jung

Well Pom would be a good example of DD hypnotizing somebody. It is going to be hard to make the case that Pom is sound physically when the whole league saw him throw his first 92mph FB in weeks and immediately retire to the DL after that stint. No matter how he pitches if he pitches against ML teams again this year nobody is going to let DD forget that...unless DD is a hypnotist.

Cora and DD need to get enough of a look at Thornburg pitching against MLB hitters before the trade deadline. Probably means he needs to get up here in the next couple weeks worst case.

So KC relief pitcher Herrera went yesterday and apparently the Sox just had nothing to offer. "News" is that talks between the Sox and Orioles have broken down also over the Sox really having nothing to offer. I guess there is some musing over Britton and Machado for Devers. Thats not going to happen. The Sox pulling off something meaningful is looking less like a miraculous job by DD and more like a work of hypnosis by DD. DD could probably get Britton by himself MAYBE.

Britton would certainly be less complicated. Still leaves us an everyday player short.

I would not give up Devers for Machado either. Devers is just young. He is not a terrible player. He is probably not even a terrible fielder once he learns how to field. At the same time, I would agree that a Machado or a player very close to a Machado would be a most needed and most significant improvement...enough to make this team a true post season contender. They are at least an everyday player short no matter how you slice it. As much as I would like more relief help our pen might be OK or at least something we can supplement successfully at little cost in anything but money. A real everyday player that can actually help this team....that is a whole nuther' story. Where we are "lucky" is that through a Machado would be as good as it gets for this team for a third of a season and post season run, we could use help at 1st and maybe even 2nd depending on what is really happening with Pedey. So really only OF and Short and Catcher are set for this team. That leaves three positions with which to work to bring in an upgrade with Machado being perfect. If there is a real shame here it might be that we were not prepared to try to capture Moose at the money he was able to command even for just one season. We are an everyday player short. I could be swayed to trading Devers for Machado if Machado came packaged up with more than 2018 in a Sox uni. But would not do Devers just for the remainder of Machado for 2018. Machado would have to come with a WS trophy or at least a WS appearance sticking out of his back pocket for me to be OK with that.

You just made my point for me. Cora is boxed. There is really nothing he can do about the circumstance he has been handed. You are correct. Cora can't just move players around willynilly during the course of a game. However I see no rational for taking your point as a positive factor for us. The performance of our LH hitting corp vs LH pitchers including that of Beni and Rafi is piss poor and the hitting performance of our switch hitters against LH pitchers is piss poor and there is literally nothing we can do about it. Holt is the only exception and he is never going to get enough playing time to make that mean anything. I happen to think that none of this is either Beni's or Rafi's fault because they are just young. It won't prevent people from throwing them under the bus. Apparently we think Mookies and Harpers and Trouts just grow on trees and they don't. It is a very very small percentage of players of which neither Beni nor Rafi are members that can just come up, play significant roles in 162 game seasons and then not be held accountable by the real baseball teams with real scouting abilities that they will face every day in the post season. There is simply not enough team here. My point is that we will not at the end of the day hold the Morelands or the Nunez's or the Swiharts or Leon's accountable at the end of the season. We will hold guys like Rafi and Beni accountable because they have been given these significant roles, batting high in the order for long stretches of the season while Sox PR heralds them as the second coming. We will not realize that it is just those significant roles and the data set produced by it that the real baseball teams we will face at the end of the season will feast upon. The only hope we really have to legitimize an actual post season run would be for DD to pull a rabbit out of a hat and I don't see that one happening either. This team just dumped Hanley for the most part because they don't want to vest him for next year. Fine as far as it goes as long as we realize that Sox brass is making a judgement very similar to the one I am making. I don't think anybody wants to make the case that Pedey should he return at all changes to any great degree the outlook for this team. A third of a season of a Machado might be the only thing we can do and that would seem more a hail mary pass hope more than something at all likely. But I wll take it or anything like it because there is just not enough team here. God help us if JD goes down because then nothing will help us which is why I do not want to see JD in a Fenway OF under any circumstances. His bat goes out of this lineup and this team is done as any sort of post season contender.

Beni against LH pitchers: .197/.295/.685 No sense in posting Rafis as his are even worse. Those are stats for a guy that Cora simply hasn't the means or the team to move out of the 2 hole no matter who is pitching and they expect me to believe that is the MO of a championship caliber team! It is just a fantasy to think the few real ML teams there are won't take that along with the other piss poor splits our LH hitters have against LH pitchers and just ram it right down our throats at the point in time when we are only playing actual ML teams of which there are only 5 in the AL. I would not be so certain about whether or not they are damaged by it either. It certainly does us little good to be instructing players at a league level where the need to instruct was never called for and therefor are skills that don't really exist. Rafi does not field good enough yet to be out of the instruction league. We will never know what Swihart could have been because we have already f***ed him over five ways from Sunday. Probably the best thing that ever happened to Travis Shaw was getting away from the Boston Franchise. Here we have become a franchise that throws its young players in the deep end of the pool ignoring entirely that some of them will just drown and we don't even do it to win championships. We do it because they are cute and they fit into some PR drivel they want to sell. They hopefully have stopped bringing in FA's for some PR drivel they want to sell. Getting roasted alive on Panda/Hanley was hopefully enough of a lesson for them.

