jung

Guardians might even be able to generate some fan support for a 2013 run. Browns are....well the Browns. Cavs are still trying to figure out what they do next. Who else are you going to give your heart to in Cleveland?

Wonder if Cleveland is going to try to make some noise in the Central. Tigers did not exactly destroy the Central last year.

Ah yes....our offseason cup runeth over.:D

I don't remember any either E1. There were some posts of that sort after the accident but I do not remember anybody suggesting that it might be an issue before it happened. Sort of reminds me of the Gronk, field goal team injury. Nobody complained about Gronk playing on special teams until after he was injured either and then of course it was the worst idea anybody ever had.

It is as I said a stretch. If anything it is the manager's decision, not the FO. I don't remember anybody mentioning the possibility of injury to Ells before it happened and that is usually one of the things I will look at to see if an argument might be legit. If you are concerned about it and it happens well then you at least have a legit argument at that point. I think if there is a point it might be that Ells does not win or even break even in these battles with other players, a wall, what have you. He does seem to be a little brittle in hindsight. Still and all, I don't think you could then extend that to a greater injury risk in LF.

There has been the general feeling expressed on these pages that moving Ells to LF exposed him to freight train, Beltre. In Center he would have seen an outfield wall, another outfielder or a middle infielder as opposed to brick wall Beltre. Its a bit of a stretch. I would not have wanted to run into Manny as a LFer if I were playing CF either. The dif there though is that as the CF, Ells could have called Manny off any ball. The chance of contact between a 3rd baseman and a LFer is much greater as there are more plays that end up being tweeners with neither guy in a position necessarily to give up on the ball. Aviles is kinda' big in the upper body for a guy playing SS. He almost ran over WMB and Nava in one play last year as he was totally hell bent on getting to a ball on a really long run. Nava and WMB saved the day as those two guys pulled up. You could tell at the end of the play when Aviles looked around finally that he had no idea how close he had been to a gigantic wreck out there in short to medium LF. WMB might have bounced off Aviles although I doubt it. They would have had to bring a grave marker out there for Nava and stuck it in LF like one of those eerie and unfortunate white crosses you sometimes see on the side of the highway.

The Patriots are of course now the New England Patriots. I don't want to be looking at the standings some day and see the New England Red Sox. That they are a "city" team in more ways than one is part of their persona I think.

It has been an interesting off season relative to how picks are allocated now. It will be interesting to try to figure out how many deals were effected once this offseason is completed.

The Sox really do get a good deal of benefit from Fenway. There is the perennial..."this place is a treasure" ********. Of course it is in fact a treasure and like most things referred to as treasure it is old. They get to squeeze out additional seating capacity at their discretion which is a great way to keep demand high...assuring that it outstrips supply. Also, they have tactfully avoided the absolute nightmare that building anything like a new park within the confines of Boston would entail. By the time they got through with the payoffs, the base price would have probably doubled. I could see it now. Fenway would be torn down at some point while the new park was under construction. As soon as Fenway was a hole in the ground, then the construction delays would start pushing FSG up against a hard boundary for opening day unless of course the appropriate "funding" was provided to the various political figures, union big shots, the Archbishop of Boston...you name it, they will find a reason why they should get paid. Find desk, bend over...prepare for insertion of flagpole with sand of course. By the time they were done with him LL would think anything else he had ever done in his life was a walk in the park. Actually maybe that is a silver lining.:D

That would actually be pretty darned excellent performance from a 5. You do have to get more than that up at the top of the rotation but those numbers would be super for a 5.

In my opinion baseball players are more personally responsible for the level of their performance than players in any of the other "big 4" professional team sports. Our pitching was not that good because in the main our pitchers were not that good.

