jung

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?

Except for LA which will have a bottomless pit of money. They will likely end up with a bunch of bad contracts but I am not sure you can actually financially hurt them with their new TV deal.

The pitching is still God Awful. By steadier I mean Lavs is just that...steadier...less prone to having balls bouncing all over creation......off his shins...off his chest protector....off his glove....he is definitely quicker out of his crouch on balls in front of the plate. I hope we get to see a play at the plate as that is one of Salty's real weak points...he is just terrible taking throws, blocking home and successfully tagging the runner. That is one of those walk and chew bubble gum sorts of things and it definitely escapes Salty. Lavs does appear to give the pitchers a better target but I have not mentioned it cause I am waiting to see more of Lavs with more different pitchers before I comment on whether I think he is giving a better target than Salty across the board. Calling games is sort of the same deal. I just have not seen enough of Lavs to have a comment worth making at this point.

Well the boring the other team asleep part of the new strategy I had mentioned earlier seems to be working as the A's have surely fallen asleep after getting ahead. However now we get the meow meow part that I also mentioned earlier. The A's might be asleep but we are just plain toothless.

Lester probably had to go back out there... V trying to do everything he can to perverse the tired pen. Lavarnway is looking steadier behind the plate than Salty has...of course that is like saying Lavs is steadier than an earthquake back there but none the less, considering the diff in experience that is a bit of a surprise. I have been surprised at how overpowered Iggy has been at the plate so far. I know it is not that many games or at bats etc etc but it is hard not to notice that he has just been so overpowered as a hitter. As for Kalish although apparently still recovering from his surgery, there just does not seem to be much game there. Even when a player is recovering from something usually you can tell that there is an underlying game there that is worthwhile. I have had a hard time finding it from Kalish.

No Jerry...right back to the warning path...not the wall....poor Jerry groping for something good to talk about

Our new strategy at work. I think the game plan is to play boring enough to put the other team to sleep and then we pounce like a stalking tiger! Sure we will....our pounce is more like meow meow....scratch my belly please....meow meow.

By the time his client is done, Boras will be begging the Sox to sign him....please guys...."baby needs new shoes"

Lester is pretty screwed up at this point. I do give him some credit though cause I think he is exerting a tremendous amount of concentration to pitch at all given where he is. When he slips into some of the bad habits he has developed he just gets creamed or can't find the plate at all....sometimes both. He has to get straightened out so he can just pitch again.

Clay could be a 2.....that could be....it would be a mistake to think of him as a 1....sort of a version of the same mistake we made this year. Lester is maybe a 4 unless he really turns it around. He could turn it around but it will take an off season anyway. Thank God for Buch...at least we could build around that but we must end up with a solid 1 at some point cause we don't have one for next year and did not have one this year.

These games are starting to come down to seeing if the opponent will put up double digit runs or not. The Oakland games could be interesting except we can't pitch with them.

Staggering...a Red Sox pitching coach actually talking to a pitcher. Got so tired of old Mt. Rushmore McClure sitting there, stone faced as ever as the world passed him by.

Well that was never going to work. I know that at the very start of the year V or somebody announced that outfielders would be relaying to a middle infielder on all throws from the outfield but you are only going to catch really slow guys doing that. Pods probably has the best of the outfield arms when Kalish is not out there. I can see Ells throwing to a middle infielder as he does not have a strong arm and Ross does not have much arm either. They had no shot at Hunter that way.

What a tremendous hitter Albert is. While I don't get to see him that often, I think right now, he does more with good pitches than any other hitter in baseball.

Lots of things go our way. Train wrecks....typhoons......locust plagues.....John Lackey.....anything apocalyptic you can think of tends to come our way.:D

I don't think he is here because he is ready to be here. The Sox are now desperate for bull pen arms. I don't think he is at all ready at this point. Based on what he has been doing, I expect the Angels to line up a row of ambulances if he comes into the game.

Believe me it did not look like a very good decision from much closer than you are either. Lackey is not and was not a power pitcher. Pitching to contact never works very well in the AL East so while he was in fact the top FA pitcher in the year the Sox signed him, he was not the kind of pitcher you would expect to succeed in Fenway or in the AL East generally. Seems to be another bad case of Theo just going to the name at the top of the page for any given year and signing that guy.

Hope Lester settles. We are in no shape for a base path merry go round with these guys. I do wonder if we will see Bard as soon as tonight as the pen is shot.

This Angels team may just catch everybody ahead of them before it is over but it does sort of point out how difficult it is to construct a team via trade and FA intending to go all the way. On paper the Angels are a terrific ball club but they are surely not where you would think they would be with this much team.

Holy Smokes....I have never looked down at the bottom of the page and found myself alone in the game thread.

I know it is convenient to blame the conditioning crew but those guys really have as much control over players with guaranteed contracts as the manager does, as in none. Having built up that much of a record for DL stints makes me suspect it has more to do with the players we have brought onto this team much more than the conditioning coaches.

Morales has looked better against bad teams but has not looked better than Felix against good teams at least in my view. That does worry me about Morales. I would not be surprised if the back end of the rotation next year turned out to be something of a proving ground for some guys including Morales unless he proves out so much over the remaining games that he earns a definite spot. The pen will likely be interesting for next season as well. This is two years running that we have just burned the pen completely out way before the season ended. People questioned my comment about the pen being burned in August of this season. Do we want to question that again? When your pen gets to the point where the pitchers in it are one turn from done, your pen is burned out. That one remaining stint puts them into the need for significant rest. Do that to them two and three times in a season and it will be an entire off season before they can come back. This is twice now that the pen has gotten to the point where they were down to one or two guys that could go at all before they would have to sit for significant rest. They are so bad off now that Bard is back having hit 10 batters in his AAA work. Do you really think he is back cause he is ready?

I think I heard somewhere that of the 35 or so games remaining, only something like 12 of them are at home. This season is going to come crashing to an end. Remember when folks were wondering about whether we would be at 89 or 90 wins? Looks more like we will end up at 75-80 wins and we will have to fight tooth and nail to do that. UGLY

Oh good Aceves is up again in the pen. Boy now I'm excited. I might get the chance to see V chasing him around The Big A with a bat in his hands looking to bop him with it.

As I have said before, all hitters are mistake pitch hitters with the better hitters doing more with the pitcher's mistakes than poor hitters will do. But it all starts with mistake pitches. You rarely see a game with more than one possibly two hits off a good pitch in a good location. it is all about the hitters doing what they can with the mistakes the pitchers make. Case in point, other than that Beckett start against Detroit way early this year, I am not sure I have seen a Sox pitcher make as many mistake pitches as we saw tonight in as short a span as three innings. All hitters can be made to look pretty feeble if the pitchers do not make any mistakes. That if nothing else is why if you don't have pitching or maybe I should say competitive pitching, it does not matter what else you do have.