jung

I suspect the only reason Crawford is playing now is in some hope that he will be attractive to somebody as a player to help take somebody into the post season....Good luck with that Sox....if anything Carl has made his new stance appear irrelevant regarding his issues from last year. Sure he turned on one of Hughes monster mistake pitches last night and jerked one out of that band box New York calls a stadium but he is still toast to anything on the outer third and cannot even see what is and what is not a strike out there even from a RH pitcher! Carl is much like most of the Sox hitters....big holes in their strike zones.

Like I said before I honest to God don't know who would want to come in here and take this mess. If I were a real deal, experienced managerial candidate I would want a guaranteed big money deal with all sorts of clauses written in stone allowing me to run my show and if the Sox did not like it they could go f*** themselves. They have made such an ungodly mess of this now that they have lost the right to make a manager toe some line or they will have to bring in another guy that has been out of baseball for a decade or so desperately looking for a way back in. We thought last year was bad....this year is last year cubed.

Of course Nava is still around....Crawford had to be removed for defensive purposes after the 7th and I guess now Carl must have his beauty rest every couple of days and can't play at all! This team has truly become a caricature of itself. All of its worst features now blown out of proportion and exaggerated to a point where there is simply not a blanket large enough to hide them. While I don't expect anything that they say to acknowledge the mess they are in....what they do from here is more important than what they say anyway.

The funny thing about V and his "Boston" experience is that he has really gone balls to the walls on the marketing of V in Boston route.....buying up restaurants and making many promo spots etc etc. It is the investing in the marketing of V in Boston thing that might well backfire on him. He may well be in and out of here so fast that all of that will end up being a net loss to him when all is said and done. Who knows....I have no idea how much of his own money has gone into this effort. When he was hired I said that I had rarely seen an instance where a manager made such a pronounced effort to market himself regionally as a consequence of his managerial position. Doing it so quickly and so definitively is what makes me wonder if he ended up tossing more of his own money into this than we would have guessed otherwise.

It is time to face up to the fact that the real mistake in Redick for Bailey/Sweeney was in thinking that the Sox had any kind of a chance this year that suggested they needed to trade for a proven closer. If there is one lesson that should come out of this season (and in truth there are many) it is that if you don't have much of a team to begin with, who you have closing is hardly something that should come up on the radar screen and most definitely is not something worth trading a fully developed prospect for. Reddick was ready to play at the ML level or certainly within months of it. Does anybody think Bailey would have made much of a difference in this team? If you still think that, wait about twenty more games....that should just about do it. If you look at what the bulk of teams do for a closer....it basically amounts to picking somebody and that is what the Sox ultimately did this year. When you are only playing better than four or five other teams in baseball, just picking somebody would have been just as good as anything. This team looked doomed from the start and should have held onto its developed and underdeveloped prospects for the same reason we want them to hold onto them now.

Holy s***....I guess we are truly grabbing at straws now.....Fox Network Mojo.....!!! I have to start looking forward to Buck and McCarvedup. I am not sure I can survive it:D:D

Oh it has been even worse than the worst of both worlds. V was castrated early on and has not been anything like the manager that the Sox were purported to want. I say purported to want since they caved so quickly that I suspect what they really wanted was a facade....the illusion of somebody building the players into some sort of a team playing solid, cohesive baseball hoping instead that the players would police themselves and at least out of embarrassment not allow another complete collapse after the 2011 debacle. Along with that, instead of getting players uniting in sort of the us against him "we will show him" group mentality that 700 was hoping for, we got the "hey we know how to bury this guy cause we just buried the last guy" mentality which always breaks down into me first thinking. While at the end of the day, they have played so poorly that I am inclined to think this manager vs player stuff is for the most part background noise, It may well have had an impact in the most important element of baseball....the starting pitching. The staff has been leaderless all year with Beckett showing no interest in leading this bunch and only occasional interest in his own performances and Lester simply being incapable in that regard....something some of us have felt and said for a long time now. The complete fiasco that is Josh Beckett as a Red Sox may in part have been aided by some of the early rancor between Beckett and V. In truth, I just don't think they are that good. Few of them work hard at their games. The exceptions are Ortiz and Pedey but they are exceptions, not the rule. Many simply are just not that talented or have talent but don't appear to work at their game, certainly don't work at it effectively and that is where this me first, I know what I am doing s*** really breaks down. Maybe Agons did know what he was doing....insisting that he would solve his own issues but his slump was interminable and he still has not been the hitter we hoped we were getting when we signed him. The younger players like WMB fall into bad habits...the older players seem oblivious to what is going on around them, making no effort to play cohesive team baseball. We revel in a Cody Ross in the main I think because so many have performed so poorly and Ross is a stand out in this group. However nothing about Cody Ross is different because he is a Red Sox player. The wall in Fenway helps him but he is a career platoon player and has done nothing to prove himself otherwise here. Again had so many others not performed so poorly, Ross would likely not be as noticed for his positives as he has been. Another truth I think is that this group of players never gave V a chance preferring the we will bury him route as I stated earlier. I guess they wanted to show management that they would revolt against any effort to use the manager's position to draw them into some sort of representative team and would not even do it in spite of management. That is the equivalent as players of saying to management, we are going to leave you with nothing. While it is extremely difficult to draw a direct line between this sort of ******** and the actual play of individual players or the team as a whole I think it is what ultimately takes a mediocre team and turns it into a nuclear holocaust. It does not turn a good team into a bad team. However it brings out the very worst in a team that is just not that good to begin with and is finally a factor in allowing the whole thing to devolve and unravel as the Sox are unraveling. They avoided open mockery for the most part at Fenway during the September collapse. I don't think they will avoid it this year.

