jung

It is interesting that the current position appears to give the Sox a big leg up in their dealings with Napoli. It does not look like anybody is beating his door down to sign him. Maybe the longer it goes, the more the Sox offer of 3/39 with the language maybe even looks better than two years at the same per annum with no language.

I don't think anybody is truly blocked either. I don't like that they spent themselves all the way back up to the limit for so little "team". In fact I think many of us thought they would not do that because the FA prospects for this year were so thin with a very few noted exceptions. Now that Napoli seems to have edged over closer to the junk heap, this is almost a comically thin FA class. This is not a version of what the O's did last year. They had young arms in their rotation with tons of upside and by season end they were pitching like it and they probably had a bit more bullpen then our vaunted group brings to the table as well. What the O's did get out of last season is a ton of major league seasoning for their young players. For the team the Sox got I think they would have done better to have at least left something in reserve and filled a spot with a cost controlled player somewhere. If I thought this bunch had more than a ghost of a chance at the post season even with two WC teams and if I thought they could go far if they got to the post season...well then fine. But IMO opinion, there are two many question marks in their rotation and not enough upside in that rotation to get enough out of the guys that end up putting a plus sign in their box. Nor do I think there is much about the group that has been brought in that will peak fan interest. So, if they look like they are not even challenging for a WC and the group as a whole does not peak much fan interest they may not even satisfy their business objectives. If that happens some fans might see something they might like.....the end of the Ben Charrington Era.

Doubront has no options left. He is in the same boat he was in last year. It is the big club or nothing for him.

Strength does not seem to be a problem after TJ. The pitcher has to learn how to pitch all over again though. He knows what he wants to do and he knew what result he would get with the old arm. So he is way ahead of the game as he has all of that pitching experience to fall back on. But he does not have the old arm anymore. He may never in his professional pitching life have had the arm he has now. The younger the guy is the more time he has to adapt. The fewer pitches he needs to command to succeed the easier it is to adapt. Power pitchers should tend to have an easier time coming back than multiple pitch, location/control pitchers. Even power pitchers often don't have much of an idea where the ball is going for a period. They often have an arm that is much more lively than what they had. Oddly enough Tommy John himself was a sinker ball pitcher not a power pitcher before his surgery, a soft tosser. After his historic operation, he taught himself how to pitch as in, did not even have the same motion although he still got you out keeping the ball down. So even John is not an example of a guy that came back and was simply able to pick up where he left off with the "new arm". What most people don't realize is that the surgery that bears his name was not initially intended to put John back on the mound again but was intended to allow him to have normal functionality with the arm. I cannot remember when he got the idea that he could pitch again at a major league level but I think he did what you would expect a guy like him to do. He tried throwing a baseball....felt no discomfort and kept throwing. Eventually went to Mike Marshall and together they rebuilt a new motion for him and he was back in business.

Surely the lost pick must be what is preventing the Sox from going after Laroche. They do not seem disposed to caving on the Napoli language yet have not gone after Larocke. Just about the only things that make sense given that course of action is that they simply are not willing to sign a contract with Napoli without what they consider adequate protection or with shorter term yet are adamant that they not give up the pick, at least not for a Laroche.

The overpays are not as alarming when you consider the short terms but on a sliding scale of term to per annum $, the Sox are still overpaying, just not as much as the absolute $'s per year in these contracts might suggest. As for the quality of the players, this was a tough year to be looking for players with the exception maybe of 1st baseman as it is a pretty thin class. As for a list of top 50, there are only about 210 FA in the whole class and 115 of them are pitchers. Relief pitchers abound.

Nobody has forgotten anything. The discussion has been focused on the period since 2000 in the main and in part since 1990 and with good reason. Much has changed in baseball and there were many more division wins generated from 91 or less win seasons in the earlier period. I would have to check to be sure but I think that is true for all the AL divisions be they two or three. And while some appear to determine that "beat the Yankees" and having a shot to win the division mean the same thing it does not. So while some post that the discussion is about whether or not the Sox were fielding a legitimate effort to beat the Yankees, others myself including are claiming that the Sox were fielding an effort with a legitimate shot to win the division in years when they were using a least 95 regular season wins as a target. If anything that is the distinction that is being missed.

