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For a guy making $11m a year that at 29 can't get his bat within a foot of a breaking ball???? Pipe dream. The only reason he is not already on his way to a glowing career suspended from the side of buildings, soap bucket in hand is because the Sox are paying him.

So you want to take the detonated fragments of Pablo and cart them out to 3rd base in favor of the possibility that Shaw might detonate? Although even detonated and dismembered I would bet Pablo's disembodied mouth can still find its way to the nearest McDonald's.

I heard that also. Who would want him and why? He can't hit breaking pitches and is really not that much of a fielder. He is a cannon arm and not much else.

One place you can see the overemphasis on this Sabregoo is in how well pitchers field their positions now. Pitchers just pitch now. God help you if you expect more than that from them. Hitting...always a weak spot. But the numbers of them now that can't field their positions is alarming. Have you ever in you life seen more pitchers that are just helpless if the ball is hit their way? They can't catch it, they can't throw it to a base ala' Lester. Something that was at best difficult is now for many of them a role of the dice. Much like the way hitters approach their business, they simply practice and are trained up on the things the matrices say are the most important and everything else just slides. JBJ is a great defender. But who taught him how to bunt...nobody apparently. So you have a defensive wizard....mostly by natural talent that at least somebody must have spotted and helped develop to a high level who has a hard time hitting........ and nobody taught him to bunt! And don't tell me that that kid was such a lock for a ML power hitter that they just said "oh who cares". There are no 14-15-16 or even 17 year old kid with a lock on ML power hitter or ML hitter for that matter.

Just announced...the one or two diving play Pablo has managed to make this ST....he has managed to......injure himself...currently suffering back spasms.....a 3rd baseman making a diving play...gee they never have those at 3rd.....please...get this guy outta' here please! I don't even care what they pay him anymore. Every time Pablo appears at 3rd it is going to make it harder on Hanley....just get Pablo outta' here.

No..... something is "highly valued" across an enterprise when it is something that is widely deployed across an enterprise. Entire skill sets have been going down the drain for years since the development and as Elk says the over-dependence on what is in fact a stilted tool....an incomplete as it relates to the actual game it tries to quantify and through Fantasy Leagues emulate. Sure there will be anecdotal evidence of an outlier, of a rare occurrence of a player still exhibiting a tool. But there is no denying that bunting, general batsmanship, base running and for that matter defense have all been going down the drainpipe since the onset of and over-dependence on sabremetrics which should just be a tool and nothing more. However it has not been used that way.....it has mutated into baseball's divining light and the results are obvious. This didn't happen overnight either and the remedies will not happen overnight. The Shift for example is not nearly as fully deployed as it will be eventually. I would say we are somewhere between 50-60% there. I suspect baseball will continue to try to deny the Shift and ignore it till it is just eating them alive and then MAYBE finally change course back toward the fully featured game that we had once. However, don't kid yourself, the Fantasy League nuts like the way the game is going and the people who make money off of them like the way the game is going...simply don't care that it is killing off aspects of the game that make it great in real form. They will cross that bridge when they come to it as long as they have extracted what they want from it till then. Do you think they care that we are moving to an unwatchable bore when they for the most part simply care to be able to pull up the game stats on their computers and compile their Fantasy Team results? Why do you think people can even say things like "throwing for a catcher really does not matter". Have you seen the way base runners run the bases now? Runners get lousy jumps now...completely untrained on how to understand what the heck the pitcher is doing. Runners attempting to steal look back at home plate.......a cardinal sin of base running. You only back at home plate on a hit and run not a straight steal! Base runner slows down....catcher throws him out......Manager stops trying to steal. You do what you are trained to do properly and eventually stop doing what you are not trained to do.

WAR is roundly criticized as being an ineffective tool because the defensive matrices that feed it are ineffective tools. That one won't pass....sorry In fact even the offensive side of WAR is roundly criticized for being an ineffective tool...a nice toy and not much else. That GM's overemphasis this nonsense is part of the problem, not suggestive of its value. Its relevance is determined by how many idiots you can get to believe in it..... has nothing to do with its value. One of the single most interesting things about baseball is its eclectic nature all of which is spiraling down the drain......leading to a one dimensional game eventually....how "exciting" is the Home Run Derby for example even when by the greatest stars of today's game.....BORRRRRRRING......Its so boring the league is trying to change it to pump it and its announcers are left with screaming hyperbole as a means to pump its tires.

