jung

Erod likely to continue to have a tough time with this team. They are good, disciplined hitters that will hit your strikes unless you can keep them off balance with some sort of a + secondary pitch. Tonight Erod does not have that terrific change he had a couple of starts ago and without a really good secondary pitch, Erod struggles. We get on him a good deal about being Mr Nibbles. But when he does not have a really good secondary pitch going for him on a given night, he is almost better off as Mr Nibbles against a team like the Braves.

I have seen this ump do this his entire career. He is for me the undisputed king of the makeup call. But that really bother me. Don't make so many mistakes and you might not feel so compelled to makeup calls.

One thing I should say about Hanley or at least my opinion of Hanley, while I took a swipe at Hanley in an earlier post commenting about his tendency to get mad about something or another, get really focused and make the opposing team pay for whatever it was that had him irked. I really thought his ability to focus and pull it together, something he has shown throughout his career would mean that he would pull it together this year to earn the vesting. Maybe he is just enough past it for a career that he just could not muster that up. Anyway, I did not think he was far enough past it not to muster up a serious year for him. Not really sure why this is working out this way for Hanley.

Yea I know he has been there. Not as often as he should have been. With exceptions for the rare pitcher that might swing somebody else into that spot. JD is probably here permanently now and well he should be. XB could go from really really good to incredible and that might bump JD back to 4. Other than that,I suspect this is where we will see. him.

We finally got JD to the 3 hole. That took some effort.

Cherrys has to get some credit for guys that have spent some time in the Sox system. It is not Cherry's fault that the Sox saw a GM in a Dir of Player Personnel. Dir of Player Personnel is was and will likely always be the best job in baseball for Cherry's. If somebody whated to pay him a premium for that job, they would have every reason to believe it would pay off over time.

The Sox did it last year without much difficulty. I don't know if we still have that same basket of not so good pitchers down there to fool around with...but I would bet we do. We have always a basket of doing nothing, going nowhere pitchers and we fool around with them liberally.

Been nice knowing ya' Hanley. But you only performing when something stupid pissed you off was getting old. Have fun wherever you go.

Well they certainly took care of the "who gets sent down problem"

Can't expect a starter to be aces every time out. Not sure why Porcello slide so far last night as he could not even get any swing and miss on any pitch. They hit everything someplace. As for who should go down for Pedey to come up. I am inclined to think they will start to shuttle relief pitchers back and forth from Pawtucket on an as needed and as used basis. They don't have enough every day players on this team as it is.

The home nine appears to be looking ahead to the Braves which would be interesting were in it not for the fact that the Braves are not in our division, not even in our league and a win in game 1 of that series is actually not worth as much as a win against a league opponent. What the heck is nunez doing?

They had something like 10k fans for game 1 and a wasteland since then.

Oh for God sake. I am less concerned with the walks than I am that Rick cannot get any pitch past a single hitter. They are hitting everything. Does he have a swing and miss yet? And what they heck is JD doing out there in LF. Was he expecting a day off today and didn't get one?

We gave up the run and lost the first out of the inning. This could now turn into a rally inning.

Oh for God sake Sandy. You have to catch that.

Rick looks horrible so far tonight.

Now that we are well into the season it should be obvious that the strength of this team is the rotation. Viewed on a relative basis what this team rolls out there every game is simply way above what other teams can roll out there. Even when a team like the Rays that has to have a bullpen game out of every 5 but can set up its rotation to put its best foot forward vs the Sox rotation, barely holds its own against us. Snell might turn out to out pitch us in this game coming up. But I would not bank on that against Rick.

Geez the Rays are walking people to get to our 3 hole hitter. Thats a heck of a note

Oh my God. Nicely done Hanley.

Oh well, at least JBJ might hit better this way. His front shoulder might have been too high before. He looks better swinging the bat this way. But I just give up on this base running thing. I just give up.

Looks to me like JBJ is trying to get his front shoulder down and out of the way. Have not seen him do that recently. Maybe that front shoulder is what causes his head to tilt.

Seem to have something of a pitching dual going here.

I opened up the game thread last night as soon as I saw it up and then promptly missed the entire game. First full game missed on the year. Nice, real nice jung. Hopefully I will do better tonight.

Because that was never going to happen. There was not ever going to be some wholesale change to trying to go oppos in this league. In the first place its hard to do consistently and in the second place it is entirely contrary to every PR and monetary influence there is on the players. There agents are telling them to hit HR's. We are telling them to hit HR's, the Dead Presidents are telling them to hit more HR's and those three influences trump anything a manager is going to say in this day and age. Then you lump on what the league is doing or not doing in rules changes and it should be obvious that the preponderance of influences and incentives to hit over and not around the shift. The accepted response is to hit over the shift and the juiced baseball surely helps that. Plus curtailing the shift into something less pervasive would be easy. That they don't do it is tantamount to a admission that players are incentivized and influenced to hit over it and that is exactly how MLB wants it. Hence MLB won't curtail it regardless of how easy it would be. The total number of shifts during each championship season has grown exponentially since Joe Maddon reintroduced the thing in its current form several years ago. We are up to thousands and thousands of shifts per championship season now.

Just remember, it took an out and out intervention to get him out of the dregs of his 2014 and this swing problem is actually considerably worse than the one he had in 2014.