jung

Do you have another practical solution? Are they going to replace the entire pen? NOPE. Do we appear to have a decent enough offense to catch teams that beat up on our pen? YUP. If you leave the ninth inning with a lead have you won the game or not? If you leave the ninth inning behind have you lost the game or not? Now of course the Sox could just pack it in, call it a season and sell at the deadline. That is a solution of a sort....could be an entirely practical solution. We have fourteen games coming up with the Rays and Yankees right smack in the middle of 34 games in 34 days. They might not survive that the way they have played so far this year.

Well the Home Run Derby balls were always hotter than the standard official MLB baseball. The problem they have now if you want to call it a problem is that the official MLB baseball is so juiced up now that the Home Run Derby ball is even beyond the absurdity of the official ball. That said, I could care less what they used for the HR Derby. In fact I watched all of two batters of the Home Run Derby just to prove to myself I would be bored to tears AGAIN. That was all I could take of that. As to the previous question about Manfred and MLB's involvement in this charade, MLB does not even have to initiate its own testing for the official MLB baseball. They can accept the manufacturers testing if they want to do so. The very idea that the manufacturer does not know what he is manufacturing is laughably absurd.

What a pile of Manfred Crap.....C....R.....A......P Different does not even begin to touch it and to suggest that the rocket ship ball has now gone through three generations in four years each hotter than the last without Manfred's knowledge and involvement is unspeakably unscrupulous and irresponsible. What is Manfred doing, angling to pick up one of those "acting secretary" jobs in the Trump Administration? Sounds like he would be perfect for it. In the first place, Manfred would not have had to "direct" anybody outside of MLB. All he had to was have multiple baseball's tested and pick one. What a load of tripe. In reality ball designers and manufacturers can produce balls even hotter than the current official MLB baseball. Its just a matter of testing and picking.

Not necessarily true. You have a few innings to make up for a deficit before the 9th inning and you have those innings against the other team's pen. In most cases the opponent pen sucks as bad as ours does. No innings left after the 9th unless tied and going into extras.

Christ, Giles was pitching with a cranky wing all year up until just before the Sox series in Toronto. Did pretty well for having a cranky wing. I would have taken him with his cranky wing over anybody we have had closing and anybody we are likely to have closing out the season.

Wheeler is cheaper and as much or as little a crap shoot as MadBum would be at this point. Some team with more assets to attract in trade will get MadBum. If they are stuck on Wheeler and get him that would not be a terrible move. However they would still need a Closer not named Nate or any of the Bucket-o-fried chicken bums from that pen. There are certainly more NL pitchers that challenge hitters than there are AL pitchers that challenge hitters. Wheeler certainly challenges hitters as much as anybody in the AL does. He losses more than I like in those challenges. He is a good deal like Nate in that regard as Nate challenges hitters as well and losses sometimes by leaving the ball in the middle of the plate. I am actually pretty sick and tired of watching Red Sox starters pitch. I like the way Sale pitches but when he can't throw his Slider, he is just a train wreck waiting to happen. The rest of them, save Nate have turned into nibbling Erod with Price having more talent than the rest. Hence Price enjoys more success than the rest. Porcello had his day in the sun as a power pitcher (and I do mean A DAY in the sun) and that is now done and dusted. Erod is Erod now with a change up. Price throws like a veteran pitcher. But he challenges a hitter about once a game, maybe twice on his way out his stint. Tired of the way they pitch across most of MLB now anyway but particularly non-plused by our own starters who have underperformed as a group about as much as a group can underperform. There was no real reason to be excited about the Sox pen EVER. But the Rotation has really been painful to watch pitch.

Geezus...Yankmees apparently talking to the Jays about both Stroman AND Giles. At least if the Yankmees got them, they would keep them out of the hands of teams we are competing with for a WC birth.

Not at the Closer it won't. We don't have a Closer. One is not going to emerge. Yes it will take pressure off of the rest of the pen because they won't be called upon for so many innings 6-8. Does not do a damned thing for the 9th and we still don't have someone that can even reliably close. These bums cannot even Hold. So what would make us think that there is suddenly a Closer in the Bucket-o-Fried chicken bums.

Too much competition for both of them. Zack Wheeler is not a terrible choice if that is where they go. Problem is, taking pressure off the pen at large will not mean that they will suddenly have a Closer come out of that bucket-o-fried chicken bums.

