Dipre

I love how the almighty Yankees ande the super-charged Rays have managed to put away an injury, inefficiently ravaged Red Sox team.......Oh wait....... Neither of them were ultimately better than the Sox. But injuries were.

I was being sarcastic. I'm thinking the epic matchup you're holding with Gom on the league has fried a bunch of your brain cells sir.

Ryan Kalish UZR: 2.5, or above league average. Am i missing something?

My semi-finals matchup with MSU was about as exciting as watching numbers change periodically can be, and i was pretty lucky to come out on top. Good luck this week WhiskeyBreath.

Lots of back patting in Jacko's post, very little substance. 1) A completely healthy Sox team this season would have been at least as good as the Yankees. If you want to state otherwise, prove it objectively. 2) Jeter and A-Rod are getting older, not younger. If the same was said of a Sox player in his mid-30's, that would have been exactly your argument. Be consistent. The reason the Sox need to get creative next season is because of Beltre leaving and Cameron's sudden decline, not because they weren't (as much as it would pain Yankee fans to admit it) on par with the Yankees had they been healthy, which they obviously weren't.

Or we can use FanGraphs, whose dollar value system is much more more complex and accurate than "He had a similar season to X, so let's call him that" and measures defense as well. 2007: 7.2 mill. 2008: 18.2 mill. 2009: 21.6 mill. 2010: 10.4 mill. It brings us to a grand total of 57.4 million, which divided into four averages exactly 14.35 million per, aka Drew's actual salary.

Ooooooh, tempers are flaring quite a bit lately. I wonder how much creativity will be required into turning all of the arguments into being my fault by a couple mods and a specific poster who shall remain nameless. Also, Doiji gets what's coming to him. You cannot be such a blatant homer or get such hard-ons for players regardless of their skillsets or how they would actually benefit the team without eventually getting responses like this, because of, you know, logic and things like that.

Definitely looking forward to facing my buddy MSU in the TalkSox league playoffs.

Sir, you've been spot on with every post you've made since coming back. Keep up the good work.

He also played 2nd, 3rd and RF in the DWL.

@MVP: I was trying to elicit a response, which i received, even though i wasn't pointing out anyone in particular, but it might have seemed that way to you, because you probably agree with the opinion i was trying to confront, which would seem the logically correct answer to your comment. @a700: An agenda indicates an underlying set of motives when addressing a subject or issue in particular, and it doesn't necessarily grant a status of importance to the person who has (or is being accused of having said agenda). It can be as simple as an unfounded personal dislike for a player or an underlying desire to bash the team/FO/fanbase. After all, this is simply a Red Sox website. Not congress. I'm not calling anyone out in particular by the way, it is what it is. And yes, i am now a Bronco, i even have my pin thingy to show it. On a side note, my advisor had me take three really hard-ass classes for this semester. I'll shoot you an e-mail so you can help me dissect some issues regarding the difference between the Dominican and American education systems.

Why still bother? People will say what they wanna say, make sarcastic misguided remarks, skew the stats, and stick to their incorrect thoughts. Whoever doesn't understand what JD Drew brings to this team in terms of overall production and declines to acknowledge the fact that he's been pretty durable this season clearly has an agenda. Oh, and this thread is ridiculous.

Clay Bucholz has clearly outpitched his peripherals. There's no way around that. They're transitioning him with exactly the same approach they transitioned Lester a couple years ago "Pitch to contact, the Strikeout pitch will take care of itself". Bucholz has not pitched to the tune of a 2.20 ERA (quite frankly, no one in the AL is a 2.20 ERA pitcher) but this aberration of a season has clearly helped a number of pitchers attain some completely out-of-line numbers, and Bucholz is one of them. In fact, his peripherals show him to be much more of Mid-three's pitcher, but when you factor in BABIP, he may be even a bit higher than that. He hasn't been absolutely dominant, but he hasn't shown his best stuff yet either, he'll have better peripherals next year, but that ERA will very much regress. Count on it. Also, it's funny how the one time Jacko has an argument that is unbiased, logically sound, statistically solid, and is actually full of praise for a Sox player, people jump on his throat and none of the people who usually defend him really do. Irony.

Jonathan Papelbon. Yeah, i said it. He's a greedy douchebag of massive proportions.

