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Wow I would not have expected any of the Giants to catch up to Verlander's rising FB. Sandoval crushes one to CF for the first run of the inning. That has got to be a big boost of confidence for the Giants in this game. They cannot have expected to be up on Verlander in the 1st inning. Although you have got to hand it to the Giants. As much as I expect much more focus from the hitters in the post season, the Giants have been the only team this post season that has met my expectations in that regard. Tigers were second to the Giants in that respect, Cards third...Yankees...pleeeeasssse!

Surprised that Verlander has shown the curve in the very first inning of this game. I would not have been expecting that at all and probably would have pulled a groin just watching the pitch go by me.

Doesn't look like we are going to have a separate WS thread. So I guess its post in here. Zito looked like he was not going to escape the 1st inning but he did somehow. Verlander is probably going to be his usual monster self since his last outing was somewhat below his standards.

Would love to get a look at the "book" that was used to draw investment dollars for that franchise. All of those issues you raise Pal would seem to have been there way in advance of the Rays even when they were a germ of an idea for somebody. Hard to see where else in the Southeast they could go if they wanted to stay somewhere in the Southeast. I have to believe they would have to get the heck outta' there. At any rate it would suggest to me that the Sox could pry Price away.

Well lets see....it took ten years and exile to another country for MLB to forget enough about how bad it can be with V at the helm for V to get the Sox job. Would V be interested in being a manager again at 72? Do they play baseball in Iceland?

Normally I would say trading a pitcher that good within the division when the Rays are still basically able to kick ass and take names would be hard to envision. But nothing the Rays do in the Trop seems to do anything to move the attendance numbers. Maybe it is such a horrible place to go see baseball that even Rays fans don't want to go. Maybe the lack of offense turns people off. I know if my home team regularly made life miserable for teams with monster payrolls and played decent baseball that would be enough for me. Since the Rays seem to have so much to do to move the attendance numbers...maybe as much as move the heck out of the Trop as well as generating more offense, I can see them willing to part with Price in the division. The other thing ya' gotta' like about Price is that unlike so many other guys that the Sox have bent over for, Price is the real deal. He is a proven monster already pitching in the AL East. The AL East may not at the moment still be the strongest division in baseball but it is still pretty tough especially on pitchers (many heavy hitters and hitters ballparks) and you still have two teams in the division that can afford to toss a heck of a lotta' money around.

I just never bought that...so the Sox were stupid with regard to signing guys from outta' town that had not proved a thing here. Does that mean that two wrongs should have made a right. Whether Ortiz wants to admit it or not, what the Sox have done in his case (maybe by accident as it is hard to convince yourself that they did much of anything right on purpose) has kept him motivated and has also kept him in gravy the past few years...right in the middle of general decline in attraction for the dedicated DH, Ortiz has earned some really big paydays. I would bet that they do sign him for two years and that the money ends up somewhere between 2/20 and 2/25.

I don't think the Sox would give up Bradley cause that would play right into Boras' hands. I do think they could go Bogaerts+DeLaRosa + Doubront and maybe one other prospect or player of like kind to Bradley. I don't think Bradley is going anywhere.

Great guy that Ortiz huh...willing to take 2/$25. Boy I'm impressed. I would go 2/$20 if possible and see if Ortiz is "insulted" by that offer. 2/$20 at least gives Ortiz his two years and might make more sense for the Sox than a one year deal.

I actually do think as I did before the 2012 season that the number of question marks and outright holes in this Sox roster will make competing in 2013 tough. The Sox have to make several moves and all of them have to work out. Plus the existing question marks all have to end up on the plus side of the ledger. That is a tall order. Maybe the result will be that Farrell gets some runway. The notion that this has been a loaded team has not worked out for anybody the last couple of years. It was not a loaded team to begin with.

Omar being borderline HOF might have as much to do with his comments as anything else. I don't think you can say categorically that at forty-five, possibly looking for enough playing time to push him over the HOF hump that Omar does not have an agenda just because he is Omar. If I had my druthers, if the Sox had their hearts set on Farrell, I would have liked for him to have gotten maybe one more year in Toronto so that he had a chance to work his way out of something of a hole. I think it would have added significantly to his experience as Manager as opposed to Pitching Coach. We all know how impatient the fan base and the media in Boston can be. But if Farrell can get a good staff around him, has learned that less is more from the Managers office and further realizes that the way to get your players to play for you is to make it part of your responsibility to always put each player in a position to succeed as opposed to putting him in a position to fail in the opportunities that he does get to play then I believe he can succeed here. So can somebody else for that matter. The juxtaposition of Farrell vs V is so hard to feel bad about though. Regardless of whether I liked the process that brought Farrell here or whether he is the best candidate "available" I certainly can say that Farrell seems like a huge upgrade to nutcase V. I have to say that the more I have thought about it, the less I wanted to see a guy's first managing job be Boston regardless of who he is or the process of choosing that might have brought him to the top of the heap.

