to think about giving him a chance. Putting it all on the team ignores that responsibility.

That's not "alive." Doing something for its own sake, for the beauty, the art, or the tradition of it goes to prove my point that it's a dead practice. The fact that the only reason to write in cusrive, is when you deliberately write cursive solely for the sake of writing cursive, means it's a dead practice. Like latin is a dead language. No one speaks Latin to each other in the street, yet some do practice it for various esoteric benefits, or because it's traditional to do so in certain fields. None of this makes Latin anything other than a dead language. Sorry, I don't buy this. I buy that cursive and typing have strengths and weaknesses, but the idea that handwriting is so superior for mental training smacks of a retrograde making the argument to back their own prejudices, getting lucky enough to find some evidence to back them up, and riding it to town for all they're worth. Like the "wine is good for the heart" people who use it as an excuse to drink alcohol, but conveniently ignore the fact that another thing that's really good for the heart is unfermented grape juice, and for exactly the same reasons