Well I certainly have been critical of this organization particularly for its performance of late.... Not focusing on the Yanks or at least Theo's comments about not focusing on the Yanks has not been one of my concerns criticisms. Focusing on things you cannot control simply turns you into a reactionary organization that will always be one step behind if not more than one step behind your competition. In fact, Cashman's comments regarding the Crawford deal (and I don't know how much I can really trust Cashman in this regard) suggest that he detected that the Sox were already overly focused on what the Yanks may or may not do and that he suckered them into one of the worst deals in baseball history. How much Cashman really had to do with it...I am not going to claim to know. What we do know is that the Sox offered Crawford money far beyond what anybody else was going to offer and that the deal shocked baseball as an industry never mind baseball fandom. The Sox were at that level competing with themselves and you can only surmise that they saw a ghost out there and that is who they were really competing with. Maybe the ghost was Cashman and maybe it was somebody else. However it was somebody.

Well since this is just a forum discussion anyway, there might be one more perspective worth exploring. We won two championships in the period from the beginning of 2000. We won 1 division championship with 96 wins. 95 wins won three other times in that period and if you recall I had mused early that once you establish 95 wins as a target, you are competing for a division championship. Asking a GM to cut it as fine as 97 vs 95 is a bit unrealistic I think and aiming for a 100 sounds like it has salary implications. Are we really going to say that if we had won 2 WS and 3 division's in the period from 2000 to today we would consider that some sort of failure? I will absolutely be the first to agree that the train had gone off the rails of late with the Sox becoming the poster child for wretched excess in wasteful spending and bad decisions but I would have a hard time calling 3 divisions and 2 WS wins some sort of failure up till then. I have a hard time calling 2 WS and 2 division some sort of failure over that period. I just don't think Dan The Duke gets enough credit for the 2004 WS win and I don't think the organization such as it was gets enough credit generally for the second. I have to admit, that I detected something of a "the fans got theirs now we are going to get ours" mentality in the way the team has been run since then coupled with something of a wayward owner that maybe should have centered and refocused the organization before the train went off the rails. I would have wanted my organization to continue to try to fill the park by being concentrated on wins as opposed to things like 100 year anniversaries of the ballpark as a means to generate revenues. Granted the organization should have and could have done both but it didn't. As fans we were treated to endless product related marketing and product merchandizing fests while the team was falling apart. But as for the success of the period since 2000 and up till the recent embarrassments, probably lucky this is not a Patriots board. We would likely all of us be laughed off the thing.

Well since this is just a forum discussion anyway, there might be one more perspective worth exploring. We won two championships in the period from the beginning of 2000. We won 1 division championship with 96 wins. 95 wins won three other times in that period and if you recall I had mused early that once you establish 95 wins as a target, you are competing for a division championship. Asking a GM to cut it as fine as 97 vs 95 is a bit unrealistic I think and aiming for a 100 sounds like it has salary implications. Are we really going to say that if we had won 2 WS and 3 division's in the period from 2000 to today we would consider that some sort of failure? I will absolutely be the first to agree that the train had gone off the rails of late with the Sox becoming the poster child for wretched excess in wasteful spending and bad decisions but I would have a hard time calling 3 divisions and 2 WS wins some sort of failure up till then. I have a hard time calling 2 WS and 2 division some sort of failure over that period. I just don't think Dan The Duke gets enough credit for the 2004 WS win and I don't think the organization such as it was gets enough credit generally for the second. I have to admit, that I detected something of a "the fans got theirs now we are going to get ours" mentality in the way the team has been run since then coupled with something of a wayward owner that maybe should have centered and refocused the organization before the train went off the rails. I would have wanted my organization to continue to try to fill the park by being concentrated on wins as opposed to things like 100 year anniversaries of the ballpark as a means to generate revenues. Granted the organization should have and could have done both but it didn't. As fans we were treated to endless product related marketing and product merchandizing fests while the team was falling apart. But as for the success of the period since 2000 and up till the recent embarrassments, probably lucky this is not a Patriots board. We would likely all of us be laughed off the thing.

