jung

Actually BTR will be missed but you cannot deny what your eyes tell you. Some of us keep saying our bright spots are 4 and 5 in the rotation. Anytime that is the case and you think are contending you know you are in trouble. We keep setting the bar lower and lower for Lester. He is no Verlander...and he is no CC. Well OK what is he. It is getting to the point where there are few #1 pitchers out there that Lester bests. To say nothing of is propensity to lay an egg in the big moments...the absolute end all be all trademark of a #1 on a contending team. And as I type this another gopher ball goes over the wall.

f***ing laughing happy Rays...is there anything worse?

Well that sucked

Man Lester's pitch count is already going nuts

By Dickface...meaning Scott of course

Well the business sector that Schill decided on is a very risky business sector. I do think if anything, his enthusiasm for gaming generally and things he thought would appeal to other gamers simply outstripped whatever business sense he does have. I also think there is a likelihood that Schill sort of overlaid onto highly technical engineering exercises the same sort of thinking that make sense to him in baseball. You have the most talented pitcher, you put him on the mound in a position to succeed and more times than not he will succeed. However it is not that way in either business or engineering. Schill may well have set the bar at a level that even very talented software engineers could not reach....something pretty foreign to Schill I would bet. I don't think you can really go farther than that as far as Schill is concerned. Now as for the people that are business professionals and people that are making decisions governing millions of dollars, to the extent that they let the glow that surrounds most professional athletes get in the way of good business sense, that is on them. Maybe there was little opportunity for Schill to know better but you cannot start a venture like this without people that should know better being involved. Now there is some new information today that would suggest that the State is bailing on Schill as they must now think that they look foolish for having supported such a risky venture and want to try to get outta' this or at least out of the public eye ASAP. I doubt the end game here is going to be anything but ugly and you would have thought that this business venture would not have even gotten this far if people that should have known better had put a set of brakes or training wheels on Schills enthusiasm.

Mickey Mouse with an OF glove on might look appealing at this point given the number of injuries the Sox have suffered. In fact I might have seen Mickey running around our outfield with his ears stuffed in his hat and NAVA printed on the back of his shirt.:D Seriously anybody reading my posts knows I like the kid. However I really cannot say that the trade is a failure from the Sox perspective at this point. This one will definitely take more time before the jury comes in. You could have made the point about Bailey's injury issues before the trade was made but you could not guess that the Sox would be on their third set of OF's by game 35-36 of the season.

I think that based on what we have seen, starting may be the role that best suits him. I do tend to think that he needs more work and more help in that regard. This is really an oddball situation. In a perfect world you might have said "OK, we screwed up. Bard is not a closer. How do we transition him to a ML starter without sending him down as a part of that process". That appears to me to be the big mismatch here. In doing it this way....the player and coaches are asking of themselves something that I think is pretty rare. They are asking themselves to learn and provide tools that would normally be learned and provided at a different level of baseball while asking the player to actually play at the highest level of baseball. But at the end of the day, the Sox really did not have anybody else to put in the 5 hole at the start of the season which has been in part my point all along. They did not bring in a legitimate pitcher to round out the rotation. They left themselves with a choice between Aceves and Bard which to me had Bard to the rotation written all over it. So I think Bard to the rotation became a necessity, the reality of where the Sox had left themselves which is not the way the Sox packaged this idea. Now I do think the Sox are really getting the benefit in the sense that he has performed well as a 5 and the Sox have a bull pen that is rounding out and soon to be choking on the numbers of pitchers it has available to it for the relief role. I do think they could do more to advance Bard's progress as a starter. That view is admittedly from afar but based on how I see them working with Doubront, the obvious care and attention he gets vs what Bard gets....at least to my eyes.

