jung

Well there is that possibility that Aviles is positively terrible at 2nd. He has no range at all going to his right and for all we know the angle you have to take to the ball going left at 2nd may even negate the one direction where he does have some range. In part when WMB was hurt I was hoping we would see some of Aviles at 3rd. By rights you would think he could play a little 3rd and that maybe 3rd is actually the best of his infield positions.

I am not sure why Ciriaco is not at SS tonight either unless Aviles is so terrible at 2nd but I doubt it. Ciriaco has already proved to me that he is a better SS than Aviles. I would say based on what I have seen Ciraico is something like half way from an a Aviles to an Iggy.

Buch throwing a terrific game.....still think he will turn out to be the best of 1,2 3 in the rotation and desperate to see him make it through the rest of the season at this point.

Folks might think the number of missed DP's and just flat out errors are alarming for Aviles over just half a season but this is what happens when you put a utility infielder in the most important defensive position on the field every day. I did not post anything at the time but once again he almost ran over 25% of the position players on the field in that one pop fly to short left field. Once again one of them, this time WMB realized that Aviles was coming with reckless abandon and knew that it was going to be a disaster of a collision if it happened.

Once again....ball right at Aviles is the play he has difficulty making...big time. He has range left....no range right and real problems with ground balls hit within a couple steps one way or the other.

The thing about a play like that is that the coach has got to have played that scenario out in his head before sending him. "I got bases loaded, 1 out and a 1 run lead. I got Shop who I know can't run at 3rd and I have Ortiz on deck. A fly out leaves me with the lead....bases loaded....Ortiz at the plate. You just have to accept that Shop can't run and you want Ortiz coming to the plate in that situation.

Wow, that was a pretty good throw but if Shop can't get home on that the message is Shop is not gettin' home on anything. They would have had to pitch to Ortiz bases loaded as well. That could easily have been a game winning inning.

I just don't think Youk was going to make it possible to keep him. So as much as I wish we still had him especially in situations like this, I just think it was as folks thought....a situation that would grow untenable. Then looking at what WMB did in that spot with Price...granted a mistake pitch in a terrible place....having the batter down 0-2, but that was still very special. The fact that he can do that reinforces the point that he was just ready to be up and playing....I don't think there is any denying that. I do hope that the FO explored how this might work out with Youk thoroughly cause I think all said and done, the Sox would have been better off with Youk admittedly not in the role he had grown accustomed IF he would have tolerated the diminished role. If they just assumed it would be bad, I would be kinda' disappointed.

Boy does WMB have pop in that bat or what. Kinda' shocked that Price made that kind of mistake 0-2. To be honest though I have seen Price do that before. It is almost like he has such faith in his stuff on given nights that he just forgets that good hitters are still going to hit your mistakes and if you make one bad enough it could easily be gone. In that particular case, he could have almost thrown any other pitch in any other place and not seen it heading over the wall. Credit WMB as well for being able to catch that with an 0-2 count. Very bad pitch in a very bad spot but he must have incredibly quick hands to have done that in that situation. Again it was a very bad pitch but I sure as hell would not have been looking there and I doubt WMB was either.

Native, you would know more about this than I would but I noticed it last night and noticing it again tonight....is this not the latest arriving MLB crowd anybody has ever seen on a regular basis? I saw what I though were people coming in to the park and taking their seats in the 5th inning last night. Anything to that Native?

I think there is simply to much emphasis on protecting future earnings potential. It no longer appears anywhere near interesting to them to sign a big contract. Now that one big contract can just be the first and since escalating pay scales just about assure that once you are granted entrance into the upper echelons of salary for your position, you don't even have to duplicate your best performances anymore in order to duplicate or even exceed you last big contract. There is just to much emphasis in my view on future earnings potential.

Was there ever any comment from either AGons or V about whether V took AGons out of that first flu game or if AGons asked to come out? Not suggesting that one injury relates to the other or anything like that but after seeing that first at bat in the game where AGons came out I would not be all that surprised to learn that V took him out as opposed to AGons asking to come out. Just wondering if anything got reported that I missed.

Well like I said, I do expect some deals or at the least a deal but any deal for pitching will likely involve multiple players and at least one prospect that will hurt to give up. I think that is about as far as the Sox are going to go for what its worth or they will offload players that represent multiple assets that are birds of a feather such as back up outfielders with teams doing something like the same thing....moving assets that are for all intents blocked from making a meaningful contribution to their current teams. The problem in my view is that the two WC system really makes things rough on the team that comes out of the one game play-in. So how much do you risk to get in that way. I just think the whole thing was a bad idea. I don't believe they should try to make things tough on the WC team. When there was only one WC team that team often had a better record than one of the division winners. In my view the one WC team deserved its shot and its post season birth especially since it often could have won a division if it were simply playing in an easier division. Now one of the two play-in teams probably does not deserve to be there at all and that is baseball's justification for making it tough on either WC team to move forward from the play-in game. Think about that for a minute and you realize the stupidity and lack of logical basis for the two WC team system. They had a good system and if they have any brains at all, they will dump this two WC team system as quickly as they can and go back to one WC team.