Beni is not ready to be #2 in the order day in and day out for a team that continues to try to peddle the idea that the 2018 edition is a legit post season contender. Beni is ready for the 2 hole every day if this was Minnesota. If this was Tampa or Toronto or any of a number of crap franchises going nowhere. But Cora is stuck being held by the nose and kicked in the ass because he has no choice but to continue to bat Beni and Rafi higher up in the everyday order than they should be for a team that already has a bunch of puss-heads batting 7-9 in the order. Cora can't do a darned thing about it regardless of whether we are facing a LH or a RH starter. Come crunch time, when every team we play every game will be a legit ML baseball team that weakness will bite us big time. Teams will be lining up their LH pitchers to face us and it won't take much of a LH pitcher to shut us down when two of the top 6 guys in the order are as bad against LH pitching as Beni and Rafi and 7-9 is as bad as they are regardless of who is on the mound. We are expecting what....that Mookie and JD and XB are going to be God every game? Good luck with that one. Moreland can't handle the load we are handing him while I am at it. What bothers me is that in Benis and Rafi's cases its youth and nothing more than youth. The Red Sox FO created this mess and guys like Rafi and Beni when he becomes a a big wiff machine in the post season who are not even getting paid that much end up taking the abuse for it. Anybody who tells me we will not be seeing complaints about "Beni the fraud" when he gets exposed in the post season is lying. What is happening to Devers is just a preview of coming attractions for both of them.

Should have done something about that as they were divesting themselves of Panda. In fact Panda should never have come here in the first place. But if they wanted to be taken seriously as a team that could go somewhere in the post season then they needed a real 3rd baseman instead of screwing around with Panda and then when that failed trying to hide the need for a real 3rd baseman behind a kid. If they don't actually have any intentions toward a real post season run then fine I guess. But thinking this team is going somewhere post season becomes very difficult when you have virtual kids playing big big junks of 162 game seasons and then expecting that by season end when every game is against a real baseball team that their youth will not become even more evident in the crucible of post season play. The Sox are stuck now. I just don't like seeing kids like Devers treated like this is on them as players because its not. We should be hoping for the day when Devers was good enough to come up as either a 1st baseman or a 3rd baseman, not banging on him because he is not much of a ML 3rd baseman. Its not his fault. This should be Beni's first full ML season and he is not ready yet either. All you have to do is look at his splits to see that.

Devers has done better with reaction plays to his right. But he is still terrible on anything he has time to think about and anything either right at him or to his left. Still has a long way to go. But I am telling you, the kid does not belong up here at all YET. If this pays off over time it does. But for now, there are a ton of holes in Rafi's game. IMO, we tend to punish him for his age and that is on the Sox, not him. They should give somebody like Rafi more time to develop instead of bringing him up and then drooling all over him. The Sox really do not do a kid like Rafi any favors.

Blammo...team can make mince meat out of RH pitchers.

Good opportunity here even with two outs. This is probably how we will beat this guy. Couple hits and somebody like JD smacks one.

Nicely done JBJ. I was about to say this could be a good week for Jackie. Four RHP's in a row starting with this bum.

At least we are facing a RH pitcher today. Big dif for us mainly because our RH hitting corp is that much better against same handed pitchers than are LH hitter corp which is flat putrid against same handed pitchers with the exception of Holt. He is the only LH hitter we have that carries reverse split. The rest of them don't get anywhere near a reverse split including Beni and Rafi, a telltale sign of their youth. We would not expect them to carry anything like a reverse split nor even be close in that regard. Especially tough sledding against LH pitchers with a really solid secondary pitch. Moreland struggles against lefties and even our switch hitters struggle more against LH pitchers. On the other hand, Betts and JD are very good against same handed pitchers and XB is not bad at all. So we have as good a shot as we are going to get of earning the split today.

Need to earn our split today.

Not really. But they have a bit more flexibility in the roster, a better pen and more importantly they have a hole card. They have that stupid little shoebox of a stadium and both their LH and RH hitters know how to use it to its full advantage. In fact, their RH hitters are more annoying in that park than their LH hitters! I don't know of another team in the AL with more of a park advantage and more of a team suited to it than the MFY. The Astros are close. The M's are behind the Astros. But nobody gets close to the Yankees for having built and instructed a team designed for their home park. If they get to have home field through the post season they will be a difficult team to beat. The Astros probably have enough juice to take them down and the Astros are still the favorites IMO. I don't know that anybody else in the AL has enough horses to take that Yankee team down in a short series if it has home field.

