jung

We gave two 17 year olds playing in the two team Dominican Summer League for Cashewnuts and the O's are paying a big chunk of his salary. This is looking more like just that sort of deal by the minute.

Cashewnuts gets a serious break from the ump.

Why would you announce a team meeting coming up to the media. Red Sox and their PR.

The spin job DD was trying to perform was that our pen is sooooooooo good that of course teams were interested in it. I suspect that teams just plain made a call thinking it likely DD would be interested in moving somebody. Of course DD is not going to say that. My preference would have been that he not say anything in the topic.

You would not be interested in Barnes if you had a team that would not overwork him? You would not be interested in Work if you had a team that would not overwork him? You would not be interested in DH if you had a coaching staff that could help bring him along? The rest of them are trash and Nate is waaaaaay too iffy at this point. But I can easily see teams having interest in one of those three guys.

1. Ji-Man Choi (L) 1B 2. Tommy Pham ® LF 3. Austin Meadows (L) RF 4. Matt Duffy ® 3B 5. Kevin Kiermaier (L) CF 6. Jesus Aguilar ® DH 7. Eric Sogard (L) 2B 8. Mike Zunino ® C 9. Willy Adames ® SS 1. Mookie Betts ® RF 2. Rafael Devers (L) 3B 3. Xander Bogaerts ® SS 4. J.D. Martinez ® DH 5. Andrew Benintendi (L) CF 6. Sam Travis ® LF 7. Mitch Moreland (L) 1B 8. Michael Chavis ® 2B 9. Sandy Leon (S) C

IMO, the pitching has been crap all year long. The everyday players finally pulled their heads out of their asses with Mookie and JD actually thinking about baseball instead of in one case, how tough it is to get by on $20M per and the weight of all that hardware from last year and in the other case worrying about his option clause. Beni is Beni (a good but not great player and JBJ is exactly what his numbers say he is, not more and not less). Put a consistently performing Mookie and JD around Rafi and X and what have you got....An offensive MONSTER, thats what. Yes they clawed themselves back to the top of the league in offensive production. When did that happen? Did it happen from day 1? NOPE. But now, guess what, the everyday players that have been defocused most of the year have the next in a series of reasons to simply be defocused. Now, it will be "waaaaahhhhhh, Management does not believe in us, waaaahhhhhh. They stuck us with this terrible pitching and did not really do anything to fix it waaaaaahhhhhhhh". This stacked up as a waaaaaahhhhhh Sox year right from day one and the team itself has done NOTHING to prove otherwise. Remember, no matter who has owned this team from Tom Yawkey forward they have always been the 25 players, 25 Limos Red Sox. Welcome to life as a Red Sox fan. At least we now have Championships to show for the tire tracks over our backs. The only dif is the rest of the MLB players and teams are getting to be more like the Sox have been since Yawkey. We should be sending out crisis counselors in an effort to prepare MLB fans around baseball for what this is like. WE SHOULD KNOW EXACTLY what this is like. I am not disappointed that they did not go sell crazy at the deadline. I do wish they had tried to sell off some of the crap that they CANNOT keep for 2020 because they are going absolutely NOWHERE in 2019. Keep the core of the team together. Hope Sale and Price work through the process of transition successfully. Take a deep breath and reinvest in their effort for 2020 and they could be back on top again that fast. DD made me nearly throw up lunch when I saw his nonsense. "You would not believe the number of calls we got on our bullpen pieces." Yea Dave because nobody could believe you WERE NOT SELLING!

Before "trust his stuff" he needs to get real about what is happening to him. "Its time Chris." He is overthrowing his FB to hit velo that came naturally to him before. So even before he gets to trust his stuff he has to trust his eyes and what he is feeling as real, not some mirage or something that will just pass if he just ignores it and throws through it. Not happening IMO. He knows he is overthrowing to hit 96-97. There is no way you can convince that he does not know it. That will be the biggest hurdle for Sale IMO because he does not seem to me to be the kind of guy that ever allowed the thought that this would ultimately happen to him to cross his mind. If somebody told me that he fancied himself a Nolan Ryan clone, I would believe it. The reality is that the chance of Sale being a Nolan Ryan clone is zero....zilch......nada! Worse, it appears to me that overthrowing his FB is effecting his Slider and even his Change when he throws that and it is driving his inconsistent command across his secondary pitches. Last time out he threw the best and worst Change of his season this year. He definitely threw the worst Slider he has thrown all year.

The three of them do not have the command that you would expect of top shelf starting pitchers. I think Porcello is in real trouble as far as ever being what he was or even close what he was in his Cy Young season and for about half a year after that. He is not a power pitcher, never was a power pitcher, suddenly made himself a power pitcher and that lasted about a year and a half. It appears to me he simply wore himself out and no longer has any sort of 4 seam FB at all. Has to reinvent himself without a FB virtually ever start which is painful to watch him go through. Gotta' admire his guts though. Sale has lost the ability to hit 97 naturally and is overthrowing the baseball. It is throwing off not only his FB but his Slider as well. He has to come to terms with that as he is in transition. I thought Price was about two years farther downstream in transition than Sale was until he pulled that last start and the approach he used in it out of his *******. He tried to throw harder, his FB flattened out and that was that. For both Price and Sale the lack of command is also costing them their ability to challenge hitters. That said it is not nearly as bad for them as it is from the general run of the mill starter mucking about MLB these days. Hitters are either allowed to simply reach entirely across the plate and hit balls a half a foot off the outer edge (see Sam Travis newfound success at the plate as he has stumbled onto the fact that pitchers can no longer pitch inside without hitting batters). Our own Rafi dives across the batter's box as does X. JD does not and Mookie does not. But much of what hitters are accomplishing these days is a consequence of the rocket ship baseball and pitchers lack of command which allows hitters to control the entire plate....unheard of before the last 5-10 years. So IMO Sale and Price are in transition and may or may not pull it off. I have no idea what Rick Porcello does. He is really a gutsy pitcher and it pains me to think he is really and truly on the back nine if not headed for the 19th hole.

