jung

I think any reasonable person would have to say that the Aaron Cook era has officially ended as of last night.

Right you are Doc. The Megatrade might not be the beginning of the end. It may not even be the end of the beginning. But it might just be the beginning of the beginning. Apologies to Winston Churchill for messing around with his quote. Dodgers lose again tonight....

Sustaining a solid effort on the field is more difficult and takes a longer view than sustaining fannies in seats. You can talk yourself into simply making successive PR driven moves as a means to keep fannies in seats and that gets to be very addictive. Of late at least in my view, they have not been willing to bite the bullet and resist the temptation to simply make one PR driven move after the other. I think Theo tried to give us a view into how Baseball Operations is simply dangling at the end of LL's string when he talked about the "pressure to do something". While he was out of the Red Sox organization by then, I was pretty surprised at how candid he was and how much he pointed us to the whole spin driven, PR focused effort within the senior offices at Fenway. I was actually kinda' surprised that his comments really did not get more play than I thought they would. Maybe we hear what we want to hear.

Good question. I am inclined to think he will if only because the replacement will obviously be someone on the current coaching staff. If the team even looks like it is breathing under his stewardship, I am worried that it might encourage folks to want him back. This damned upper management group is so PR driven that they might actually listen to something like that. I want them to make a solid move here. Bring us a manager that is current, has been on the field, not in an announce booth for ten years and give the guy a decent length contract....something that says to the players that this guy is here for awhile.

Well I said two weeks ago that this team was going to fall apart at the end just like they did last year. Only dif...falling about from 5th place instead of falling apart from 1st place. That may be the silver lining. By the time this team is done losing.....with starters that cannot go more than a few innings and a completely burned out pen, two years running, Management will not be able to hide behind the injuries or any other ********.

In case you are wondering it is 3-3 in the bottom of ninth Ari-LAD. AGons is 0-3 with a strike out and a pop up.

And I also agree with Brennan that talking about these bums in terms of the slots they might fill next year is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. In truth that is very much what they did to us this year...lets see, Bard will be our 5 (until he implodes), Felix will be our 4 (until he needs to go on the shelf because he won't be able to last the innings, Buch will be our 3 (if he holds up), Beckett will be our 2 (if he successfully makes the career transition he is going through) and Lester will be our 1 (if he is finally able to do what was expected of him since 2010). And if that fails, we have Cook and dice coming back! Oh boy I can tell ya' I was excited.

I rarely agree with anything Callahan has to say. But for me, bringing in a manager that had been out of managing for ten years was another PR move just like many of the Sox glitzy signings have been PR moves that could simply not be rationalized as part of an effort to build a team. It was the very first thing I posted here when V was being leaked into the media as a potential choice....Larry's choice. How does it make sense to bring in a manager that has not managed in ten years to manage in one of the most difficult situations on the planet, AT THE BEST OF TIMES! Tell me how that made any sense whatsoever. The LL Red Sox have done just about everything they have done for show and very very little for go since the last championship. They have done it to the point now where they are really in a hole. There is no justifiable reason to bring V back next year....which is exactly why I am scared to death that it is exactly what they will do.

Well eventually the pen just dies on you. I have been saying for weeks that there are just so many times in a given year when you can gas the pen completely. They had done it once by the start of July, a second time by the end of July and are now going through the 3rd period this year when the pen has been completely gassed. This is much like bicycle racing. Once you body goes into oxygen death, you have to get off the bike. Nothing will work other than a complete long rest. Once you gas the pen this many times in a given year, they will not come back for you until you put them on the shelf for like an off season. People scoffed at me when I said they had gassed the pen even earlier this year than they did last year. Their starting pitching has simply put the pen into to many holes to many times this season. They have left V with no real good choices other than try to stretch out a failing starter or be submitted to what we have tonight. They will get by for the remainder of the year on pure luck...that is all that is left to them...pure luck. Least we ever doubt the importance of real pitching....not pitching names but real pitching....all we need do is look at this season. Frankly I do not much care to think about the Hamilton's of the world until I see some sort of indication that the Sox realize that the next big bopper FA is not going to get them anywhere. They need a plan that will provide them sustainable pitching before getting us another big bat to oh and ah over. You need solid starting pitching and a cohesive lineup made up of everyday players that compliment each other as opposed to having everyday players that you could describe as a few glitzy stars surrounded by bums cause this what you have the money for after paying the glitzy stars.

The surest sign of the lack of a cohesive team. I did not even think it a coherent team...the Crawford signing being the last straw in a completely incomprehensible effort if the idea was to build a team that wins games. Can pretty much see the logic in what they were doing if the idea was to keep pink hats climbing over each other to get in the front gate. However if the idea was to win games, these guys lost their way several trades, FA signings and extensions ago. Talk about a low point...battered into submission by Oakland's murderers row.

