jung

Ells becoming the new AGons...good for a useless hit to pad the stats.

As much as people tend to be non-plussed by the prospect for good player deals, look at the future flexibility those two guys give the Sox. They gave up flexibility in the short run as there were a number of moves that they almost had to make after offing Beltre. You can play the game at least two ways that we see a good deal. You can constantly feed your farm system yielding steady performance over a long period of time....However don't kid yourself....generally you have to start the process with a few years of high draft picks and you have to be smart about how you spend those draft picks...pitching, pitching, pitching. You will likely have good teams but not great teams. If you are careful about FA signings you might improve your chances for a few more great teams or you can spend your farm system more liberally on trades that bring you star players but often will rob you of as much as an entire year of player development in the form of guys that would have worked their way up to the bigs. You improve your chances for more great teams but God help you if you get stupid about how you do it either by having another agenda or just being stupid about how you do it. The Rays are an example of the former and the Sox of late have been an example of the latter. I would like to see much more of the former from the Sox and I would like to see much more sense used in how they spend the money and prospects the Sox spend in star player trades and FA signings. You don't have to be the Rays and you surely don't have to be the Yankees to be successful. In fact I would have thought the Sox were in a great position to build strong teams that could be restocked regularly had ownership not gotten so wrong headed in the middle of it all. I had initial hopes that 2012 could be the beginning of a new era until I saw how poor the Sox evaluation of talent seemed to be and how stubborn they were about some of these knuckle-headed decisions. Now I don't think they can make headway unless they clean house.

Guys like Ceriaco and even WMB are signposts on the highway. They tell you that the key to the Sox future is not the next monster FA signing, especially for everyday players....it never was. Like I said, what they have done is ONE WAY to keep fannies filling seats, especially if you only have 37K seats to fill.

Hate to say it Bren but based on the ******** spewing out from both JH and LL in print, I don't see it happening. Worse than that, they appear unwilling to yield and start the team down a path to right the ship. I would be OK with them being unwilling to tell me they know this is no way to manage this asset if your interest is still winning championships. It would no longer take much of a genius for us to see moves that would head the team in the right direction if they made them. I am more inclined to think they will squeeze out changes just like they have squeezed out additional seating at Fenway WHILE raising ticket prices all the while. Anybody that thinks this management and ownership group did not plan it this way just ain't been payin' attention. Do you really think they wanted to build some new 75k seat stadium, in Massachusetts no less? That whole thing all played into their hands...the previous ownership group making it appear impossible to continue without a new park....the facade of the new owners being willing to bite the bullet on renovating Fenway...the whole thing was sheer genius and the one truly brilliant business move this ownership group has made. It has been the key to keeping demand high for tickets raising prices all the while and avoided the utter fiasco that trying to build a new park in Boston proper would have been. Sheer genius.....better yet, they still have people believing this whole thing has been a tremendous sacrifice on their part....unbelievable.

If you mean how bad September is going to be, I have been saying the same thing the past few weeks. They are going to collapse again or I should say are collapsing again, this time from an abysmal starting point unlike last year. It is almost like they exhausted themselves on all this ******** and have nothing left to play the game. There is a silver lining for the Sox there also I think. Ownership will likely be left with no way out after this season. If they continue to pander to the pink hats, that is all they are going to have left. JH may even have to untie the knot between LL and the Sox if he is unwilling to untie the knot that ties JH to LL. Do they even look like they should be on the same field with the teams they are playing? They don't look like they should be on the same field with the bad teams they are playing.

Maybe the silver lining for the Sox in the way Ells is playing is that it will take the pressure off to spend upwards of $35M just to secure rights to Crawford and Ells. You really want that much money tied up in two players like that? Had I a way to unravel it I would have not done anything on Crawford and would likely have ended up in a pretty good position to resign Ells. I don't believe he is as bad at the plate as he has looked this year and he ranges CF better than anybody else the Sox have at this point.