I guess the only real issue I have with the idea of the players being unhappy with the choice of V to manage the team is that it does appear from the outside looking in that some of the players....maybe even more than some have never given V an opportunity in the sense of just abiding by what he wanted to do and just playing the game the best they could. In the backdrop of what happened to Tito it is hard to have any empathy with the player's in the way they appear to have handled playing for their new manager. I do think the Sox erred in commenting about the type of manager they would or would not hire before hiring V. That is not to say that they did not have the right to go ahead and hire the manager they wanted to hire regardless of what they said initially. I just do not think they should have said a thing in the first place. I can tell you that I do not need to win championships to enjoy watching Sox baseball. They have won championships. I would love to see them win championships again but it is getting to the point where I would prefer to see them try to build championship teams without going the high ticket free agent route. Sure it will be much harder to win championships that way but to be honest I have just grown tired of all the stuff that comes along with employing high ticket free agents to get it done. Will they perform even if they remain committed to playing their best? Will they lose their edge once they have their guaranteed contract in place? Will they feel so entitled as to allow them to resist the organization and its efforts to compete the way it wants to compete? Honest to God it is just getting to not be fun anymore. I would rather see a bunch of guys playing like the guys that have come up from Pawtucket even knowing that they are going to have peaks and valley and at times make terrible mistakes and very likely lose many games than watch a bunch of gnarled vets insistent that they are going to do things the way they want to do them....play the baseball they want to play individually, for the most part protective of what they have and unwilling to take even the smallest risk to achieve more. What are we really asking of them? We are really just asking them to play hard....play like there is something out there worth playing for cumulatively as opposed to individually. They have their pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. If you really think about it, how often does it now appear that its not enough for these guys. Once they have the big contract, many of them now appear to spend a good deal of time positioning for the next one. I would prefer to have a bunch of guys play for that first big contract and if they continue to play well after they have it then fine, keep them. If not, move on to the next guy in line.

Pods has probably shown enough to be a trade piece even at his age. Maybe the Sox put together a bushel basket of their abundance pieces in some sort of three way deal that moves them off to places where they can be more useful in return for getting something the Sox can use. I would bet that regardless of what or how many the Sox will have to cough up at least one prospect that will hurt to get back anything that will help. That should be enough though to allow LL to claim to have made good on his statement that the Sox would be aggressive players at the deadline.

I don't think Sox Management is going to bet much on trying to pull this season together. I would expect some trades for show and thats about it. I know we would like them to bet on Lester and Beckett returning to form but both will have to show real signs of that before the deadline I think for the Sox to be willing to pull the trigger on a real deal of some sort. Betting on both of them doing that is about the same thing as rolling a pair of dice.

Lester should stay but he shows no signs that he will ever be a 1 in the rotation for a contending team. He is our innings guy....in reality has always been our innings guy but he is not a 1. Regardless of his protestations of being a grown ass man he is a grown ass follower. He needs a rotation leader worth a s*** as opposed to either being thrown into a role he is not suited to (rotation 1) or in his desire to avoid the responsibility of a 1 follows a s***-head like Beckett. Unless we get a real 1 that wants to be a 1 here, Lester in his follow the leader mold will end up following Lackey next after Beckett is gone.....we really want that to happen.

I don't think the farm system is in shambles...I do think that some of the guys down on the farm could have and in other organizations likely wold have been handled differently and I do wish the Sox had been less willing to trade away pitching prospects as opposed to bringing them along, ultimately bringing them up. What is done is done though. Maybe what was lacking was a little more faith in the farm system they had built combined with a willingness to accept that just because a player you are developing is not destined for the all star team does not mean he is a failure and won't either contribute to your team as a player or have more value as a trade chip having proven himself at the major league level. Considering they have really not been picking at the neat end of the draft it seems to me that the Sox have had and do have a fair number of good players down on the farm. Maybe the real key to the Sox future success is not in trying to use their assets to out Yankee the Yankees but to use their assets to out Ray the Rays just to use an example. Clearly the Sox have the assets to support a healthy farm system, one that can be turning out ML players like an assembly line. Now would that be fun or what....watching Sox teams full of young budding stars running circles around Yankee teams full of old codgers, overpaid and on their last legs.....its enough to warm your heart on the coldest hot stove league New England winter night.

I don't think the Sox really "created" anything in Bard. They tried to find him a place in baseball where his velocity, the one asset he had could return the most value. Once they decided he was not destined to close, the question of how to unlock the value in that velocity became more complicated.Maybe they will figure it out....maybe they won't...maybe Bard will continue in baseball...maybe he will be a memory on a year or two....who knows.

Some one of these days it might dawn on folks what Bard actually is., a pitcher that has been on again off again in some state of repair or disrepair....pitch from the stretch, pitch from the windup, find his release point...blah blah blah.....for an entire career. The Sox keep trying to scratch his itch because he could through hard....all be it without having any idea where the ball was going. As for best set up man....elite set up man....its a fallacy....a creation of the players association in its never ending effort to increase salaries....lets see, if a regular set up man is worth X then an elite set up man is worth X+.....its ********. Pitchers settle into a role and that is that....as far as I can tell, set up men are guys with 9th inning arms and babe ruth league heads....sort of sounds just like Bard. Have you ever noticed that set up men usually don't stay set up men for long? They either fall off into middle relief or become closers and surprise surprise, the Sox diverted Bard from a path toward closing....Gee I wonder why!

Scott must be addicted to high heat. That second one was worse than the first and he could not help himself.

They don't miss low strikes as much as they miss strikes on the outside edge. I don't know what the numbers are on that pitch but they must be ridiculous.

Damn...I hate it when the ump misses low strikes and forces the pitcher to come up in the zone.

Listened to first part of the game in the car. I always forget how eery baseball sounds in the building until we are back playing here again.

UN normally I would completely agree were it not for the fact that CC would get to come back in a stadium he has been comfortable in and that might be a very convenient way to ease him back into the lineup without really doing anything other than having him play his first games in Tampa. Were it not for that I would say have him finish out and come back Monday. I just happen to think that given the player himself, playing in Tampa actually does him more good than finishing his rehab stint where he is.