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AGons, Beckett and Punto share the ignominious fate of having been part of the disappointment of two franchises in one season and from what has been posted have not gone unnoticed as having contributed next to nothing positive to the effort by the fans of the Dodgers. LA was three games out of the WC the day of the big trade and today they are.......three games out of the WC while being 250M or so lighter in the pocketbook. While I don't expect LA to have the same kind of visceral reaction to it that Sox fans would have, I do expect that ultimately the day those three bozos showed up in LA will eventually be known as the day the music stopped or something equally depressing for LA fans.

AGons, Beckett and Punto share the ignominious fate of having been part of the disappointment of two franchises in one season and from what has been posted have not gone unnoticed as having contributed next to nothing positive to the effort by the fans of the Dodgers. LA was three games out of the WC the day of the big trade and today they are.......three games out of the WC while being 250M or so lighter in the pocketbook. While I don't expect LA to have the same kind of visceral reaction to it that Sox fans would have, I do expect that ultimately the day those three bozos showed up in LA will eventually be known as the day the music stopped or something equally depressing for LA fans.

No Gonzo was not outstanding until he left because he was still unable to accomplish his primary role at the plate and has not done it in LA either. Gonzo has to be a power hitter. If Gonzo cannot hit HR's at a rate around 30 plus per year then he is not getting it done. It does not matter if he leads the league in doubles blah blah blah. He must be a true power hitter and he must be a timely power hitter as well. He has been neither. He has hit 12 HR in the second half which is an average of 24 per year. He has hit 3 in 34 games in LA which would actually be even less. At that rate he will hit 16 per year. Gonzo has become an overgrown version of Wade Boggs and that will not get it done. It just won't. I actually expected AGons to do better back in the NL but so far that has not been the case. Whatever he does in the NL, I do not think he ever would have enjoyed success here and now I am really beginning to wonder if he will ever be the kind of hitter he once was. He is not doing at all better in the NL at least so far.

Bullpen has simply had to many guys that were coming back off of surgery or other repair and we did not know what we had. I think Tazawa is our closer next year. He has recovered enough of his velo to do that job. Tazawa closer Breslow, setup Menlancon, setup Miller, left hand specialist Hill, long and middle relief Morales, long and middle relief, spot starts Padilla, middle relief Atch, possible TJ Bailey, Aceves...gone I can see Menacon possibly gone as well as the Sox may shuffle more pieces. However I think Tazawa is their closer next season. Forget trying to copy or have some sort of version of Mariano Rivera. Rivera's come along very rarely. It does not matter what Paps was or is. We no longer have Paps and we need to think about our closer the way 90% of the league thinks about closers. You work to have a good one for the current season and keep moving guys into that role in the years that follow. Having a single closer for years and years is just not the way it is done. The Yanks have the guy in Rivera and Paps may be one as well or he may not be. At any rate planning on having a team year in and year out that can afford a long term contract closer at big money or planing to have the guy that can do it and the team is simply wasting a bunch of time and money on short odds for success. Tazawa is the closer for 2013. You plan on having someone in the wings for 2014 or if possible, use Tazawa in the role again. The time needs to be spent finding at least one good SP for the rotation for the 2013 season that will slot in somewhere from the 2 to the 4 and possibly two although they really need a 1 for the rotation and that is probably something they will not get done until 2014.

Imagine not selling Gonzo????...the poster child for useless RBI's. Mr has left more runners in scoring position than anybody in baseball...please. Frankly now that he has such little HR power I don't know what anybody is going to do with Gonzo. You don't want him on the base paths cause he is a walking traffic jam and you don't want to remove him late in games cause he is a great defensive 1st baseman. If Gonzo cannot hit HR's at the rate of about 30 per year his value is severely diminished. I don't think he would have ever hit them at that rate here again and may never hit them at that rate anywhere again. Scutaro...what has Scutaro got to do with any of this. They saved money on Paps and dumped salary with Scutaro....you maybe could argue that they would have needed the Scutaro salary dump more if they kept Paps but they didn't. Who knows what they had in mind when they dumped Suctaro. "A" solid starting pitcher would have been inserted were....2,,,,3,,,,4,,,,where? You are telling me that Lester is still your 1 and Beckett is still your 2 and you are going anyplace? One solid starting pitcher would have made a difference but not enough of a difference and one solid pitcher and Paps would not have gotten it done either nor would one solid starting pitcher, and Paps and Riddick. You still have lame assed Salty as your catcher, Aviles as your SS, Mr No Power AGons as your 1st baseman and your One more solid starting pitcher is in fact your "ONLY" solid starting pitcher because none of the rest of them were solid. This team is a mess because it failed to spend money on personnel wisely from the Beckett extension through the Crawford signing and that includes, AGons, Crawford, Jenks, Lackey, Cameron. All of them were either bad signings or bad fits for the Red Sox. In some cases they were both bad fits and bad signings. It traded off prospects that should be on this team now or soon to be on it leaving a big hole in the train of players coming up from the system, either trading players or leaving them to languish in the minors while their core ML players simply grew older. If you want to talk about a set of player moves that cascaded through the team then you have to talk about moving Youk to 3rd. That is the move that did create a number of other moves that really turned out to be failures for this team. Whether Crawford and AGons go on to be successes somewhere else, they were failures here and examples of our dumb assed FO being willing to give guys all the money regardless of their physical condition and a slew of other elements that were simply discounted as irrelevant. But the Sox got to make their big glamor signings again and again and again, signing names instead of players that could fit on this team.