I actually think that as is the case with most ball players, Ells is not as good on average as his great 2011 and not as bad as he has looked lately. He is somewhere in the middle. I think he has seen his high water mark for HR's just as an example. He is a very very good baseball player but I never saw greatness in Ells. This is not a player in route to a HOF career. Funny game baseball. Ells has really created so such stir inside the Red Sox with the Sox signing Crawford in part protecting against Ells departure. So the Sox have never really paid Ells much money as he has been cost controlled, are paying Crawford a fortune and neither one is going to sniff the HOF except as a visitor.

Looks like even Buch, on a great run as a starter, has thrown in the towel with that last HR. Glad V took him out of this game.

God Damn it....not the night for Buch to lose his edge. Imagine how much Pedey is working not to lose his edge....the thing that makes him Pedey while the whole thing is just on play out the string mode.

Albert has some sort of leg injury

It is a real shame and a sham for that matter. The Red Sox now make money in something like the same manner as a carnival complete with arcade. Honestly, one of the saddest things I have ever seen cause I cannot bring myself to believe that LL, TW and JH do not know what they are doing and what this has turned into.

Boy all of these games have this annoying sameness now...give up two...no response...give up one....no response...before you know it the score is 5-0 and the game is over. It does almost look like they might have finally been shamed into shutting their traps. Had not heard anything stupid for...oh at least two days.

Wow....what a hitter Albert is.

This bunch apparently thinks we want bats and bricks and Pumtos' and Byrds'.

Not sure how Remy can muster what it takes to say the "Sox will be playing from behind" like it is some sort of new thing.

dice can only improve the impression he leaves with GM's if he pitches up here. If he pitches poorly, he is no worse off...if he pitches well then he leaves ML GM's with a much better impression than they probably have had. I would be surprised if the Sox gave him a shot at this point.

Wishful thinking!

C'mon Agones...make me eat my words

Agreed...the rest are not even in the same zip code, area code, time zone, universe

The entire medical and conditioning staff needs to go as well. To me they seem as clueless about helping their players get through a season as McClure was about getting pitchers through a season. Granted in baseball there is little that conditioning coaches can control. They have no power to do anything. They are almost glorified towel holders. That said, I see no effort whatsoever to help players actively mitigate their known issues. There is surely every chance that I am just not seeing what is going on behind the scenes and it may well be happening all the time. Was Ortiz regularly stretching his Achilles before games and workouts? I have no idea. Has there been a good deal of attention given to mitigating known player issues.....some attention....none at all? No idea. If you even lose one player the calibre and importance of an Ortiz for a significant length of time, it is an issue.

The whole crew on Elks list. Anybody that sat around and either actively promoted activity that resulted in this disaster or passively sat by with one hand on their balls and the other on their ass needs to be gone. LL on NESN right now. The closest he will come to a change in direction coming up is a suggestion from him that maybe they will have to take a longer view on this team....followed by the usual claims that there is no quit in this team. Apparently LL does not recognize that the team quit long ago.

Sox fans are used to having their hearts broken. This is different. This is being bent over a desk by a bunch of conniving carpetbaggers that don't deserve to be stewards of one of baseball's most cherished franchises. Sure they have spent money...ya' gotta' spend money to make money. You can't convince me that they spent all this money in an effort to build a competent team because you could not have maniacally mismatched players this badly if you tried. They continue to pander to the "I want my superstars" crowd ignoring the "build me a winner" crowd. Granted it is much easier to simply go to the top of the FA market and grab whoever is there whether it makes sense or not and it is A WAY to keep people coming back to the park....just not the best way. The other side of the "I want my superstars" coin is the number of chumps you end up seeing in your favorite home town uniforms because there is a limit to what they will spend. I give you Pods, Byrd, Punto, Sweeney, Aviles, Salty, Shop, Cook, Melancon and on and on and on. On the field their biggest problem is the starting pitching....no question. But that only highlights how ill conceived this "team" is. The kinds of games this bunch can win has been narrowed down basically to slugfests where they are able to mash their way to a win. But they no longer even mash very well and can't do anything else offensively. Their pitching strategy is Buch and pray for rain...their offensive strategy has been get Pedey and Ortiz back to the plate as fast as possible and hope they do something....whoops....Ortiz is not even playing.

