jung

Did JH elaborate? I gotta' hear this. Just how exactly did LL "revolutionize the game".

Luck..you make your own luck. I just got back from a visit to the local "Cliches' are Us" store and bought a few on sale. Can't ya' tell?

I think when they got to it Bogaerts came in at exactly #20 on the list.

Just watching MLB Network's top 50 prospects show. They have JBJ coming in at #32...Barnes just a little lower. They have not gotten to the top 20 yet. Will be interested to see if they rank a Sox prospect higher than JBJ at 32.

Did Bard give an interview after one of these stints 13? Just wondering what gained him entrance into the Bobby V Home for Terminally Whacked MLB Players. I have to admit that even when Bard is at his worst, he tends to seem a little detached from it all. That is regardless of where he is pitching. There have been times when he has reminded me of one of the lines from "Silence of the Lambs". Somebody comments that "Lector's pulse never went above normal" as he was carving somebody up for lunch. In Bard's case he almost looks that sort of detached as batters are carted off to the waiting ambulances.

NESN has got the game today. My stuff says 1:30 in the afternoon but that sounds like an odd start time to me. Maybe if you're interested you might want to tune in at 1:05. Worse case you get a half hour of Sox talk from somebody....although you would think the Sox are gonna' be JBJ and 24 guys names Smith or Jones.:D Watching the Mariners, Padres and MLB Net just flashed up what must be a tape delay announcement for the Sox game for 8:00 Eastern tonight.

It gets like this when the regular season has not quite started and when the board has sort of exhausted itself on the spring discussions. We end up hungry for the game threads and that sort of stifles some of the other discussion. At least I think so.

Its a pretty tough spot for Bard. I still pretty much feel like they can not pressure him beyond just going out and trying to make his pitches. I just do not think he can do more than that. However, i can also see why it would be hard to give a guy a spot on the roster under those conditions. If he can go out there and throw and get outs and not go backwards while at Pawtucket if one of the guys on Bells list go down (bound to happen) I would not be reluctant at that point to give a shot. That does not mean I would bring him up and insert him into pressure packed, high leverage situations. I would let him come in and start clean innings and be a bridge to that later innings in games where the starter failed to get farther than three four or maybe five innings.

Iggy just made the kind of play that would have doinked right off of Aviles.

What do you know....several amazingly coherent posts about Iggy in a row. Probably to logical for the Sox to adopt a plan like that. Clearly the entire offense hinges on cloning Robin Yount. Imagine the wet dreams Sox FO guys must have about finding the next Robin Yount?

Now that the WEEI "Big Show" has been broken up ala' the firing of Glen Ordway, can the morning team of Dennis and Callahan be far behind? My apologies to their fans but I cannot think of a sports talk radio team that knows less about sports. Kirk Minihan, one of EEI's few young guys considered to have a future by the industry is so exasperated by their efforts to discuss the Sox this morning that he seemed close to blowing a gasket several times.

Can't really blame fans for being excited and anxious about the rooks/prospects. There has not been much to get excited about around here lately and fans are not falling all over themselves to embrace the "like us cause we are goofy" campaign by Sox marketing. Actually, Farrell earned major points from me for taking the bull by the horns and focusing on one of the more relevant points regarding the whole JBJ discussion. He is not a left fielder! I kept waiting and waiting for somebody here to recall that when Ells got hurt he was playing out of position in left field. What we deserve would be for the Sox to bring up the talented but youthful and exuberant JBJ only to see him make an error in judgement out there and go crashing into Ells with Ells playing the role of the larger player with the more mature body at 6'1" and 195 to JBJ's 5'10" and 180 soaking wet. It would not at all be out of the question to see JBJ carted off in sections after such a train wreck, never to be seen nor heard from again for the year.

Funny....can't tell how many Sox fans are in the stands today. Can't tell when Youk K'ed if that was Sox or Yankee fans shouting Youuuk or Sox or Yankee fans booing him.

Sox facing a higher % of good teams in these last 11 games starting with the O's last night. They finish with 3 straight games with the cannon fodder Twins for another ego boost.