Riddick is nothing more than a nice ballplayer that is streaky as hell. I would have liked to have him but Reddick did not create the need for Ross...uncertainty about Crawford and Kalish created the need for Ross and Riddick did not have a good enough year in 2011 to offset the need to protect anyway. We would have needed to protect Crawford and Riddick instead of Crawford and Kalish. Nobody had some crystal ball that said Riddick would even be what he has turned out to be in Oakland and there are surely no guarantees that Riddick would have been in Boston even what he has been in Oakland. We are loosing track of the ball gentlemen....the issue is and has been starting pitching by a long shot...nothing about Paps helped that...the closer is not even the second biggest issue on this team...the second biggest issue is the lack of timely hitting up and down the order....even when we were scoring enough to be #2 in baseball we were scoring buckets of useless runs...scoring 10 when we could have won on 4 and scoring fewer than three when four or five would have won us a game.

That is Ells major contribution on defense.....he easily ranges in CF better than anybody the Sox have and in with the best CF in baseball...lf he had any kind of an arm at all he might be the best CF in baseball or certainly within the top three. As it is maybe he is top seven to ten but that arm is nothing more than a pop gun...and he cannot even make throws from middle depth CF...has actually yet to throw a ball past the pitchers mound on a throw of any depth, short, middle or otherwise the entire season.

Yep that is....A starting pitcher and paps and we would have been competing for the division....you have got to be kidding me!

"A" solid starting pitcher? are you kidding me? A starting pitcher would have lifted these starters enough above 27 out of 30 to have mattered? This team is 22 games below 500. To compete you have to be something like 15 to 20 games above 500. That is a 35-40 game swing. Please...be serious.... The rotation is a complete fail and will need at least two pitchers plus a return to form for Lester, plus the best Buch can offer, plus a Lackey that recovers entirely from TJ. You have two guys that we have not even named, three guys that are total question marks and we have not even started to talk about pitching depth...Good grief....I guess our depth is Doubront and Morales...but who cares...so we have some guys that can step in once some real pitcher goes down..... Please lets not have another of these, we were only one or two players away discussions because they don't live anywhere on the right side of Alice's looking glass. I guess we can have them but they are not at all realistic discussions of what this team was and is.

It does not matter whether Paps regressed or not....this team would not have handed Paps the ball with enough opportunities to have won to have mattered....and likely won't be handing any closer the ball with chances to win enough times to matter next year and maybe the year after...by that time Paps contract is up and you have him again if you want him.

Our starters are now 27th out of 30 teams....27th out of 30....looking elsewhere at this point is a distraction but not much more.

To many games lost by the starters to look at any component of the bullpen as that big a deal at this point. The "strength" of this team is middle relief...big deal. When you lose 93 games and have starters like ours, you simply cannot look into the bullpen to find a relevant number of lost games. The preponderance of these games are lost almost as the are started with few still games by the time the bullpen gets to them.

The more I think about it, the more I think the Sox will have to renovate the entire FO and will likely resist the temptation to spend much of the money they got out of the trade until they have done so. These are still the same guys from the Theo era just sans Theo. Can't see that working. As for Bailey...he is a walking Butterball Turkey. Every time the Sox see him they will think it is Thanksgiving and the season must be over.

This is going to end on a walk of HR..only a matter of which Yankee hits it.

I still would have wanted Bresloe against Granderson to start that inning. The only benefit to us might be that we now should know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Bailey is a total dickhead...cannot close for this team and should not close for it even next year. Pull somebody out of the system and allow him to close for a year. Bailey is a complete fail. The team will just go into deep depression every time they see that fat f*** warming up...and why are so many of our pitchers fat f***s by the way...so many of them just look like blubber balls....not big big guys that also carry a loota' but just blubber balls. Sick if it.

I am actually surprised they did not send Jeter against that pop gun arm of Ells even as shallow as he was...and even as shallow as he was Ells STILL did not get the ball past the pitchers mound

Baileys biggest asset to any team is that he stays injured enough not to pitch that often....a full season of Bailey would likely be the ruin of any team.

Pap was not going be kept here and probably did not even want to stay here. Our problem is a FO that is totally clueless...misguided and misdirected...really for the most part taken advantage of all over baseball. Paps could not have saved enough games this year to have mattered and would not be able to save enough next year to matter. If we are lucky this might be a team that needs a prime time closer again the next time Paps contract comes up.

At this point it might actually do me some good to see Bailey just creamed to the end....what a waste...*******...complete f***nut....does not even seem to understand where he was, what he was doing...just served em up.

Three blown saves and it is not like this jerk has had tons of save opportunities. Worse than that it was only a matter of which of those suck balls pitches was going to be sent into orbit.

Closer my ass....Don't care how limited Riddick is...this guy is a total jerk...we have no shot at this point.

Go to hell Bailey you total waste.....another guy I am totally sick off....complete nothing pitch from dickface.

Damn...would have loved to see Bresloe out to pitch to Granderson. Damn it this would look totally dif right now with 1 out and nobody on

Iggy my grandmother could out hit you. You are pitiful!

Seems like Iggy is rubbing off on Lavs. This keeps up and i am going to start to contend that Lavs sucks!