I would be fine with Zack Wheeler. He won't cost much money. However if they get a starter, THEY STILL WON"T BE ABLE TO CLOSE. Just because there will be less pressure on the pen at large does not mean they will suddenly be able to close.

To me, a true Put Away IS NOT a pitch thrown off the plate as the hitter can just decide to ignore it. A true Put Away is a pitch that can beat the hitter in the strike zone, as in an "I need to get rid of you right now Mr Hitter" pitch. Plus we know the trail we have taken to all these K's in MLB and they have much more to do with hitters trying to keep MLB, their agents and their wallets happy than anything else.

Would not surprise me in the least. Would just be another indication of MLB's Madness IMO. That said, the widespread picking around the fringes of the Strike Zone, lets not challenge hitters PARISH THE THOUGHT, nonsense started in earnest a good 5-6 years before the 2016 1.A version of the rocket ship ball, at least 5-6 years before it and it seems pretty much universal now. Maybe two or three NL pitchers willing to challenge hitters and that is about it. Now that we are up to 1.C who knows what is going on with the pitchers. Can they even grip this thing? As for not allowing hitters to command the entire plate left to right and right to left and reach across at will, Pedro has been complaining that pitchers no longer feature enough command of their pitches to pitch inside and at least own one side of the plate or the other since 2010, again before the 1.A rocket ship baseball came on the scene.

Waiting for Wright's knee to cave right out there on the mound. I am in favor of Nate coming back to the pen to gain his footing back. But Nate would be the ONLY starter we have willing to challenge hitters at the moment, pitch in the strike zone instead of around the edges of it, earn easy outs in 5 pitches or less and go deeper into games than the rest of these chumps can go. So my preference would be to see him come back to the Pen and then go back to the Rotation. As far as I can tell, instead of Erod learning how to pitch from our more veteran starters, they have learned how to pitch from Erod, much to my disappointment.

Our starters with one exception don't have a put away pitch and that one starter ain't exactly blowing our dresses up this year.

Well letting Price nibble away, challenging few hitters very few times over 99 pitches against the worst hitting team in the league would be a strange way to "hold him back". Seems to me if there was actually an intent here, it would have been easy enough to both save Price AND save the pen. Just challenge for God sake. Its the f***ing kittycats.

Porcello was even worse in his start....going all the way to his 42nd pitch before getting his first swing and miss in the strike zone in the entire game. IMO Porcello is toast. He turned himself into a power pitcher for all of a 1.5 years. He was never a power pitcher. He did enjoy the best period of his career but appears to have burned himself out in the process and will likely simply be another over the hill, rag arm for the remainder of his career. Since MLB has burned through buckets and buckets of minor league pitchers as pitchers break down trying to accommodate this power pitching game I am sure Rick will be able to stay in MLB. There is really nobody in the minors that can replace him. MLB needs about 400 pitchers to support its teams. He will find a home somewhere putting up hideous numbers out his career (see Zimmerman).

So Price is done. Time to tally up the swing and miss in the strike zone that he got for this stint. 1st inning, 2 foul balls held by catcher, Decided to count those as swing and miss in the strike zone 2nd inning, 2 swing and miss in the strike zone 3rd inning, 1 swing and miss in the strike zone 4th inning, 4 swing and miss in the strike zone 5th inning, 0 swing and miss in the strike zone but after the Sox gave him the larger lead Price got a couple easy outs letting the kittycats hit the thing. So that is 9 swing and miss in the strike zone out of 99 pitches. Not bad for this day and age until you realize that this is the kittycats Price was pitching to and he really did not even challenge them! Notice that Price appears to have figured out what not challenging one of the worst hitting teams in baseball was doing to his pitch count and threw 4 swing and miss in the strike zone in the 4th inning. Then with a bigger lead pretty much pitched similarly in the 5th just letting them hit it. But the real question is how much farther could Price have gone in this game if he had been challenging this crap hitting team right from the first inning, even as much as he challenged them in the 4th and 5th innings. Price is the best Starter we have this year, pitching against the worst hitting team in the league and Price does not even challenge them really.

We might just have somebody to play 2nd base regularly if Marco can stay healthy. Ramirez just like every other pitcher in MLB allows X to command the entire plate and pull a pitch all the way on the outer black over the 3rd base bag. There is hardly more than one or two pitchers I have seen all year that takes control of one side of the plate or the other from hitters. They can't throw inside effectively and as a result they just let the hitters bend them over a desk and pummel them all game long.