I just don't know what they were trying to do to bring him back. What I saw of his minor league stints he was unable to find the plate at all. Not sure if he might have gotten so gun shy that he started aiming the ball. It would not make sense for a pitcher that relies on velocity to try to nurse the ball over the plate just to get it over even if he is trying to fight his way back. So I have to think that except for those instances where he just finally was trying to throw any strike anywhere at any velocity, most times he must have been trying to throw at his normal velocity. That sure as heck was not working out. The last few times I saw him in the minors he had absolutely no idea where the ball was going and velocity was still way off. We have been discussing different ways of throwing in some of these threads. Clearly Bard is a "stand tall and fall" hurler. While that style of throwing is easier on the body, once you lose your landing spot and other critical points along the way it can be real difficult to get it all back in place again. Bard looked like he was all over the map last I saw of him. Maybe Tim Wakefield has a Nekro like career waiting for him. Maybe Bard can be the first pupil he teaches the knuckler to. Things might not be able to get much worse for Bard from the last place I saw him. I honestly think that if Bard has a career it will be a second coming, not some appearance that he makes this year. In that regard I think he is just plain done. He may be back but probably with a rebuilt motion and God only knows what else.

Hopefully the Sox will smarten him up and pack Salty off to some team looking for a "catcher". If not we will see more of what we saw last year....remembering that the way Salty gives Targets, frames pitches, just plain receives the ball is just the tip of the iceberg with Salty. We have those memorable occasions when he actually forgets to cover home. We have those two games in a row that he lost by simply being unable to make a play on a ball thrown in to home plate last year...could not even catch the damned thing....never mind make a tag. There are so many reasons to off Salty that you could have a tread just on that topic. Focusing on one of them like how he handles the pitchers misses the point. My first post in this thread stated that Salty IMO represents the worst combination of defense and handling battery mate duties of any front line catcher in MLB and that is why the Sox should off him. What the hell do they think they are losing, offing Salty and catching Lavs?

They clearly need the extra days that the all star game takes up. However the league still generate tons of money off the damn thing and the league organizations wait their turn to make the big score in the year they are hosting. Regrettably I don't see it going away which is why I only called for detaching it from WS home field. It is just a pageant for crying out loud. Don't attach something that really matters to it.

I hate interleague play especially since the DH has not been resolved between the two leagues. Even with that I hate the whole idea. The model can't be a game with a 16 game regular season (pro football). Having the AS game decide WS home field is idiotic.

Near as I can tell, agents have more to say about what their players do or don't do these days than coaches or for basketball, assistant coaches. If you want to really have an impact you have to be directly attached to the money as in: - I make a cut of what you make or - I am paid by you to provide you a specific service like help do thus and so in the off season. Heck I can get nostalgic with the best of them when it comes to baseball and while I would not want to see players back at the level of indentured servants they once were, I would love to go at least far enough back where the money had not corrupted the sport so. How often did we hear that one of the major issues that Tito had his last year was how much the players noted that he did not have a deal from the Sox beyond that last season. There was a time when it was not at all about the money (you just could not make enough). There was an era when it was partially about the money and one where it was mostly about the money. Now it is just about all about the money with players noting who makes what and making judgements about whether they will blow a guy off completely or not based on where he is in the hierarchy of pay scale. That is how much it has become all about the money. All it really took for Tito to lose his players was for his pay in the hierarchy of money to fall to the level of dog meat as in "Tito has no contract for next season". That is all it took for a guy that cut his players every possible break to turn into a piece of garbage attached to the bottom of their shoes. That is why I commented that I would want a pitching coach today that was an informational wiz...who could catalog opposing hitters and his own pitchers in a way that was useful and relevant. Graft that guy onto a guy that can earn the trust of the staff pitchers in the sense of making each of them feel like his main interest is in them as individual pitchers with individual goals and aspirations that he as a coach is willing to subjugate himself to and ya' got something. I don't think a Manager at the ML level any longer tells a coach to go help pitcher X to do thus and so. I think a Manager MIGHT tell his pitching coach to go ASK player X if he can help him do thus and so. That is an entirely different perspective from which to approach the job and it effects everything including who is willing to take that sort of a job.