We are talking about winning the division, not toping the league. Since 2000, the AL east has been won three times with 95 win totals, 3 times with 96 win totals and 3 times with 97 win totals.

I think it is more common for a FO to think in terms of wins. That is also why I think most years the Sox have tried to be competitive for the division. I would think that in most years the Sox are thinking in terms of 95 wins plus....surely something north of 92. Once you are thinking about win totals like 95 you are competing for the division. There was never any guarantee that the Yanks would also end up north of 95 in many years. The 98 Yankee team was a monster winning 114 and rolling into and to the WS. They had 100+ win totals from 01-03. In 05 and 06 Yanks won the division with 97 and 95 win totals. The 07 Sox won the division with 96 in 07. The division has been won with win totals over 100 in five years since 1990. the Yanks in all cases, twice going on to win the WS. Since the year 2000 the Sox have recorded 95+ win totals in six seasons, recording a 93 win season in one other season since 2000. With the exception of years when a GM feels like he has built a real powerhouse (as in a 100 win regular season team) I would be willing to bet that 95+ is a very common goal with everything above 95 representing something pretty close to gravy and 95 or 95+ considered a decent shot at a division win.

Only 2012 stands out as a year when they did not make an effort to be the best. That much was painfully obvious from the start. But I am struggling with how one could make the case that they were not trying to go all the way in the previous years. Their efforts were somewhat wrongheaded but if anything they tried to hard to buy it. Those were stout teams as well. I don't think those were efforts to finish behind the Yankees....I just think that in most cases the money was spent building sort of historically typical Red Sox teams....short just to short on pitching but long on hitting. We always used to chid ourselves as fans because we would get all exited about the Sox usual early sprint to first followed just as quickly by the usual late season collapse. In reality how much does that sounds like a team that never really had the pitching in the first place. Pitching takes over late and more often than not we could hit with most teams but did not have enough pitching to make it through the dog days of August.

As you can tell from some recent posts I am intrigued by the "location light on the stuff" pitchers and what they will end up doing this year. Some of them absolutely ripped up these so called power lineups on occasion just by being able to locate the ball and having a slider. Jurjens is an example and whatever hopes I am hanging on Lackey stem from hoping he can locate and maybe benefit from the same sorts of undisciplined haphazard hitting performances we saw last year, especially in the AL. Cook even enjoyed more success than I expected but was so marginal that in most instances he imploded at some point in games he started. That might not sound like much but I expected him to not be able to get out of the 3rd inning......ever......

On some teams Kalish would be a 4 and on some teams even Nava would be a 4 or a 5 again team dependent. Some teams would likely prefer Kalish to Gomes. Gomes is nothing to write home about.

Not asking for more research believe me. While 200 and 5 should be a stretch for obvious reasons, getting close to it could have as much to do with the manager as the pitcher. Some managers will allow a starter one ugly inning and will get out the hook very quickly as soon as said starter looks like he "might" be headed for another. Some managers will give a starter more of a chance to pitch his way through even if he started a later inning (5th on up) with a walk or a hit. Sometimes that will work out and sometimes it won't.

I actually like Victorino cause it gives the Sox some protection on Ells. I am really not high on Victorino otherwise but reluctantly I have to admit they have to protect themselves on Ells. I like Ross (the catcher). Gomes I can take or leave. They took him...ok. It still looks like we are stockpiling #4 outfielders. Does anybody have more #4 outfielders than the Sox? I like the pitching acquisitions they have made this year with the exception maybe of Dempster. While I like the guys they have acquired as some of us have discussed, some here think it useful to "stockpile" bullpen depth. I simply am not of that school. Starter depth...totally agree with that concept....bullpen depth...not real convinced on that one. Seems to me they have made upgrades and can cut something away at this point. But in the long run it really won't matter, so fine....it is what it is. The biggest glaring weakness is still the biggest glaring weakness. That was going to be the case with or without Dempster. The one everyday player move I really don't like so far is the one that is hung up, Napoli. So if that falls through, I won't be all that disappointed. I am just not convinced that the Sox have accomplished what they appeared to be trying to accomplish for 2013 either from a business perspective (fannies in seats) or a performance perspective (wins). Is it an interesting team...not really...not to me anyway. Is it a team that can get to the post season...I doubt it. If you are neither interesting nor good, what are you?

