jung

"Hey John....how is carting your team across the pond doing for ya". "What did you say? I can't hear you over the money counting machines."

No Buck...first pitch to chicken wing was not a strike....IT WAS A MEATBALL

All too often opposing hitters simply do not give his pitch a chance to finish low out of the zone. By the time they start taking its too late. Its not even a matter of specific pitch recognition. You know what he is trying to do and you know how he does it. If it starts at the top of your knees take a few and see what happens.

1. DJ LeMahieu ® 3B 2. Aaron Judge ® RF 3. Gary Sanchez ® C 4. Luke Voit ® 1B 5. Didi Gregorius (L) SS 6. Edwin Encarnacion ® DH 7. Aaron Hicks (S) CF 8. Gleyber Torres ® 2B 9. Brett Gardner (L) LF 1. Mookie Betts ® RF 2. Rafael Devers (L) 3B 3. Xander Bogaerts ® SS 4. J.D. Martinez ® DH 5. Andrew Benintendi (L) LF 6. Christian Vazquez ® C 7. Brock Holt (L) 2B 8. Michael Chavis ® 1B 9. Jackie Bradley Jr. (L) CF You knew Rafi had to stay in the 2 hole when Beni came back. Smartest thing Cora has done in weeks. That said, I am not entirely sure why Beni should be 5th in this batting order. Certainly 5th is better than seeing him at 1 or 2 in the order.

I remember one instance that saw the pitcher look at 3 baseballs before being sated by the ball in his hand, throw one pitch, decide he did not like that and look at 3 more before being sated again. So he had looked at 6 baseballs having thrown 1 pitch. The batter looked like he was at Center Court in Forest Hills watching a tennis match just following the flight of ball after ball going out to the mound and back to the ump. Of course the batter wanted to try to catch a glance of the ball going to the mound to see if HE wanted to complain about it. I can't remember the pitcher's name. If you asked me to try I would have to say his name was "you frigging jackass" because that is all I remember saying from my seat.

We were not uniformly throwing them out in the 70's. Umps were still at that time giving them a little rub and tossing them back in their ball bag though I do think the 70's saw real ball scrutiny during the post season. That IMO was actually the genesis for uniformly tossing them out in the regular season. The other element that drove uniformly tossing balls out of games is that pitchers really began scrutinizing balls in the 1980's and you would regularly see the ump toss a different ball out to a complaining pitcher only to have said pitcher toss it right back to him. I remember seeing that exercise go on for as many as four baseballs before the pitcher finally gave in and was satisfied with the ball he got. Then of course batters would complain because they would see a scuff or something else on the ball and it would be tossed for that reason. I was a season ticket holder several years in the 70's and we were not then uniformly tossing them during the regular season. I believe we started uniformly tossing them out of regular season games in the 1980's though I could not give you the exact year. It might have even been in the early 1990's.

Correct but even measuring a player against the rest of MLB across separate years is out the window because Manfred keeps f***ing with the baseball. Historically stats have always been important in baseball....OUT THE WINDOW NOW. Are we going to remember that the 2016 baseball was hotter than the 2015 and that the 2018 ball was hotter than the 2017 ball and that the 2019 ball is actually the hottest of all of them so far? Worse, Home Run Derby balls are hotter than any official MLB ball for any given year. So Manfred can go farther than this is he wishes and who is to stop him. The point is, we are left now to value a given year independently and as an exception to every other year because of this nonsense. All we can do is rate the player against other players in that given year playing with the exact official MLB baseball used in that given year. It does not matter what the hitting stat is, OPS, OPS+, whatever.....they now stand alone year by year and comparing career stats to the individual season stats for a given player is now out the window. In other words, we can look at how a player stacked up against his peers and where he rated against his peers one year to the next but how his individual season stood up v his career is now a thing of the past. Ask yourself how many times we compare a player's season stats to his career stats and you see the problem.

Nothing strange about it. Henry was surely paid a pile of cash for this nonsense. I have no idea what MLB is doing here. A Liverpool/Boston marketing angle is hard to imagine being effective for Fenway Group. So this is the MLB trying some s***. Send two scrub teams in March for games that don't count. They would never have known the dif across the pond. Send two scrub teams in March to a part of the world that actually cares about baseball....anything but this. This is asinine especially when you consider that the Sox and Yanks ridiculous first half schedule was probably motivated by having to earn three days off in 5 days AT THE END OF JUNE FOR f*** SAKE just to pull this off.

We have to go 55-25 just to get to 99 wins. That is a .679 winning percentage for the second half. Do you think they can go .679? Do you think 99 wins gets the Division crown?