OK so maybe this is semantics. A number of Sox pitchers got overused last year including Paps. However does it not appear that Paps has recovered from being overused late last season? It does not appear to me that Bard has recovered from whatever has gotten to him. He is pitching much like he pitched the end of last year. As a starter he cannot be expected to rear back and find 96 mph on his FB but what is interesting is that his BB/SO is basically today what it was then. So he maintained his velo through last year but still could not get back the BB/SO ratio. He is not reaching back for 96 mph as a starter but the BB/SO is basically the same as it was the end of last year. So it appears to me that there is something more serious going on with Bard. Maybe Bard will forever be lost in the middle.....has an arm that can throw lightning bolts but for single inning stints.....sounds like a closer.... No??? But maybe Bard does not have it as a Closer between the ears. The way he has lost focus under very modest pressure this year would suggest that you would not trust him in high pressure, high intensity situations like closing. Maybe that is Bard's saga. His talent is what keeps you coming back for more but I am beginning to think he is a riddle that nobody has solved as yet...maybe nobody will. He has a Closer's arm but it is attached to a head that is to easily distracted and never seems very confident. I am not sure I have ever seen Bard carry himself like you would expect a big arm. mayor league pitcher to carry himself. I keep coming back to the fact that the Sox clearly diverted Bard from the path that they had him on...a path that they had invested a good it of time and money into....choosing instead to bring in Bailey and pay for the privilege for that matter. When Bailey went down we focused a good deal of attention here on the fact that Bard did not move to the closer's role. Maybe what we should have been focusing on was that it appeared that the Sox did not ask him to move there. Do we really think we know more about what he is capable of than they do? So where does he go from here? I have said here many times that I think he has performed admirably as a #5 when comparing him to other 5's. Now that Buch has found real trouble Bard is likely the 4th best starter on this team right now. If he does not have the head for closing or high pressure situations generally, then maybe his fate is to play this starters role out or at least try to. If that does not work out then like it or not maybe his ends up in that growing pile of guys that perform in middle relief at one of the the game or the other.

Amazing how we want to pick the stats that suit us. What I said was when last we saw him in the relief role he was not slamming the door shut but was more leaving it ajar. You want to give him an out for it fine but you cannot deny what was not even close to "lights out" for that period. Batting average against went up by 100 points....OPS went up by 250 and OBP by 200 points. But those are not the most disconcerting stats to me. Most disconcerting to me is that his BB/SO almost went to a 1:1 ratio, far worse than at any time last year by a very wide margin. His BB/SO was more like 4 SO to ever 1 walk, sometimes as high as 7 SO for every 1 walk. Low and behold what is the biggest problem he has had this year...surprise....surprise it is his BB/SO which continues this year at something like 1:1, 29:28 to be exact. So that trend has not gone away. In fact it is still here in spades. In fact BA against, OBP and OPS for Bard this year are remarkably like the worst numbers he recorded for any period last year. While maybe not as disconcerting as his BB/SO none the less sort of makes the argument that he was just a shot load at the end of last year a little hard to swallow. Combine that with the way he has lost focus....not just lost it but completely lost it under what for a shut the door relief pitcher would be marginal pressure and I am not at all confident that he would do well in that spot were he in it this year. I continue to believe that the Sox went to the expense of bringing in a Bailey as a closer, turning 180* away from the plan they had for Bard in the process because they no longer believed in the plan. The Starting Role may be the best Bard can hope for at this point because I really don't know what they do with him if he fails as a starter. Based on his numbers and the way he has responded to pressure, at this point it would likely not be best to put him into a really demanding, pressure packed spot if in fact he comes out of the rotation. If his numbers are no better than they are today when his innings pitched and the return of some other arms forces him from the rotation, where they put him at that point will be most interesting indeed. I doubt he will close unless Ace falls apart because whether we like it or not, V seems now to believe in Ace and I see nothing in what Bard is doing that will convince him that he should pull a guy he believes in who is closing for someone who has not done it at all this year. The biggest problem this pitching staff has as a whole is that for a team that we WANT to view as contending, it has the largest stable of mediocre pitching when taken as a group that I have seen in a long long time.

What is most staggering is that they could not even launch the thing. Man....talk about a bunch of bad decisions......wow!