Yanks going station to station on Felix in the 2nd inning. As I mentioned last night, the Sox are facing a higher % of better teams in these last 11 games than they have by far this spring and frankly it is showing a bit with the Orioles yesterday and the Yanks today.

JBJ gets hit first time up today against yanks

I have always thought Iggy would be dealt and I still think he will be dealt.

Red Sox/ Yanks today at 1:05 Eastern carried on ESPN live and apparently MLB Network tonight on a delay.

This next grouping of ST games may tell us more about the 2013 Sox than we have learned so far. Not saying you can really take much from ST games cause you really can't. However, almost all of the WBC guys are back around the league for one thing. For another, the hitters have been catching up to the pitchers and we are seeing much better hitting around the league since at least Saturday and Sunday. Lastly, out of the Sox first 18 ST games only 8 of them were against teams that anybody would think would at least be in the top half of teams in baseball and 4 of those were against the Rays who can pitch but if anything might even be a weaker hitting team this year than they have been. However 6 of the remaining 11 including the game today against the Orioles are against teams that you would think at least stand a chance of being in the top half of all MLB teams and have some hitting. I don't know what LL paid the Twins to get all these games with them for one thing. In fact as many as the Sox have had with the Twins so far (4) the last 3 games of ST are against the cannon fodder Twins as well. The Sox will have had more ST games with the Twins than any other team when all said and done. In truth, proximity of the Spring camps more than anything else tends to dictate who you play in the Spring. A few more games against the Yanks, Phillies, Jays and Orioles might offer up a sterner test at least of the Sox pitching.

I actually think most of the hell BC catches is not specifically for moves that he has made. I think he ends up starting with two strikes no matter what he does. Strike 1......he is viewed as a left over from the Theo era and most particularly the latter part of the Theo era. BC has certainly been here long enough to share in both the credit and the blame. However if you look it as handed down from Theo and then look at the general view regarding Theo, it is not a very pretty picture. Strike 2......he is the guy that was picked by the brain trust of JH, LL and JW. They are not getting high marks lately either. So I think he takes some flak for being the guy Mo, Larry and Curly have chosen to be the GM. Some may view that as no better a decision than choosing Bobby V to be the Manager. All of that said, people are calling the 2013 Sox, BC's team and I can't say that I am real thrilled with what he has done here for all the reasons that I have discussed in earlier posts. To sum it up though and at a Macro level I would have preferred that he had done more to move forward and less to sort of mark time. A year lost is a year lost and I think at the end of the day, in retrospect it will turn out looking like a year lost. It is not enough for me to go wild beating the guy up over especially since I save most of my Management ire for the aforementioned Mo, Larry and Curly.

Tallying up what Iggy has done so far with what he might do really does not amount to a stat worth talking about. Either he comes around or he does not. Holding developmental time against him does not make much sense. Once a guy actually gets to the majors and sticks, well then his stats from day 1 make some sense.

The only thing Overbay looks like he could tear up would be a king size bottle of Geritol.

Ya' never know. Sometimes the way things go, nothing works out for a player all the way up until everything falls into place and works out for him. Maybe this injury to Drew coupled with Iggy's new swing will turn out to be just that sort of deal. I think it is really a long shot because Iggy has so much working against him here. He is nothing like the typical Sox SS. What have they got to lose. I don't see them bringing somebody in to play SS at this point.

