Dojji

Moonslav would it kill you not to write everything you post in bold? It's like posting in all caps, it reads like you're shouting all the time. We have a very nice qoute feature in this thread along with all sorts of other shiny buttons. Learn what all the shiny buttons do please.

if I'm not very much mistaken, Tommy Bond is a Hall of Famer. EDIT: Nope. Not sure why, he led the league in categories that don't exist anymore. Probably just because he was before the so-called modern era. A guy who had 2 40 win seasons and a 43 win season for such a team as the Boston Red Stockings in the 1880's should probably be in the Hall. (no it wasn't quite us. I suspect the Red Sox called back to those Red Stockings though)

true, and even those who have issues with Schill for one thing and another have to admit that his performance in 2004 was nothing short of legendary. I think people forget that Schilling was 37 in 2004 and he did things that year that you wouldn't ask of an ace in his prime.

The counting stats put him right on the borderline even without considering the postseason heroics he contributed to 2 different franchises. Postseason and pennant-run heroics matter a lot when considering a player's legacy. While 2001 and especially 2004 are what he'll be remembered for, Going out in 2007 with his last pitch thrown in a win of a World Series game ought to help too -- his performance in 2007 looks pedestrian until you remember that his pitching arm was being held together by duct tape and string. And being responsible for one of the most magical moments in recent baseball history in 2004 puts him way over the top. It would be a travesty if... other factors kept the sportswriters from voting him in. And even if that miscarriage of justice does occur I think we can count on the veterans committee to make it right.

Yep. He failed at business. He didn't steal anyone's money, he lost it because he din't know what he was doing. That's bad enough, no need to make up crap to make it look worse.

honestly this result pushes me away from buying new talent this year, not toward it. Most of this team's keepers are here next year and we have some serious prospects on the way over the next 18 months. If we can't beat entropy in the rotation this year (and acquiring another starter would be treading water at best) the correct decision may be to take what you can get this year, play it out with the horses you have and load up for 2017, get Eddie healthy, get Smith healthy, get a development year for Shaw, JBJ and CVm learn what we have with Porcello, Wright and price, finally get free of the conundrum that is Buchholz, and get a chance to slap some things together in FA to round out the edges. We don't have to be frontline competitors every single year. The way parity is in the league that's a completely unrealistic expectation even if it wasn't for the dead money on the roster right now. It would suck to lose Big Papi's last year as a contention window year, but roster logic is roster logic -- you can only fight entropy up to a point and I'm not in favor of throwing good money (and especially good prospects) after bad in a year that isn't to be.

it's a high risk market, but the reward is also high if you manage to create a game that captures the imagination.

He is arrogant. Arrogance is often a side effect of the kind of take-no-crap-from-nobody mindset that Schill was notorious for on the mound. lots of baseball players, especially lots of pitchers who were highly successful in the big league, have that kind of way of looking at the world, they're used to looking people in the eye and beating them, that will breed a certain self confidence that combined with other character traits that help them succeed as big league pitchers, often breeds into arrogance.

You're getting loopier and loopier. And I know a thing or two about loopy. The guy made a specific allegation. He should back it up if he can.

yours certainly was. And it was utterly hypothetical and had nothing to do with Curt Schilling or anything else BUT politics.

Now look who's getting into politics? And even if there were, that does not justify anything. Two wrongs do not make a right. Your completely hypothetical conservatives, and the guys who sandbagged Schilling and Tim Thomas, are both dead wrong for doing so.

You raise an excellent point. We went through a generation shift between 2013 and this year, and it's only this year that some of the players in the new generation have begun to really find their feet. Farrell's job in the 2 intervening seasons couldn't have been to place first, since he didn't have the horses to do that, especially not in 2015. I think a lot of the 2015 season had more to do with who was going to be part of the future than it did about doing anything meaningful in 2015 -- which has implications for the media-driven (and this has been VERY media-driven, I don't recall even seeing a direct quote from any member of the FO that Farrell's job was anything other than completely secure) campaign against Farrell since he actually did a pretty decent job of finding players and helping new talent settle in in 2015, starting with Shaw.

Papi shoulda got the MVP in 2006. He was literally the only reason we won more games than we lost that year. had the team done better in the standings he probably would have.

Gonna demand a link for that. Unfounded speculative BS made up on the spot to accuse someone of wrongdoing is a job best left to our sportswriters. he probably has the ability to leverage his playing career into some kind of income even if he did lose his savings, so no, likely not actually penniless or anything, but you made a specific allegation of a kickback from 38 Studios and I would appreciate it if you either defended it or retracted it.

Sorta. I'm talking about judging people fairly and remembering that there's room in this world for divergent opinions, and when there isn't, therein lie the seeds of oppression.

Agreed, I got a bit carried away there, but I stand by what I said. you don't get productive discourse in this country if your approach to the opinions of half the country is to try to consistently shame them into silence.

