Dojji

Lowell's a decent hitter, but I think the deciding factor is that he's proven himself to Tito while Bay, despite being off to a great start, really hasn't yet. I imagine that if it becomes blindingly obvious the lineup needs to change, it will change. In the meantime I'm just glad that it looks like Mikey is going to make the opening day lineup. There were times we didn't think that'd happen. He might not be a game-changer like Teixeira, but we definitely need him to be healthy and hitting in order to go anywhere this year. Personally I'm betting that Lowell goes back to his usual modus operandi of playing 140 or more games, hitting 20 HR's and a crapload of doubles, and playing above average D. He's only 35 this year, and there's no particular sign of his batspeed slowing down so there's no reason to predict a decline for him , not yet anyway.

Lugo's recovery going according to plan. He'll be back in mid-April. http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20090327&content_id=4074892&vkey=news_bos&fext=.jsp&c_id=bos

Ed Rogers hit a walkoff grand slam against (IIRC) the Twins and had a titanic spring, and still has yet to sniff the majors again since his brief 2005 and 2006 cameos. Heck, Kevin Cash hit a game-winning HR against the cards in a regular season game last year. He's still Kevin Cash. Ambres is intriguing because of good AAA numbers but in the final analysis the guy's the definition of AAAA. If Baldelli and Drew are hurt at the same time you might see him in midseason as a desperation option, but otherwise I doubt he sniffs the big leagues again.

Deck chairs successfully rearranged.

The track record of pitchers drafted #1 overall is pretty grim. Wasn't Floyd Bannister one of the better ones?

I believe Bailey's with the team on a minor league contract. Unlike Carter he'd have to be added to the 40-man to make the team. Also the positions Carter plays or can bump Youkilis to play are all filled with righthanders, giving a platoon edge, in theory, to the lefthanded Carter. Also, we're not lefty heavy. Kottaras is our only LHH that is definitely sitting on the bench and we have 3 LHH's in the lineup. Throw in 1 more lefty and that's just about right, actually. There's certainly more room for Carter than there was in 2008 when our only righthanded hitter on the bench was Cash (alongside Cora, Kotsay/Moss, and Casey).

Power looks nice but Wily Mo had power. What else has he got?

Yes, but it was after the Alex Rodriguez debacle. Personally I don't think Teixeira makes that much difference. I think his acquisition was viewed by the Sox as "a piece it'd sure be nice to have" rather than "a player we desperately need." Did we ever? We just got done playing a 5 million dollar game of chicken with the guy over Varitek, and we didn't take much nonsense from him over Matsuzaka either. Not to mention Boras wanted a big league contract for Dan Bard, which Bard didn't get -- and a good thing, too. We got bent over way too fast for Drew, but that's because we were in serious need of an RF at that point and Boras' contract demands were not wholly unreasonable given his level of talent. The alternative was probably us winding up with a David Murphy/Gabe Kapler platoon in RF. Gimme Drew anytime, especially when healthy. They did that all the time anyway, except the one time that the two teams were pretty close together which was on Drew.

http://students.cs.byu.edu/~jenny888/Virtual%20Zoo/toilet.jpg

Why don't we ask Dan Bard?

I've heard that a number of scouts think the guy is an injury waiting to happen. Odds he'll wind up in the pen in the big leagues a la Dan Bard?

Alright, enough. Just enough. Bottom line, I think Johnson still has projectability as a starter in the major leagues. Crespo does not. We'll know for sure in probably 2 years. Squabbling about it further in the meantime is unproductive. Consider my small aside in a post about 4 pages back in this thread actually having the temerity to suggest that Johnson might be as high as 10th on the starting pitching depth chart withdrawn, if it's THAT important to you. For the record, the only time we've gotten as far down as that on the depth chart is 2006 so the whole argument is based on an extreme contingency that'll never happen anyway. So getting back to what we were talking about before this whole fiasco started, I believe we were praising Buchholz for an excellent spring (the thrust of the fateful post was my broaching the possibility that he might wind up the 5th starter of a stud rotation of Beckett-Lester-Daisuke-Smoltz and himself and we'd still have some young depth left over. I didn't have to mention He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named there, it could have been Tazawa and my point would have been probably stronger). All I have to say to you, Crespo, is that you must have been EXTREMELY bored today.