Every team tailors its team to its ballpark. When artificial surfaces were more prevalent, those teams had speed burners that constantly put the ball on the ground as it would zip through the infield. We look for guys that can attack the green monster. By far the most changes we have seen over the years in baseball have been designed to pump offense or hitting. This includes the way MLB has treated the use of PED's in the main (ie...we don't want to know so don't get caught). The effort to to boost offense started in the 60's when pitching had grown to such a position of dominance that teams could barely eek out any offense at all. This was the era of the starting pitcher when guys like Sandy Kolfax, Bob Gibson and Marachal regularly went nine innings completely dominating games and defenses were much more stout. Ferguson Jenkins may be one of the last pitchers of that particular era. The mound was lowered in both leagues so the pitcher was not throwing downhill so much. The AL adopted the DH and successive rounds of expansion basically watered down the pool of available pitching talent enough to stem the tide of pitching dominance. However pitching is catching up again and this time Starting Pitching is coming back at a time when MLB has fully developed its use of relief pitchers to a very high level of sophistication. I don't see any expansion on the way either. So, there is nothing out on the horizon that looks like it will water down an ever growing pool of pitching talent on a relative basis. I suspect that unless this generation of PED's can really help hitters, we are going back and maybe all the way back to the era of pitching dominance we saw in the 60's. In which case if baseball truly thinks it needs big boppers to retain fan interest in the game, I am just not sure what it will do this time to boost offense. There also does not appear to be as many teams as there used to be that sport a recognizable, unified offensive style as well. There used to be more teams that were known for sporting a particular offensive style. You used to watch teams as much to watch them exhibit their particular flavor of team play. Most guys just seem to go up there these days and take their hacks. Even plate discipline seems to be more and more going out the window making these hitters cannon fodder for stout pitching. While I for one never liked the efforts to boost offense and was alway totally content with baseball as it was once played, there were also periods during that era where ballparks were completely empty. It takes more effort to truly appreciate what can and should be happening out on a baseball diamond. You can be a fan of physical violence, hitting and find happiness in football or a fan of passing or a fan of super running backs. You really do not have to swallow the whole enchilada to have a strong appreciation for football. But go to a baseball game and see how many fans have no idea what is going on between the pitches and it is not hard to understand why the powers that be would think it needs big boppers to fill seats.

It is to a very large degree about getting hot at the right time or at least it can be. That makes it similar to the NFL in that regard. The difference is that in the ML, they play 162 games over a season that spans across 6 months. The NFL plays 16 regular season games over a span of 4 months. IMO, minimizing the importance of the 162 which in effect is what MLB has done by allowing teams that have no business being in the post season a shot via a one game play in, a game played against an opposing team that beat them over the 162 makes no sense. As I have said before the old system was defensible because you could very often make the case that the team with the best record that had not won a division actually had a better record than one or more division winners. That is not the case with the 2nd WC. That team has no business getting a shot at boosting a team that beat them over the 162 in a one game play in scenario. In fact there is every chance that we will see teams taking the 2nd WC that were handily beaten by the 1st WC team over the 162, win there way into post season play based on winning 1 game. There is no legitimate defense for such a ridiculous system.

Well maybe a different perspective is that in years past the Sox on several occasions built teams that you could see competing for the division. They had a chance to win the division. Last year was the first I can remember in awhile where you could not make that argument no matter how you sliced it. They were not going to compete for the division. For my part I could not find my way clear to the Sox competing for the division with their pitching last year.