Just as you choose. Until somebody can explain to me another reason for why bunting, base running frankly a number of baseball skills started their spiral down the drain exactly as Sabresludge became so prevalent, I will hold to my views thank you. The timing is as clear as the noses on Mt Rushmore's faces. You can take a shot at how long these sorts of trends take to wind their way through baseball virtually all of them beginning to disappear at the same time and you would count back to the beginnings of Sabresludge popularity. These skills are clearly no longer taught or learned skills and because of that, another element of the game, a Catcher's ability to throw out runners also goes down the drain with the rest. Because of Sabreshit, a process that I hate, the exaggerated shift succeeds. I don't applaud Madden for starting the process of developing a tactic to its fullest because I like the tactic....I hate the darned thing. I applaud him for seeing this for what it is, for seeing the handwriting on the wall and having the brains to find his way to a means to deal with it. Hitters are in the main helpless in the face of the shift and it is not even as fully deployed to this point as it will be. At some point we are are going to end up with the equivalent of the old "Home Run Derby" TV show with the only people happy with that the Fantasy League players who will finally have the game boiled down for them to a very least common denominator.

Its only been able to quantify and qualify to any degree authoritative, hitting matrices and a few pitching matrices which is the point. That leads to a number of woes some of which I identified above. One effect is that it boils all offense down to one feature of the offensive side of the game again leading to a number of woes that are utterly contrary to the spirit of the game. "Market inefficiencies" is nothing more than a term used to cloud the reality of what is happening to this game and to what end? Again what has Oakland actually won since adopting it whole hog?

Throwing for a catcher is "just gravy" because nobody knows how to run bases anymore. Nobody knows how to steal, how to take extra bases, how to bunt...all of that has gone by the boards in this insane, steadfast adherence to the sabremetrics mantra.....nothing but hitting matters. The foolishness in this is that they have all been hoodwinked. Nobody even teaches these skills any longer. We glorify via their salary a putz like Pablo who produced the laughable base running numbers that Pete Abraham put out the other day. Clearly the whole scale of players rated as base runners has gone in the tank with the bottom represented by a guy that can't run at all. That the mighty sabremetricans have not been able to develop tools that allow them to quantify and qualify things like defense and base running or batsmanship has led them to a very political decision or at the least a business decision. If we can't quantify or qualify it.....it must not matter! So things that make baseball a great game and clearly as conceived, the most eclectic game we have simply get swept under the carpet by a belief in geeks that act like computers. Whatever made us believe these people understood this game? How many championships has it earned them out there in Oakland? It is this insane insistence on and adherence to the principles of a stilted rating system, Sabremetrics, that guided Joe Madden to its baseball response....the exaggerated shift.....which is now slowly but surely being adopted across baseball. We can beat on Madden for his odd take on a manager's interaction with players all we want....that a manager of a team devoted to pitching and run prevention, that could not afford to compete for MLB's greatest hitters thought his way through the Sabresludge to a tool designed to counter it is as close to sheer genius that we will ever see come out of a manager's place in the dugout.

The right place for Pablo next year is some other city.

And how is this actually meaningful. Here..lets go with an analog: You already know Pablo is awful. So you want to trade the awful you know for the awful that might be...Sorry...give me the awful that might be.

And what do you do with Pablo who now can't react fast enough to balls, can't get to them once he reacts to them, feeds his 1st basemen Hanley low throws, the one thing other than pop ups that Hanley is struggling to deal with and can't run and can't hit for Power. Pete Abraham's figures on Pablo's base running stats last year are appalling. Why are we trying to shoehorn this guy into a starting spot on this team? He stinks...he stank last year and shows every sign that he is going to stink worse this year. Complaining about what Shaw might be is whistling past the grave yard when you already know what Pablo is. If Pablo beats Shaw out for the job I suspect it will be because the Sox for all their talk will have lowered the bar for Pablo to make it happen. If that does happen then DD better be the guy with his finger on the trigger because Farrell has never been fast on the draw with regard to vet replacement.

JBJ again with a very solid AB against a LH pitcher. Fights to keep the shoulder from flying open...nice balanced swing, not trying to do too much...doubles in two runs. If he would just go to the plate with the same attitude against RH pitchers, his career as an everyday player would be made. JBJ follows that with the best AB against a RH pitcher I have seen from him this spring and rips a single to RF. Maybe he is finally getting it. Crap...Carston Smith comes out of the game very quickly flexing his pitching arm and wearing that Oh s*** look on his face. Whatever it is, it can't be great.