I'm still trying to figure out exactly how this got started and why it's gone on so long.:dunno: Personally I've been content to drop this for most of the afternoon but Crespo keeps coming back with one more bitchfest and mischaracterize my position AGAIN just to keep things going. These posts would be a lot shorter if Crespo edited out all the low-level insults he's been slinging my way. Actually at some point I wonder if he'd have anything to say at all if he dropped them. It's all white noise anyway.

Resorted to calling out typos have we? He's got time. He's shown some signs of progress. Just because it's not enough for you doesn't mean it's not there. I'm telling you about Jacko's argument because you asked. And that isn't corny. OK. Question: If he's not worth defending, why have you decided he's worth attacking? Actually, that would be a terrible argument, because Bard never pitched in Lancaster again. I used him as an example of another player who got torched in Lancaster. You took all the remaining logical steps without any help from me. My mistake was playing along while you shifted the whole premise of the argument. He wasn't originally even a comparison. Just an example. I don't take all the blame if you decide to run 20 miles with "(see: Bard, Daniel)" as your starting line No, I';m not, and guess what? I never said that. Show me where I ever said that because Bard bounced back, Johnson will, or even that it made it more probable or possible that Johnson might. In point of fact, I've repeatedly said that Bard was far more talented. I've repeatedly made the obvious observation that Bard has passed Johnson. If you want to keep arguing this point you're only arguing with yourself. The only one who is trying to compare Bard to Johnson is you. Or I would be if the guy wasn't going into his age 24 season in AA. That's because you're ignoring the fact that he's advanced a level in the meantime. I never contradicted that. He wouldn't be the first lefthander whose command started to come around at about age 24-25 though. I didn't make up the number. That's one number we really don't have a baseline on with Johnson. His Lancaster rate is equally absurd the other way. One of the reasons I think we don't really know all we need to know about Johnson to decide what he is yet.

Well, he did put up better numbers the next year at a superior level. There's little to doubt that he needs to improve to make it, but if they didn't think he'd do that anyway they should probably trade or release him. Considering the source, I'll take the compliment. My, we ARE unobservant. I've found that around here, I've had to be literal. You clowns tend to take every little thing I say and go all Ken Starr on me over it. This whole Bard nonsense is a classic example. The Bard comparison was never a big part of my argument, if other people hang up on it it's time to abandon it. It was only ever there as another example of the ways Lancaster can mess up a good pitcher. That was all the farther I ever intended to go with Dan Bard in this thread. You were the one who tried to stretch the analogy out twelve ways to Sunday. Honestly they probably should have started Johnson in Greenville in '07 for the same reason starting Bard there last year made sense. I'm guessing they'd do it differently if they had it to do over again. I don't think it's about the runs, per se, every pitcher gives up runs, it's about making sure a guy's ready for the level of competition he'll be facing. I think Johnson's a little behind his age bracket in development, what with a bit of a lost year in college on top of getting torched in his first full professional season. You can sneer at the results he gave us in Portland, but they do represent progress over what he gave his teams in 2006 and 2007, and at a level higher of baseball. A year of mixed positives and negatives after a player's been struggling is usually a sign that a guy's close to "getting it" if he can just take the next step forward. There is some breakout potential there in other words BTW, speaking of plusses and minuses, I just double-checked Johnson's numbers and BABIP was an issue for himlast year. His 2008 Portland BABIP was .339, which is quite high. Unfortunately I can't find the contact rates so I don't know whether he just got unlucky or whether he was just surrendering lasers. His FIP was a respectable 3.41, not bad at all for a pitcher with modest command like Johnson, which points towards bad luck. Take it for whatever it's worth. If we'd found that out in the minors instead of the bigs, like we did with Bryce Cox (remember him?), he would have done us less damage. If it's ridiculous, then he'll be promoted. I still think he gets at least 15 starts in AA though. That seems to be the standard. This FO has acted in the past as if AA was the place to finish the last of a player's development and that AAA was just the place you go while you're awating promotion. Not too many of our top prospects have spent much time there recently before getting called up to the big leagues. Masterson got his first AAA start after he got his first big league appearance, and Bowden and Buchholz weren't much better. In other words, while it's possible for a guy to be in AAA without getting called up quickly, since that doesn't happen very often to our top pitching prospects,if a spot opens on the big league roster we could probably count on seeing Tazawa in the same year he reaches AAA. It's definitely a factor in thinking about whether Tazawa should get quickly promoted to that level.

