jung

There must be something that has come out via Napoli's medical exam that has the Sox worried. Look worse case they are saying to Napoli that they think the risk of him losing considerable time via that hip is great. We are willing to pay you. We are willing to sign you. We are just not willing to lose the time that we are buying based on your condition. They are simply asking Napoli to make good on the time. I can see why he might be balky but I can also see where the Sox are coming from. Unfortunately you cannot conduct a medical on a player until there is an agreement in principle. It should not be a surprise that teams are seeking some solution besides killing the deal. If Napoli was not willing to stick around for this he could just walk away entirely at this point. He seems not to have done that as yet. So I guess he is not totally "insulted" yet to refresh a term from last year. I do think this is an issue that will not get by the next CBA and I believe we will see modification there that will govern the options that teams and players have. Frankly I think this is more an issue of the players wanting to have their cake and eat it too and teams having few tools available to them to simply get what they are paying for. However it is getting messy. Hence I think we will see things done in the CBA.

And the Steinbrenners overruled their GM on ARod out of their goodness of the hearts....right....or was it because they saw ARod as a marketing draw and took on that idiot contract because they saw it as an opportunity. We don't have any idea why the Sox did not insert language into the Crawford or AGons deals. In the case of Agons....who knows....maybe they view a player that has already had his surgical repair differently than one that is heading into heavy waters. They might have seen Crawford's wrist as nothing more than a nuisance since he had been getting shots for it apparently for years without effecting his play. I am not arguing that it wasn't wrong headed in the case of either Agons or Crawford. I think it was. However I can see how they could rationalize it. I think one thing we as fans totally miss is that all of these guys are carrying around some sort of injury or damage. None of them escape...it is a fantasy to believe any of them escape the wear and tear of being a pro athlete. Merloni was on the air today talking about Drew's ankle. In describing his own ankle problem he said that while making a throw, he literally turned his leg out of his ankle. Think about that for a minute. So he had just worn that thing down so far that in just making that throw he turned hie leg right out of his ankle! When Jeter went down in October, it simply looked like he had turned something. Instead the ankle was broken, shattered really. That was a nothing play. Jeter had simply stressed the joint to such a degree via abuse over time that just landing on it wrong shattered the thing. Think about how much that joint must have been worn down and how brittle to have just shattered like that. I am not looking for sympathy for the players. They go into this with their eyes open and I suspect they know more about the risks they take than we will ever know. I do think it is the fans that remain wearing their rose tinted glasses and really have no idea how few "healthy" ballplayers there are running around out there. I think the teams know though. With the amount of money in play now I suspect we will see more and more teams trying to flesh through these issues with player and we may possibly see modifications in the next CBA aimed at addressing some of them.

Well I don't think it is as cut and dried as "the Red Sox are dirt bags who can't be trusted". Seems to me that JD Drew is the guy that has made the Sox more mindful of these situations by dancing around the language in his contract all the way up until the last year when it did not matter. So in response, the Sox decide that in certain situations where justified, they are going to tighten up the language in the agreement so that at least if there is going to be dancing they are going to call the tune. Appears to me that had JD dealt with the issues honestly the Sox probably would not be here today. I do think the game has been mightily corrupted by the amount of money being flung around. The players all want their piece of the pie and maybe are getting a bit huffy at efforts by a team that is willing to pay the money but is just not willing to be dragged over the coals at the same time. These guys all want their money regardless of anything including s***** performance (see ARoid). Teams can't do a damn thing about s***** performance but they can and likely should make an effort to protect themselves from some of the ******** we see regularly now including: -what is likely rampant PED use - insistance by players that they not return from injury until they are 100% and in some cases seemingly 110% - what appears in some cases to be players making decisions about how they will play, how they will hit for example because it suits their efforts to generate numbers they can use in their next contract negotiation. I don't really know where this great game is going. However I do think money issues are making it more and more difficult for fans/owners/players to see eye to eye. I actually don't wonder if the next CBA could be a hum dinger. The owners have basically been skirting some issues that really are at the heart of the matter cause they have been unwilling to take them head on with all of these fat TV deals sitting right in front of them. Will the next CBA be the one where they feel like they can no longer just skirt around the edges of some very real concerns? I don't know. However I have to believe a whole bunch of this s*** is going to come to a head at some point.

