jung

2nd time through the order Sox...time to get crackin'

I way like XB batting 9th and right in front of Ells as opposed to something like 8th and in front of Drew

Drew was not even on the same planet for that AB.

To be honest I don't see what all the excitement is about so far. There is nothing here that is Scherzer like or Verlander like or even Sanchez like.

Oh no Fox...he walked somebody. What are you going to talk about now?

Pitched him too carefully John

One of the things we love about Pedey...game has not started yet and his uni is already dirty.

Wacha will pitch the way he is used to pitching and he will hope that he can do what he does well. It will either work or not.

Perhaps I should have been more specific. There is no way that Lester was throwing spitters. You can see the added spin dimension of the spitter vs anything else and I do mean anything. Well thrown splitters make hitters look more foolish than well thrown knuckle balls. There is just about no way to hit the well thrown splitter...there is almost no way to look like you ever even had a chance to hit the well thrown spitter.

There is no controversy here just as there was none with Buch earlier this year. The dif is grip vs slip. Doctoring the ball is either using something to make the ball cut through the air differently, maybe by actually slicing into the skin of the ball or using something that makes the ball slip off your grip adding a different rotational dimension to the ball. Pitchers have been using stuff to "improve" there grip for years and that is the difference. That is why there is no controversy here or with Buch months earlier.

Great explanation of Fenway RF by Vic on MLB network right now. There are so many things that are difficult about Fenway RF but I always thought the toughest thing about it was something Vic explained and that I always understood only because you could see it so well from my season seats. If the RFer looks left from his position in RF, he sees all of this room to his left that he has to cover all the way to the deep corner past Pesky Pole. However that turns out to have an illusory effect right behind him and to his right. As the RFer retreats directly behind and to his right, the wall is actually angling back toward the field, totally counterintuitive to everything in that RFer's past experience. So he is actually losing space or ground behind him and to his right. Running full speed, the warning track as big as it is in Fenway still does not give you much warning and if you are tall enough (like Beltran or Hunter) you either crash into that wall full speed with your shoulders over wall height, ribs totally exposed or like Hunter go right over the thing. Best change they could make from a player safety perspective, use fencing and a topper so that you could still see though it but the taller guys can't get the shoulders over the wall completely exposing their ribs. Less HR's. So not sure we will ever see that. I cannot imagine, having run into walls I knew were coming, how much of a shock to the body it must be to have that wall come up on you about 5' before you expect it, hammering into it full bore. Like I said last night, Dewey was the best I ever saw at making plays at or over the wall without injuring himself. Can't imagine how many fly balls he took out there to get that good at it.

I am a bit surprised that Metheny has sort of tossed his SS under the bus here. What if he needs that guy later in the series and back here in Boston no less. I actually think one of the things that is coming apart a bit for the Cards is their relative youth and inexperience combined with Metheny maybe not being the right kind of manager for this kind of team and situation. If you had a bunch of young kids, do you think Metheny looks like the kind of guy that they could look to when everything was going sideways? Would not instill much confidence in me. Now tonight it all falls on a rook. If Wacha does not go out there and dominate I think this Cards team is going to fold like a cheap suit.

Might be different right now but from what I heard a few minutes ago in the car, the Cards lineup has not been posted yet.

Meaning that if a hitter has better numbers against a same handed pitcher than the alternative platoon player has, regardless of the fact that the alternate player is not same handed, I would really have to pay attention to the better numbers being produced by the like handed hitter. Would I automatically go with the like handed hitter in that situation? Not automatically....but it would have a very big impact on my decision.

We don't count win/loss as a relevant stat when we value pitchers for crying out loud. We are going to count it for LFer's...ridiculous.....Farrell binkie-ism However the reverse split thing is a different story. Reverse splits are as relevant as splits and anytime they are there I would pay as much attention to them as I would to splits.

Yes but our pen is going to be taxed surely in any game that Buch starts and the bridge in that game will likely start in the 5th inning. The some may be true of Peavey if he comes out of the gate walking a foot off the ground again. That is why I am concerned. We all (I think all) know Farrell going to Frankie when he did was a monster blunder. Blunder or no what does it say about Farrell's confidence going to guys other than the guys he has grown used to dropping into the 7th, 8th and 9th slots. I happen to think that Farrell's mistake was not that he did not go to Workman but in not tapping one of his late inning guys for that job. Remember we were already in a jam that we had to get out of before we could go forward. As for the Cards, they actually have a similar problem. If you look at their average starter stints they are coming out of games pretty early even without the kind of pressures the Sox bring to bear. The Cards do have more reliable options. They have more arms that their manager has confidence bringing into the game in those middle inning situations.

So from what I am hearing, Buch is like way up in the air as far as whether he can give us anything. So, that means who...Felix...Oh my God!

Funny how after all this time and all these games we will likely life or die by the bridge...have to use it and we likely die...avoid it and we very likely live.