The interesting thing is that had they traded for, say, a reliever and the move backfires while the player they traded for the reliever was productive for the receiving team for several years, then the people who are complaining about the non-moves would be complaining about the failed moves. Sometimes you just have to cut your losses.

I wouldn't trade Kalish for Kearns and Capps combined, specially given the fact that Kearns has comparable numbers to both McDonald and Hall across the board, meaning he doesn't actually represent an upgrade. Kearns: .787 OPS McDonald: .781 OPS Hall: .779 OPS Q: Do i trade a guy who's likely going to be manning an OF spot for several years at the league minimum for a reliever who may or may not be effective under a new role in a new team (See: Gagne,Eric) and an OF who has similar numbers than two guys i already have? A) I don't.

I personally don't see the logic in making a strong prospect investment on a relief pitcher given their volatile nature (See Gagne,Eric) and even less when it's done in a move that may or may not actually help this team make the playoffs. I'm one of the more optimistic guys, but the truth is, this team is flawed because of Beckett and Lackey's ineffectiveness as well as missing the two best hitters in this lineup. They may pull off a miracle and make the playoffs with what they have, and who knows what may happen from there, but standing pat at the deadline was probably the right thing to do.

Caught most of this game using the campus high-speed internet connection (Thank you Secretary of higher education) on MLB.TV and it didn't sputter once. Not missing another Sox game (unless i have class) for the rest of this season.

Ital's team was clearly superior to Jbay's. Deeper lineup (Two of his bench players would start on J-Bay's teams) and deeper pitching, both SP and RP. I like both guys, so i have no bias, but that's really a travesty.

Tito got away with pitching to Teixeira, but that was an awful, awful decision. Teix is sporting around a 1.015 OPS in August, and had already homered in the game, while Gardner is mired in a .227 OPS slump in August. You play your matchups. In fact, i'd bet dollars to doughnuts LaRussa or Torre walk him 10 times out of 10 with such a weak hitter behind winning run or no winning run. Funny note: Why is it easier to complain about the Sox getting only six hits than to feel happy Sox pitching held the Yanks to six hits on a day were neither Lester nor Bard had their best stuff?

I've been in first place in both leagues for three weeks running. I've earned some bragging rights.

I remember calling a Rays pitching regression and someone else calling their offense regression early in the season. People here were blowing loads over Zobrist and his unsustainable HR/FB rate, and as usual, it normalized. Ditto with Bartlett, and Upton's taken his under-performance act to a whole new level. As for the pitching staff, they've gone from an otherwordly 2.80 ERA to a 3.66 mark. And that bullpen's still due for a regression. It could still happen. As for still thinking the Sox don't have a shot, i was reading a Rosenthal article the other day, and came along this gem: Don't bury the Red Sox just yet. With this little paragraph of particular interest: Both Tampa and the Yankees, as well as the Sox themselves, are flawed clubs, be it due to injury, age or ineffectiveness, and nothing's set in stone. Need to let the season play itself out. Baseball-related predictions are usually wrong.

Yankees starters have had the following ERA by month: April: 3.41 May: 3.94 June: 4.49 July: 3.27 You gloss over those stats and think they're A-OK, but here's the problem: Yankee rotation, peripherals by month: April: 1.20 WHIP, 7.0 K/9, 2.02 K/BB May: 1.29 WHIP, 7.1 K/9, 2.51 K/BB June: 1.29 WHIP, 8.0 K/9, 2.39 K/BB July: 1.31 WHIP, 6.5 K/9, 2.21 K/BB Not coincidentially, while the ERA for July is low, that has a lot to do with the strength of the schedule, because the peripherals were below the benchmark set by the starters for the rest of the year, and it coincides with Hughes' recent ineffectivenes, and Pettite's injuries. The fact of the matter is, that Javy Vasquez, Andy Pettite (due to the recent injury), Hughes and Burnett, are currently all Wild-Cards, and the Yankees needed a starter to cement their "Big three" for the playoffs, because the assumption that one (or even two) of the above mentioned starters were bound to get their act together. The fact is, the rotation has struggled, no use denying it, and as Y228 pointed out, they weren't going to dangle their top prospect for a rental, get turned down, then go after another starter, if they didn't think adding said starter was necessary.

Epic tool with an unwarranted sense of self-importance to boot. On the topic, it's not even August, the Sox are getting to the soft part of the schedule, and the team is getting healthy. Pretty self-explanatory.