Well this whole topic of good fundamental baseball is what makes guys like Nava such a pleasure to watch and what makes these pampered stars in part so difficult to watch. Even though Ells is still waiting for his first big monster payday, he is still at this point a star that couches probably can't talk to about anything anymore including how he slides. Look at the plate appearances these guys make. They go up there make embarrassingly bad plate appearances....inexcusably bad....beyond stupid. Yet you get the impression that if they went back to the bench and the hitting coach said something like "geez you might think about seeing a few more pitches so that you get more of an opportunity to hit something you really like" these guys would look at him like he had four heads! What really irritates the hell out of me is that on some occasions with some players you get the feeling that their frustration that the game seems to turn on them or at least will not cooperate and bend to their will turns into a form of pouting and the things they do poorly they start doing even worse! Its like "f*** the world I want to get off".....until pay day rolls around. Nobody is sending the checks back I would guess.

Man I don't think I remember Yaz looking like anything like 175 in his glory years. Looked much bigger than that to me. I don't think what is listed really matters with any of these guys. I think what is listed is their own personal PR more often than not.

I think what folks either don't know or have forgotten is that Nava went on one hell of a Pawtucket hot streak just as the Sox were growing desperate for more help in the outfield. So it really took all of his seasoning, his baseball smarts, his very admirable play AND a monster hot streak just as the Sox needed outfield help to get him here. So all the stuff I admire in him and have discussed here, was not enough to get it done. He had to get white hot on top of that. I suspect that once he steps down off of that podium and goes back to being a very smart, very seasoned player that is a joy to watch, he will have a very difficult time sticking at least past the time when the Sox have a reasonable stable of OF guys. So do I think he will stick over d-mac? Yes I would be very disappointed if the Sox sent Nava down for d-mac. However d-mac probably describes Nava own kind of Mendoza line. Players better than d-mac as they come back to the Sox probably each hold the possibility of seeing Nava go back down. d-mac or less likely will not shoehorn Nava off this team. Putting d-mac aside for a bit, it might boil down to something like keeping Byrd here or the Podster here or Nava. I would take Nava over Pods at this point and might even take him over Byrd.

Well ya' but last we saw of Bard in that "slam the door" role he had turned that into more of a "left the door ajar" kind of deal. Not sure he is really well suited to that long term either. In fact looking at how he sometimes folds up like a house of cards under the slightest bit of pressure (like one guy on base) I am not sure he is well suited to that role. Do we really want to see him called in from the pen and roll out a couple balks in a row?

I just remembered in my comment about injury that Ross has a foot injury. But he just sustained that so I am not sure anybody knows right now when he will be back at this point.

I think unfortunately, a number or the Red Sox injuries are large joint and/or bone injuries or are also injuries that are lower back or somewhere related to the player's core. Unlike football where you can just bind up ribs and even shoulders (been there done that) and play reasonably well, baseball requires freedom and range of motion. About the only thing you can bind up on a baseball player that will allow him to still play I think is something like an ankle, maybe a knee, possibly a hip. Seems to me that anything from the waist up would be pretty tough to play with and even the waist down injuries would be pretty tough if they were severe enough. Everything from the waist up needs to move pretty freely or the player just can't play. Unfortunately if I am not mistaken, with the exception of Cook all of our injuries are large joint or bone injuries from the waist up.

Nava is not a crappy player. He is in fact a very good player. He simply has not got anything like the talent of the typical ML ballplayer. However he plays very smart, very focused baseball, seldom making a mistake either at the plate, on the base paths or in the field. Those are his strengths. Raw talent is his weakness. He is so small that he is almost puny...he is certainly smaller than Pedey without Pedey's extremely strong wrists. But the kid is a pleasure to watch because he plays such pure baseball. How I wish some of the more talented members of the Red Sox played the game nearly as well as Nava. I don't think he will stick as I suspect the skills he exhibits playing the game will be overmatched by his lack of raw talent. But I have nothing but respect for him for the way he plays the game. While I certainly would not credit him with the clubs recent W/L record, I am also pretty convinced that without him a couple of those wins would have ended up on the other side of the ledger.

