jung

Yankee total team pitching ERA is ranked 9th in baseball at 3.70 while the Sox are ranked 16 at 3.97. The more telling numbers: Yankee team starters are ranged 16th at 4.01 while Sox starters are ranked 26th at 4.71. So even with the injuries the Yanks have suffered to pitchers, they are still out-pitching the Sox.

Well I am sure Felix will try but if he cannot keep from getting right in the wheelhouse of those RH hitters, I don't see how it will happen. It is not at all easy as a LH pitcher to not make mistakes inside to a tough RH hitting lineup in Fenway Park. You cannot just give up the outside part of the plate. So you have to be able to pitch inside....if you miss....by-by baseball.

To be honest I am wondering if it is starting to dawn on some of the doubters how deep a hole the Sox have actually dug for themselves, not just this year but given the length of some of these contracts, the play of the players that have these contracts, the health of the players that have these contracts for a few years now to come. This is no longer about making the playoffs this year. This team could not win a short series if its life depended on it WITH Ells and CC and it is looking more and more like CC is done for the year....not because of the groin but because the more we find out about the elbow the more it looks like he is heading for TJ. To date, management here has clearly shown reluctance to spend past current commitments as they try to recoup some of the coop money or whatever you want to call it that they do not get back unless they get undo the LT cap. So LT cap is a double whammy now.....you pay a tax and you get back a smaller % of the dollars that are supposed to come back to you from the league. The players where the money is invested are all damaged goods in one way or another....since Lackey is coming out of his surgery and recovery, he might be the most tangible asset they have. 1) Beckett, aging, injury prone, most consistant of a notably inconsistant group of starting pitchers 2) CC, a contract that the Sox can do nothing with 3) Lackey, at least coming back from injury and probably a very tangible asset believe it or not 4) AGons, no power either due to something or another or the shoulder is still in trouble and probably on the way to surgical repair 5) Ortiz, an arbitration guy. Either you keep him or you don't. You can get out from under Ortiz but who hits for this team then. I suspect that they will get out from under Ortiz just because they don't have any other place to realistically cut payroll and cutting payroll appears to be what they want to do 6) Lester is likely a tangible asset but he has pitched like a 3/4 guy in the rotation so what do you do with a guy you are paying $8M this year committed to pay him $12M next year who is pitching like $6M So to be honest, you might be looking at a 5 year period of damage control from Lackey, Lester, Beckett, Agons, CC dollar commitments and end up without Ortiz not to mention Ells cause the FO is looking to cut payroll. This is a mess folks and the wacko pink hats at least to this point still pack the place out. So, management has no real incentive to do anything.

Well the bigger problem with Crawford is clearly the elbow. What the hell is going on here. That elbow is now looking like headed for TJ. Isn't that injury the TJ surgery injury? If that is the case what the hell have they been doing? We are half way through the season...CC now says the elbow is no better and they delayed what I guess is going to be TJ for what?

The natives sound restless in Fenway...that is a good thing I think Brennen I really think that the "everything is fine" crowd for the most part has not seen as much baseball as the "whoops" crowd and in their defense, this is really the first time they are seeing this kind of baseball. If you were not watching baseball in the 70's you don't even know what the hell you are lookin' at right now. Your view of baseball has been to much engaged by the Steroid era. As a result, while I believe in the numbers as much as anybody....they tend to look at the wrong numbers or look at the numbers from the wrong perspective at least in my view. As for defense, the contemporary matrices have not even been developed yet to properly provide a means to really look at defense in a contemporary fashion. The guys that are mainly responsible for the contemporary baseball matrices admit they have not as yet developed reliable matrices for defense. We still end up looking at things like errors which tells no story at all. Reason it matter is because we are going back to baseball as it was played in the 1970's. My God, for me at least it is scary to think how old you have to be to know what that looked like. But, if Uncle Bud does not do something to change how the game is played, that is what we are going back to. It might happen. Before Steroids, baseball did all kinds of things to hold down the impact of pitching and as an indirect result the impact of defense on the game. I would not be completely surprised if Uncle Bud did not feel compelled to make rules changes. I just don't know ultimately how the rank and file baseball fan of today will react to these lowered power numbers. Will they even like this kind of baseball? I just don't know. I am fine with it. I always was fine with it but that is me. By the way...mean no disrespect to anybody here. You just don't know how much I wish I did not know what baseball looked like in the 70's for a multitude of reasons.

I would not give up on Morales just yet....he got scared off the mound today which can happen to a young LH pitcher in this park against a tough RH lineup. Arm angle f***ed up....wild in the strike zone...was wrong from Jeter's first at bat. You have to win or lose with your best stuff....you go out there and suddenly decide that you have to change what you are as a pitcher and you are doomed.....that happened to Franky DURING Jeter's very first at bat and he was doomed from that moment on. I blame f***-head McClure for that. We started the season with a bunch of young guys we were tossed out there in rotation roles to begin with and for the most part McClure has left them out there to twist in the wind. f*** Sox Management for having worked themselves into this mess and f*** McClure for being a jerk-off. He would be the very first guy I fire at the end of this season.