Just laying it out there. Manfred and the MLB have made it impossible to rate a player based on his own career stats v a specific year because they keep changing the baseball. Now we are going to have to go to rankings by year for all players in a league. For OPS, JD was ranked 3rd last year.....13th this year. For BA, 2nd last year....23rd so far this year. As I stated earlier, I think he has worked himself into a rut. But pitchers ARE NOT going to stop pitching him this way and he is going to have to respond. They are not going to stop pitching Mookie the way they are pitching him either. I am less sure Mookie works it out.

Maybe next year Manfred will actually put booster rockets on the rocket ship baseball just as a favor to JD. Don't want that OPS to slide too far.

Not sure about the nagging back. That would suggest he not be sent out to the OF AGAIN where he looks like an aging gazelle trying to avoid the fangs and teeth of an onrushing cougar. Yet he was sent out there so....so.....so Beni could get some rest???? Something does not compute. If JD's back was still cranky I would have suggested sending Beni out there if he had to crawl out there.

JD's batting average is off 43 points at .287 from .330 in 2018 and his OPS is off 147 points. So how is that contrary to a guy who is not hitting with the frequency that he was in 2018 but given the latest rocket ship baseball is just hitting it farther when he does hit it? JD is not doing badly. But the recent trend is not terribly inspiring. JD will probably be fine in the overall....probably in better shape than Mookie and definitely in better shape than Bozo Manfred.

I suspect the better teams in the AL are a cut above the better teams in the NL as they were last year. I also suspect that the Yankees will spend whatever it takes to get past the other AL teams and to and through the WS. I don't think there is another AL team willing to do that including us.

Expectations for me as a fan are not more than a foil. I love to laugh at "expectations". I will enjoy watching the Sox play if they are in the basement or in the penthouse. Have enjoyed them more often in the basement THAN the penthouse in my time. I also have to admit that part of my "enjoyment" of the game is to raze the ever optimistic, ever unrealistic Sox PR department trying in vain to pump tires with holes in them and I enjoy razing MLB's PR department for its ludicrous pumping of tires with holes in them. But neither expectations, or PR departments or idiot Manfred will prevent me from enjoying this game, the players that play it a zillion times better than I was able to play it or enjoying the Red Sox whether in the basement or the penthouse. The only way to get under my skin is to be a player or a team that does not appreciate or respect the marvelous benefits of what are in the main, God given talents. Everything else, I laugh at for the most part.

I think JD has gotten himself into a rut. In general, what passes for ML pitching these days is not very inspiring. While many want to claim its all about the cost of starting pitching and that is what started the whole trend toward fewer complete games and less innings from starters and the army of relief pitchers in the pen I think that crowd has the chicken ahead of the egg. The pitching is simply not as good which turned coaches and managers to this whole "give me all you can for as long as you can give it to me" methodology which is virtually the same thing as saying "I know you guys really do in fact suck....just give me what you got and when you are a spent load, I will stitch it together from there". Heck average innings per start this year is probably going to slip below 6 innings ACROSS MLB inclusive of the big bucks fat cat pitchers in MLB. So now we pay millions of dollars for what is in fact starting pitching suckage and so called "Quality Starts" and it all flows downhill from there. Here comes the army of relief pitchers in the pen, paying big bucks for Closers (or not) and a short bench which really does make it difficult to play the pro game as intended. But as it relates to hitters like JD and Mookie and on and on and on, they all got used to just waiting for the pitcher to toss a pile of crap pitch up to the plate for them to bash. For Mookie, its an inner half FB that he uses his hands and wrists and a compact swing to knock over the LF wall. For JD, its a crap Slider or Curve or even weak cheese thrown just farther out over the plate and a little lower than Mookie's optimal pitch which JD takes to the RF bullpen with power. What happened this year is that they are not getting those pitches. Pitchers are not giving up as much weak cheese over the middle of the plate and are instead just spinning hook after hook up to the plate low and away, low and inside, finishing either a foot off the plate or even barely making it to the plate, and they can't hit it. They can't hit it and they can't lay off of it. Its worse for them than high heat they can't reach. Though high heat is the pitch they get when they are caught focusing on all those hooks low that don't even finish in the zone and then they fall victim to the high heat as well. AND THEN HERE COMES THE CHANGE UP. This is also the distinguishing feature of MLB baseball that has STILL not changed no matter all of MLB's efforts to manipulate this game. You still get pitchers that can make you look silly because no hitter ever owned the whole plate. Never happened other than with true punch and judy hitters and LORD KNOWS nobody wants to be one of those these days. No hitter with power ever owned the whole plate on every pitch. I even wonder if hitters have lost the ability to see the spinning seams of the baseball from the pitchers hand......or along with all the other changes brought on by the rocket ship super slick baseball, is it just flat impossible for them to pick up the spin from the pitcher's hand. That has always had to be a nanosecond ability on the part of the hitter. Picking up the spin has to be almost instantaneous or its too late. In fact that sort of unreal, other worldly hand to eye coordination is what knocked so many of us out of baseball as those players with true talent, REAL HITTING TALENT just went right past us. So yes, this version of the ML hitter can knock the ball a mile because all you have to do is touch this thing with the barrel of the bat, ANY PART of the barrel and this baby is gone! One handed swings....gone, all your weight forward, swing already spent.... gone. Both together....still gone and to the deepest part of these parks no less. But the response from pitchers, a response that came far faster than I thought it would come was to throw more spinning hooks of all varieties than I ever thought I would see and the hitters either can't see them or can and simply can't lay off them and can't hit them either. X can, Vaz can, Devers can, Holt can, Nunny can. Notice that I am claiming their ability in lesser degrees from X through Nunny. Then there is Chavis who can only hit a bender thrown right over the middle of the plate. Devers and Holt have an advantage because they will never face as many same handed pitchers as any RH hitter in this league is going to face and the breaking stuff is more effective against the same handed hitter. When one of these guys start throwing an ole' timey screwball again instead of a two seam I am going to laugh my ass off and stick another pin in my Manfred voodoo doll.