I would suggest that it will be very difficult to send JBJ back down regardless of what happens in the first few weeks of the season. That problem is compounded by the fact that he MUST play everyday wherever he is going to be. That is further complicated by having to face the rigors of a full ML season. He still at least to me looks like he could use a year of adding some bulk as well as a year of seasoning although extra bulk might be the least concerning of the issues the Sox face with JBJ. JBJ has never really faced true MLB pitching, yet we are freely discussing bouncing him around between Pawtucket and Fenway. The guys that I have heard that I respect on the topic have said that this is not the kind of player that suggests bouncing him around. His future production is too valuable and his future contracts likely very large. This is the kind of player that you bring up when you are completely committed to keeping him on your roster baring injury. This is NOT Nava nor even of a feather of Nava. We chide the organization when it treats players like rag dolls that they can just bump here and bump there without regard for the consequences and when we have an opportunity that just screams at us to not do that again....what do we want to do??? We want to do that again and for what? What are we afraid of or what do we think we will get? Is the team going to go 0-20 and will adding JBJ turn 0-20 to 20-0? I for one have never believed that a team's fate is determined in the first month of the season. That is not to say that a lost game in April is somehow better than a lost game in September. However that is to say that once you get into the latter part of the season, with contending teams playing each other and the focus honed to a very sharp level, the teams that have the goods float to the top. Want proof? Could the 2011 Sox win one lousy stinking ballgame against contending teams when they had to in 2011? Answer ....No. That is why I choose to ignore all the ******** that surrounds the 2011 Sox season. Having to win one lousy stinking ballgame for something like two weeks at the end of 2011, they simply could not do it. The 2013 Sox simply do not look to me like the kind of team that will float to the top. Too many changes in one year including another new group of coaches and Manager. Too much of a patchwork team with too many major question marks in the rotation that will still be question marks regardless of what happens in the Spring. The Ortiz situation to me is just the straw that breaks the camel's back. IMO, they do not have enough power but do not have enough pitching and defense to make up for it...not in the DH, AL. Personally, I am surprised that the discussion has honed in on JBJ up because Ortiz is out. It does not matter. JBJ does not replace Ortiz. Iggy might replace Drew. But JBJ does not replace Ortiz.

That is clearly the issue with JBJ. They have to play him. I really struggle with the idea that he spends a single day on the bench which is why I don't buy the fourth outfielder idea. Yet, he really has not proven that he can hit real ML pitching and there is no way you will convince me that he will not suffer the same fate as the typical rookie. The scouts will scout him. They will find his weaknesses. That information will inform how the pitchers pitch him and he will slump at that point and until he works through it. So, I would not absorb the downstream hit for bringing him up to start the season. That is fiscally irresponsible. Then I would not bring him up at all unless he was going to play every day as that is simply short sighted. Iggy looks like a different story. It looks more and more like Drew will not be ready. As I have stated elsewhere, I hate seeing a guy go down to injury but Iggy has had such lousy luck until now, maybe he is due some good fortune. He has his new swing and it looks like he has this opportunity to impress. This might actually work out to be the best thing that could happen to both the team and the player with regard to Iggy. As for Ortiz, some of us want to dodge this bullet because his issues are not all about the Achilles but in reality, most of them are very likely about the Achilles. He got put on the shelf last year as an aging player. Has not been able to get back on the field and these things have a tendency to simply spiral the wrong way for an aging player. Worse than that, he is a very big guy that is aging. So he is carting 250 lbs over those legs, ankles and heels and that is the slimmed down version. Inactivity produces more issues for them at the worst time in their careers for inactivity to be a factor. Every time he tries to move now, something happens to him. My opinion is that this is yet another decision that the Sox made that had little to do with baseball regardless of the fact the David is such a force or has been such a force at the plate. It was not to me a smart move although at the time, I was absolutely certain that the Sox would sign Ortiz and pretty certain that it would be for two years. I would be tickled pink if David makes it back and proves me wrong. That possibility becomes more remote as each day passes though. Look at how far behind the pitchers the hitters have been so far this Spring. Just yesterday and today, the hitters around the league have shown signs of catching up to the pitchers. So even if David is ready to take swings again on April 1st, you can just about kiss the first month of the season goodbye. Does he even look like he will be swinging the bat on April 1st? As usual, the Sox have nobody to blame but themselves...not the media, not us the fans, nobody but themselves. They put themselves in this box that just about demands that a 37 year old, 250 lb guy with a damaged Achilles find a way into the lineup and produce for a significant part of this season. While the pitching has looked good so far this spring, this still does not impress me as the kind of rotation and pen that will hold down the opposition enough without being able to score some runs. In other words, it is not even trying to flip flop from a team mainly built on offense to a team mainly built on pitching and defense. However, given all the other factors, it does look like a team that without Ortiz will have lost too much of one without having enough of the other two to make up for it.