He hasn't covered himself in glory yet, but his career and he are both quite young. I guess I don't see very much reason for such unbridled pessimism either, especially when you can write off so many of Johnson's relatively few minor league innings as Lancaster Effect and Lancaster shell-shock. He's a better pitcher than you. They rank prospects after #20 because some of them still wind up doing some good things for the team. You're only just now realizing this? Say... what? I brought up what I felt they had in common -- being victims of the Lancaster Effect. I probablyh should have used someone else, but Bard was the first guy to spring to mind. What's so absurd about it? Seriously. Both of them got scrambled by Lancaster. Both of them struggled as a result. Bard bounced back in bunny innings in Greenville, Johnson bounced back against advanced competition in Portland. Eventually Bard, who has better stuff than Johnson, surpassed him. Anyone who knew anything about the two pitchers knows that's going to happen because Bard's raw stuff is better. All I'm saying is that Bard looked pretty crisped about this time last year. Johnson is still bouncing back from the same thing that nearly toasted Bard except he probably weathered it a bit better -- but because he needs to be finer with his stuff to be effective, it'll take him longer to truly get his feet under him at the minor league level, and a certain level of patience is in order, especially since he's been rewarding that patience by slowly improving. If the Sox FO disagreed with that assessment Johnson would not have been in Portland last year. They're not big on charity promotions. And certainly Johnson didn't advance based on his dominating success in Lancaster, now did he? They must think he learned something. The alternative is Craig Hansen. It's not about protecting the poor fragile egos of the prospects. It's about managing risk for the team. They give players a set amount of time at a given level partly to make sure they've learned what they're supposed to at that level, and partly to make sure that what they're seeing from a guy isn't just a mirage or a flash in the pan. If you move a player up too quick you're running the risk of the ultimate lose-lose-lose, stunted player development, loss of wins that a properly-developed player would provide, and loss of future revenue for the player. Or even realizing that that player who hit .300 at each level really isn't as ready as you thought and he never touches the Mendoza line again. Tazawa's pretty polished, but he's honed his stuff against A ball level competition. It's very possible he could come up to the majors right now and dominate. I'd love to see it. But if he's in AA to start the year he's probably there until at least the ASB in order to make sure that the team can get some kind of real baseline on him before they start jerking him around on the Pawtucket to Boston shuttle bus. Actually it is. You might even be right. I disagree though. I think Johnson is a strong breakout candidate this year based on a few things I think I know about his situation.

Dude, we really don't need to know. Save it for the ladies.

