jung

Hawks are taking the puck off of Chara's stick constantly and it just turned into a goal for the Hawks.

No question that there has been a premium on starting pitching, In the Sox case that gets coupled with the double whammy of short term contracts. Even one more year on that contract would have likely gotten Demps price down to $11m. Hard to get a starting pitcher that is actually a genuine piece of your rotation for less than $10-11M these days. I cringe to think what Kershaw will get for his first big contract. It will likely make him something like the world's 4th largest economy.:D

Really worried that the Sox will give up on WMB only to find some other team putting the effort into getting him straightened out and doing so successfully.

Bruins solid in game 6 so far. I like their energy but they are still leaving themselves exposed the same way they have in the games they have lost. They still give up the puck too often. Hawks don't seem to ever give up the puck. The Bruins still do not just shoot the puck as often as they should. A shot on goal is never a bad play. Hawks still beating the Bruins through center ice. That is to be expected. What I would not have expected is how effective the Hawks quickness has been in front of the net. I would have expected the Bruins to be better than the Hanks both behind and in front of the nets and that unexpected edge to the Hawks has really turned out to be important in this series. There is a little more wide open play than would be to our liking. Tuukka just stopped what was close to a breakaway. Great save.

I think Demps has done better against the good teams that anybody expected. He has been about what at least i expected against the not so good. However he has not been pounded by the better AL teams. Days when he is very successful at keeping the ball down he is downright tough. I don't expect that of him though and I have been pleased with what he has accomplished so far. For me the biggest dif in my expectation and the actual for one of our starters has been Lackey. To me he has been really terrific so far considering TJS. If he keeps going like he has been IMO he slots in right behind Buch and not far behind for that matter.

I think it could be the beginnings of the pitching staff cracking and crumbling but I really don't think we are there yet and nobody here would likely call me a rose colored glasses sort of fellow. The argument that it is the beginnings could be made mainly based on the fact that the most critical linchpin to the rotation, Buch, has an injury that has already "lingered". So it is not an issue of whether it will linger. It is now an issue of when the hell is he coming back and having been away for so long what the hell is he going to pitch like when and if he gets back. Conversely you could argue that it is not the beginnings IMO because If Buch comes back in good shape I really think we can say that Lackey makes up for Lester and solidly moves into the spot behind Buch as our second best starting pitcher. Why Lackey?...for me it is because of the quality of his pitches AND the quality of his sequences. Nobody other than Buch combines those two elements to the degree that Lackey has so far. I have been very impressed with that. Dempster is either down in the zone or he is not. Not = walks and bombs and he gets enough of that during the course of a game to make it hard for me to put him in the spot behind Buch. Felix simply cannot get enough innings coupled with a propensity to give up runs early. Give me one or the other Felix but don't give me early runs AND early exits. Lester is into another of his blue funk periods and there is no telling when he will come out of it or even if he will. But as I said earlier, if Buch does come back and comes back strong I think Buch/Lackey just about equals the early season Buch/Lester. That still leaves us looking for one more solid starter though. He does not have to be spectacular although that would not be a bad thing. Just give me solid. Without one more we are stuck on pins and needles wondering who is next with more than half a season to go. Lester is the worry. He may have a hard time turning this around mainly because of what goes on between his ears. Funny how there is all this talk of trying to get Bailey to regain confidence when in fact I believe his issues are physical and that it will end up being a situation where he is really all but done when in fact it is Lester that needs the sports phycologist work over. With Lester you can see his mood swing from pitch to pitch once he gets into one of these periods. First he tries to be way too fine with his pitches when he is into one of these periods. He does not even attempt to work on and off the plate but will continually fixate on hitting the edge of the black...never mind just being content with the black . He has to have the edge of the black or he is a nervous wreck. He will go along like that....finding himself more and more often behind in counts as a result. Then some hitter will crank one up maybe for a HR or an extra base hit. If he is in one of these blue funks of his when somebody cranks one he may not throw another strike for 6 pitches before he finally regains some semblance of composure. While his approach to pitching is completely different when compared to Felix, Lester ends up with remarkably Felix-like situations when this happens to him. Much like Felix when Jon does this he ends up staring at 110 pitches in 5 innings or some such nonsense number like that having arrived there in an entirely different manner than Felix would have gotten there. Lester has always seemed to me the Sox pitcher most likely to try hypnosis as so many pitchers have in the past. Then we can be treated to the spectacle of Jon turning around and looking out at the jumbo-tron at just the wrong moment, imitating whatever he sees up there until somebody comes out and escorts him to the clubhouse for a flip side visit with the hypnotist. "I am going to count to ten Jon and then you will cackle like a rooster...no forget that.....I am going to count to ten and you are going to awaken refreshed and happy...one....two....three:blink:

You don't abandon you most important secondary pitch the way Bailey has because you have a mental block. You abandon it because you can't physically throw it any longer. Bailey probably does have a reluctance to throw his FB for strikes because it is not, taken on its own, that great a pitch and he weakens fairly quickly even when he is throwing it decent. Whenever he does throw it in the zone it gets creamed. They can fart around with him till hell freezes over IMO and the should...they paid for him...they own him. I don't think it will get them anywhere though. Whatever they do with him at this point should be as low leverage as it can get...as in not in live games.