Honestly, while I think it will be a step in the right direction with regard to ticket sales, I don't think the Ortiz signing in and of itself will net the Sox anything like the kind of early ticket sales they have grown accustomed to.

The Sox themselves may not have wanted Ortiz back on the field at less than 100%. I don't think the fact of his not coming back is as much a concern to the Sox as the fact that in spite of the huge amount of money teams spend on player contracts, they have boxed themselves into such a PR and a practical corner that they cannot even be part of the discussion. At least from appearances, players are making these decisions unilaterally and well they might under the circumstances. How many times have we discussed on this very board that many players now seem to stay out with injury until they in their own estimation are 100% ready to come back. So I don't think the fact that Ortiz did not come back would be as much disconcerting to the Sox as: - that the incentives for players to come back and play under circumstances that might not be ideal no longer seem relevant to the players in the decisions that they make - that the clubs have no tools to bring to bear that even allow them an opportunity to be part of the discussion in any practical sense in spite of the huge amount of money the clubs have tied up in player payroll It is another element of the rather weak hand the owners had dealt themselves in the CBA or more correctly, the weak hand dealt themselves through the very early CBA negotiations and the owner's subsequent unwillingness and inability to deal with the resulting issues at their core. This is why I am not inclined to lump Ortiz in with the many baseball prima donnas. Nick Swisher is a prima donna. David Ortiz is just making a pragmatic decision based on the dynamics that control baseball today.

There are already V apologists pressing the "unfair to V" button over the "revelation" that much of what comes out of V's mouth is a fabrication, fortunately not as yet here on this board. Let me try to narrowly focus on why V's ******** is so detrimental to an organization's efforts unless that organization is maybe something like a TV variety show. Any time you are in an environment where your compensation is totally based on doing something that is hard to do well, you resent every single second that is taken away from the time you use to prepare for the task at hand because you have to deal with ********. The fact is, players for example are at work when sports reporters get to query them. They are going to and from batting cages, or bullpen, going to and from the clubhouse, in the clubhouse, in the dugout or on the field preparing for play. If under those circumstances you even once have to scour your memory banks, trying to remember something that in fact never happened in the first place so you can provide a cogent response to a question from a reporter, you will resent it. Once you are confident that it in fact never happened to begin with, you resent it. You resent the time taken away from what you are really trying to do in order to perform at your best. Bobby V does not force his ballplayers or anybody else around him to deal with that once but constantly. It should be clear to us by now that it never stops. If you are a GM or a player, somebody that the media believes has interaction with V on a regular basis you will be stuck scouring your memory banks constantly, trying to treat your relationship with the media, with your teammates and with your manager with a respect that the manager himself clearly does not have. The only way you can scour your memory banks trying to recall the incident, the comment, whatever the question of the day pertains to, you have to defocus from the thing that you are actually trying to do....make yourself a better ballplayer, be a better prepared ballplayer, be a better GM, be a better prepared GM. Add that component of dealing with V with the part of V's make up that forces you to deal with V-speak, his never ending habit of speaking in code and I would be surprised if in a very short time, your head got to the point where it just wanted to explode. So is it any wonder that eventually players very likely want to just punch V right in the mouth if for no other purpose than to finally close off that end of the sewer! V complained in the Costas interview that in retrospect, he should have gotten authority to hire his own coaches so that he had guys acting as his interface with players that "understood" him. Lets put aside for a moment that with regard to his interface with his coaches, V once again has on two different occasions made comments 180* off each other. Frankly, I would not find anybody that actually could tolerate V within the competitive environment of pro baseball somebody I want around my ballplayers. If I were a Red Sox player my worst nightmares from 2012 would have been the very thought of having more goons like V around the clubhouse.

Players are always going to view something like "manager/ player interaction" through the prism of their own experience with a particular manager and whether they feel that manager had more empathy for the player, less empathy for him or the same as what the player had experienced in the past. So you really are getting 25 different takes when you ask that question. We already know Farrell has had players "fear" him. Fear and empathy don't usually find themselves on the same side of the ledger. So I really don't know how to value the comment from Vizquel or any similar comment from any player for that matter.

As I mentioned in the Valentine thread, Farrell may be at a point where he has learned from his mistakes in Toronto. That might actually be one of the strongest recommendations for him. However there is no doubt that he ran the Jays into outs...there isn't anybody that watched the Jays regularly and reported on it that deny's that. Although I do firmly believe that this is a failing of first time managers generally and even we fans that insert ourselves into the job. We overcomplicate the job and often insist that many managers are bumps on a log when it comes to in-game tactics. I have come to believe that over-managing is a common mistake of first time managers and will insure their failure with far more regularity than the avoidance of same. They try to make themselves somehow more relevant than they can be. I have finally come to the conclusion that managers should follow the Dr's credo of "first do no harm". The earlier they learn that, the sooner they stand a chance of actually being a "good" manager. I suspect that is however something very hard to accept for a first time manager.