The OTHER JBJ, the one that trudges to the batters box and trudges back to the dugout is almost in full bloom AGAIN. He is what he is.

Firing LeVangie will likely have some impact as a messaging tool to the team and coaches in general. I am not as convinced that it will have much impact on the actual pitching assets we have. The Red Sox have for at least the last 50 years been one of the organizations that buys pitching. I can't remember a time in in 50 years when the Red Sox were organized to develop pitching and if you are not developing pitching you also don't have the coaching assets that can be capable deploying pitching assets at the ML level. You just end up with "the guy as pitching coach that the next manager wants" or worse in our case, somebody promoted from within a system that does not develop pitching assets. The current Rays pitching coach, Kyle Snyder came up through the Rays minor league system, one we all acknowledge knows how to develop pitching at the minor league level and deploy pitching assets at the ML level. LaVangie came up from Red Sox bullpen catcher to bullpen coach to become Cora's pitching coach. Frankly the Red Sox are simply not the organization you want to be promoting pitching coaches from within IMO. They should revamp their entire program for dealing with pitching coaches and hire minor league pitching coaches from outside the organization that have established patterns of success developing pitching assets at the minor league level and then they should promote THEM to the top jobs at the ML level with the Red Sox. Coaches are relatively inexpensive when you compare them to the cost of buying pitchers.

Vaz will likely be out for at least a couple days with a knee contusion. He could barely bend his leg at the end of this game.

Read the post. I said they don't DEVELOP pitching at the ML level. I also said that Tampa knows how to DEVELOP it and then DEPLOY it at the ML level...two different functions though if you have coaches that can develop pitching in your organization it stands to reason that you would advance their employment in your organization and ultimately they would make it to your ML coaching staff. I don't recall posting anything like the gibberish you are implying that I posted. Doesn't change anything by the way. Our pitching sucks and I suspect at season end either Cora or LaVanchie will be held responsible particularly since it has gone downhill all season long.

Telle me Tampa does know how to develop pitching and then deploy it at the ML level. There are two types of MLB teams as it relates to pitching, those that develop it and those that buy it. I have never really understood why teams that can buy pitching don't just BUY the coaches that would allow them to develop pitching because coaches are cheap and highly rated Starting pitchers are expensive. But that is just not how it is done. Don't ask me why because the only answer I would have for you is that baseball ops organizations around baseball are not populated by rocket scientists nor brain surgeons either. If it were me, I would just scoop up the coaches and develop pitchers. But that is just me. Also, just as an aside, development is done below the major league level. So I would not myself blame LeVangie for the lack of pitching development in the Red Sox organization. That decision is above his pay grade while the actual function of developing pitchers is below his pay grade.

What is Kiermier doing in the first row of the CF bleachers? Its not like he can't go back on baseballs...good grief.

For all the analytical crap that rules what Tampa does, they have gotten 74 pitches out of Yarborough tonight and Cash has nobody up in his pen until Mookie's hit. This after the Chavis HR. As for their starter/reliever mix, they have two more very legit starters that are on the shelf currently, one of them last year's Cy Young.

Rays have gotten a lota' mileage out of Yarborough tonight. He might be at the end of his rope.

Eck all humped up over a solo HR that makes the score 8-3. Sure Eck...you must have gone to the Yes Network school of broadcasting in the off season.

Its LaVangie's asset to coach or its Cora's overall responsibility. Rightly or wrongly one or the other is going to pay for this at season end because outside of two guys, this staff sucks. Which of Cora or LaVangie do you think it will be? Correction, I forgot Erod who is having a banner year for him.

Tampa is winning this game going away. As much as I can blame the pitching which is godawful, for all our gaudy offensive numbers when we really need runs, all too often this year we just don't get them.

Well actually that did not look like it was hooking that much and because of the shape of the RF wall in Fenway the distance once you get past that foul pole grows remarkably and very quickly. That was likely out and fair in a lotta' parks.

That is not far wrong at this point. Were it not for the lack of any sort of baseline acceptable MLB pitching across baseball, he would likely be out of baseball after this season. But with a Cy in hand and with the trash that passes for MLB pitching today, he will get a shot to pitch somewhere if he wants it on a much reduced contract.

IMO Rick literally does not know what he can throw when he takes the mound for the 1st inning any longer, mainly because he cannot follow the approach to pitching he used for that magical 1.5 years and he can't go back to what he was before that 1.5 year run. He simply was not meant to be a power pitcher and did not have the endurance to do what he did for more than a year and a half. Now he is stuck trying to figure out if he has any sort of 4 seam FB at all when he takes the mound. He fails that test virtually every time out and then he has to figure out which of his secondary pitches he can throw good enough to get through however many innings he can go and he does not know at that point which he can or can't trust. Like I said earlier, Rick is literally reinventing himself every single start. We can knock him for his performances but not for a lack of guts. I just can't imagine what that must be like.

Well actually that was way back in the RF grandstands, higher than the pole when it went past. The HR's that are only HR's in Fenway are the ones that literally wrap around the Pesky pole only 305' from Home Plate.

Rick has to reinvent a way to get through innings every single game he pitches and that is a horrible way to have to pitch. I am actually surprised he pulls it off at all. Not to say he pitches well these days. I just can't imagine imploding and reinventing myself every single time I took the mound for a season.