The only poison anybody ever poured into Bard's ear was the thought that he had a future as a ML pitcher, short circuiting a very promising career as a parking lot attendant.

Iggy finds a way on base...taking a page from the Shoppach school of hitting!

What do those successful teams have that the Sox nor the BlueJays have? Pitching. It will be tough for the Sox to get back quickly because in truth they really have one guy in the rotation that we might say is solid at season end....presuming he continues at his current pace and that is Buch. Buch would slot in as a very solid 2. Nobody cares about 4's and 5's until they end up being mush like Cook and dice or various and sundry other flotsam and jetsam. So really it is looking like we may have a 2 in Buch, have no idea who would be a 1, and have serious question marks everywhere else. We can HOPE that one of Felix or Lester or Lackey or Morales might be a 3. I guess for now we are left plugging the other guys into the remaining 4 and 5 holes. A super solid 1 makes a huge difference but if you think about it, a super solid 1 probably puts the Sox were most "decent" not great but decent rotations are in the ML....two guys carrying the load and a cast of question marks behind them. They have much farther to go to have a rotation that you would think can take you to and through a post season run.

Remy talking about team chemistry based on Reddicks comments to Nalco saying that the A's have floated on team chemistry and pitching. I actually think that Remy and Reddick are talking about two different types of team chemistry. Remy is clearly taking about whether or not teammates get along or are buddies, maybe even kindred spirits. That is not what Reddick is talking about. Reddick is talking about the ability for a team to gel on the field. All those teams that Remy talks about not having buddy buddy chemistry gelled on the field. Their playing styles fit together into a cohesive effort. The Sox dick-heads may have liked each, even loved each other but as good as they might have been as individual athletes, they never gelled on the field.

As for the Sox dung heap of pitchers.....that was a sham from the start. Some of our forum members tried to compare it to what the Yanks did in 2011 to try to help their rotation along and there was never any comparison between the two approaches. At least you could look at the Yankee choices and consider them reasonable risks, less than 50% bets for the most part but you could see your way to what led them to take a shot on somebody. The Sox choices were simply choices of convenience. As soon as some team threw somebody on the dung heap, here came the Red Sox.

Geez I forgot the ever forgettable Punto in my list of recent ex-Sox now Dodgers. They actually had Punto leading off the other night.....and we beat up V for his lineups. Come to think of it, with Punto, AGons, Crawford, Beckett and HanRam in the Dodger stable, they probably don't have a snowballs chance in hell....to much Red Sox weight to carry around.

Cook is horrible...as bad as the Sox starters have been Cook is the only one of them that if you just took a few years off of us, we could very likely hit. He is that bad.

Sounds about right Bell. I had thought they would flip what they had to do (win almost two out of every three) and lose at just about that rate and that looks like where they are going. I frankly do not think they would have done a whisker better with Crawford, Agons and Beckett. Beckett is the only one of the three that pitches....sort of! Notice that the Dodgers have started to slide since taking on a few Sox players....about the equivalent of adding a couple of tons of lead to a ship already taking water.

Heck the game threads are about the only fun we can have this woeful season. It is amazing to see how fine Cook must be to succeed. His margin for error is something on the order of .0001%

Cook sucks again tonight. Has not had a single ground ball. Not only no ground ball outs but no ground balls at all. Another laugher of a FO beauty....Cook starting for the Red Sox...terrific.

While we would like to see guys, if there is no chance of them playing for the ML club in 2013 there is no reason to bring them up and start the clock in 2012.

Ells apparently not hitting better than Iggy. Iggy missed a bunt attempt and promptly hit into a DP the other night. Ells missed a bunt attempt and promptly hit into a DP tonight.

The Dodgers will definitely feel the need to do something if their current roster and lineup craps out. The difference between the Sox and the Dodgers is that if it happens to the Dodgers they will just spend more money. They will not necessarily have to find an angel to bail them out of the bad contracts they have. They will just get more players and offload what they can when they can.

That is how I feel about everyday players and pitchers 700. Why give a guy with issues all the money. Will somebody do that ....yes...so what. Give all the money and maybe a little more to a guy that is solid, stable, without some big injury history or just coming off surgery that has not even played a game yet. Give all the money and even a little more if you need to for a guy that does not come with all this extra baggage. Does that curtail the number of guys you might be in on? Sure....Frankly I don't care. Tired of these guys turning to s***.

I assume you mean the one that is great for about the first 5 innings of a game but has been disappearing late and close just like he had here. That 1st baseman?