I don't care what people say about ball players being different, the differences don't amount to better baseball than we had in past baseball eras. We see somewhat more athletic baseball but much like pro basketball is more athletic, it is not necessarily a better brand of play nor is it more interesting. I would trade the modern day pampered idiot and his more athletic game for the players and the way the players played the game in a minute.

We have been hoping for and looking forward to runs since the first losing streak of this season. Truth is, they never looked like they had a run in them. Mainly they never looked like they would put together a string of decent pitching performances that would allow for a run. At the start of the season, our 4 and 5 were lining up nicely with opponent 4's and 5''s and while Bard very quickly fell apart, for a period of time he was keeping us in games with opposing 5's. Same was true for Felix. At that point Buch's performances were in the main bad and we would either get a bad or good performance out of Lester and usually the opposite of whatever Lester gave us out of Beckett. By the time Buch came around, Bard had already imploded, Felix was closing in on his innings limit and Beckett and Lester were still bumbling around. At that point, I give you for your viewing pleasure Cook, dice and Morales. While they were not Mo, Larry and Curly, they were not the Father, Son and Holy Ghost either. Cook has to be to fine to pitch in the AL East, dice appears to be done or close to it and Morales was just to young and inexperienced as a starter at least for this year anyway. Then you have the facade of a team purported to have a really good offense. The Sox enjoyed a significant period of time when it had the important pieces in place...those were Youk/WMB, Ortiz, Pedey and Ross. AGons should have been an important piece, is paid like an important piece but while eventually putting up decent numbers, eventually turned out to be late enough for the Sox to be basically done by then. Ells looks more and more like a guy that has had his big year and Crawford is Crawford. As long as the Sox could mash they could score but put them in front of a pitcher that could control mashing and they were done. As we saw when Ells and Crawford came back, they really did not have that much of an impact in that regard. I would contend that Ells biggest 2012 contributions came while ranging in CF. Crawford has had some nice moments at the plate this year but in the main...so what and he is still basically on safari in LF and this offense simply does not know how to use a Crawford up there in the 2 hole. This is not the Rays toothless offense although there were times when they looked like it. I don't see the Sox attempting to build an offense around Crawford. Defensively it almost did not matter who they had out there when you have Salty catching and Aviles at SS. That defense was always going to suck and it did. While we are wondering what the record would have looked like if Beckett and Lester had performed to expectation we should also wonder what the hell it would have looked like with an actual catcher instead of an empty set of shinguards and chest protector back there. All in, I don't know where this run was supposed to come from.....just based on the field performance of the team...putting aside for a moment whether the coaching could have been better or if the players were ever going to give V a chance in the first place. As for the pen, as I often said during this season, when you have to start looking at the pen to find something that is a plus or may be a plus, you are in a lotta' trouble. These last forty games depending on how much the scrappy bunch from Pawtucket gets to play should finally put to rest any ideas that this team was going anywhere as I strongly suspect that they are going to fair even worse in these last 40 than they have faired in the 120 before them. IMO, the challenge for the offseason will be in recognizing how truly f***ed they are....not fall into the trap laying in wait for them....that being the "gee all we had to do was get Beckett and Lester performing up to speed and we would have been great in 2012" trap. That is a version of the "September of 2011 was an anomaly" trap. More than anything else in my opinion it boils down to whether JH has the balls to do what he should do. I doubt it.

Well if you think about it Doc, the only Sox representative that has talked about "bold" moves has been LL. If anything the other Sox mouthpieces of late have talked about being cautious more than being bold. Occasionally one of them will spout something meaningless like, "we will make the moves we need to make if we see moves we can make" or some such blather. Here at this board some of us have talked about the need to make bold moves because the situation called for it. There is no easy fix for the mess the are in and no quick fix either. They can make up a lotta' ground if they make a bold move but it will require that they consider some of the Red Sox favored sons as trade bait as there are few players the Sox have that would yield real help. While the team has played so poorly together, you would think it would be easier for us to see our way to a bold move, how poorly they have played seems not to register.