Well that may well be true. This might well be the right call on Napoli. I suppose the Sox could say that since they could not perform a medical examination until both parties had an agreement in principle, they could say that they really could not include consideration for the preexisting condition into the original offer to Napoli. They did not know the extent of the condition. Further the Sox could then contend that they believed that inserting language into the agreement that would take effect should the condition force Napoli to the sidelines was a better way to go than lowering the value of the contract either by changing the term of the $$ per annum. That does sound like a reasonable argument to me. Still and all at the point of having conducted a medical on Napoli it still might have been better to go back and negotiate the term and/or the per annum. I just think that for some ballplayers, the kind of thing they did with Lackey might be tough to swallow. For example I would bet Napoli figured he would be able to generate some attractive numbers playing in Fenway and that he could use those numbers in his next contract negotiation. Giving the Sox time at the end of this deal to compensate for injury time apparently was not to appealing to him. Who knows where they are at this point. As I said earlier, I would not be surprised if Napoli is sort of nonplussed by the whole thing.

I for one would not let him bat "no matter what". However in the scenario you described SBF the only element of the discussion regarding Iggy was late innings in a tie game with two out. If that is the only condition, no I would not necessarily pinch hit for him there. "No matter what" is a completely different discussion. You added that later. I don't think anybody else said "No matter what". Although I did not check all of Soxsport's posts on the topic I don't think he said "no matter what" either.

I did not realize that Napoli already said no. I suspect that means his agent is talking to other teams.

I just checked again myself. Assuming the site I checked has the correct info, the Cap for 2013 is $178m and then moves up again in 2014.

Should be interesting to watch but this sort of stuff does not just happen. It would seem to me that Felix either has to get more contact outs or has to be sufficiently strong to overcome the number of pitches it takes to set up and K so many guys as a percentage of total outs. 200 innings is not like rolling out of bed. I could believe 180 with an ERA still north of 4 somewhere....maybe something like 4.25-4.5 for an ERA. Felix has been a starter his entire career as I recall. So it is not like he has been making a major conversion with that as a basis for issues that have curtailed his progress. I would be tickled pink if he threw for 180 at an ERA around 4.25

I guess I keep forgetting but I think the threshold does not increase till the 2014 season...That is correct right? So this year the threshold is $178M. Also we usually forget when we are making these calculations that there are some adds that are hidden in the background behind the AAV based salaries. I am not even sure we can do better than just guess at those even if we wanted to. I take it the $165m being reported in the 2013 salary thread is just the salaries and now includes Napoli and Dempster. Is that also correct Soxsport?

Well I would be interested to know what sort of basis there will be for Felix to improve. He seems to be sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place. He had not as of the end of last season learned how to record outs in any significant quantity without recording K's. Setting up every batter for a SO really pumps up his pitch count and last year before you knew it he had been bounced out of the game from fatigue. He had 29 starts so his average was above 5 innings per start but below 6. So I guess my question would be: Do you think he will have between these two seasons learned how to get guys out on more ontact as opposed to relying so heavily on the SO? Do you think he will have bulked up so much that he can withstand the high K percentage and stay in games longer? He certainly does not seem to be a version of Sandy Koufax or even a cousin of a version of Sandy Koufax from the perspective of stamina. His high K percentage and inability to get enough contact outs seems to me to be his biggest hurdle from the perspective of a really major improvement. In addition I don't see him becoming so much stronger that he can withstand the effect from having to use so many pitches to record an out, yet if he has not learned by now how to get a sufficient number of contact outs, when is he going to learn that? I believe that to be a not insignificant challenge for a pitcher that has not figured that out yet. What kind of an improvement are you thinking about in his case? Do you think he will pitch 200 innings at an ERA below 4:00 for example. I think that would be considered a surprise. It would certainly surprise me. If however you believe he might make it to a rotation 3 well then I have always thought that was his upside boundary...certainly not an insignificant accomplishment but not elevating him to the stature of a rotation 1 or 2.