The Sox had few tangible options for a 5th starter in April and with Cook's fast departure due to injury they have few today. Aceves was the only other tangible option in April and when you stacked Bard up to Aceves, given the flexibility, the value that Aceves represented pitching out of the pen, the Sox could ill afford to put him in the rotation in the 5 hole instead of Bard. Last we saw Bard in September of the previous year he was having difficulty in his single inning stints bridging to Paps. There was simply no logic to moving Aceves to the rotation in order to keep Bard in it. I do think we can see in this starting role why the Sox might have given up on Bard as a closer if in fact that is what happened resulting in the acquisition of Bailey. Would we have wanted to trust Bard with the 9th inning given his propensity to simply lose focus completely....do I really need to remind us of Mr Balk? Of course the Sox could have gone out and gotten another starter but they decided not to do that leaving them with Bard or Ace. Bard does appear to be falling off some now and maybe the added load is getting to him. I still think that Bard as experiment was more packaging than reality. The Sox needed Bard in that 5th starter role given the corner they had boxed themselves into and that was that. That is the reality. There is certainly now the possibility that Bard will be one of the casualties of a season that has been predicated on the Sox vision of how they planned on recovering from the FO fiasco's of recent years. The Sox decided against bringing in another true starting pitcher cause they did not want to pay for one and opted instead to choose between Bard and Ace and then see what they could flesh out of the band of misfits that they brought in. Seems to me that now that we are into the season we have to some extent lost track of how we got here. The Sox tied the purse strings at least for this season and at the very least it meant no starting pitcher of any real stature of any kind was hired. Cook was likely the closest thing to it and he certainly was not ready to start for the Sox in April.

Your comments are in my view correct Bellhorn and I think 700's comments would be correct if "the experiment" perspective was accurate and the difference sort of defines the problem. If you want to buy into the idea that this whole Bard thing is an experiment and the Sox have a keen eye seeing this as having a high degree of potential for turning Bard into a solid 3 or maybe a 2 someday then I can see somebody being less than impressed. However if you resign yourself to this being what I think it is..... Bard is the Sox 5 for this period of time, the Sox want it this way and he is in that role as an end unto itself, not with some grand expectations ala' "the experiment" then it is much easier in my view to accept the idea that the Sox are way getting the better end of this deal. I think that is far closer to the truth and that is what makes the discussion both interesting and relevant. I have gotten to the point where I at least have enough respect for what Bard is doing to wish that the Sox had not packaged this whole thing up the way they did as I think that their actions "from what I can see of Sox/Doubront vs Sox/Bard" do not support the way they had packaged this thing up and I think to some extent they do Bard a disservice. The difference is not insignificant as for some Bard is closer to yet another spoiled rotten Sox player out for himself while underperforming than I think he is. I believe he has proven to be a serviceable 5 that regardless of whether he wanted to start or not, has not received much support and has in my view done pretty well under difficult circumstances. In my view he has been tossed into the deep end of the pool and the Sox seem stingy with even a floaty. Yes he wanted to start...but if you look at the difference in salary for starters why would that be a surprise. Just in this one thread and in these few posts we have some comments about Bard's performances to date that would seem to be based in the idea of "the experiment" and others based on Bard's role as the 5 being an end unto itself.

Your right I don't know how much they have worked with Bard which is why I qualified my comment in that regard. It does seem to me that they have been more diligent with Doubront....making more trips to the mound when he is in trouble, doing the kinds of things that I would expect looking at it from the outside looking in where a young pitcher is involved. You guys may be reading to much into what I am posting here. What I am trying to say and I guess doing a pretty bad job of it is that I do not think this has been the Bard Starter experiment as much as it has been Bard as the 5th starter....an end unto itself. If it was the Bard Starter experiment then I would have expected more of what I see them doing with Doubront. If you remember at one point it was being reported that this was going to boil down to which of either Aceves or Bard was going to be more valuable pitching from the pen, not which was going to be more valuable pitching from the 5 hole. From that point onward I thought there was little chance that we would see Aceves as the 5th starter and every chance that we would see Bard as the 5th starter and that is how it worked out. I suspect it worked out that way for that exact reason.