Look at how far back you are having to go to find these guys. Even then you are not talking about roles that allowed coaches to dictate what the player would do based on some authority passed on to them through the FO to the Manager and down to them. When you go back as far as Koufax...yes.... you are really going back to the era where the player had far far less control over his future, his present his anything. You are going back to the era when most of them held down other jobs in the off season just to make ends meet. Once you get up to the Al Leiters and even Jack Morris, coaches don't have the authority to do more than assist the player. He may offer much assistance or little assistance but it won't be by dictate. It will be because the pitcher seeks it out and wants the aid of the pitching coach. The point is still the same as far as i am concerned. In the contemporary game anointing pro ML baseball coaches as major contributors from the perspective of teaching is simply unrealistic and really saddles them with more responsible than they have. It is unfair as much as anything else as they are as powerless as pro basketball assistant coaches. If they have some knowledge to pass onto the player it will be because the player is open and accepting and if the player does not want it the coach can stamp his little feat and stammer till hell freezes over.

I wonder if the Sox do not believe Kalish's shoulder should have been an issue last season. He has been injured forever and the Sox have accepted that and continued to support him. Then last season rolls around. He does not play that well saying nothing about the shoulder until the very end of the season. Suddenly he is dog meat, worthy only of a platoon role in left when he seemed to be destined for RF where his talents could be best used. Something just does not wash but you just cannot trust anything they do these days as they are just as likely to zig as zag. How do you trust the player with so much money at stake? Guess we will just have to wait and see. I would not be surprised if at this point even a decent ST showing might not earn him much in the eyes of the FO. He will very likely have to take advantage of every opportunity he gets to play or else. Wouldn't it be a laugh if both he and Riddick ended up successful in organizations other than the Sox?

Well at least Dempster throws from the right side of the plate for Fenway but not for that little piss ant park in the Bronx. I don't want to think about Dempster in that place.

What do we hear about coaches in this era....they need to be able to build relationships with the players....if you are have power....if you have control...you don't need to build relationships worth dick. I would want a pitching coach that had the ability to catalog all of the various idiosyncrasies of my pitchers so that they could spot a change in an individual pitcher's motion and assist him in returning to his successful motion. Combine that with the ability to gain each pitcher's trust that as a Coach he has each of their best interests at heart....and ya' got something for a pitching coach. Anything heavier handed than that and at least IMO you have a recipe for being irrelevant. That would be most critical I think for a Boston pitching coach in light of the Bard fiasco because at the end of the day, you cannot consider what they did with Bard as a legitimate effort to turn him into a starter. Had they been willing to truly make a legit effort, they would have had to send him down to a developmental level so that he could have learned something about being a professional starter, something he had not done at any time in his professional career to that point! I said it and posted it at the time. We saw it repeated over and over again that. Bard did not know how to get through individual hitters as a starter, how to get though innings as a starter, simply did not have the beginning of a clue or even the means to figure it out and even finally said so. I even commented in game threads that I could not much tolerate the way they were leaving him out there to just twist in the wind on his own. But in truth that should have been expected from a ML level coaching staff. They are not there to teach. If I were looking at that situation as a pitcher I would fault Bard for being naive enough to think he would be able to pull that off to the extent apparently of asking to start but I would also be critical and very likely more critical of the Boston brass especially the FO for making that whole mess appear to be a legit effort for their own purposes. In retrospect, that sucked. It was a fiasco...they sacrificed that kid for their own purposes. Maybe it says more about how much talent they really thought Bard had to be willing to do what they did. Does not change what they did. If I were a pitcher, I would not trust that FO bunch as far as I could throw them. At least the Sox will benefit from Farrell being able to say, not on my watch.