IMO, the Sox actually did aim to win the division until the creation of the second WC. Last year was the first year that I can look at what they did to build the roster and then the resultant roster and convince myself that they were "aiming" for one of the two WC births. Ironically, Uncle Bud created this mess in order to draw more fan support for the smaller market teams and give them a hope of post season participation. I doubt seriously that Uncle Bud's intent was to see one or more of his big market teams set their sights so low. Although it does my heart good anytime any part of Uncle Bud's cluster f*** blows up in his face. They had a defensible playoff setup and scraped it for a set up that is not defensible in any regard including generating revenue as that did not happen to any great extent either. I joined a wireless telecom company many years ago. It was active in several wireless telecom markets. One of its newer ventures when I joined was known then as commercial wireless radio, an umbrella term that mainly covered commercial business, public safety and utility applications for radio technology. Their efforts in this area were an abominable failure. I was hired to fix it. Fix it and I had a career, fix it not and I would likely be gone. Well I did enough to fix it temporarily. However I realized that the entire effort before I got there was built on the notion that the market was big enough to support another player and that at some level they could generate enough market share to make some money out of it on a modest effort. A woeful business plan if I ever saw one. Though I did fix it enough to buy some time I realized we could never survive that way. Our core capabilities were not at all well matched to that end of the market and as soon as we made enough noise to cause some trouble the guys the really had the market share would simply put us out of our misery. So I cast about for an embryonic market that none of my competitors was paying any attention to that we could get into on the ground floor. I would service the businesses providing the main radio piece with our complimentary but necessary accessory product. Found it and convinced ownership that we could invest in and grow with that business. That was almost twenty years ago now and the market was unlicensed wireless data connectivity....the market that ultimately became Wi-Fi and other related FCC Part 15 governed radio technologies. We dominated our end of that market from that day forward. Competitors ten times our size could never catch up to us no matter what they did or tried. The lesson...aiming for second place is a lousy strategy. The Red Sox cannot cast about for something similar to baseball to do with their assets as I did but it is still true that aiming for second will almost assure you of something less than second....like the basement for example.

I think he would be an upgrade as well but is he willing to take 4, 5 rotation money even if from a big market team....and how does that rate with possible positions higher up in the rotation from smaller market teams that might take more of a gamble on him. As I mentioned in the other thread we seem to be into a really interesting time in team considerations regarding players with existing conditions among other things which may lead up to a very interesting next CBA negotiation. Hamilton got five years but I don't think he even got to sniff seven years. Oswalt was close to driven into retirement last year before signing. The Napoli deal appears to be going nowhere unless he takes the language in the original Sox contract or fewer years (shorter term) at the same per annum. There are other examples as well but those come to mind.

It appears to me that teams are willing to pay all the money but are now somewhat more stubborn about the condition of the player and the potential for injury. Any player can fall prey to injury but this is starting to feel a little like players with an existing condition that looks like it is headed toward injury are between a rock and a hard place, there value in the market tumbling in terms of either term or per annum....term being more likely. I actually never thought I would see the day where some semblance of sanity entered the equation as teams continued to try to outbid each other for aging players with some star power. But I actually think there is finally a line teams are finding more difficult to cross. Taking on salary obligations with the ceiling created by the LT tax penalty and additional penalties and under the umbrella of the guaranteed contract simply makes no sense. Of course we are likely to argue that teams should just spend above the cap penalties be damned but I don't think that is reasonable either. I do think the next CBA negotiation might be the most interesting one we have had in awhile. It will be the second since the money has gotten completely ridiculous and the first since teams appear to be adopting positions that are somewhat more risk averse on a player by player basis. MLB had no stomach for that fight in the last negotiation but by the time we get to the next both sides PA and League may well be looking for a better way out of these messes than they have now.

Can't believe there is simply no interest as pitching,...any kind of pitching is valued at some level these days. Maybe there is an inside the beltway knowledge of pending injury doom for Marcum and nobody is willing to touch him. It looks a little like this year's version of Oswalt whose situation was apparently injury concern motivated.

Hey I am just letting my "anything can happen" freak flag fly. I had to live with that utter nonsense that the Sox might be going someplace last season. Heck I would tack him onto just about any deal I could find before he trips over a stray baseball bat in the dugout, breaks an ankle and is out for the season again.