So even last night's disastrous defensive performance by Aviles was not enough to convince the Sox that he simply cannot play SS on an everyday basis....staggering. Is Avlies yet another player they hope will play well enough to entice somebody to give up prospects for him? There is less chance of Avlies playing his way to success in that regard than there was with Youk. By the way, how many RH hitters can you have on one club that cannot see the ball low and away well enough to lay off of it or swing at it to waste it as opposed to being so ass backwards at the plate that they swing at it to pull it....Aviles, WMB, even Ross on occasion! Then there is the oft mentioned Mr. Crawford who has the same malady from the left side of plate. He may not try to pull that kind of pitch, the ultimate folly but he still cannot see it worth a damn, new stance and all. The Sox are fast playing and trading and managing their way to irrelevance. I suspect the end will come very suddenly with attendance at Fenway plummeting like a stone and tickets available for almost nothing from season ticket holders desperate to get out from under their tickets. In fact, they are so bad now that I very much suspect that they have finally and irreversibly put next year's season ticket sales at risk.

They may or may not be able to get a deal done, Crawford for Reyes....Aviles does not hit either and costs the Sox outs and runs almost every game now. He was a defensive disaster last night, making so many mistakes at SS that even with a Salami topping things off, he had already made enough gaffs to have allowed the first four Yankee runs home, enough to have lost the game. It no longer matters what Iggy hits. Get him up here and get Avlies the hell off the field.

The way this franchise is going, they may end up lucky to have V. I never thought I would say that but the thing that will stand out to other managerial candidates will be the degree to which V had to bend in order to be in this job. That much is so in the public domain at this point that you would have had to have been hiding under a rock not to know it. A really good manager will likely not touch this job with a ten foot pole at this point, a real indication for how far this franchise has fallen. If they do make a change it will be another guy desperate to get back into managing or a guy with no experience managing. There is so much wrong with this organization at this point that I am not even sure it matters.

They don't have money that they will spend. Ross is a free agent at the end of this season. So it really does not matter if they rent him to a team for the remainder of this season. He will be as available to the Sox as he will be to anybody else if they want to sign him again and bring him back here. The truth is you have to make really bad pitches to him for him to shine. You have to deposit the ball middle of the plate and in and up and he will kill the ball. Keep the ball away from there and he is toast. Granted all hitters are mistake pitch hitters...I often make that argument myself but his "Go" zone is pretty small and his "No" zone is pretty large and he does not really even have a "Maybe" zone. He is however likely more suited to Fenway than many of the places he could play because he can loft the ball and pull which makes the Monster a real target for him. But a full season without platooning him would not be a pretty picture and I believe that is why teams can sort of take him or leave him. The Sox would be foolish to keep him if they could really get something for him.

The thing of it is that the Sox seemed to have preferred Kalish to Redick and were willing to wait for Kalish to come back to health and see him remain in the Red Sox system. To me the part they really got wrong was planning for Kalish to contribute at the major league level this year. He was not ready...not by a long shot. You would have thought they would have known that. To some extent it does seem that since the Sox really lack power, particularly this year and in this outfield that Redick might have been the better keep. That is really water over the dam though. I am more surprised that the Sox saw Kalish as somebody that could contribute this year when he turned out to be pretty far from ready. Maybe hindsight for us but nobody is paying us to know this stuff. Should have been foresight for Sox management.

