Dojji

I agree with you for the most part, except that the pitching coach does have one duty that is just plain easy to overlook. He's the primary injury spotter for our pitchers, and plays a large role in keeping them healthy. I'm not convinced it's entirely coincidental that the 2006 was both a year of crippling and unprecedented levels of pitcher injuries, and simultaneously a year where we had Al Npper for an acting pitching coach for much of the year.

True -- which makes the likes of Ortiz and Vaughn even more impressive. For the record, I'm more than satisfied with Drew myself. Was just playing devil's advocate there. put the pitchforks away, k?

Because we all know how coachable Daniel Cabrera turned out to be.

tell that to the Cardinals.

BTW -- Micah Owings is very possibly the next guy to make the jump. He is not even an average pitcher and may decide to throw it over for hitting, which he's OK at and might improve if he concentrated on it.

Well, he's finally had a 20 HR season for us. He's a good complete-package offensive player but I do think we were expecting more raw power. That said, he's a very competent offensive RF and a find defender, so no complaints here.

There will be one eventually. It's a tenet of the laws of probability. Anything that's possible will eventually happen, given infinite chances.

Of course no one holds a candle to history's most famous crossover player. I think the Babe would very possibly have made the Hall as a pitcher. Can you imagine if Ruth played in the DH era? Think he would have been that fabled P/DH?

Oh, and apropos of nothing, one of last year's position players has transitioned permanently to pitching in the middle of this year. http://www.thebaseballcube.com/pitching/P/Tony-Pena.shtml I his one inning of work he did hit 91 on the fastball with a 75 MPH... something offspeed, looked like a college level slider. Good separation whatever it was, he got 2 of his outs wth it. He hit like a pitcher anyway, so this is probably his best chance to get back to the bigs.

Just a random thought really, but we've had at my count 3 different position players on the mound this year now. Jon Van Every Nick Green Dusty Brown Am I missing someone? This is just here because it's just one of those things I find funny.

Actually I don't like the looks of Cleveland. They're missing some key pieces and their GM seems to have a hard time getting it.

I agree with Kilo. It's one thing to talk about the objective financial value of a player, but sometimes you have to pay a premium to get the best available guy in a given year.

Farrel made Beckett what he is. I'd be wary of shipping him out. Our pitching has been a strength of the franchise every year he's been here.

Pretty much. I think as awkward as my use of the law of averages might have been, the rampant appeal to history i'm seeing here is worse. Just because we've always beat them doesn't mean we'll beat them this time. That's just silly. I think we have several advantages. But I was responding specifically to the fallacious appeak to history.

[Captain_Obvious] Depends on how you use it. Anything that is possible will happen eventually, given unlimited opportunities to do so. If you're saying a .250 hitter on the season, who is usually a .300 hitter, will hit so well he winds up with a cumulative .300 average that's an abuse of the law of averages. If you argue he has a good chance of hitting up to his career averages from this point forward and there's no known reason for the change, that's better. In this case there's no known cause that's good enough to explain away the possibility of the Angels eventually beating us. That being the case, we have an the same chance to beat the Angels as we would any other team with a similar roster. [/Captain_Obvious]

Oh, they'll beat us eventually. Law of averages if nothing else. I do think we have a superior roster though.

The Red Sox also have a lot of strikeout power hitters and the Angels do not. Just sayin'.

Both teams are weak against the best game of the other. We have a lot of smart but low-range infielders rendering us weak against little ball, and they can be pitched to and don't have a good bullpen meaning we'll do our best work with power in late innings.. It comes down to who's better able to impose their will on the other team in the playoffs.

I agree with a700. Drew is a very good professional player who's well paid for what he provides, which is extremely valuable for this team. His worst fault is that he's a bit stoic and doesn't tell the world what he really thinks. And if that's a guy's worst fault then he's doing pretty good.

The key is going to be keeping runners off the basepaths and controlling the running game.

yf I was Farrell I'd stay with Boston. Guardians have got a promising young cadre of players there and if some of them start clicking the Guardians are going to be making rapid progress soon, but that's not a situation I'd want to go into because of the number of things that could go wrong, and the lack of GM support. I think Wedge got unfairly blamed for things that aren't the manager's fault. I don't think Lou Brown himself could have taken this gaggle of losers and won the division with them. The GM shares most of the blame for what happened this year IMHO. They lost CC Sabathia off a losing team and their big offseason move is to spend $10M replacing him with.... Kerry Wood? They spent most of the season without anything resembling a first baseman either. The bullpen is also a pile of steaming feces and key offensive players decided to pretty much take the season off. Sizemore springs to mind almost immediately, and so does Hafner. In short this roster wasn't designed to compete so no one should be surprised that it hasn't. The only thing you can really hut Wedge for is the collapse of of Fausto Carmona who just hasn't been the same since JD Drew flattened him in the 2007 ALCS. Partly I'm sure since he went from throwing about 102 1/3 innings in 2006 to 215 in 2007 -- at age 23. That's a heavy workload even if you're ready for it. If you aren't, it's a recipe for disaster. I'm not sure you can blame that on Wedge either though. The Guardians were in a tight pennant race until well after the point of no return. Any other manager in baseball would have done exactly the same and prayed that it didn't bite them. In short, the Guardians didn't do a lot, but theres a whole lot of people who felt the need to shift the blame by firing the manager, instead of fixing things. Now, if Wedge was going to bat for an incompetent coach (who's their pitching coach anyway?) and made it an "over my dead body" issue, well that's another story.

Bowden throws 95 like Clay throws 96. Generally he sits around 92 throughout the season. If he's much below that it's because his innings cap is being pushed.

Well at least I can console myself that even without the Wild Card rule, we would have won in 2007.