I am not sure I understand how the term "can't miss FA" is being used in this discussion. Does it imply a guy that was or would be considered worth the price paid for him even if he only met the lowest expectations had for him at the time of his signing? Are we talking about the next David Ortiz deal here. Ortiz came off the waiver wire as I recall so he really was not a FA. If he had gotten to FA that year I don't know what kind of money he would have attracted but I doubt it would have been much. The lower the cost I guess the closer you would get to a description like "can't miss". Taken to an extreme, if you paid 0 for a FA, then he can't miss right. How can you lose on that deal? It seems to me though that every FA carries with him some of risk burden. As such there is no such thing as a can't miss FA. Each and every one of them could flop taking your investment in them right down the drain. If we look at recent Sox examples that were maybe examples of much more likely to miss, I would say the more you are dealing with a player that is hampered by a physical problem that has not as yet come into full flower or a player that has not played a single game since having gone through a major surgical procedure the more it would seem you are playing with fire. For example, Agons while being a trade and extension had not played a single game since his shoulder surgery when the Sox sent SD prospects and agreed to an extension for Agons that gave him ten years at $21m per. Seemed to me the error was in giving Agons all the money under those circumstances. Crawford's wrist issue was known to the Sox and if I am not mistaken, he had been experiencing growing pain throwing the ball up to the point where the Sox signed him yet once again the Sox signed him to a long term deal in that case for all the money and then some. Lackey clearly had some physical issues when the Sox signed him again giving him all the money but in Lackey's case, inserting language that would be triggered by a decline in his capability to pitch with the injury. In Lackey's case it sort of worked out for the Sox cause he just could not continue to pitch with that injury, had to get the surgery thus tripping the language in his contract. JD Drew however successfully danced around the language in his contract for years and the Sox never got anything out of that contract language. Their current situation with Napoli may be directly related to the Sox inability to gain anything out of the language they inserted into JD's contract. As I have said before I don't like the idea of trying to insert language in the contract that offers some protection to the team should a known preexisting condition deteriorate to a certain point. I would prefer that the club make an offer to the player that assigns a value to the risk. Either the player takes the offer or he does not. If some other team decides to ignore the risk and offers the player more than you are willing to offer then just let them sign him. Seems to me that for a period of time, common sense went right out the window with the Sox and they simply ignored negative elements that came as part of a player's package. Maybe they saw their willingness to ignore those risk elements as the domain of the big market team. They surely paid for that mistake proving that enough things can go wrong with enough players to even bring the big market team to its knees. I don't think that the can't miss FA exists because the implication is that you paid very little for him. If you paid very little for the FA I suspect he carried with him a huge risk of being a total bust and that was reflected in the price. The real mistake to me goes beyond simply ignoring the risk elements that came along with particular FA's or trade candidates. That was part of it for sure. But the bigger problem was using that logic while also deciding to build a team primarily through FA signings. Now they really had their asses hung out in the breeze cause they were going to make a number of these FA signings ignoring risk elements and paying all the money every time. At the same time the Sox left a gapping hole in the developmental cycle for their prospects trading a good number of them away for guys like VMart and AGons. To me there is nothing wrong with FA signings and nothing wrong with big FA signings and even not much to complain about in big risk FA signings. The mistake is in not relying mainly on your system to develop players for your big league club instead trading those players away. Instead of using FA to fill holes in a roster mainly made up of the players you developed, you end up with to many FA's on your roster all of them carrying some element or risk and none of them cost controlled.

If they sign Napoli now I would bet there is a chance it is going to leave a bad taste in Napoli's mouth. They knew he had the hip issue before making him the offer. Then the Sox tried to insert language in the contract that apparently Napoli's people balked at. As such now they are I guess talking about a cleaner contract...fewer years at the same AAV. That would leave a bad taste in my mouth if I were Napoli. At the end of the day, players still have way to much power afforded them in the ML CBA. I'm not sure how I am going to feel about Napoli if he feels like he has been abused in this process. Cannot say I am real happy with what the Sox have been doing this off season. Not sure why this looks like progress.