You guys described one pretty well already -- a polished player that didn't need that much more development. That's not, and never was, Johnson. Granted. But "hasn't pitched well" and "can't pitch well" are two different things. Yeah, Johnson isn't in the national rankings. My point is that I think he's a bit underrated, you come back with how he's rated. Way to state the obvious. As you like to say, your words not mine. That really has nothing to do with what I'm talking about and is tangential at best to anything I said. You're the one who's making a big fuss about bringing Bard in here. I only used him as an example of another pitcher who got off to a bad start because of the Lancaster Effect. Is it even possible for me to use a limited analogy in this or any other forum without some addlepated goofball carrying it 20 times farther than I ever intended to and then attempting to impale me on his own strawman that he made for himself way out on left field that has nothing to do with anything I ever said? That would be monumentally foolish, and this from a guy who's generally in favor of aggressive promotion schedules. You promote the guy who's ready. Johnson has a year of experience at the AA level even if that year was not very good, and Tazawa has no experience at all in American baseball. It would be absolutely insane to promote Tazawa over Johnson, unless Johnson spends his year pitching his way out of professional baseball altogether. And even if Johnson sucks, there's NFW the Sox promote Tazawa much before July because Tazawa will need to have at least 12-15 starts before they'll even think about a move. He'll need to work through the league several times and face the same hitters multiple times before the team will see what it needs to see from him at AA And since I was specifically talking about Johnson as a starter, that counts as writing him off.

Nah, if I was making stuff up I wouldn't be as down on the guy as I am. If I didn't have to defend against the overaggressive negativism of Crespo I'd probably be a bit more critical of Johnson myself. Frankly the only think that puts Johnson above the Kason Gabbard/Devern Hansack types is that he's somewhat less injury prone. However he's still young enough to improve and I don't like giving up on prospects at the first sign of disappointment.

Kris Johnson isn't your typical college pitcher, especially if you look at the year he had just before we drafted him. Because he started out overrated and the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. Also because people worship the 93+ MPH fastball far too much. Quite honestly, the trend of SP to universally inflate their prospects doesn't really exist. Other than a few diehard advocates of this or that player Soxprospects is very much a "What have you done for me lately?" kind of organization. Player does well, he gets overrated. Player struggles, he gets thrown under the bus. Kris Johnson doesn't get a lot of play there, either in the forums or on the website, in fact he's a bit of a forgotten man. If anything, that'd swing the ratings in the other direction, especially at Soxprospects. Would be nice to know why you thought I "keep mentioning Bard" then. I'd mentioned him a grand total of twice. You'd better tell Baseball Reference then, it has them both down as 23 last year http://minors.baseball-reference.com/players.cgi?pid=34013 http://minors.baseball-reference.com/players.cgi?pid=31147 When he was 22 Bard was getting lit up in Lancaster and Greenville, and Bard put up those ridiculous k/bb numbers you like so much the next year with the Greenville Drive. A 22-23 year old with a 100 MPH fastball dominating mid-A ball for half a season isn't quite the same as a 23-24 year old hovering around average at the AA level all year. Personally I give the advantage to the AA player, at least until they're both playing at the same level. I thought of that, but Tazawa is completely unproven in American ball and was playing in Japanese independent ball, which is basically A-ball level competition. Even if he's a good bet to eventually outperform Johnson, and he probably is, I still think Johnson gets promoted first as long as he manages not to completely suck. I think Tazawa gets promoted closer to midseason, and only if he blows the door down. If nothing else, the team is going to want to see how other hitters at the AA level respond to seeing him more than once, and that takes awhile to establish. We did that with guys like Buchholz, so that's no slight to Tazawa. In fact while I doubt it'll happen this way Tazawa might even spend a full year in Portland depending on how he does and whether the team needs to slow-track him for roster reasons. It could happen that way and still put Tazawa on track for a midseason callup to the big leagues in 2010. Obviously I'm counting on him to get his act together and improve that number in AA. He doesn't even really need to improve it very much to get it out of the red zone -- get it down about .10 and he's OK. Now granted if he struggles in his second year of AA then he really will be what you guys say he is but I think he should have that extra year of what might best be referred to as suspended disbelief. He's only been in our system for about 2 years, I don't think anyone can say the guy is the sum of his numbers and no more.

