jung

Fulmer throwing more breaking stuff this year. What else is new. Isn't everybody?

1. Leury Garcia (S) CF 2. Tim Anderson ® SS 3. Jose Abreu ® 1B 4. James McCann ® DH 5. Eloy Jimenez ® LF 6. Jon Jay (L) RF 7. Yoan Moncada (S) 3B 8. Jose Rondon ® 2B 9. Zack Collins (L) C 1. Mookie Betts ® RF 2. Rafael Devers (L) 3B 3. Xander Bogaerts ® SS 4. J.D. Martinez ® LF 5. Jackie Bradley Jr. (L) CF 6. Christian Vazquez ® C 7. Michael Chavis ® 1B 8. Marco Hernandez (L) 2B 9. Eduardo Nunez ® DH Devers to the 2 spot in the order. JD to LF in Fenway. I guess all I can say about that is at least its not RF in Fenway.

Yea I am completely convinced that Erod is on his way to his best season ever...Again that might not be saying much and really that is due to his Change and not because he can even at this stage throw 3 different pitches in a given start, but there it is. But oh by the way, Erod....EROD of all people is on his way to being the only Sox Starter that might just exceed the league average for innings per start for Starters all in, meaning including the big dick, fat cat guys getting a zillion $$ a year to pitch. And: Finally there is the rub in this absurd game that MLB/Manfred is inventing. Here MLB's TV demo is staggering for the average age in the numbers with the 18-49 demo pulling 1.7 as a number and the 65+ pulling a 9.7 meaning of course that within a total number of 6.6, 5x the households watching are 65+....barely awake in front of their TV's at 11:00 at night. This is apparently one of the really neat side effects of this "power game" that actually the older crowd of which I am a member has little to no respect for. The games take FOREVER. No wonder only the truly dedicated (like people willing to post at a baseball team forum) can really tolerate this stuff. "Well yea, I can throw 95+ if I get to scratch my balls, tug my shirt, take a deep breath, palm the ball in my glove, scratch around in the dirt around the rubber and muse about a few different pitch choices before making one" and "oh yea, I can hit this juiced up baseball 8 miles if I can ....scratch my balls, tug my shirt, take a deep breath, adjust all the crap I wear to the plate, step in and step out and scratch around in the dirt first". This s*** does however give the 3rd basemen the time to run over to second base or shortstop and then a pitch later run back again, another fabulous aspect of this modern version of the game. And then comes the army of relief pitchers and all the time it takes to accommodate them. Now get a hitter to ground into a DP or even ground into an out and earn some outs without having to K a guy....NO, SORRY, we can't do that! Even if we could the team in the field behind us will screw up the play as they regularly don't know how to.... make the play, how many outs there are, where to throw the ball or how to catch it!

I don't know what to think about that. Cora used him there early and has not used him in that role since. Not sure why. I suppose he could do it. I would rather Cora send him back to that role than the way Cora has used him since. Appears Cora has dropped him into the "basket of bull pen whatever" category and is just inserting him because he is there, sort of his time in the barrel.

That is of course the other issue. I have Walden slated to move to some higher leverage work IF HE SURVIVES THIS and DJ goes back to the pen. Hembree didn't. Neck-tat didn't. I have not been a buyer on the entire direction MLB has gone in and simply don't buy that the economics force fed the shortening of starting stints. We kept paying them more and more money for crappy starts and even invented stats designed to redefine crap as ice cream. WHAT DID WE EXPECT TO HAPPEN? You just cannot convince me that MLB has not been trying to turn this into a power game both from the batter's box and mound and they don't really give a rats behind about anything else.

Are anybody's starters with any regularity? If they want starters to go deeper into games they need to stop congratulating them and paying them off for what is s*** starter work. I said it the day it was invented, the "Quality Start" was invented for Agents by stat-geeks. But of course what I want is not the direction the powers that be in MLB want to take. They want it to be a power game from the batters box and from the mound and they don't give a damn about how much actual baseball is lost in the process. Hence we now have the "give me all you have for as long as you can" perspective on Starting pitching. Its a lousy idea, always was a lousy idea and we fans have simply fallen in line, trance like and have adopted this whole "quality start" nonsense. There is so much stuff MLB should STOP doing IMMEDIATELY it hurts. Stop messing around with the baseball itself for one thing. Stop a process that compels teams to stuff their rosters with relief pitchers so teams actually have a bench again for another thing.

IMO, Cora's dilemma (outside of not preparing his rotation to pitch at the actual start of the regular season) is that his pen is made up of niche players. Guys that he really cannot get out of a very narrow comfort zone for them. This is particularly true now that Neck-Tat is up on the shelf. Of those particular niches that each of them can fill, not one of them is a closer. Chose Brasier for the job. I think the Brasier experiment is about done. If we work from back to front, probably the best guy they have to close now is Work. Not saying I have a great deal of confidence in Work in that role. But what else are they gonna' do. Barnes is the fireman and the only fireman I have any real faith in at all. So he should be used when the fireman needs to be employed. That said, Barnes IMO has been exposed as significantly less effective on the second day if used two days in a row....in other words, another niche bull pen arm. Walden I suspect is the only guy they have that can actually go more than 1 inning in a stint. So he gets those assignments IMO. Unless it is a real raging fire that you need Barnes to put out, I suspect Walden is best used now as the guy that replaces the Starter. Taylor is really their best LH BP arm at this point. So you really do have to use him in that role. The rest of them are just a basket of whatever and you really have to use them to spare the guys you can at least say can fill some identifiable BP function. So Cora is stuck trying to fit in the rest. Can I get a 7th inning out of Brasier? Can I get anything out of Brewer or Shawaryn. Once BJ moves back to the pen, Walden can probably try some additional high leverage situations. Hembree probably outright replaces somebody when he comes back. You can literally see Cora struggling with this assortment of pen arms. Why do you think he tries to squeeze every last out from his starters?

