jung

Boy that gash in Cooks knee really did slow him up. Tough brake for him and for the Sox. He might end up ready before dice is ready. I would almost bet on it at this point.

Insurance run here would probably seal the deal if it is not already sealed.

Cooper has had a great day on the base paths today.

If Gonzo does not come up again today he will pick up some ground on his BA outta' this series. Not much though. Started with 3 hits the first game but sorta' lost the opportunity to really make an improvement after that. Nothing seems to be changing for him though. Got a couple of cookies to hit the first game and hit them. Has had RH pitchers the whole series but has not done much with them.

Damn would have loved to see Hutchinson pay for hitting Youk. He has had Youk's number the whole game and hits him....stupid....would have loved to see Youk stomp on home plate for that one.

I don't know but I tend to put that on V more than the pitchers. There has been several instances now where our pitchers have been crazy wild and V still leaves them out there while they are filling hospital beds.

Funny game baseball....Bard totally blows up....probably creating an improbable line cause never should have even gotten outta' the 1st inning....Morales who blows up regularly in relief comes in with all pressure released as Bard has just about removed any pressure from the next guy coming in...."just get us some outs please Mr Morales" and the guy pitches pretty close to lights out for his stint. One more inning for Morales might really be pushin' it though.

That was a nice play all around there....I think Nava might have lost that ball just a bit as he, ball and wall got close together but he recovered nicely. Ding dong trotting down the first base line got what he deserved outta' that.

Gonzo gets jammed inside cause he is always looking outside to go the other way....no matter the count or anything else for that matter

At least this should be a bad enough outing to make for a nice easy FO decision. Will they then be smart enough to put Bard on the DL and give him a chance to hit the reset button???

Almost uncanny how often Schoppach hits some guy the rest of the Sox are struggling to hit.

I do wish V did not leave guys out when they are wild to the point where we are filling hospital wards.

Damn....Youk at least had stopped chasing sliders since coming back from the DL...still has not hit them for s*** but had stopped chasing them. Now he is back to chasing them again and looks like he did before going to the DL.

I think a DL stint is absolutely the best thing they can do for Bard right now. Maybe he could have gone directly to the pen if he had made it all the way to the end of his starter's role "successfully" but I can't believe they will leave him in a starters role at this point and he needs some time to try to work out issues.

There have been worse starts but not by much! Bard filled a role for the Sox at the start of the season. For a period here the Sox may have had the best 4 and 5 going in the AL in their rotation. However he is not even improving by microscopic degrees at this point and no young pitcher aims to be a 5. A 5 is either a young guy on the way up or an older guy on the way down or somebody just off the DL. Bard has done a good job in the 5 hole but is going nowhere. However who the hell else were they going to put there for the beginning of the season other than Bard or Aviles and they needed Aviles in the pen worse than they needed Bard in the pen. So he has filled that role and has done it almost up to the point where he was going to have to get the hell outta' there anyway. As for ruining him as a RP, I am not sure he has what it takes there either. It is not like he is wild somewhere into the game. When he is wild he is wild from pitch 1 and he had gotten that way last year. I just don't buy this overworked argument from last year because just about everything that plagued him at the end of last season followed him into this season. As a starter he has been able to stay out there on the mound and work out issues where as a reliever he was generally pulled from a bad stint quickly. Obviously at some point Bard goes to the pen. However if he does not do well there I would be less inclined to blame it on his stint as a starter. If he succeeds there, good for him. I do think something happened in his delivery, in his approach, in something last year and Bard may have to go down a notch to work it out before things get better for him.

I wonder how the organization will handle d-mac. Whenever you hear something about d-mac that seems to come out of the Red Sox organization, it almost sounds like he has found a way to endear himself to the Red Sox in a way that just does not seem likely for a guy who is really a career minor leaguer/bench player. I would expect him to be DFA's as well. You do sort of wonder why it has not happened yet as the Sox could have probably done something like Pods or Byrd at any time over the last couple years. Maybe this will just go off without a hitch. Might be interesting to watch though.