Or the offense could be distributed by improvement at multiple positions -- for example, decent .800 OPS bats at first base and left field combined with Vazquez getting his average and OBP up a bit, but a relatively modest DH, would still provide about the same if not slightly more offense overall..

If Ortiz played first every day his career would have been a few games, if not a few years, shorter. There were times that even with the DHing, Papi's knees or legs were playing havoc with him. Less so since he slimmed down in recent seasons, but I think it's fair to say that if he'd been playing 1B regularly, Papi would have had to sit quite a bit more often. Just the nature of being a big guy.

Do we really need a 30 hr bat at first base at all times? Best 1B we'd had since Vaughn was Youk, and he never got to 30. I don't know what the fascination is with big-fly power. It's attractive, it's nice to have, but the idea that a first baseman had better hit at least 20 HR's Or Else, is kind of dated in my opinion. you need a guy who's going to create runs one way or another, because it's a position that can tolerate a guy who's a hitter first and foremost, but there's no ironclad law that says that those runs have to be created by home run. Now I'm not going to weigh in one way or the other on Travis, he's got some growing to do before we get a good picture of him, but let's remember this -- we have never had a first baseman hit 30 HR's or more in any year in which we won the World Series. In fact the most HR hit by a Red Sox first baseman during a World Series year was Napoli in 2013 with 23. You can absolutely win without an overpowered hitting 1B. you can win with 'em too of course, but anyway, they're not the be-all

I agree with you actually, I had no problem with Schilling getting moved along by ESPN. If he wasn't a good fit for that company, they're within their rights. But the level of what I can't find a better word for than "bullying" that religious and conservative people tend to get on a daily basis in certain parts of this country is something that should be spoken out against more than it is. And the fact that it's coming from the side that above all else should be the ones practicing what they preach about tolerance disgusts me.

Exactly. And I find it absolutely pathetic and deplorable to hear the suggestion made that the solution to this problem is for the athlete to avoid exercising his First Amendment rights. Schilling has just as much right to his opinion as every other American citizens. We can tolerate the 9/11 truthers, the anti-vaxxers, the alien watchers, why the hell can't we tolerate a guy who thinks God made the world in 7 days?

I don't have a problem with a vigilant media, but when people talk about the Boston pressure cooker, that doesn't really have that much to do with the park or the fans, as much as it does on the aged hacks in the press box. And every few years you hear about a guy the Red Sox were considering acquiring but weren't sure they had what it took to survive the banshees, or a veteran who's been here too long and smelled wrong to some overripe pencil jockey, and we lost out on their talent over it. Something really needs to be done to pull their teeth

It's gotten to the point in this country that a certain brand of political viewpoint is enough to get one rejected and ostracized even when that viewpoint is not so far removed from the mainstream. to dare risking politics for a second, I think the only absolutely controversial position Schilling ever took was standing out in favor of Creationism. Since Curt Schilling isn't a molecular biologist, I kinda feel like he should be left to his own viewpoints and not harrassed because of them -- people seem to be disagreeing with that though and because he's disagreeable enough to not only have controversial opinions but also dare to express them openly, that somehow makes it fair game to set him up as the next Jurassic Carl, and it seems to have found a way to color every other perception of the man. I kinda feel like this is like the smear job that was run against Tim Thomas after refusing to meet with President Obama and daring to reveal his right wing politics following the Bruins' Stanley Cup win. And I find both attitudes absolutely execrable -- and worse, COUNTERPRODUCTIVE TO WINNING IN THIS TOWN. If we insist on heroes that share every opinion we have, the list of our heroes is going to be a very short one indeed. If the mess we make of former athletic heroes who have controversial opinions drives one guy who could have put us over the top, away from this town because for whatever reason the media declare him to be socially unacceptable and the general wool-bearing public goes along with it, then the media has stopped covering the story and started trying to become the story, and they have hurt our teams in the process. That is not OK. I still wonder what the Bruins could have accomplished if the media didn't set out to deliberately burn the bridges with Tim Thomas hn the 2012-2013 season. Tuukka's a good professional goaltender, but Tim put the team in his back in 2011 in a way that Tuukka never has. Anyu of you guys who are also Bruin fans remember how that year ended, with Tuukka just letting a couple bad goals in in the last second of an elimination game. You have to wonder if maybe TT would have been a bit more focused with that kind of game on the line, he was always a big game goalie. Driving Thomas away from this town could quite literally have cost this town a date with Lord Stanley, we'll never know and no one ever will hold the media responsible for their part of pushing Thomas out of Boston. despite the fact that they're the ones who were pathologically incapable to FREAKING DROP IT and let the guy have his goddamn opinion.

Not sure what people were expecting. The guy's a Jevin Jarvis/Kyle Snyder/Devern Hansack type, you're never going to get much more than what he gave us from a spot that low on the pitching depth chart.

Benintendi promoted to Portland. Just sayin... here we go. I'm skeptical he can make the rapid adjustments to get all the way to the big leagues from Salem this year, but this is one of the steps he has to complete to get there.