Last night was last night. Putting players as young as Beni and Rafi in positions where they literally have to carry such a heavy load for 162 games is a deal with the devil. It has been a deal with the devil since the Sox PR machine started advertising these guys as the second coming of Jesus Christ. It is barely fine to have players this young playing with really no back up of any consequence for 162 games. To have them there anticipating that they are going to get you successfully through 162 AND into a deep post season run is frankly a little delusional. By season end, the weaknesses of these two young players will be fully understood and will be exploited by what will inevitably be the best rotations in baseball because this game has always been and continues to be about pitching in the main. I suppose we might muse that one day this burden we are making them carry will pay off in a faster maturation and we can hold onto that. We have to hold onto that. But considering it a plus in this year is what is a bit delusional. They will have valleys that are disturbing and peaks that are wonderful. But their valleys during the course of 162 will be deeper and more problematic than we like which is particularly true of Devers. To be frank, this should be Beni's first year in the bigs and Devers should still be learning the game somewhere other than the pinnacle of the game. You add to that the obvious lineup issues presented by Moreland and Holt (both very professional baseball players) and nunez, the enigmatic JBJ and the utterly useless Swihart and you begin to realize that the reason we win so many games is because of our rotation and because the bulk of the teams we face are utter and complete trash masquerading as ML baseball teams. All wonderful until the day when we are only facing teams that are actual ML baseball teams like we are. We all know when that day comes.

Well we could make the case that Devers will come into his own in 2019 though I think that is one year optimistic. Beni should be prime in 2019. They are both a bit too young to be carrying as much of the burden as they have for a team with post season expectations. Here they are tonight still in diapers, batting from the 2 and 4 holes against a LH pitcher. Getting to the post season...not a problem for this team. Not sure we can expect much from them in the post season unless DD pulls a rabbit out of a hat at the deadline. Not sure he has the ammo to do that this year.

That is very true and its also true that Swihart does not belong on this team at all. I think the Sox have got to hope that JBJ goes on a run somewhere in here. I just don't see the rational for trading him at this point. In the off season...gladly...but now, I don't think there is an option to hoping he has a serious hot streak somewhere in here. In my opinion Beni and Devers are a bit too young still to be as under the gun as they are on this team. Beni needs one more year anyway and Devers needs two at least. But here they are...Beni is always in the two hole if not batting lead off if Mookie is out and Devers was cleanup tonight for God sake. So we have two left hand hitters that are basically in diapers batting from 2 and 4 tonight against a LH pitcher and I am not sure I can argue with Cora about that because what choice does he really have?

The Hanley move would seem to suggest that the Sox think their young players other than Mookie need another year of seasoning and they need the $22m from next season that they would have paid Hanely to sign another serious bat. Pedey is not an answer at his age though it will be good to have his defense back and he can't be worse at the plate than some of the guys we are sending up there now. But if I had to bet, I would bet the Sox really don't think their chances of getting past both the MFY and the Astros are that good this year. The Sox were willing to risk what Hanley could give them this year against having to pay him $22m in 2019. I frankly don't think Hanley would give the Sox a better chance of getting past both the MFY and the Astros this year. If they get past them they get past them. Just don't see Hanley figuring greatly in that calculus.

The other thing that happened immediately after the Maneae game is that pitchers stopped feeding us 0-0 FB's for strikes and started pitching in reverse, showing the FB more often early in counts. Lots of pitchers can do that. This Sox team is going to win a ton of regular season games especially in this league this year. Not at all confident about the post season. Just too many holes that they have to fill and they are just making it too easy to scout them effectively.

Excuse me but you are whistling past the graveyard of you don't think this will haunt us. It already is haunting us.

I would not be going that far just yet. But we do need to do something with Swihart and get more heft off the bench and we are going to have to deal at some point with the entire league knowing we are super vulnerable to LHers that feature the change. If we don't we are going to be seeing them coming out of the woodwork when push comes to shove. Guys will be lining up their pitching staffs to match up with our weakness and we will end up wondering why nobody is hitting.

Yea...we scored 3 ER's in 7 innings the second time around and LOST in Boston. We can't be creaming our pants when one of our guys has one of these so called quality starts and then call it some sort of victory when a guy no-hits us in one park and then goes 7 giving up 3 ER's and wins again in our park. Still does not change the reality of being vulnerable to LH pitchers that feature a Change. In fact, we have really not been the same hitting team since the first Maneae game.

If we think its some accident that the two pitchers that have absolutely dominated the Sox this year are LH pitchers that feature great Changeups we are dreaming. The problem is that Maneae really showed the league how to get the Sox hitters out and now LeBlanc is putting a period to the sentence. Still and all, we usually get our hits and score runs. But when push comes to shove expect to see teams lining up their LHers for us, especially if they are guys like Maneae and LeBlanc.