I just don't think the Sox have faced another team like the Cards all year long. In one sense the Cards are the NL version of the Sox. I heard some talking heads today discussing the star factor, commenting that the Cards are a real lunch pail team "they have no superstars like Ortiz and Pedey and Ells". Ortiz is 38 years old and a DH....as good as he is, he is past superstar status. Pedey....come on...Ells, maybe a star but a long way from a superstar at this point. These are really two lunch pail teams that are going to duke it out. I would not at all be surprised to see this go 7 with the Sox winning four home games and losing three road games. That said I have picked the Sox in 6.

There are a few things that scare me about this Cardinal team. 1. They will not beat themselves anything like the way the Tigers did. It is no wonder that Leyland fell on his sword. Your team may not have the talent sometimes or might suffer from the match ups but when everything goes sideways like that, usually the manager ends up taking the hit 2. They have very solid relief pitching. The Sox method of running up the starters pitch count will not be hard to employ but it will be harder to make work. 3. Molina....It is not that we ran so much in the Detroit series but almost every time we did, it meant something. How many double steals do I expect to see from us in this series? ....about none. In a series like this seeing Molina so many games in a row generally has runners with their heads on a swivel. They can't get used to the idea that the ball just about appears in the 1st or second baseman's hands. The runner has no idea how it got there...he is is just out. So as opposed to the pitchers getting rattled by potential base stealers, the runners end up rattled by Molina. Things that worry me from our end are losing Napoli in St. Louis and 5 inning Buch. Thankfully, we have home field. Were it not for that, I might have a hard time working up much optimism for this series. But...we do have home field and we have XB, basically an unknown wild card that so far has been an Ace when Farrell has flipped that card over. There is no reliable ML book on XB at this point. That may not sound like much but as we must realize by now, these series turn on pebbles of sand, not mountains of rock. We have marginally better starting pitching. I expect a great series with the games hinging on which team brings its strengths to bear best as opposed to one team or the other just wilting in the WS heat.

Well OK, I guess with 15 teams per, inter-league does provide a means to absorb some games that would just become unmanageable imbalance within conferences. But maybe then if inter-league was just used for that purpose alone, the total number of interleague games could be cut considerably. Might bring back some of the novelty although again I would love to just see it go away if the numbers could be made to work.

That V could not understand that you cannot talk to players like you are at some cocktail party showing off how erudite and witty you are is beyond my comprehension. That he was unwilling to give that up even in his interaction with players is beyond self-centered. I cannot even call it selfish because a selfish desire would be to give oneself every opportunity to stay in the job, not toss the job on the rocks just because of an insistence on having players walk away talking to themselves. Remember we had guys trying to figure out what the f*** that idiot just said instead of trying to figure out how to hit the slider! Worse than that, V would chide people and players for not being able to figure out how to use the V Decoder Ring. That tendency alone would have been enough to have earned V dismissal. Heap all the other V horse s*** stuff on top of it and you have a mountain of difference between Farrell and V and an advantage to Farrell that V at this stage of the game has no chance of denting as a manager.

I might not have been clear enough in my last post. I would want interleague to disappear. If we got that to happen, I would actually want most of those games to go to inter-conference play with "a bit of an uptick" in division play...whatever it would take so that the number of division games played made for relevant division champs. i have not looked at the question in depth but I think if we took all interleague away, then a few of those games would have to get tossed back into the division just to maintain a relevant ratio. Maybe they could all go to inter-conference. I just have not looked at it closely.

Much as I hate to admit it, I have to agree....Salty has not only done a tremendous amount of work to improve, he has in fact improved. I had credited him at the beginning of the year with improving his throwing which he has even if only marginally. His targets still leave something to be desired and he can still be kinda' stone handed behind the plate as well as stone chested, stone calved, thighed, forearmed...you get the picture. But even there he has done better this year. He has not so often been on safari for pop-ups, an area where he was really bad at one point. In addition he appears to have narrowed the gap a bit between him and the acknowledged better handlers of pitchers from behind the plate. If you went back about 20 years, well then Salty would be laughable as an everyday catcher. There were many better catchers back then and almost for all of baseball history before then. However based on today's standards, if Salty can keep his bat working per norm for him, he is passable as an everyday catcher. Never thought I would be saying that about Salty.

The difference in and of itself is no reason for the NL to keep the DH. Is hockey not played the same way whether east or west, basketball? In fact MLB could take its guide from the NBA. The rules governing play in the NBA are the same regardless of where you are playing. However western conference teams had become the offensive powerhouse teams of the NBA with the eastern conference teams depending more on defensive dominance. A league or conference does develop a personality even if the rules are the same. There is also an example in the NFL where for some period all the good young QB's were drafted into the AFC. That turned out to have some bearing on how the game was played one conference vs the other. IMO, both leagues should be the same in MLB and they both should have the DH. In addition, interleague play has lost its attraction for me. I would prefer that teams play more within their respective leagues and a bit more within their respective divisions. At the end of the day, I think you want division champs playing each other as much as possible in the post season. Myself I am glad to see the two teams with the best records in their respective leagues playing in the WS.