I did not get to watch today's game but it sounded like another really stellar performance by Felix. I got the impression that he did not have his best stuff and had to battle but not seeing anything I really could not tell. Hardly matters....he has been exemplary as our 4. Not much more to expect from a 4.

1. Rangers - Derek Holland: 6.18 IP per Start, 3.95 ERA 2. Rays - David Price: 6.59 IP per Start, 3.49 ERA 3. Yankees - Ivan Nova: 6.09 IP per Start, 3.66 ERA 4. Tigers - Doug Fister: 6.76 IP per Start, 2.83 ERA 5. Red Sox - Josh Beckett - 6.43 IP per Start, 2.89 ERA Then they either taxed their pens or their 1's made up the difference or some other starters took up the slack. To some extent you have to look at the ERA's which suggest that at least in the cases of Fister and Beckett, their managers removed them, and did not allow them to go 7 innings when they likely could have. In fact I read comments here last year suggesting that Beckett's excellent ERA for the year was in part a consequence of being removed a bit early in games. Fister also recorded an excellent ERA and got closer to 7 innings on average and I would suggest that his ERA combined with that average in innings being over 6.5 and just short of 7 means Fister did his job and justified his role in the rotation. Nobody thought Holland and Price had Hollandish and Priceish kinds of years last year meaning they did not meet expectation for their assigned roles on their staffs. Are the better than league average...sure....are they what was expected of those pitchers in their assignments...no they were not which is what makes the league average argument somewhat irrelevant. Nova?????? how many times has the Yankees staff been discussed in terms of CC and pray for rain. They had a very disjointed rotation last year, got really good performances from pieces of the puzzle that were question marks at the start of the year and had an outstanding pen anchored by a once in a lifetime closer. So I am not sure but I think you might have gotten closer to proving my point than proving the opposite. More importantly, the last few years have seen the pendulum swing entirely over to the far end of the spectrum which has prompted Nolan Ryan's effort in Texas and I think a more general effort around the league to have starters in general and you most highly paid, top of the rotation starters pitch more innings. I think it will be interesting to see where these numbers fall out in the next five years when we will likely see a shift back to more innings especially at the top of rotations.

Correct Bellhorn, a correct answer partly because it has nothing to do with this league average nonsense. 447 and 443 are still not 486 and if your rotation is going to average 6.5, then somebody better be averaging better than 6 to make up for the 2-3 guys at the back end that are not going to average better than 6. I said that about six different ways but it did not stick for some reason. It was not a specific enough address to the question apparently. Who are those mystery guests supposed to be? Are they supposed to be some #6 or #7 scrub that gets to the rotation via injury to 1 through 5? Are they going to give you those innings? When and if those replacement stiffs, maybe either #'s 6 or 7 or 8 do pitch, do we think the chances are good that those guys are going to give you better than 6.5 innings or even give you more than a passing fancy chance at at win? You are lucky to get 150 innings out of #5 and maybe 175 out of #4 maybe. #3 is a likely candidate for something between 190-200. For argument sake lets make it 200. Frankly it does not much matter wither you give #3 200 innings or #5 160 innings you are not likely to get more than 525 innings out of those three guys or from those three positions in the rotation if you want to disassociate the total innings pitched from the actual pitcher which is also a sensible way to look at the question. That leaves 483 for #1 and #2. and the occasional stiff that you do not really want to start under anything but the most dire circumstances. If there are any injuries in #3, 4 or 5 then said stiffs are going to be logging some part of the 525 innings i just allocated to those three guys. 483 divided between #1 and #2 is 240 innings for 31 starts, a very common number and is 7.74 innings per start. 240 at 32 starts a season is 7.5 innings per start. 30 starts is less common but not completely unheard of....30 starts and you are now at about 8 innings per start. You can slice this up anyway you want to. The guys at the top of the rotation have got to pitch more than 6.5 innings per start or you are very likely screwed and they better not miss starts either...something Mr Beckett has already done cause then....here comes Mr Stiff to take his place and likely toss a stinker that your team losses while putting even more stress on your pen. Excuse me for thinking at least at this board, I did not have to go into a full mathematical justification for why #1 and #2 in the rotation HAD to be pitching more than 6 innings per start and in fact HAD to be pitching more than 6.5 innings per start just to meet the requirement for their spots in the rotation. If they have to pitch more than 6.5 innings per start it is a little bit hard to tolerate the notion that a start for either of those two guys that does not even get to the the 7 mark is a "good" start. I said that about zillion different ways as well. The nebulous and irrelevant comment from last night was the following: It supposes that you can let #1 and #2 off the hook because as long as they are averaging 6 IP per start at any ERA they are by definition good. They are not even doing their jobs!