And besides the pitching I have recently begun focusing some attention on the offense because my position is that they cannot pitch with the competing teams and won't hit the teams with solid pitching good enough to win enough of those games either. This to me is an incredibly thin offense. Take Ortiz with his Acilles out of it. Then where are you? When the Sox brought in Agons, all be it another wrong headed move, they were adding Agons to Pedey, Ortiz, Youk who they thought still had something left, Ells, JD Drew and then got Crawford. They at least thought they had a sustainable offense. That team turned out to be a house of cards on so many levels. This team is not a house of cards but it does not appear to be headed toward anything like the offensive depth that the 2011 team had even with Napoli. You can think of offense two ways....who comes in to fill the spot for the injured player....or who in the existing lineup picks up the slack enough. To think of it in terms of an injury free season is more foolhardy than depending on 5 SP question marks all putting plus signs in their respective boxes. If Ortiz as old as he is and with a known issue breaks down, I don't see any way this team replaces him or his offense or even part of same. With the exception possibly of catcher, everyplace around the diamond and the outfield finds this team with critical players that must both produce at close to career best numbers and must do it for an entire season because there is close to nothing behind them. If Ells goes down we have Victorino. But that moves Kalish to full time RF and brings us (sound the trumpets)...Nava platooning regularly....just like that. WMB goes down...where are you....Gomez??? If Pedey goes down where are you....Ciriaco????? If any two infielders are injured at the same time...then where is your offense??? We have already seen that the only way Ells hits for power is if he is perfectly healthy. Even if he sustains an injury he can play with, take any chance he has of generating power and throw that out the window. This is not something we have to guess at any longer. This is stuff we know. This offense is not IMO going to be that great even with everybody in place. But now even more than 2011 if any combination of Ortiz with either Pedey or WMB is out for any period of time...they are sunk offensively. This time I would say even Ortiz by himself for a considerable period is a hole that the Sox won't be able to fill. So while we are for good reason focused on the starting pitching as the weakest element of this team by far, it is also looking like the weakest offensive team they will have started a season with in a good long time. They simply do not have the offensive firepower to stand off years by either Ortiz, Pedey or WMB and any injury to Ortiz for any length of time likely sinks them even further in the East. Any injury to any combination of two of Ortiz, Pedey and WMB and they could easily be cellar bound even if they are getting decent starting pitching and even if the sign Napoli. There is not enough firepower in the existing lineup to make up and not enough behind those players to make it up either. If you want to make the case that they can be "respectable" meaning something like 3rd place in the East...fine. But to now suggest they are are competing for a WC I think is pretty far fetched at least based on the team they have right now. Not only is the starting pitching a huge basket of question marks but this is neither a scary offense with all its pieces nor is it one that can sustain injury particularly to Ortiz or most particularly any combination of two of Pedey, WMB and Ortiz.

By the way, Kuroda is more a drop and drive pitcher, although Colon is probably the last of the classic drop and drive pitchers left standing....just barely. When Appier was around there was at least the two of them. The only other guy I can think of is Drabek.

What I am saying is that whatever method the pitcher uses to get the ball to home plate.....he has learned it before getting to the ML's. He is not going to "learn" much from coaches in the ML's. That is not what coaches do at that level. In part the proof is Bard who went nowhere as a starter.... IMO did not get the assistance he needed to make that transition and while he likely would have failed anyway, things that he needed to know and do as a starter he never did nor made a single days improvement on while he started. He was totally lost with regard to working his way through a lineup a second or third time through just as one example that should have been obvious so I will use it (although I am not sure he ever got to a third time last year). That is the sort of thing that a starting pitcher in the ML's is expected to know by the time he is pitching at the ML level and expecting that the pitching coach whether one of them, two of them or three of them was going to "teach" at that level from a position as a ML coach was simply wrong. Nor are they going to dictate to a ML pitcher. Help yes...dictate...not going to happen IMO. I fail to see the evidence in the modern game that coaches have that kind of power or authority. The money has just gotten way out of control....has been headed that way for decades and you really have to go back decades now to find coaches with that sort of power and authority to "teach" at a ML level. You do find players going to get assistance in the off season from guys that did "teach" them at a developmental level or that work at a developmental level if they are trying to regain something they had or change something and you even see teams recommending somebody the player can go to but you really don't find teams controlling that sort of activity in the sense that a pro football team controls it. You won't find pro football players doing more than unsupervised work outs with each other in the off season. Everything else is really controlled at a level that baseball players would find wholly unsatisfactory.