Actually CALLING them anything is another version of the same scam that calls 6 innings at some number of runs a "quality start". Its just more crap invented by stat-geeks for agents to justify salaries. "Why my player had 10 quality starts last year. That should be worth at least $2M per for a $20M annual salary."We have already blown up the salaries of Closers. Lets blow up the salaries of the entire pen.Why not....not that anybody realizes that 80% of the actual audience for these things is made up of 65+ year olds like me. Once we die off, then what? Honestly the amount that the powers that be in MLB and the stat-geeks are artificially manipulating this game is just ridiculous.

No question about it....you can tolerate a good deal of to and fro in the short stokes between the starter and the closer, but if you can't close out games, if you are giving up leads and thus games or being forced to extras because you have nobody really able to stand the heat of the 9th inning, you're just asking for it. I am not real sure I favor this whole idea of calling failures ahead of the 9th inning "blown saves". All we are going to do is end up convincing ourselves that the 7th and 8th innings are just like the 9th. They aren't and thats the point. Teams try to get Starters our of games and get to their pens. Heck if the Red Sox could not get to pens, we would barely score at all regardless of all the noise and hoopla about our runs scoring offense blah...blah...blah. Given that we have IMO already screwed the hooch in having anointed Starters as being worth millions of $$ to pitch 6 innings at best, Managers should be expected to stitch together the means to get to the 9th inning. Their offenses should be able to beat the other team's pen and get to the 9th inning with a lead and then have a Closer capable of standing the 9th inning heat. That is the game as it is played today. It at least partially resembles the game I grew up with that had starters pitching regularly into the 7th and 8th if not completing games, bullpens not being this veritable army of arms and of course then bench compliments that actually allow the game to be played as it should. If we make this next transition that will result from this saves and blown saves nonsense ahead of the 9th ninth inning this game is just going to devolve farther until it is no longer recognizable as baseball. The Stat-geeks are entirely out of control IMO. I wonder how many of them actually ever played this game.

I don't agree that Barnes did not make pitches that could have and frankly should have had Abreu. Its not like Abreu was just toying with Barnes like Kansas City's Perez was toying with somebody I can't remember from 3 years ago. Abreu just beat him. Several of those that Abreu fouled off should have had him out as Barnes was working him up and down, Curve and FB. Even Mookie's 12 pitch job was not IMO as impressive as what Abreu did here. Barnes is no closer though. The amount of intensity that hitters bring to the ninth inning requires somebody that can sustain and perform through that...in other words, beat the hitter as opposed to the hitter winning the battle. I would also offer something I have posted before. Barnes is not as effective on the second day of back to back stint days. No idea why Barnes was thrown into yesterday's game where he was thrown in. That was a waste and we don't have arms to waste.

We don't have a closer. But if we had one, his name would not be Matt Barnes.

Absolutely CORRECT!!

What a hitter...that is all there is to say about that.

Can't believe what Abreu is doing here. I would have been out 12 times by now.

Barnes would be in much better shape if he didn't get behind in the count so often.

Put ducks on the pond in front of X and he sees roast duck for dinner.