Dojji

Fight out of this Clay. getting sick of all the 3-0 counts.

Ehh, looks like Overbay laid off a good pitch there. Buchholz isn't missing by much.

One of those beautiful curveballs would look good right now.

hey ump, did the corner move again?

Down a bit please Buck.

Agreed. if he gets through this inning quickly, then "going the distance" is on the table.

Crap, I thought that was ticketed for the gap.

Good, Drew. Make him pitch. Another run would be tremendous.

Yes.

Buchholz looks good.

over those fie games? Sure. but personally I'd blame the Yankee sweep in the Bronx for costing us a playoff spot long before I talked about Youk's suspension. That took us out of the pennant race, if nothing else. And that happeend with Youkilis in the lineup.

C'mon, let's blow this thing wide open.

Terrible strike call.

Average might be a compliment. All of his good years and 1 of his bad ones came in the biggest pitcher's park there is. He's nibbled ever since he left Petco, and towards the end of his Padres tenure even Petco wasn't holding him.

See also: cherry picking. Also, define "easily avoidable" to me. You really want to tell me that you have a lid on your temper 24/7? Otherwise you're just throwing crap out there to try to keep the argument alive.

Meredith "blossomed" for a single year in San Diego, then fell back to earth and has been steadily receding each year since. His WHIP has torpedoed upward and now his ERA is following. If we'd kept him, we would have hated him.

Yeah, I don't like calling attention to it since it tends to make things ten times worse, but getting a little sick of the baiting I'm getting from certain corners. Seriously, listen to yourselves. The Sox are going to miss the playoffs and the prime factor is going to be one player missing 5 games in August? who writes your material? And did you get your money back? No matter how you attempt to manage your statements to try to make yourselves sound correct, and to filter out the ten different distinct causes that would have far more to do with us missing the playoffs than a suspension that lasted less than a week, it's still a pretty danged petty thing to fret this much about.

Somehow I think our tender feelings aren't the primary concern this time. I'm glad he's on the far side of his treatment and wish him well.

Not buying it. I'm sorry, but at least Daisuke on that list was pretty easily avoidable as well. Just make him stay home from the WBC. The worst that happens in that scenario is that Daisuke is mad at the team and the Japanese fans resent us for awhile. I find I can stand that much better than losing a season from our #3 starter. You say you aren't creating a crisis, yet you drama queens want to try to stretch this suspension out as if it was some pivotal moment in our playoff aspirations. This stuff is just part of playing a season of ball. I see no reason at all to get worked up about this, especially now that the penalty is over. Any repercussions of this one suspension are well within the margin of error. Kilo, you ought to know that as well as anyone.

That's the closest thing you have to a good point. I much prefer players to get their "revenge" by winning the game. However, while this play was dead, Youkilis did accomplish one thing by rushing the mound -- he got Porcello out of the game and replaced him with the guy we tied the game off of. Not saying that doing that was worth a 5 game suspension, but if you're going to pull out an argument that said it didn't affect the outcome of that game, it's pretty clear to me that it did. I think the problem has more to do with how Tito replaced Youkilis than the actual suspension. We have a capable cadre of corner infielders with or without Youks, between Lowell, Kotchman and Martinez. Tito seems to have decided to use the suspension to get needed rest for other veterans (notably Drew), instead of putting the best lineup he still could out there until his star hitter got back. And even in the worst case, there's still 45 games to go, we have Youks back, and we're still in position to make a move for the playoffs. I don't like that he was suspended, but I just don't see why we need to invent a crisis over it.

No I do get it, the difference is that Youkilis comes back fully healthy after the suspension. I'm not sure what that has to do with the discussion at hand. You seem to be trying very hard to find a way that some of what's happening to this team is somehow Youkilis' fault. Him missing 5 games is unfortunate but no matter what you or Kilo say that's really about the worst you can say about it. I'm not having him play the scapegoat here. There's a long line of Sox players who rate that kind of treatment before Youks does. Did I want him charging the mound in that or any other situation? No. But there's a lot of other boneheaded things this team and its players do that I feel about the same way about. There would be 27 "is f***ing selfish" threads if I wanted to rant about all the things someone conntected to this team did which I didn't like or I thought were detrimental to the team -- 1 for each man on the 25 man roster, 1 for Tito, 1 for Theo. In the end, this is a little thing. The only reason to still be talking about this is the love of a good discussion combined with a desperate decision to accept an ersatz substitute for one

And in all that outraged flibberdyjibber, none of you actually managed to rebut the point. Why is the suspension worse than any of the number of other ways Youks could have lost those 5 games? For that matter, why is a 5 game suspension being treated like a full blown disaster? We've had similar suspensions for this and that in each of the past few seasons. Good players too. Heck, this isn't even the first time Youks has been suspended. Stuff like this happens to any team over a 162 game season. It's just an incidental hazard of playing the game. Stupid? Sure. Unnecessary? Sure. A crisis worth 20 pages of frantic wibbling? Not really.