Drew danced around the language in his contract most of his time here. He did have shoulder issues but the language in his contract was not strongly enough worded to keep him from dancing around it. That is precisely why the Sox are taking so much time with this Napoli contract. They are trying to avoid the Drew situation. However I think Napoli's people are likely to consider dropping back on the years at the same per annum as something of a bait and switch and pull out.

Neither one of them can be distinguished by their gloves at SS. Sometimes we just cut these numbers to finely. SS is the only position on the field where you have to judge the player based on the opportunity the position presents to negate the opponent's offensive thrust. You cannot judge a SS just by the number of normal everyday plays that he makes and you cannot even judge him by the number of errors that he makes the way errors are tallied in baseball. A really good SS is like a good goalie in hockey. Both can really frustrate your team. You have runners on 1st and 3rd with one out or on 1st and 2nd with no outs and your hitter hits one in the general vicinity of SS. Suddenly the SS comes from nowhere and snuffs out your rally with a killing DP on a ball he had no business getting to and corralling and you out of the inning no runs scored. Neither Drew nor Aviles have the capability to make those sorts of plays from SS. Regrettably there are few SS that can any longer. In the era when pitching truly dominated baseball there were SS's making magical plays virtually every day. However neither Drew nor Aviles even sniff plays like that from SS. Part of the problem with the Sox and their approach to SS is that they are so focused on hitting from the SS position that they hardly consider how much a really good defensive SS can blunt the opponents offense and help your weak pitching staff.

Right you are rjortiz. It might be time to look at what the Sox have done here so far. We have an outfield made up of Ells if they don't trade him and the Sox amazing combination of #4 outfielders. We have once again cornered the market on something nobody really would normally care about as we now have more #4 outfielders than anybody else ever thought of having. In the infield we have new SS, S Drew, who might be fine defensively depending on what he has left in his legs, might be fine at the plate but is a LH hitter in a park that is pretty deep in RF.... but hey on the new look Boston Mid-Packs, he should fit right in. We have WMB still learning how to throw across the infield from 3rd and possibly Mike Napoli trying to figure out how to catch those throws across the diamond from WMB and we have Pedey, the one true standout on this team of to old, to infirm, to often injured and recovering from injury ballplayers. Behind the plate things are either as confusing or as simple as they would appear. Salty, quite possibly the worse combination of handling pitchers and basic fielding from behind the plate in MLB for a supposed everyday catcher. We have Ross, a legitimate defensive Catcher. We have Napoli if he is signed who will occasionally play behind the plate but will only look good back there when compared to Salty and we have Lavs who if the Sox had any sense should probably just be given the job for most nights considering the chances for this team actually going anywhere in 2013. At DH we have the last legit, really good dedicated DH in baseball all be it, getting up there in age with no assurance at this point that the achilles will hold up. All and all a roster of everyday players that should score some runs but is not daunting by any means. I really do not think this offense will scare anybody when paired with the Sox pitching. As for the Sox pitching, who is going to be where? We have posters that believe that Dempster will be the Sox opening day SP. I don't know which is scarier...that or Lackey being depended on in the rotation anywhere. We have Lester who might slot in anywhere from 1 (highly unlikely) to 3...who knows. We have Buch who must deliver at least 180 innings and 30 starts if he is either the 2 or the 3. Then again maybe he is the 1???? Finally we have Felix who must figure out how to get batters out without striking them out if he is to become a more significant member of a ML rotation. That brings us to the heart and soul of this team...the bullpen. This will make three years running that the strength of the team will be the bullpen....need I say more. Unfortunately we have already had two years running where the bullpen has been driven to exhaustion by the end of the season cuz' the SP can't pitch enough innings to keep them off the mound. You expect your 4 and 5 to leave innings out there but our 1, 2 and 3 have regularly left to many innings out there and that is the dif that matters. I just don't see Dempster as making enough of a dent in that and he might not make any dent in it, pitching in the AL East. All in, a team that does not have enough hitting to make up for its likely weak pitching. I would pick them today for 4th in the division with a shot at 3rd and likely no shot at the post season as I do not think that 3rd in the AL East whoever it turns out being will end up the 2nd WC this year. The chemistry should be good though so they should all have a good time getting to 3rd or 4th in the AL East.