The rocket ship's afterburners ran out of fuel on Mookie.

Well this should be interesting. Soto throws nothing balls at 98, flat as a pancake. We should crush him if he is out there for any amount of time. Maybe he is just an "opener", an abhorrent travesty if I ever saw one.

But those changes were not radical and the last live ball era followed the dead ball era. So there was considerable concern that the ball was simply dead! They have changed the baseball 3 of the last 4 years and are now onto the worst of the rocket ships with no apparent end in sight with no indication before the 2016 rocket ship that we had another dead ball on our hands. As for bats, bats are not THE BASEBALL. The helmet is not THE BASEBALL and the hitter is not the pitcher. Everything that happens in baseball starts with THE BASEBALL in the hand of THE PITCHER. You screw around with the baseball and the pitcher and you are screwing around with the fundamental core of the game. So IMO, what they have done with THE BASEBALL and the bias toward promoting power pitching makes everything else at to changes pale in comparison. The the changes to the baseball have made it possible to just touch it with a bat and get it to fly, have likely made it more difficult to grip the various pitches, probably even changed the spin/rotation on pitches as they come up to the plate. But probably worse has been the bias toward power pitching which as burned through an entire generation of pitchers, breaking down early and often without being able to backfill the minor leagues to keep up. Why for example wasn't the change to the 2016 baseball enough? Frankly I did not think THAT was called for. However, why was that not enough? Why the 2018 ball which was hotter still and then the 2019 which is just an absurd rocket ship! As for the pitcher himself, he is now stuck throwing a baseball with much lower seams and we are running though pitchers like crap through a goose because of what has been a bias toward power pitching. They are breaking down, they are being brought up too soon. Many of them should never see the inside of a MLB uni but that is the corner MLB has boxed itself into. Hopefully they don't mess with mound height again in either direction. The interesting aspect of the marketing of power pitching is that pitchers no longer challenge hitters. So here they are raving about velocity and nobody is challenging hitters. If you can't throw swing and miss in the strike zone, you are not challenging hitters. Predominantly breaking ball pitchers don't challenge hitters any longer and FB pitchers don't challenge hitters any longer. They don't because they can't. That was NEVER The case before. They don't get swing and miss in the strike zone and they don't get easy, weak contact outs thus driving up their pitch counts and exiting regularly now by the 5th if not 6th inning. We complain about pitchers that nibble, yet encourage it in somehow admiring called third strike K's as if called third strike K's were something special. NOOOO....swing and miss in the strike zone is actually something special because the pitcher is actually challenging the hitter in order to earn swing and miss in the strike zone. Pitchers no longer even make the effort to own at least one side of the plate or the other, giving up the entire plate to the hitter, allowing the hitter to dive across the batter's box unimpeded because they can't throw inside effectively (see Rafi for a guy that dives across). They are not good enough to throw inside effectively. They don't command their pitches well enough to throw inside effectively. But I keep coming back to the same things that stand out like sore thumbs. Starters no longer complete games regularly as they did and they no longer even go deep into games as they did FOR DECADES because they can't, even using 5 starters instead of 4, they can't. That has brought about legions of relief pitchers, good for about 20 pitches each. All pitchers are breaking down early and often because they are throwing too hard. That has started the conveyor belt of crap pitchers coming up from the minors that should not have come up at all or are brought up too soon to fill the holes left by the broken down rag arms that simply can't go any longer or that are on the IL and on the way to can't go any longer. All the other changes ever made in baseball over very long time horizons have not had the impact that the last 10 years of changes have had. Now there are very few pitchers in MLB that can throw competently and virtually NOTHING in the minor leagues backing them up. MLB sucked the life out of minor league pitching while running throw arms like crap through a goose. Since this is the Porcello thread, what did Rick do to earn his Cy Young and his best season by far? He turned into a power pitcher, exhibiting much more velocity than he ever had in his career before. That lasted all of a year and a half. He is IMO effectively a burn out now. So that worked well. I would not call this a conspiracy as much as it has been a Collusion, an unwillingness to actually deal with MLB's issues effectively. They have seen my generation getting to the pushing up daisies age for a long time now. Yet with all the crap they have tried, all of it misguided IMO, 65+ year olds are 5x the demographic viewership of the 18-49 year old age category. Young fans know less and less about the game than they did generation by generation and are less interested in it generation by generation. Why would they or should they be interested in this game of 3+ hour duration that seems to be for all intents and purposes about hitting a baseball over a fence. There is just not enough game there to hold their interest. Heck if that is what this game was for all intents and purposes about when i was growing up, it would not have held my interest. Going to the park itself is a fun night on the town more than it is a trip to the ballpark specifically to watch a baseball game. How many people in those seats actually know what is happening on the diamond?