I would say that there is not pitching coach alive that could bend pitchers to adopt a particular approach, not with the kind of money at stake these days. Pitchers simply are to different one to the next. Even what they do with and for each other is not more than a series of efforts to try something that might work. It is true that a pitching coach has to understand each pitchers motion and try if he can to catalog them in such a way as to able to detect when one of them has gone awry. More importantly he has to be up to speed on the changes that the pitcher has made in the offseason if he has made any so that the coach is not one year behind where the pitcher is now. However there is no one way to pitch. Sure drop and drive power pitchers are going to use their lower bodies more and all power pitchers are more likely to come as much over the top as they can but you can't cookie cutter these guys. If a pitching coach had a bunch of soft tossers he could probably try to get them pitching to contact especially if they were cost controlled but I happen to think that the era of coaches "dictating" anything to players is gone. The Manager is the only guy this generation of players really cares about because he rules their playing time and even that control is clearly limited. You have to go back a lotta' years to find that higher level of control being exercised by hitting and pitching coaches. Coaches may advise the Manager with regard to who should play or who should pitch but the Manager is going to decide who plays and who does not, at least with regard to day to day decisions, the GM having more to do with who is actually on the roster to begin with. Coaches will help players and watch for changes in their motion or in the swing for a hitter but they are't dictating anything to these guys. Would you let some guy making a few $100k per year dictate to you what you are going to do to maintain your multimillion $$ stature?

Nobody is likely to want to hear this but in truth, pro baseball players are more responsible for themselves than any of the other players that play high level pro team sports in the US. Football and Hockey probably are the most structured sports. They are violent. In both cases the risk is much higher that as a player you may just leave the game in a pine box or at least never be the same again. Best way to get hurt in either of those two sports is for a teammate to miss an assignment and for you to get blindsided or just plain run over because of it. Baseball is without question the most independent of the team sports. Players are pretty much responsible for themselves. This is not the first you have heard me say this. I said it often enough when folks wanted to string up the Sox conditioning coaches and I called them glorified towel holders cause that is in essence what they are. They will help you with your routines, nice to have around but have authority over nothing. Baseball is built on the principle of the independent contractor. While on the job site, there are a set of overarching rules that each must abide by. However, nobody tells you how to do your job. The prime contractor does not have a guy that is a specialist in your particular area that governs what you are going to do. He might have some advice for you that comes from a particular knowledge he has as the prime on this particular job but he is not going to teach you your job. I know it might sound kind of silly but in truth, pitchers and players generally learn more from each other and from their own efforts than they will ever learn from a major league coach at the professional level. They bring more in knowledge into the game than they are ever going to take from it. They might hire a personal trainer that is a fitness expert. They might hire a guy to help them in the off season. They might go back to a buddy or old coach that knew them when they had it right. Once a player gets to the major leagues the assumption is that he has learned his craft. He has graduated if you will and is now an independent contractor working as any other independent contractor would. In part that is why I commented last year that sending Bard with all of his issues right into an ML rotation was a real oddity to me because Bard would be caught in no mans land....there would be no assets at the ML level designed to actually teach him what he did not know. If they were truly serious about turning Bard into a starter, they really had no choice but to send him back at least one level if not more than one level in order to find a spot where he would have the assets available that he would need every day. But that is not what the Sox wanted to do. Bard wanted to start...he was a ML ballplayer...the Sox wanted to take the shot that he could start. Coaches are not meaningless in Major League baseball but they are not more than advisors either. They are advisors that have grown up in the same system that they are a part of. You are not ever going to see a coach at the ML level even act like he can govern what a player will or won't do....how he will hit, how he will pitch, how he will do anything. The player may ask for his help and he will give it willingly but he will give it almost the way a valet attends to his employer. Lester's comments about "fearing" Farrell when he was the pitching coach, says more about Lester than it does about Farrell.