Boegarts is the B I was referring to that is crawling up Iggys butt for the SS job which is why I contended that the Sox had this year to finally figure it out on Iggy and thats it. As I posted in the other thread my view of it is that Iggy will not improve significantly going back down to AAA. He spent most of his 2012 ML stint employing a slap hitting style that was either tolerated by the AAA club or possibly resulted because Iggy was so completely overwhelmed by the difference between ML pitching and AAA pitching. The slap hitting style became very popular with college ballplayers playing in the era of the early metal bat design. In fact many pro baseball careers foundered on the rocks of change to an all wooden bat league. I have no idea what the genesis was for Iggy adopting it. However Iggy only started to make modest improvements late in 2012 when he finally abandoned the slap hitting style. Whether it was tolerated in AAA by his AAA coaches or whether Iggy adopted something of a defensive swing, simply overwhelmed by the dif in AAA and ML pitching I cannot say. On that score alone I think that Iggy is the kind of hitter that will only improve at this stage against ML pitching. Sending him back down will not help him develop as an ML hitter. He has to learn to stand in and hit against ML pitching. Either the Sox give him that opportunity or they don't. I have contended for more than a year now that whether I think it right or not, I don't believe the Sox will give him that chance as he will never be the prototypical Sox SS. Not to say that there is anything so admirable in being a prototypical Sox SS but he is clearly not Iggy. Boegarts stands a much better chance of filling that slot and may even have a better glove that we usually find patrolling SS for the Sox. Boegarts will remind nobody of Iggy out there but this is the Sox, a team fully willing to put a utility infielder at SS on an everyday basis hoping that his bat makes up for his fielding inadequacies. To me 2013 represents a year when they could afford to finally figure out players like Iggy but that it not to be. If I had Iggy in the 2013 lineup I would not pinch hit for him late in games. Again unfortunately from what I can see if he is to develop further as a hitter it will have to be against ML pitching.

Salty is a laughing stock as a catcher....utterly and completely hideous...quite possibly the worst target in all baseball along with all of his other pitcher related catching traits. Terrifyingly bad defender sometimes even forgetting that home plate is his base to cover! Only occasionally blocks the plate well when he remembers that its part of his job. Made some improvements throwing the ball last year but the game still goes to fast for Salty. I suspect he has improved back there as much as he is going to improve at this point. While the HR's are nice they come with a huge penalty in K's even for a catcher, a position player usually far enough down in the order to allow for some forgiveness with regard to K's.

Felix may be able to step up this year. Unless he finds a way to get guys out without striking them out he will have a hard time improving on his innings pitched. Seems to have to set everybody up for the K and that turns out to be a lotta' pitches. Felix does not impress me as the kind of guy that is strong enough to pull that off season after season. Several more ground ball outs per game would help him immensely.

See I would trade more off the chance to get lucky when the odds are so far against and give the younger players all the playing time I could in 2013. In my view if Iggy comes up again after spending some number of months in AAA he will go right in the tank again as he did last time and will have to work his way out. Either he will be given the time to do that or he won't. I don't think his hitting will enjoy some remarkable turnaround spending more time down in AAA. If you recall, for at least half of the limited time he was up here last year he brought a slap hitting style with him that was getting him no place up here. I don't know where he got it, where he was taught to hit that way but he certainly brought it with him out of AAA and it was in the main responsible for his inability to even get the ball out of the infield even when he did hit it. Either he brought it with him or he was so overwhelmed by the dif in pitching between AAA and here that he adopted a defensive hitting posture as a consequence. It was not until later in his ML stint that he rid himself of that slap hitting style, started getting his hips and body into his swing and he showed some improvement in his ability to hit the ball at that point. If that slap hitting style is something they are allowing him to get away with in AAA or whatever the hell is at the heart of that, I have eyes. I can see that he brought it with him to the Sox and finally got rid of it toward the end of his stint up here. Without anything other than my eyes to go by, I have to assume that he was slap hitting the ball for his entire AAA stink in the 2012 campaign. If he goes back to that again while down there, that alone would be enough to convince me that he should not have gone back there.