Yup....though all of my sympathies are with the players be they pitchers or everyday players. I don't care what they get out of the MLB franchise owners. They should get what they can get. The pitchers have certainly taken it on the chin more than the hitters have. Every single thing that happens on a baseball diamond starts with the ball "THE BALL" [now f***ed with to an absurd degree] in the hand of THE PITCHER and MLB had the unmitigated gall to f*** with that. - Did they do anything to develop a next generation of fans that had appreciation for the game that is? NOPE, decided they knew better than anybody else and decided to reinvent a new game while still calling it MLB baseball. - Did they do anything to deal with the trend that they themselves created in trying to turn the multidimensional game of baseball into a unidimensional power game from both the mound and the plate? Did they do anything to mitigate what it was doing to pitchers and pitching? NOPE, just allowed the innings per start for Starters to slump into something unrecognizable, brought more relief pitchers into the game, came up with crap like the "quality start" and the "opener", kept promoting this idea of a power pitching game selling nothing other than pitch velo, leaving us with broken down rag arm pitchers and a steady stream of guys brought up to pitch MLB that in any other decade would NEVER have gotten out of AA ball - The rocket ship, low seam profile baseball. There is not a single positive aspect to that pile of s*** that Manfred keeps changing now onto the 2019 version all the while claiming he knows nothing about it. Its all bad....its all negative and is very likely the straw that is breaking the camel's back for MLB pitchers and oh by the way, the very game itself. Rick was onto his 42nd pitch last night before he got a swing and miss on a pitch in the strike zone....HIS 42nd pitch. Zimmerman got all the way up to his 49th pitch before getting his first swing and miss on a pitch in the strike zone. Coupled with MLB pitchers inability to get easy outs on weak contact, this is just an ugly spiral in the wrong direction because they are pitching 90-100 pitches before they can get out of the 6th inning, sometimes can't get out of the 5th inning before they hit the century mark. Since pitchers are throwing too hard, trying to get paid based on what MLB says it wants, they are breaking down sooner forcing to the BIGS, guys that in other decades would have never made it out of AA ball and there is your ugly spiral to hell in a nutshell because MLB cannot backfill with quality arms as fast as they use them up now. They have no command of their pitches and they can't throw inside effectively allowing hitters to dominate both the inner and outer halves of the plate. As such these skank pitchers contribute to their own demise. So I would say that as a top of the line Starter, Rick Porcello's career is about done.....DONE in a game that used to get through 162 game seasons on 4 Starters not 5. Porcello's exit will leave yet another hole in the MLB pitching ranks and will likely be replaced with another guy that should never fill a MLB uni EVENTUALLY. MLB has not been able to backfill the pitching ranks they have decimated apparently convinced that nobody will look behind the Wizard's curtain and find Manfred with his pants around his ankles circle jerking with the owners. So now we have major suckage in the MLB pitching ranks and uber-major suckage in the minor league pitching ranks and it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. Most of the damage to this game has been done in a period not greater than 15 years and more like 10. I would say they have about 5-10 more years to get wise to themselves or they will cross the Rubicon and won't be able to cross back again. For the record, the steroid era was a tempest in a teapot with regard to total impact on the game when compared to this crap of manipulation and mutation of the game at its fundamental core. So yea, Rick is probably done, relegated to playing out his career somewhere doing something at about a quarter of his actual potential as a pitcher, rubbed out not by drugs or heavy hitters but by manipulation of the game at its fundamental core. But he will pitch somewhere for somebody tossing up hideous numbers until he finally succumbs because there is actually nobody to replace him in the ranks of MLB pitchers. Rick just becomes another step on the spiral staircase going DOWN.

So that was a good job slamming the door which has been Barnes job most of this year. The question is, will Cora try to get four outs from Barnes or will he pull out another piece of chicken from the bucket-o-fried chicken bums.

This could actually be pretty interesting because this is going to make three straight nights for Barnes. I am not even hopeful at this point.

Geezus we SUCK. My God where did we get these guys.