There is no question at least in my mind that Bard wanted to start. I just don't believe and never believed that he was starting because he wanted to. He was starting because the Sox wanted him to start. If not for that Bard could have wanted to till he was blue in the face and it would not have mattered. I think they gave up on Bard as a Closer for whatever reason although they are never going to say so. The question is, given that Bard could throw (maybe could not do much more but could throw) should they have judged him not worthy of more support than he has gotten? Maybe...I do think that if he does make it, he will mainly have made it on his own steam as I just don't see much of an effort on the part of the Sox to actually work with him to develop his skills as a starter. I think that is what we expected when it was announced. Like I said before, there is a side to baseball that can be harsh. To me it says that the Sox don't think Bard has it. They needed innings from the 5 hole and he has given them innings from the 5 hole. He has probably given them better innings from the 5 hole than they had a right to expect. In the long run I don't think that is going to get him very much in this organization anyway. Maybe at the end of the day he ends up impressing some team enough that they are willing to actually do what we thought the Sox were going to do with him and the Sox end up with someone that they can package as part of a trade. By the time this season is done it looks like the Sox will have an overabundance of mediocre relievers and mediocre starters. I am having a hard time convincing myself that they will keep Bard under those circumstances.

Frankly I no longer know what Bard is and I don't think the Sox know either. One of my biggest concerns with this whole "experiment" is that I have grown to believe that it is the Sox that do not have their hearts in it. I have not seen anything like the support for a young pitcher trying to make this transition that I would have expected out of Sox Management and Coaches generally. He is not removed from games at points when you would believe there is a golden opportunity for his pitching coach to sit him down and review. Neither the pitching coach nor his manager even come out and talk to him during innings in the same way that they have with Doubront just as an example. It seems to me that he hardly gets any attention at all. We actually have the Sox and their handling of Doubront to place side by side with Bard and I have to say that while I am looking at this from a distance I think the Sox have been much more diligent in their handling of Doubront. I no longer think this was an experiment at all. I think this was the Sox simply deciding that it was in their best interests to get as many innings out of Bard in the 5 hole as they could get. I don't think the Sox give a rats ass about whether he truly has a future as a starter and are just as inclined to see him back in the pen regardless of what all this bouncing around might do to him ala' Joba as an example. I do think that if he excelled as a starter the Sox would have been fine with that but in my view they have not helped the process along at all. It appears to me that they have basically left Bard to his own devices. Maybe this the end to the business of baseball that none of really like to look at. It certainly might say that the Sox do not consider Bard to be the talent that maybe we thought him to be or that we thought the Sox thought him to be. I think they are taking from Bard all that they can get having tossed him into the deep end of the pool. Maybe that is fine. They are certainly a better judge of talent than I am. However it is hard for me not to feel at least a bit of sympathy for the young man because I really have no idea what is going to happen to him next and I doubt he has much of an idea either.

The biggest difference between Nava and Agons that is a plus for Nava is something that Agons should take to heart. It is the way that Nava plays the game. It makes up for a monumental deficit in pure talent when you look at a player like Agons and compare him to Nava. If Agons played the game with the focus and intelligence that Nava plays with, his slumps would not be as telling and as much of an eye sore as they are. Agons has more raw talent in his pinky finger than Nava has in his whole body. However, you rarely ever see Nava have a bad at bat for example and to be honest you rarely see Agons have a good at bat...even when he is going good he is not very disciplined at the plate. When he is going poorly, that lack of discipline is just another element to Agons game that makes it difficult for him to come around.

Way to go Sox....really happy for the guys that are not supposed to contribute at the level they are contributing at...for most part, great examples of smart unselfish baseball...as for the big money chumps....