Why should they trade Iggy now?...cause they are not going to move him up in the system and he probably has enough trade value as part of a package to bring back help in an area where the Sox are weaker. In my view they are spending much to much time trying to turn this mess around and actually make a run of some sort in 2013 when all the Napolis and Drews in the world will not help them unless there is much more help coming for the rotation. If somebody wanted him as part of a package that would bring back pitching he would be gone for me. They are not going to use Iggy....that should be plain as day at this point. So what are we doing? We are going to keep him down on our farm in case Drew and Ciriaco go down when we are still this weak in pitching. And that is my point about a number of the moves they have made this off season. It might make them respectable in the sense of winning 80+ games in 2013....so what. Why are we going to care about this baseball team unless it is going to make a serious run at the post season. It has signed a bunch of short term deals with guys that have no real future here. While they might be good clubhouse guys, I don't see Red Sox nation falling in love with Gomes and Napoli....they might get a little excited about Victorino. Unfortunately, many teams in the AL think this is their year and they are either all in like the Jays or close to it. Hell the Royals think they are going to kick our ass this year. I agree with the short term deals but they should have made them to players that help supplement the play of young players that we would end up caring about instead of making deals for players that keep guys we would care about from getting playing time. They should have taken LaRoche not Napoli especially if this was their Napoli plan all along. LaRoche would help if you were going to have a young left side of the infield. Napoli won't. Victorino was fine because he frees the Sox to try to do something with Ells but if Victorino keeps Kalish on the pine for 2013 I don't think I like that deal that much either. If Iggy cannot be part of a package that helps the pitching, then leave him there. But he will never be the Sox starting SS as long as this FO regime is in place unless he is the last option and they are stuck using the last option. They made that decision this weekend and to be honest iggy cuts entirely against the grain of the typical Sox SS whether this FO regime or some past FO regime. Frankly I would not have brought Drew in here because Drew is all about 2013. I would have given Iggy the job and let him swim or drown. Unless all the gambles they are making in the rotation pay off and I mean all of them, this team is going nowhere in 2013. It just isn't. They just paid for the privilege of bringing in another rotation question mark in the form of Dempster. The entire rotation is standing on quicksand playing 81 games in a ballpark that is a notorious hitters ballpark and it has so far constructed an offense that might be good but is not daunting. So what the hell are they doing dicking around with Drew? Maybe if they packaged up and sent either Lester or Buch on their way for a solid pitcher and turned at least one rotation question mark into somebody not standing on quicksand, then I would be more inclined to this 2013 constructed team. But the only effort they seemed to have made around Lester was to KC and that was not a serious effort, not with the Rays in the game and it was not a package deal intended to bring back a rotation piece to take Lester's spot. Right now we are going to start the season wondering what Lackey will have in his first year back from TJ, if Buch can actually start 30 games and pitch about 180 innings, if Lester can recover and be the Lester of old, if Dempster can pitch effectively in the AL East and if Felix can go about 25 starts and 150 innings effectively with no real basis in fact to be confident that any of those things can or will happen. Yet with the possible exception of Felix all of those bets in the rotation must pay off. At this point we don't even know where to slot Lester in. Is he the 3 just behind Buch and ahead of Lackey? Is he the 2 behind Dempster and ahead of Buch? If Dempster is our opening day pitcher is that something encouraging? Clearly the Sox don't want to let go of there minor league talent but for what purpose? So they can get injured down there delaying their progress indefinitely? That is basically what they have done the past few years at least with those guys that they did not trade away.