That depends on who you move where. If we are stuck unable to keep up scoring runs in the AL East as we were last year then sticking a guy that had as many RBI as Mookie had hitting from the 1 hole in a spot where he gets much more opportunity could have a much larger impact than minuscule. Remember a goodly number of Mookies RBI came during JBJ's run late in the year when those two players were just about in the middle of every rally the Sox had. If JBJ is not getting on as he was Mookie does not get those RBI. I think JBJ has a great chance to finally meet the expectations we have set for him all these years...but not more than that. We are not the Jays offense and all the Yankees have to do to compete is have decent, not great but pitching and keep their LH power upright for most of a season. That is one of the things that irritates me about Yankee fans beating their breasts about not finishing last. In that shoe box as long as they can keep their LH power upright not finishing last is nothing to write home about. They will be competitive by virtue of that dumb park. Most of our pitching improvement is in the pen and this sort of pen only becomes a game winning tool if you hand it leads. At this point even if Kelly is real, starting pitching is still an issue here. So far nobody else is real other than Price and Kelly has not done anything over a full season yet. Plus the potential for minor improvement with lineup changes cuts both ways. What is the advantage to keeping Mookie at the top for this team? This is the, "we don't run because we are the power hitting team that does not want to run out of innings team". So what good does Mookie really do up there? We run ala' Farrell and Butters wacky running moves which generally blow up in their faces. So we do run ourselves into outs but not because we run als' the traditional running team. We don't run ala' a KC nor should we IMO. We run ala' Butter and Farrell and we all know what that looks like.

So I had not seen Kelly throw a single pitch this spring before today...have no idea what he was throwing before today. But today it looked just like he finished last year...not overdependent of 2 seam or 4 seam. Putting hitters away with Curve or Change mostly instead of just hammering away with 2 or 4 seam. He looked good. Probably second to the Price start of a few days ago. The Cards ran into some stupid outs...but did not change the way Kelly threw or how good he looked. Mookie made the OF throw of his OF career today from right....had another HR. Actually the wind was blowing out real hard just before a major storm and there were three wind blown HR's....one from Cards, two from us. I am still convinced that he should be deeper in the order and not leading off. His bat is just too valuable as an RBI source unless the middle of the order is much better this year than last and they are never going to use his speed to optimal effect from the top of the order IMO. That is just not the team this is in spite of Farrell and his wacky running stuff.

How ironic spud....my exercise of choice after my back would no longer allow me to run was my dirt bike. Then my back really went bad and that was the end of that too.

You are right about that. I probably would not. Believing anything that a MLB exec says publicly is like believing that two movie stars imperviously un-involved showing up at the Oscars together are "dating".

If that is true then Spud has been right this whole time...He is without doubt bumping the 300 mark. Time for a new term in baseball, like the Mendoza line. What to call it....The Sandoval Arc........The Sandoval Circle.........The Panda Parabola???

Anybody know if Vaz is reporting stiffness in his forearm after today's game? I heard something that was attached to JBJ's reported shoulder stiffness about Vaz. I can only assume that if that was pregame, they would not have had Vaz play today.

Yup about right Spud. These split squad games with no coverage of either are a little tough. We lost both today. Porcello went 4 innings v Twins. Gave up 6 hits, no HR's, 1 BB and 3 runs all in the 2nd inning. So that sounds like the Twins must have bunched their hits in that 2nd inning to get the runs. In the other game, the Sox only scored 1 run against Tampa. Elias made a good showing. Pablo had his throwing error in that game. Two games, one each Sat and Sun broadcast this weekend. After this road swing to the other side of the state expect to see a bunch of minor league assignments.

Elias could get the spot and not Wright. Elias certainly has a better chance at it than Owens. But I think like Owens Elias will have to pitch his way past Wright to get it. It won't just be given to him.

Well I probably should have said that my preference by leaps and bounds would be to have Eddie out there. But I know they have to be careful with this injury...it is sort of why telling us that they were going to reevaluate 72 hours later was typical mumbo jumbo. 72 hours was not going to tell them anything given what they knew. You cannot mess with this and any discomfort at all along the way should be considered a setback and adjudged accordingly. But since it can't be Eddie for now.....I will take the guy for 2-3 starts that will likely be even more confounding to hitters this early in a season than he would be normally. Wright could skate by 2-3 starts and just look like a world beater this early in a season though we might know otherwise. How happy would we be if they were all wins?

Even more so than the last time we had this discussion, it looks like Wright will get the slot in the rotation until Eddie comes back. Surely it can't be Owens. As of last discussion, he was a Control Pitcher with no control, bordering now on Control Pitcher that can't find the plate. I don't view Wright getting the early spot as a bad thing at all. Throwing a knuckler at somebody early in the season does have its advantages.

I don't care what they are saying! Since when have I ever given a rats behind about what they are SAYING. What I can see is what I can see. He is making all the ground ball plays. He is as yet not comfortable or secure around the bag and not comfortable or secure fielding pop ups.