The Red Sox "organization" appears as dysfunctional and disorganized as can be. Choosing V to manage their team was nothing more than another highlight of their dysfunction. V was not the problem but V was not the answer either and I don't think there is a snowballs chance in hell of V being the answer as manager for any team. That was a bad bad choice. As for Ortiz...Ortiz is a product of the CBA and the incredible amount of money available for teams to toss around mainly because of the value of cable TV contracts. As long as the guaranteed contract exists in baseball, and there are these huge pools of monetary resources for teams to dip into, and for players to crave, instances like Ortiz and his contract and things like continued PED usage will continue to plague baseball. It should be no surprise to anybody that Ortiz has been linked to PED usage at least in the past. That behavior is similar to this behavior. David Ortiz simply focuses a great deal of public and private effort on negotiating his contract. It is that simple. He is not a prima dona as much as he has taken a pragmatic position on the amount of money available to him under the current dynamics that rule baseball. At least Ortiz gives us the goods on the back end of the deal. He performs or at least he has performed. Giving him two years at this point might be dumb as dirt but clearly the Sox are not willing to risk being wrong at this point. If baseball had a proper CBA, they would not be backed into that corner. In fact giving Ortiz two years might have been the only way of getting some assurance that Ortiz would not shut it down again during the 2013 season. He is an older player. He is likely to suffer something during the season. What is to prevent him from simply not "in his estimation" being healthy enough to come back from such an injury? Nothing that is what. The only way for the Sox to get out from under this mess with Ortiz was to cut him away and see him come back to town in another uni. All things being equal, based on what we know, this might have been the best decision the Sox could have made. Where it not for the phenomenon of cable TV contracts and the dynamic that has added to baseball at this particular moment in time, baseball would be struggling under the weight of the guaranteed contract right now. Its owners are not at this moment disposed to tackle the inherent problems baseball has at this moment. It simply cannot afford a work stoppage, not with these monster TV contracts and opportunities right in front of them. Something the NHL is apparently to stupid to figure out. However the guaranteed contract was a fork in the road that should have been resisted at all costs....it never should have happened. If the owners of that era had a dime's worth of sense and got themselves proper representation in its initial negotiations with the PA, it never would have happened. It is actually a burden for both the owners and the players although the players would be utterly nuts to give it up at this point. What it guarantees is behavior from both owners and players and their agents that is simply not in the long term best interests of the game, behaviors that are destructive to baseball. All of what we see such as the ridiculous two WC post season format is an effort by baseball to nip at the edges of its inherent problems, avoiding addressing them directly at least for now. At least those efforts suggest that MLB and the owners particularly realize that the core agreements that are the underpinnings of MLB are fatally flawed at a very fundamental level.

I have got to say...it is getting to the point where you have to question the relevance of a manager in MLB in any sense. Somehow the comment that "somebody has to fill out the lineup card" no longer seems sarcastic at all. Heck give 700 the job...give me the job. At least we would treat the job and the players with some degree of respect unlike V apparently...unlike knuckleheads like the Mariner's Manny now out on the street again. I guarantee you that if the job boils down to what I can identify, give me a competent set of assistant coaches and I could do that job....I certainly have enough business management experience to handle the organizational responsibilities and my baseball instincts are as good as anybodies. Give me a hitting coach that can actually help the hitters, a pitching coach that can actually help the pitchers, a bench coach so that I have an extra pair of eyes, ears and another baseball brain to pick and a bullpen coach in tune with the pitchers and the pitching coach and a decent enough coach in the third base box and I am in business. Sort of gives you a better feel for a guy like Tito, who could handle the media spotlight and maybe simply followed the very simple Dr's Credo of "first do no harm" in his managerial approach. It is entirely possible that we as fans want to overcomplicate the job of Manager and in our effort to insert ourselves often complain that this manager or that manager never does thus and so and seems like a bump on a log when it comes to in-game tactics etc. Maybe the best of them realize that much of what we call "in-game tactics" are simply hunches, some right, some wrong, some supported by statistical odds and averages, some not. I think I am coming to the conclusion that Managers are at their best in big game situations when their players cannot often even remember to breath. Keep your guys from making errors of omission on the field, like forgetting to breath, make sure your pitcher and catcher are on the same page in big game situations where the game is going to be won or lost on one swing of the bat, manage your bullpen correctly, put guys in position to succeed instead of putting them in positions to fail and fill out the line up card correctly and you are just about doing what you can do effectively. If your players know that you see your function as putting each of them in positions to succeed as often as possible, you will earn their respect. I don't believe anything else will do that for a manager. I even tend to think first time managers make the same mistake we make as fans, trying to make themselves relevant in ways that simply at the end of the day fail, like Farrell continually running the Jays into outs on the base paths in his first effort as a manager.