Why should they trade Iggy now?...cause they are not going to move him up in the system and he probably has enough trade value as part of a package to bring back help in an area where the Sox are weaker. In my view they are spending much to much time trying to turn this mess around and actually make a run of some sort in 2013 when all the Napolis and Drews in the world will not help them unless there is much more help coming for the rotation. If somebody wanted him as part of a package that would bring back pitching he would be gone for me. They are not going to use Iggy....that should be plain as day at this point. So what are we doing? We are going to keep him down on our farm in case Drew and Ciriaco go down when we are still this weak in pitching. And that is my point about a number of the moves they have made this off season. It might make them respectable in the sense of winning 80+ games in 2013....so what. Why are we going to care about this baseball team unless it is going to make a serious run at the post season. It has signed a bunch of short term deals with guys that have no real future here. While they might be good clubhouse guys, I don't see Red Sox nation falling in love with Gomes and Napoli....they might get a little excited about Victorino. Unfortunately, many teams in the AL think this is their year and they are either all in like the Jays or close to it. Hell the Royals think they are going to kick our ass this year. I agree with the short term deals but they should have made them to players that help supplement the play of young players that we would end up caring about instead of making deals for players that keep guys we would care about from getting playing time. They should have taken LaRoche not Napoli especially if this was their Napoli plan all along. LaRoche would help if you were going to have a young left side of the infield. Napoli won't. Victorino was fine because he frees the Sox to try to do something with Ells but if Victorino keeps Kalish on the pine for 2013 I don't think I like that deal that much either. If Iggy cannot be part of a package that helps the pitching, then leave him there. But he will never be the Sox starting SS as long as this FO regime is in place unless he is the last option and they are stuck using the last option. They made that decision this weekend and to be honest iggy cuts entirely against the grain of the typical Sox SS whether this FO regime or some past FO regime. Frankly I would not have brought Drew in here because Drew is all about 2013. I would have given Iggy the job and let him swim or drown. Unless all the gambles they are making in the rotation pay off and I mean all of them, this team is going nowhere in 2013. It just isn't. They just paid for the privilege of bringing in another rotation question mark in the form of Dempster. The entire rotation is standing on quicksand playing 81 games in a ballpark that is a notorious hitters ballpark and it has so far constructed an offense that might be good but is not daunting. So what the hell are they doing dicking around with Drew? Maybe if they packaged up and sent either Lester or Buch on their way for a solid pitcher and turned at least one rotation question mark into somebody not standing on quicksand, then I would be more inclined to this 2013 constructed team. But the only effort they seemed to have made around Lester was to KC and that was not a serious effort, not with the Rays in the game and it was not a package deal intended to bring back a rotation piece to take Lester's spot. Right now we are going to start the season wondering what Lackey will have in his first year back from TJ, if Buch can actually start 30 games and pitch about 180 innings, if Lester can recover and be the Lester of old, if Dempster can pitch effectively in the AL East and if Felix can go about 25 starts and 150 innings effectively with no real basis in fact to be confident that any of those things can or will happen. Yet with the possible exception of Felix all of those bets in the rotation must pay off. At this point we don't even know where to slot Lester in. Is he the 3 just behind Buch and ahead of Lackey? Is he the 2 behind Dempster and ahead of Buch? If Dempster is our opening day pitcher is that something encouraging? Clearly the Sox don't want to let go of there minor league talent but for what purpose? So they can get injured down there delaying their progress indefinitely? That is basically what they have done the past few years at least with those guys that they did not trade away.

Ciriaco becomes the backup and I think Iggy becomes trade bait.

If the Sox took all or most of the salary that would be a different story. I doubt the Sox will be willing to take on all that salary for Santana.

I would be surprised if they would just take DeLaRosa especially since they are willing to eat salary on Santana. The Sox have the trade chips to do it I would think.

Iggy will very likely be traded. With one of the B's flying up his butt they had this year to figure Iggy out and decided they already had it figured out. Looks like see ya' Iggy to me.