Why is 6 inning a number that matters? Mainly because of the number of innings left for the pen to pitch if your starter exits after 6 innings. That one has an answer but the data is harder to get to and I have never tried to compile it as a league average. However if for example all starters went 6 innings, you are going to leave 486 innings for your pen to pitch. I have done this for a separate team before and I think there was even a thread with this topic or where this was discussed but on average most AL teams that get to the post season leave about 400-420 innings or so for their pens to pitch. The Sox of 2011 left just over 500 I think and they did not get there. The Rays left about 400 innings for their pen. The Rangers left 440 and the Yankees left 469. The Phillies left 408 and Cardinals left even fewer. The point being that even in the DH AL if you leave as many as 486 innings for your pen to pitch you are not as likely to make it to the post season. All by way of saying that I would not be to keen on averaging 6 innings from my starters if I wanted to get to the post season.

I realized I did not answer this question and maybe still will not answer it to your satisfaction here. but: No I am not using the terms great or good in the way you think I am...I am using them in relation to expectation for the spot in the rotation for that pitcher. I am not using them in relation to league average anything in the first place. For example I have said several times that in my view the Stars (not the aces) but the stars of our rotation have been Doubront and Bard because they have performed above expectation. In that sense they have done a great job for us. They have gone through the entire season to this point having between them only had one start that I thought was below expectation. Are those great starts relative to league averages? Not likely. That said, this discussion of the number of great games and a great season is just a specious and meaningless argument. I used the example of a season of 30 "good" performances to define a great season simply as a means to answer your insistence on mating some number of great pitching performances and equating them to a great season. The two things are mutually exclusive in that you don't have to pitch some specified number of great games to have a great season. Your trying to force a order of merit into the discussion that has no bearing on the discussion. I don't give a damn if my definition of a great start by a guy holding down the #1 spot in the rotation mates up to how many times Pedro accomplished that particular feat in a given year or not. It does not diminish nor enhance what Pedro did one iota.

You have your opinion and I have mine. I assume we both sleep well nights with our varied opinions?

Pitchers don't often go nine innings anymore. The point is that your 1 and 2 CAN'T be going 6 innings because you already know your 4 and 5 are going to be lucky to go 6 and that may be true of your #3 as well. So I already answered this one but I will say again that your 1 and 2 cannot consider leaving the mound after 6 innings a good or great start because they will not have fulfilled their primary responsibilities or even in that case their secondary responsibilities. Their primary responsibility by the way is still considered by starters themselves, maybe not by me and certainly not by you but by starters themselves to go 9 innings and win the game. Failing the ability to fulfill their primary responsibilities their secondary responsibilities at the top of the rotation are to limit exposure to the pen and leave the team in a position to win. 6 innings does not meet the standard for top of the rotation pitchers. Does that clear up that one for you?

If this is one of your specific points to be honest this is just silly. The number of great starts a starting pitcher might have and a great season are mutually exclusive. In fact would you not say that if a pitcher had 30 starts and all 30 were "good" starts he would have had a "great" season? Does that clear that one up?

What specific points do you want me to address...I saw a lot of rhetoric but not much in the way of specific points but the posts have gotten long and have strayed so maybe just point me to a post number.