For the most we have done what we have usually done of late...we hit cherries, meatballs, the acknowledged best pitches for a specific Sox hitter to hit. The rest were dribbers and 12 hoppers. Of the regular starting lineup X did the best job of hitting on the night by far followed by Vaz. As for the rest, if they don't get their particular version of a meatball (see Mookies HR, Beni's double, the Chavis hit) they seem pretty helpless. In other words, within the regular starting lineup, for the most part, if you don't give them not just a good pitch to hit but what for each of them individually is the perfect pitch to hit, they seem pretty helpless. I cannot call pitchers giving hitters the very pitch they should avoid like the plague "good pitching". Can't do it.

Yea I did. Good has new meaning for pitchers since the so called "Quality Start". Take a look at how often our offense has scored 3 off a Starter of late and tell me more about how GOOD he was. That said, I am becoming more and more suspicious about the effect of the these new baseballs not just on balls hit but on pitchers ability to move from grip to grip on a given night.

Not in this game and if anything the WS pen is worse than ours. I really do wonder how much the streamlined baseball is effecting pitching grips. If you look for it you can see pitchers unable to go from a particular grip to another particular grip in a given game. Porcello a few nights ago could not grip and throw a two-seam after a four-seem. Just totally lost the grip and command on a pitch that he probably came out of the womb throwing. Giolito could not throw FB's after a Slider. Just could not throw it....same problem. No command of a pitch he should have been able to command. I have been waiting for this to happen. You can't just keep taking down the seams year after year and expect nothing to happen to pitchers. That said pitchers are "trying" to throw more breaking pitches instead of FB's than I have ever seen.....EVER, not just in the last few years but EVER.

In case nobody noticed, its the No-names that won this game for us AGAIN. The No-names plus X is about what this team has right now. If it had not been the horrid WS we were playing I am not at all convinced they would have pulled this out. Sox hitters are chasing crap all over creation and outside of a rare X or Vaz AB can only hit the sweetest cookies....their most particular pitches and the WS pitchers were quite accommodating in that regard. From what I am seeing, if we ever hit another stretch of actual MLB pitching again these guys are cooked. Actually if we even hit a team that can field again, their little dribblers and nubbers will just be outs in the box score instead of hits. Its a win and I will gladly take it...but I am not seeing a team that can compete with the best this league has to offer.

IMO what timely hits we have gotten this year have come from guys like Vaz. 1-6 in the order has been a desolate wasteland of inconsistency.

Truth is though, with Holt hurt we really don't have anybody we can replace one of the everyday players with...who Sandy....Nunny. I hate having to carry an extra relief pitcher though I really don't know who I would bring up to this team if we had the spot available sad to say. IMO the way we have spend 1st base money has been sheer insanity. Thought so when we did it.

I would start pulling some of these big assed name everyday ballplayers off the field before I would pull journeyman relief pitchers off. Billy Martin used to do that pretty regularly and end up in a fist fight in the dugout. I would not mind seeing a fist fight in our dugout the way we have played.

That deserves a WTF Cora

This has got to be a Cora hunch. If Cora did not want Brewer pitching to the LH hitter he would have lifted him before the AB started. I HATE managerial hunches.

Strike 3 to Abreu from Brewer is the only kind of breaking ball you can throw trying to get a called 3rd strike with it. But the only guy I ever saw that could do that consistently, be that fine with breaking stuff was Greg Maddox who literally would carve teams up with that stuff. You came away from those games thinking Maddox was an alien from another planet.

Well at least we got three runs off a decent starter tonight....a rare event for us these days.

ERod has yet to put together a year of more than a start or two where he has equal command of his Change which has now become a great pitch for him and his slider which is now apparently in decline. Those two pitches have passed like ships in the night for Erod where optimally you would have wanted the Change to become better and the slider to have stayed where it was. It is in fact so bad and such a known quality of Erods pitching that just as he would years ago, he still abandons completely one pitch or the other. The only dif is that now its more often the slider that Erod abandons completely and not the Change. Sort of amazed that this particular quality of Erod's pitching has never changed.

So somebody explain to me how that guy thought he was ever going to get that FB past Mookie? Does not matter how bad Mookie is going you would do just as well to turn around and throw that over the fence.

But I really don't think Cora has much choice but to squeeze every out from every starter. You really want to see MORE of our Bull pen?

Well this will be Erods, best year, without question....which is unfortunately, not saying very much.

Eck is right....Erod did not have a Change grip on that and it didn't come up to the plate like a change up. Just a lousy pitch from Erod.

Gripping the baseball is not an exact science. Just as Porcello the other night could not find the grip on his two seam after throwing 4 seams (which he also could not throw for strikes) Giolito could not find the grip on his 4 seam after throwing a slider. That does tend to happen more often with this "streamlined" baseballs than I remember happening in the past.

Don't blame you Rick...I would pull him after that hot mess too.