Might even be worse than Heath Bell. Bailey does not have a single pitch that he can throw that he can get by hitters. He just doesn't. It is so obvious now that you can see the balls coming back off the hitter's bat as the ball is leaving Bailey's hand. I actually would give the Sox more credit than saying this was entirely unexpected as well. While I know it is popular to say they got Hanrahan as insurance against a future Bailey injury if you just look at Bailey's pitch usage you can see the slider disappearing. You can see everything but the FB disappearing long before this. I think the Sox probably saw something like this in Bailey's near future...maybe not as bad as this but close enough to need somebody else to be the closer for this team. Unfortunately, Hanrahan was on the way to surgery. Not sure that is anything more than a really bad break, like what they have now with Ross. As for why Farrell is doing what he is doing...I have no earthly idea.

Why do I consider today's call in RF the worst call outside of balls and strikes I have seen in 50 years? Because the phantom tag call is one that is pretty frequently missed and you can argue that one is worse than another by a matter of degrees. You did not have the wrong ump even trying to make the call in the case of the phantom tag. This was a failure of the entire ump crew, most particularly the 2nd base ump and the 1st base ump. I am not even sure which is worse...the 2nd base ump for making a call that he did not see and should not have made or the 1st base ump for not having positioned himself as he should have both making the call and preventing the 2nd base ump from even opening his big mouth in the process. What the 2nd base ump was claiming to Farrell did not even happen. To me, absolutely the worse call I have seen outside of balls and strikes. As I said before, what really disturbs me here is that Selig now has entire ump crews that are not doing their jobs and have no idea where they should be and what they should be doing to make solid calls. While I am not happy about individual umps making bad calls, I am way less happy with whole crews of umps blundering around the field like the Keystone Kops, one lying and the other swearing to it. Worse yet...believe it or not...in the face of everything the 2nd base ump is STILL sticking by his call. To me, now that in-season PED testing will be the rule of the road going forward, the abysmal performance of ML umpire crews and individual umps, their attitude toward players and coaches, their insistence on inserting themselves into games in meaningful ways when their goal should be to disappear into the woodward is far and away the biggest problem MLB faces. My comment about this being the worse call I have seen in 50 years is as much driven by the downward spiral of individual ump performance and the downward spiral of ump crew performance as it is by the specifics of the call itself. It should not be a surprise that the worst officiating in pro team sports occurs in the leagues acknowledged to have the worst commissioners, the MLB and the NBA. You guys that have been petitioning for finding the means to remove some of the power from umps either via replay and coaches challenges or even software based systems to make ball and strike calls have finally won me over. f*** um'. Less control by umps will be better than the same or more control by umps. Fewer umps will even be better than more umps. This is the year when for whatever reason the level of ineptitude has just gone over the top. Maybe it is worse because years of being bad finally results in performance getting worse and worse. That this is the worse year the umps have ever had is an opinion we have heard from virtually every corner except of course the ever silent MLB itself. I guess the degree to which one might be willing to tolerate this BS varies from one to the next. However I can no longer defend anything that allows the umps to continue to have the degree of control over games that they have. It is time for this to end IMO.

I guess you are referring to comments about Bailey. Problem with throwing Bailey out there in a 1 run game in the 7th inning is that is "Not a low leverage" situation. Farrell is choosing to toss Bailey out there in situations where he is doomed to failure. You could see it from the very first pitch Bailey threw. He had no shot. Bailey is done...maybe done for a career and it does not take a rocket scientist to see it. As for Felix and his inability to get past 5-6 innings. That is not Farrell's fault. It is what it is. We all hoped we had started the season with one more arm for the rotation. None of that is Farrell's doing. I probably would not have liked seeing Bailey out there in the 6th against the bottom of the Tiger's order either but that would have been worlds better than the 7th against the top of the Tiger's order.

XB has terrific reflexes...probably better than the average ballplayer who already has better reflexes than the average bear. It is not at all unreasonable for a guy to be more of a see the ball, hit the ball kind of hitter especially early in his career and maybe for a whole career. Certainly makes sense for a young guy that really does not know the pitchers that good yet anyway.