I would likely leave Germano in.....the Sox have no chance to win this game.

Don't think Kalish would have either but Wise is a pretty special defensive outfielder....then again why do we care....McDime was defense as far as we were concerned and we cut him. I am truly getting to the point where a complete implosion might be the best thing for this team....may be the only thing that gets them looking at the organization as a whole cause this is as big a mess as I have seen in a long long time. Started life during the era of the great Yankee teams of the 50's and early 60's, went through the period when both teams sucked and and when both teams came good.....was never embarrassed by the Sox as an organization before this....they are an embarrassment. While am at it I could give a f*** about your $14M embarrassment, David Ortiz.

That was another of the worst 1st base calls I have seen and this year there has been more of them than I can remember in any other year. The ump had no excuse there. He HAD to be listening for the sound of the ball hitting the first baseman's glove and looking for Ortiz hand reaching for the bag which happened to be in the same field of view as Tex foot leaving the bag.....a horrible horrible call.

Not only do we end up having to listen to McCarver prove why he is such an idiot for 3+ hours tonight...we have to deal with him now. He was a terrific catcher and actually had some insight in his first years as an analyst....has been an utter fail since. Combined with Buck they are truly bad.

Oh my God after this mess we have to endure the Fox idiots tonight

The Sox are the second most patient team in the entire AL seeing more pitches per at bat than anybody other than Oakland....has not done the Sox much good now has it....Why...don't have the starting pitching to compliment their hitting.

You want more evidence that the pitching and particularly the starting pitching is the problem here....if you look at every pitch and every hit, hit after hit from last night's game, you will only find one hit that was hit off a good pitch...Arods hit in the middle innings was a solid hit off a well thrown baseball....every other hit was a mistake pitch. That is not unusual particularly in the regular season....you will not often find more than one hit a game that is made off a well pitched baseball with every other hit coming off a mistake by the pitcher. As I said in a recent thread if pitchers did not toss mistakes up there, you would be lucky to finish games in 9 innings. Ergo...if your pitchers make more mistakes than their pitchers.....you will lose more often than not because you won't generate enough offense to overcome that.

Correctamento Divinity...it has enough offense to win its fair share of games but by the end of this one the Yanks will likely have upwards of 8 runs again....no team succeeds when the only games it can win are 8-6, 10-8 slugfests. This is evidenced by the number of losses we have even scoring 4 runs. Only in the AL East is four runs not generally enough output to compete and we lose games all over baseball, not just in the AL East.

So it is poor offense that gives up runs in the first inning or for that matter any runs at all....starting pitching is the biggest problem this team has followed by the lack of timely hitting and defense. You can stack the other two behind the first anyway you want to. Starting pitching must be resolved for this team to succeed.

The problem with continuing to look at the offense which I would acknowledge has not provided timely hitting enough this season is that is ignores two things: 1) the starting pitching IS without question the biggest problem this team has why.....because starting pitching is without any question the most important facet of baseball by a long stretch....and this team has none to speak of that has shown any consistency of any kind 2) it ignores something that we no longer should question.....when the offense has to start game after game in a hole, it eventually simply crumbles under that pressure....However this is not a knock on the Sox players particularly....you start off any team in a hole as often as these guys are and they will eventually not bear up to it. Unfortunately we have been forced to watch this two years running but to suggest that this is some form of malady that is a Sox Special is just wrong. Believe me and one or two runs can look like just as deep a hole as 4 or 5 depending on where you are playing and who you are playing. If this team continues to ignore the major problems it has in starting pitching it is going nowhere.....not this year....not next year....not any year. These guys are now going on a few weeks of starting out in a hole. They dug out the first week or two but eventually just have succumbed to some extent.

Like I said earlier, Franky has a few more of these in him today. And this is not a double post

Like I said earlier, Franky has a few more of these in him today.

Actually Garcia is making some bad pitches today but we are just missing them. Once we get to two strikes he has been nipping at a corner and we have to protect. Although remember last year....the team eventually just crumbled eventually to the pressure of being in such deep holes right from jump street.

Franky has an incredible move. How I wish the Sox could tighten this game up so that it really did mean something. I want them regretting having challenged him to pick them off.

f*** you Swisher you *******. Hope your picking clay out of your teeth.

Finally decided to get up off your fat ass McClure...4-0 enough for ya'

Nicely done Sox...please get Swisher this time. Franky is working on luck as much as anything though cause he is putting the ball in some terrible spots. If he can get out of this inning maybe Garcia will fall apart.

Franky's is all over the place today which is why I think he will just leave a few more inside right in their wheelhouse.

Problem is that based on how is throwing today I don't think Franky will avoid another mistake or two inside and those are all headed into orbit. He seems to be going after them a bit more and that is the only thing that will save him.