Dojji

2007. No question at all. 06 was ridiculous but the postseason becomes magnified for a closer.

Ortiz07 is probably the compromise position, but Ortiz06 was when he broke the longstanding team single season HR record and that counts for a ton on its own.

Well of those, Yaz67 and Clemens86 have deep playoff runs going for them, and Yaz67 has the edge in that department because it doesn't have a spectacularly embarrassing ending (fighting Bob Gibson's Cardinals to 7 games was probably overachieving yet again). That said, I'd like to enter a new contender -- Ortiz06. Single season home run record for a team as old as this one needs to be included. And just since we're such a storied franchise, let me throw another concept out there. Cy Young, 1901. Led the league in ERA, 33 wins, 1.62 ERA impressive even in a relatively offensively stunted era, 371 1/3 innings pitched, 219 ERA+ NO one today COULD do that.

The Dodgers are where the Red Sox were a few years ago. They can't beat the Yankees contract for contract, but they can easily match or beat them for any one player if they decide it's important enough. I have a hunch, you know, just a small inkling, that the Dodgers might decide that Kershaw is important enough. Besides, wasn't it the same song and dance from you until not very long ago when it came to Felix too?

No he was not. There have been players before Yaz, and players after Yaz, who had bigger impacts in their time. Yaz put the team on his back in 67, and is one of the team's great cultural icons, but that doesn't put him ahead of Williams. Williams was just too dominant for just too long. Honestly I'd seriously consider putting Pedro Martinez ahead of Yaz, because he was as dominant as Yaz at their respective peaks, in as pitcher-unfriendly an era as Yaz's era was hitter unfriendly, AND he got us all the way to the promised land. Which Yaz did not.

It's relevant to the extent that this is what he did when he was healthy, now that health is subject to reasonable question. I count on nothing from John Lackey.

I think modern audiences would have appreciated Evans more for what he was. He was an OBP machine along with being a fairly decent power hitter. If people appreciated OBP the same way 30 years ago that they do today Evans is probably considered to be on track for the Hall.

Yeah, pretty hard not to put Pedro right up there as #2. Incidentally, where do you all put Clemens? By all accounts no one ever accused him of doping during his Red Sox days. He met that corrupt trainer in Toronto. And despite the flaws that saw him never take his team over the top, he was one heck of a pitcher, even if you end his career at about 1996 when it probably should have ended.

Your recollection was not wrong. His ERA at Fenway was in the high 4's low 5's when he signed on in Boston.

No it isn't. It's one of the reasons that I was pulling my hair out when they signed him. Lackey's numbers against the Red Sox at Fenway were dismal. We always handled him here. There's no denying that his numbers got worse after 2011, but they were always bad here.

Ted. Full stop. You will not see any significant disagreement with this sentiment. A better question is who the second greatest guy is.

Combine that with a couple prospects and that's better than what a lot of teams have for an outfield. It's not nearly what we're used to though.

Ross is a backup catcher. Salty is a starting catcher. Starting catcher > backup catcher. If Ross had ever been effective playing more than about 70 games, I might think you had a point. Besides, of the two, Salty is the one with any upside at all. That just makes it an uphill battle for Lavarnway, doesn't it?

Right now "figuring something out" = "cutting David Ross." That's the guy Lavarnway has to beat.

*snrrk!*

Outside the 2005 draft their draft record has been nothing to write home about for almost their entire tenure. The best moves this franchise has made in its history were all trades, and with the exception of drafting Dustin Pedroia they haven't really yielded that franchise defining player in the draft. I think their drafting philosophy was in need of adjustment in 2007 whgen they adjusted. It's just that their adjustment made things as bad or worse than the original policy.

15? Seriously, that's like 3 starts or less, or less than a quarter season even for an RP. You'll include a lot of "noise" if you try to analyze like that. At least wyo-sox attempted to root out small sample sizes and call them out for what they are. No matter what you compare Salty's numbers to, it's going to be based on either a different year, or a smaller sample. Because he was the starting catcher. I don't kid myself for a milisecond that anyone like Lavarnway, Shoppach or Ross would have done much better with the pitching staff we had in 2012 if they were asked to handle the majority of the load. I'm not saying Salty is blameless, or perfect, or even good. I'm saying assigning the whole problem to Salty is shortsighted at best and overlooks other equally fundamental problems -- starting with our ongoing issues at shortstop.

Well on the basis of the excellent evidence you just provided to back up that argument, how can I fail to be convinced?

I think you're trying a bridge too far, wyo-sox. There's a group think that starts pervading the culture of a fanbase after awhile, and once that group think makes up its mind, it's danged hard to unmake that decision. And the Sox fan groupmind has decided That Salty Sucks. So you will hear every effort to interpret the various available facts into Salty somehow sucking, no matter how the truth has to be contorted to get there from here. Think I'm nuts? I invite the members of this forum to prove me wrong. But I doubt they wind up doing it.

Sorry, not buying it. Two individual pitchers had trouble with Salty and one of them is gone which really distorts his numbers. Both of those pitchers had reported mechanical and health problems during the years they "struggled" as well.

*shakes head* I think they'd have been insane not to make a shift. That was the year they lost Schilling, and they have still never managed to adequately replace him. That's also when the game of "Who Is Our Shorstop This Week?" began, when Tek started to seriously play out, Manny was gone, Drew was ineffective and then gone, Beckett sagged down into his on-again, off-again pattern, Buchholz revealed himself to be a project rather than a potential ace... basically we got hit with a whole lot of entropy in the wake of the 2007 World Series title that we've never managed to successfully reverse or recover from. So in 08 and 09, they went ahead and brought in some patchwork veterans to try to play the string out, and that kinda worked, but each year was worse than the last so they tried to make a series of over-the-top moves... while they were nowhere near the top. And paid for it. Once we rebuild our core into something stable that can contend for multiple years in a row without major repair work each offseason, I expect the FO to start resembling the version of itself we had in 03-07 when that was true. Until then, it's going to be the team doing everything it can to rebuild itself in any given year, which means you don't have a lot of resources left for over the top moves like Schill was in 04.

Pretty much. The first year I really noticed chinks in the armor was 09.

It would help, but the big thing the big defensive players at the big defensive positions provide is a chende to make the pitching look better. If we weren't so obsessed with shortstops who "at least hit a little" we'd have taken a different and arguably better direction at short over the last several years, especially since the "offensive" shortstops we've brought since 07 (Lugo, Aviles) in have only been "offensive" in the sense that it offends me to watch them try to hit.

Maybe, but I don't buy it. The 'just a game' has a culture and a narrative built around it that it's entirely fair to take into account. Youk knew that when of all the 29 other teams he could have signed with, he inked his deal with NYY.

Well it's not quite that simple obviously. That's a good place to start understanding the issue, but if it was about number of defensive attempts, first base would be the biggest defensive position on the field instead of one of the presumptively less important. It comes down to where you need your rangiest people and the fact that your rangiest people tend to be quick and light on their fight, which tends to contradict the possibility of also being a power bat. Usually your shortstop is one of your smaller, leaner players, and that makes it harder to muster the ballast to really put a charge into the ball. That said if you have freak like Pedroia who is small, light and fast, but also knows how to sting the ball VERY hard, that's great, and if you have a big guy who's athletic enough to maintain decent range, like Tulowitzki, and maintain himself as a solid to elite up the middle defender, rock on. We're hoping Xander Bogaerts is going to turn into that kind of shortstop, and he's got a fighting chance. But your up the middle guys have to be able to move.