Excellent point by Rice and Farrell about who's call that was. That was the 1st base umps call...not the 2nd base umps call. Although this is one of my biggest frustrations with ML umpiring of late. You no longer see the rotation that Rice was referring to or at the very least you do not see the umps move to complete the rotation like they used to. Often the HP ump will only move up the line a couple of feet if at all. I don't think either the 1st base ump moved an inch to get a better view of that play in RF. The 2nd base ump appears to have moved out into RF a few feet. Why....I have no idea. It was the 1st base ump that needed to move out and put himself in position to override even a thought by the 2nd base ump that he should open his big mouth and make a call there. Farrell said that when he argued, none of the umps claimed to see the play differently than the 2nd base ump who had made the call. Total ********. The 1st base ump should have been in position and should have been forced to make the call. The 2nd base ump should have kept his big trap shut forcing the 1st base ump to make the initial call one way or the other. Lends more credibility to SFF's comment that Selig needs to be gone. He has whole crews of umps that have no f***ing idea what they are doing.

Funny you should say that iortiz. I was just thinking that while Farrell has done a much better job in the sense that he does not f*** with his ballplayers heads the way V did, his in-game management is just about as flawed only not in the same ways. V was so f***ed up that you could not even point to many specific instances and say...that cost us the game. He would make so many mistakes in so many areas of in-game decision making that by the end you could rarely point to an individual decision that was critical. In Farrell's case he is very consistent and his errors in judgement are all in very specific places and you can pretty easily see which were really critical to the outcome and which were not. Point being that when all said and done, I suspect Farrell will have cost us just about as many games as it relates specifically to in-game decisions. As far as the game itself and its importance. This to me was the most disappointing game of the season. We had a chance to basically wipe out Scherzer's game yesterday and take a game off of Verlander and the Tigers. We could have ended up with a 2-2 split instead of a 1-3 finish. Could have sent a real message to the O's and even the surging Jays that we are not going anyplace anytime soon.

In fact the more I look at the idiot ump claiming he knew what the f*** he was talking about to Farrell his argument is a complete fabrication. Nava had already turned his glove over to make the transfer BEFORE the ball came out. The ump was arguing that the glove simply moved down without Nava having rolled the glove over to get the ball out. Absolute worst call outside of balls and strikes I have ever seen. That is 50 years of baseball. Nice job ump.

Totally totally disgusted. Selig only survives not considered the worst commiss in pro sports because he could always look down at that idiot David NBA Stern.

And no doubt as SR has said, the bullpen management has been horrendous today. Although it has not been good the whole year...Farrell's weakness in my opinion. Today it is just extra-bad. In truth, Farrell has likely allowed Bailey to cost us yet another game that we were still in until that f***-up. Everything after that seems in some sense the rest of Farrell's genius bullpen moves today seem to have had its genesis in that ridiculous move. If he HAD to use Bailey he could have brought him in ahead of Taz and had him pitching to the bottom of the Tiger's order. To me, if he had to use him, that made the most sense by MILES!!!! Let me see, I know.... I will bring in Bailey to pitch to the top of the Tiger's order in the 7th....Sure why the f*** not!

That was the worst kind of call though.... the absolute worst kind of call an ump can make. That ump did not even have a chance to see what he was claiming as the correct call. How do you justify that kind of call as an ump. That would be like a Hockey official calling tripping because a player went down without seeing a stick underneath him actually causing him to go down...just completely says it all about how important these s***-heads think they are and their willingness to insert themselves into games. I swear to God they are making it more and more possible for me to call for electronics calling balls and strikes. f*** them....costs them jobs...tough s***....get the f*** out of my game.

f***ing hate umpires

Miller is not the guy you want sitting and coming back out again which he would not be expected to do closing. Sox have seemingly poked around trying to find somebody other than Mortenson and then Frankie that can sit and come back out in a relief role....I would think Bres could do it and DLR could do it. Sox for the most part don't do it but when they do, seemingly pick a guy that can't do it on a bet.

That was a ******** call on the play in RF. The ump could not see into the glove in any event. So you are going to tell me that as an ump you are going to assume the drop as opposed to assuming the catch. Are these guys completely out of their f***ing minds. What's the matter ump...haven't had enough opportunities to insert yourself into the proceedings so you can show us all how important you are? f*** heads!

How I wish Felix could slot into the Frankie role. Then they could try to bring in a starter and drop Felix into Frankie's spot (assuming Buch reappears sometime this decade!) and work Frankie into the rest of the relief crew. Unfortunately, Felix cannot pitch in relief. He just cannot do it even in the Frankie role.

Well on the bright side, I think we know who our other closer is besides Ueh since Ueh cannot be overused. Miller has been getting both LH and RH hitters out for the last few weeks. He did make that mistake and ended up with HB but not because he was overthrowing the FB. He just hung onto that one too long. Question is...do they have enough guys to afford to use Miller that way.

Hell of a pitch to Victor by Miller. May bail Farrell's ass out of this mess

If Bailey gets out of this inning it will be pure luck cause nothing he is throwing is going to fool anybody. If Farrell was going to throw him out there today then why not toss him out there in the 6th against the bottom of their order and bring in Taz for the 7th instead of this.

Farrell just stop please. Look at this s*** Bailey is throwing up there....against the top of their order no less.