By the end of the year he was. IIRC Johnson had a bit of a second half surge and was looking like a total sunk cost around the ASB. Also, have you looked at Johnson's college numbers? They're actially pretty comparable with his AA ones this year, or even worse. We should have been under no illusion that he wasn't a project and I don't think the Red Sox brass are under that illusion. That's why I said he was overdrafted. That said he's shown consistent improvement over his 2 professional years. I don't see any reason why that trend wont continue.

There is no contradiction here. Command isn't the problem because a a lot of lefthanders the same age and level of development do struggle with command, and also because he's relatively inexperienced. Consistency should come with time, if his stuff is good enough. I fail to understand exactly why that's so hard to understand. To the best of my recollection, this is the first post where I've mentioned Bard in this thread, at least as part of this argument. And there are some similarities, which I'll get into as we go along. If you're going to respond to my posts it would really help if you actually read them. As for relative age, both players completed their age 23 seasons. That's close enough IMHO to be just an argument over semantics. I'm sure Kris Johnson is just as relieved to note that he doesn't have to impress you. Just the Red Sox brass who manage his promotions. Personally I don't expect Kris Johnson to stay in Portland the whole year. If he's pitching anywhere near where I think he will he'll probably be a midseason callup to Pawtucket, probably to balance Smoltz' callup to the big leagues. At least at this point trying to look ahead, unless Mills seriously surprises me I can't think of anyone else I'd rather promote at that point. It should be noted that this is only KJ's third full professional season. Even if he's a bit old for AA (and really, by the time you get to AA that argument starts to become a bit frail) it's about the right experience level for him. And 24 YO is not exactly graybeard territory. Cherry-picking that one stat is no better than me cherry-picking his respectable ERA and K rate. Considering he's still rebounding from the blasting he took at Lancaster I see no reason why those numbers won't improve as he gains experience and confidence. Unlike the big leagues, in the minors players can be more than the sum of their numbers. Johnson is as good a breakout candidate as any. Certainly, Bard has better stuff, that's why he rebounded quicker. I challenge you to deny that the Lancaster Effect had a big part to play in why Bard struggled so much in 2007 though. Also, Johnson managed, at least so far, to remain in the rotation, while Bard's maltreatment at the hands of the California League was enough to end his time as a starting pitching prospect. I'd call that a mitigating factor.

You really want to carry this forward beyond reason don't you? Just o recap: My "words" were that Johnson is a legitimate starting pitching prospect. You started this mess off proper by mocking my argument as "devoid of logic." You then add two good arguments (his WHIP and his standing on he prospect boards) to about 45 pounds of pure concentrated argumentum ad homenim. I believe your actual words were that Johnson was a "walk machine." Which actually isn't he case -- Johnson's got about a 2:1 bb/k ratio and his bb/9 ratio is not particularly good, but survivable at 3.7. His problem is hits, not walks. Furthermore Kris Johnson was drafted old at age 21 and has a grand total of about 300 professional innings under his belt, and he's he same age as Bard. He was overdrafted, and started out overrated as a result, but he pendulum has swing way too far in the other direction IMHO. I happen to think Johnson got burnt by Lancaster as much as anything. Spending your first pro season getting lit up in the California League is a great way to start off on he wrong foot -- and to get sold way short by a lot of impatient people who expect first rounders to instantly dominate regardless. He's got to develop some more to make it into the big leagues, but he's more than talented enough to make it if he starts off well this year. Instead of throwing him under he bus because of mediocre numbers while he's still adjusting to pro ball, I think a bit of patience is in order with the guy. He's only entering his age 24 season his year and he's got a good pedigree. He's at least pitched well enough put himself in position where a good year will help restore his status to some extent, and he's got more than an even shot at big league innings within he next 2 years if he impresses. Johnson was hardly he only Sox pitching prospect burnt badly by Lancaster (see Bard, Daniel) and Bard was able to rebound, I think Johnson will as well. Time will tell I guess. Point is, there's plenty of reason for optimism with this guy, especially if he can somehow get his college curve back.