The fact that they are unwilling to entertain offers for Ross speaks volumes and is ridiculous. The season is over. Those two starts back to back by Lester and Beckett broke their backs and their spirit. They are done. They should sell on Ross as he is a FA at the end of the season.

Oh my God....Hughes as player of the game....that is embarrassing by itself. He did not pitch that good a game...we just totally sucked everywhere...pitching, fielding, hitting we just sucked.

Sweet Caroline won't sound so sweet when it is echoing off of 15,000 empty seats. It will be very hard for the FO to avoid the truth of what this team has become. I am going to bet that they will go into a shell....leave all public comments to BC. You won't see or hear from JH or LL or TW at all....won't even see them in the owners box anymore at some point. Public comments from BC will likely be few and far between as well. Really I think those two starts back to back by Lester and Beckett were the end. That broke what was left of the team's spirit and intensity. All that is left is the ashes.

This s*** that they are doing right now is in part how you develop bad habits like making poor plate appearances...beer and chicken is background noise when you compare it to just carting your bat to the plate, hacking away thoughtlessly and carting yourself back to the dugout. It is not a bad role models thing....it is an entire team without focus, without intensity, without cohesiveness. This is all baseball stuff...not role model stuff. Completely different kettle of fish which is why many of us said last year when the beer and chicken stuff was going on that it was a bunch of meaningless noise. These are not the same things at all although their plate appearances at the point when they broke last year looked much like they are starting to look now this year. Part if it is that they are just not that good to begin with and pitchers have now got really good books on these guys. They are just not going to make many mistake pitches to them for the remainder of the year and whatever is left of their confidence will be gone by season end.

Did not mean to imply that the hitting is the problem 700. You already know where I stand on that score. Their hitting tonight at least to me is more indicative of where they are as a team....their spirit is broken....they are done and dusted.

Look at the look on WMB's face coming to the plate...absolutely no intensity and no focus at all. He gets a so what base hit with two outs. That is why I am really worried about the guys like WMB. He is learning all the wrong stuff like what a team looks like when its back is broken and its spirit is broken and they are just playing out the string.

A grand slam home run by Granderson......unbelievable. I would have to say that I think it has been maybe 15 years since we did not belong on the same field with the Yankees. What an embarrassment. I think they are going to pack it in right here in New York. How ignominious......just let it all go right here in the home of the evil empire. I said it earlier this week, they are going to leave nothing to the imagination by the end of this season....NOTHING. I cannot cheer for them to try to do badly ...the "lets see them completely collapse" thing so they have to clean house but it does not matter what I cheer for. I am really pretty sure there will be no doubting what they are and who they are by the end. They have been broken...again...under a different manager this time.....speaks volumes.

The looking through certain lenses comment by BC is a classic. Hi....my name is Alice and when I look through my looking glass I see a team that can make a run or is it a team that has the runs....never mind as long as I have my looking glass everything is A-O-K.

Be still my heart....actually looked like a professional defensive play...film at 11:00

Ross is free to go his way at the end of the year...are they off their rockers!!!! Forget it....season is done....I don't think the pinkest pink hat would believe they are going anywhere at this point.

Agreed...somebody or something has to save him though. How I wish Pedey was a different kind of leader than he is or I just wish they had one that was more somebody that would and could take the kids under their wing. Playing a practical joke on one is fine as far as it goes...keeping the clubhouse loose. The Sox have some guys that might really be something but they are being influenced in many cases much like the pitchers are being influenced, in the wrong direction.

I am not so much disappointed in WMB for his performance as for his foolish plate appearances. He has just fallen into the same practice of trying to pull everything. As is the case with him, Ross and Aviles they are all three of them trying to pull even when the situation does not call for them to pull. They are trying to pull even with two strikes and a pitch on the outer half of the plate. That is as good as a fail without an effort. Carting you ass up to the plate to look foolish for three pitches is not an effort. Just swinging is not an effort. Regardless of Pedey trying to put a good spin on things, this team is looking like they have already packed it in. This could get scary embarrassing before it is done.

Sox should bring up Iggy now. Maybe they will learn something from actually allowing an all field no hit SS to play.