jung

Knew Salty would have to go out to the mound for instruction. Thought it was going to be sooner than this.

Salty can't seem to figure out what he wants to throw. At this rate, Peavy is going to ask Salty to move his mitt out of the way so he can hit him in the nuts.

Time for Salty to move just to his left so Peavy can hit this ump right in the nuts. He does go 3-2 alot and did his first start with us as well. He is up a little bit more tonight so far as well. That last batter got two strikes out of four pitches called balls........

Peavy looking very much like the pitcher he was in his first Red Sox start. Thank God....sounds like the Sox are planning about 85 bullpens and 12 rehab starts for Buch. I see no problem with his being back for the start of the 2014 season.

Thank God Ortiz is back in the lineup. Just too many holes with him out. Chen should have been nothing last night. Santana is 3-0 in his last three starts and will likely be much tougher than Chen although at least Santana is a RH pitcher.

The Sox will eventually have to bring WMB back in order to see if he can hit ML pitching anyway. You don't see enough if any of the kind of pitching sequences at AAA that get WMB in the kind of trouble he was in here. You just don't. He says he is doing better cause he is seeing more FB's. Is he seeing more FB's simply because you are always going to see more FB's in AAA or because he is laying off s*** pitches to hit? Ultimately there is only one place to go to figure that out and it isn't Pawtucket and sure as hell is not Portsmouth.

I do think the Sox FO is worried about Will having been to some extent rushed up only to fall back. In reality, now that Iggy is gone, in their perfect world, Will probably goes back to 3rd and XB takes over SS. I just don't think they want Will to believe he is being left without a chair when the music is stopping. I also think the FO believes it has more time to make this decision. The Sox are still in 1st place. True, this is turning into a real dog fight. However they have not been dislodged for more than a day at a time and are in 1st now. I thought the trip would have been a good spot to bring one of then up. Maybe it still happens out on the road. Eventually the Sox come back for three games at Fenway and go right back out on the road again. Maybe that is the time period that they have decided would be the deadline.

Not quite Houston Rubby. Well at least the remaining Royals starters are RHers. But Santana, Guthrie and Shields are no cake walk.

I was looking at that myself and wondering what the hell I missed. Base running is surely the biggest hole in Nava's game.

First time Chen has gotten past the 6th inning this season...yuk

Game is a good barometer for just how important Ortiz is to this lineup regardless of whether the opponent has a left hander or right hander going.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ...huh...what???? It's this lineup. Punch came to the plate last inning. Judy is up next.

Like to see KC run into an out here

Of course it is hard for Naps to check his swing...its too f***ing long. His swing starts in Missouri and ends in Kansas.

With so many of his pitches up even when he does throw a strike, I suspect Jon is going to walk somebody and follow that up with a bomb. We will need 6 at least again tonight to win this game I fear.

Well the gauntlet was really thrown down to the Sox RH lineup tonight with Ortiz sitting. So far not looking great. The RH lineup just seems to have the worst time stringing hits together. They are usually out of the inning before they can get anything to happen.

Well of all Jon's bad 1st innings this year, this one might be the worst of the bad. As necessary as the Peavy trade looked the day it was made, it is looking better by the second.

Jeez Lester is just all over the place, including up in zone when he does throw a strike.

Certainly was not sharp the last time out in the first inning and never recovered. 30 pitches already.

Well this is starting nicely. Actually this Royals team worries me way more than Houston did and we have four here.

I see some other team offering Ells money that the Sox will simply be unwilling to match. How do you justify spending big bucks on Ells if you still believe in JBJ? Aren't you going to take the shot at repeating the Ells experience with the cost controlled JBJ taking whatever money the Sox would have been willing to spend on Ells elsewhere?

Well unfortunately, I only get to see WMB hit in little snippets now. Last I saw him, on Saturday past, if he could get ahead in counts, he was getting FB's to hit and he was hitting them at least at a decent clip. If he could not get ahead in the count, he pretty much looked like the same hitter that went back down. I wish I could say that I saw him laying off the kind of pitch that gave him fits last time we saw him in a ML uni but he did not get the opportunity on the day I saw him to swing or lay off that kind of pitch. The biggest dif IMO between AAA and ML pitching is that you just do not see many pitchers up here that will give in an inch. So up here even behind in the count, a pitcher is just as likely to throw a secondary pitch as a FB. At some point, the only way they are going to find out if WMB has truly made any progress will be to expose him once again to ML pitching. On an optimistic note, I have always thought that turning back the clock would not work for him, as some have pointed out in the last few posts. At least at this stage of his career, it seems to me that he has to get ahead in the count to succeed. Maybe he has at least learned how to do that enough to have some success up here. If he has then, maybe the Sox can bring him up for Snyder anyway and see what happens.

I would assume BC wants XB at 3rd. I don't know how much 3rd XB has been playing...that might be the answer to the question of why he is not here at this point.

Wow.....interesting that Drew has been a house afire since Iggy exited.

That is some respect.....Fields just would not throw the FB there. Paid for it