Say what! The WMB incident never happened???? V leaked a story that was a lie unprovoked by a writer's question and started that whole hullabaloo for what? Its a baseball team for crying out loud....intended to provide its fans entertainment with its play on the field....not some vehicle for a guy that seemingly cannot generate enough attention on himself no matter how hard he tries so he can scratch that particular itch! V is so whacked that I am not even sure he realizes that if any baseball organization retained any thought that they might hire him again...hell if anybody anywhere thought they might hire him again....I think he just sunk that particular boat. "here guys....let me confirm for you that you cannot trust a single word that comes out of my mouth be it complimentary, provocative, humorous, informational...whatever.....never ever believe that a word that comes out of my mouth is truthful". You thought you could get the job done! How.....what aspect of the job included fabricating stuff for the media forcing them back into your clubhouse to your players to confirm, deny, question etc? How much on point does that makes the Mets GM comments about how a GM eventually just becomes exhausted with the effort to answer the countless media inquiries that result from V simply opening his big mouth and allowing s*** to come out again and again and again. I guess we would be forced to say "exactly". So where does that put the whacko's that hired him for the Sox job on the competence and credibility scale?

Damn I did not catch the Costas Tonight interview with Bobby V. Any more revealing items besides "Ortiz quit" after "the trade"?

Atila the Hun would have been a better hire than V, probably knew more about when to employ the hit and run as well.

The injury part of the equation for Ortiz is the thing that has to be resolved. Clearly these older players ultimately just wear out. It looks like Jeter's ankle just shattered when he came down on it during the playoffs. That looked like an injury that would not have been an injury to a younger player...somebody whose ankle had not been under the stress of MLB season after season. Stuff just wears out and then it breaks. So Ortiz has to at least completely recover from the injury he had going out the 2012 season. He is such a potent power hitter that if they do sign him, I would probably ask him not to be as agressive on the base paths in 2013 as he was in 2012.

I think teams are generally going to be more willing to live with modest offensive numbers from SS's if they are aces at run prevention. Major League BA's are on the way down on average and we are getting back to MLB where pitchers dominate. AL BA's are down 20 points in only six years and ML BA are down 12 points on average over the same period. Hard to blame discontinued use of PED's cause it has not discontinued. With so much focus on league DS and CS, some of us get to see more pitchers hitting than we see most of the season. Sort of interesting how good some pitchers are as hitters. Some of these NL pitchers clearly are more of a threat than Iggy is at this point. Sox sure have plenty of places where they need to make decisions. Giving Iggy his shot might not be the worst decision they make if that is how they decide to play it.

Well like I said in a few posts earlier, there is much to be said for a manager in baseball or a coach in football making his mistakes someplace and going to his next team already having stepped in a few land mines. Hopefully he has learned something about being a manager instead of being a pitching coach. These players have s*** the bed so bad that I no longer know whether universal happiness with the choice of Farrell is something I want to revel in. It does not look like anybody in Toronto is bemoaning Farrell's departure, more or less happy to see him go. You would have to believe that since he is going to a team in their division. I did not remember this until reminded this morning but Farrell did run the Jays into tons of outs, running them in all sorts of places where the result was just running right out of innings. Hopefully he will not make that mistake here as this is a tough yard to do that in. If he was punished for it in Toronto he will really be punished for it here. If he can bring some stability to and get performance out of the pitchers, that would be big. Lets hope for the best and see what kind of team they put around him.

Myself I am not sure I can so far as to say that Ferrell stinks but he has not proven to be the exception to the rule that pitchers rarely make good managers and I still think whatever "process" the Sox went through to arrive at Farrell was a facade. They have lusted for Ferrell from the beginning. As usual with the Sox once they get it into their heads that they want something, it does not matter what other information might contradict that desire. So now they got the guy they wanted and it may well work out but I am more just exhausted by the way this Sox organization does things. No longer even seems like an organization that really has a process for doing anything. Nothing seems to change down there on Yawkee Way. While "the trade" worked out as far as ridding the Sox of a whole bunch of rotten decisions in one deal, that was totally instigated by the Dodgers desire to be stupid. I am not even sure that it would have worked out so well were it not for the fact that Henry was running it from the Sox end with the Dodgers whispering the magic word CRAWFORD, in Henry's ear. Henry's third leg probably sprung to attention and he tossed out his viagra right on the spot.