Dojji

The Nats are in a market where they can usually afford to hold onto a few premium players. The days of all the best players bolting for FA seem long gone for now. Which is part of the reason why big market teams like Boston can no longer contend indefinitely.

There's a lot of luck in play there. None of those pitchers had to be as bad as they are right now. Tear apart the team's offseason planning because the rubber never hit the road, that's fine, but pretending that they didn't do quite a bit to build up the pitching staff over Theo's tenure is retarded.

Then imagine what Wilbur's on.

I'm not convinced they outweigh the consequences of actually pulling the trigger this time. The fact is there are no good options here. "get rid of him" is not a good option. It's an option that does something for the sake of having done something, nothing more. at its finest.

In truth every team in major league baseball can say the exact same thing. The perennial contender BS was just that. We never actually revitalized the core during the run from 02-now. How can you, when you bring players in who are pretty much the same age as the guys who went out? And we did that with Drew, V-Mart, Bay etc. until we reached a critical mass where too many of our guys were too old to allow for simple fixes. It doesn't help when almost every big signing you've made over a 4 year stretch blows up in your face. But that's just ordinary luck, and us having less of it than we did in 04-07.

If anything they placed too high a priority on pitching in FA. Our lineup has been rotting from the middle on down for years while they sign Mike Camerons to plug the gap. We essentially replaced Manny with Crawford, which is a very expensive downgrade, and we went from looking for the ideal 5 hole hitter and a leadoff guy to hunting desperately for a decent cleanup man to sandwich in between Gonzo and Papi and maybe another power hitter after that to stretch out the lineup. To the point that we were trading real assets for 2-3 year options like V-Mart instead of actually addressing the real problem with the resources we had available. We should not be as dependent on Gonzo as we are. Back in 07 Manny slumped for most of the first month and made up for it as the year went on, and Pedroia had a tough first month, but we were able to role behind Lowell, Youk, and Papi until they really got going. We don't have the depth of secondary hitters we need to have an elite lineup right now.

And if Beckett dominates for a contender while Miller does his usual, that move will be heralded as another epic Red Sox blunder. You know it, I know it.

I agree with Soxsport. Beckett was never this out of line when the ownership was strong and people knew who the front office leaders were. These problems start at the top and are only manifesting in the field. Ownership needs to get a handle on things here. Now.

The root cause of this problem is not Beckett. The failures are too systemic to single Beckett out as the problem. Be as pissed as you like. But don't make death threats even in joke, and don't, whatever you do, do NOT give in to groupthink. Hate him but hate him for your own reasons, not Felger's.

Stop it. This is just an idiotic level of overreaction to a golf game and a bad outing. There are 10 or more players on this team performing as bad or worse than Beckett, 3-4 of them as essential to carrying the team as Beckett is. Stop focusing on him as the sole problem. I'm far more disappointed by Lester's tepid leadership and Buchholz' complete inability to pitch a baseball. Sure, he picked a bad time to be Josh Beckett, but this vapid obsession with his every word move and gesture gets us nowhere as a team or as fans. We have bigger fish to fry than Josh Beckett. And when we had stable leadership on this team Beckett wasn't even a problem, so there's that to consider from a dig-down-to-the-real-root-of-the-problem perspective.

Not loving the death threat jokes. That's a little too far, even if you are frustrated.

You have a problem. You're probably joking. I hope you're joking. But even if you are, you have a problem.

It's the accentuation that's a media creation. Most of that is barely out of the ordinary.

Beckett has 10-5 rights. Getting rid of Beckett isn't as easy as saying "let's trade Beckett."

you guys still think it's about this year. I don't. There's not enough to work with for me to conclude at this time that there's a contender here. That being the case it's time to focus on the long term, not the short term.

I agree. This is a media creation. This whole thing. They have a chance to make a mint selling papers by being negative about the Sox, which is their traditional default setting anyway, and they're making hay. That's about all this is.

Does not appear to be progressing? How much progress did you expect over like 6 starts? He's been progressing fine IMHO. he's getting through lineups multiple times, pitched past the fifth in every start since the first one, gotten deep into games more often than I frankly thought he would, and if it wasn't for two boneheaded decisions by Valentine to leave him out there after he was obviously starting to wear out, and for the bullpen letting the vast majority of his inherited runners score, his ERA would look about a run and a half better. More to the point, his last time out Bard was for the most part getting outs without blowing people away with strikeout stuff. Most people are going to worry about lack of stuff, but the point of the exercise in my mind is that we know the kid can pitch effectively to contact. At least while his command holds up. It's his first go-round as a big league starter -- first in 5 years as a starter period. Did you expect there not to be rocks along the way? Frankly the kid's a LOT closer to looking like a big league starter than I thought he would be. He's still catching up on some skills most starters learn in the minors, so there's going to be consistency issues, but once he plays catch-up on conditioning and command, Bard's not far away from being a good #3 and with his stuff he could go further. On the whole, I'm encouraged, not discouraged, by Bard.

He's not as dumb as he acts. I know the type. Played that role myself on the forums a few times. It's his job to take the devil's advocate role so that there's an actual discussion. Stir up controversy for the sake of content. Sometimes he does it too well? I've been there too.

What a gutpunch of a game.

I'm just taking it as a positive that he can get outs without blowing people away.

The thing is, kid is pitching here. He's not blowing people away and he's still getting outs.