jung

Refreshing...even the EEI guys have termed it "refreshing".

Rafi has lately been willing to show pitchers he is willing to swing at that rising FB that he can't hit. Its not a big deal that Rafi can't hit it. Ortiz could not hit it either. He just does not want to keep swinging at it.

Alex Who and ex-player Tom Walker? Where does NESN get these guys? Where did they get this Alex guy?

Are you trying to horn in on my prick of the board award Slash?

Because its a fraud. Manfred Missile HR's are frauds. Destroying MLB pitching in the manner in which it has been manipulated and is being destroyed is a crime. They are taking all the actual legs that support the game's stool out from under it in the name of change. Not only is it not change for the better...ITS NOT WORKING. Are you blind to where attendance and rating have been going. Are you blind to ratings demographics? One result is you have got the players as represented by the MLBPA running scared and the owners running scared at the same time which is why the current end of 2021 season expiration date for the current CBA is both too close and too far away. There are some major issues at play behind all this nonsense, all of them playing into how players are compensated with a major issue at play for virtually every kind of ballplayer there is except for a pure power hitter and even THEY might be in trouble once we all get used to the fraud of the Manfred Missile. MLB is barely getting through 2019 looking at all like baseball with virtually the only games that remotely resemble actual baseball games, those that feature the very best starting pitchers left in the game.....all 15 or so of them. That is why 2021 is too far away. Its too close because we have real constituencies within the game for which all of this is coming to a head and for which the consequences are great. Could there be another work stoppage? Yup and this time there won't be some magic bullet to pull their asses out of that fire because my crowd with is the only demographic left of any scale supporting this game won't IMO wait them out. They will just lose us for the most part. They have less than two years to get this done and I am not sure there is compromise to be found in the major issues that confront this game: - the players clearly do not care about pace of play and a pitch clock even if they approve it will just be a band-aid, not a fix. Umpires have got to keep batters in the batter's box first or a pitch clock does not matter. Stop this nonsense of hitters consulting their dead ancestors or the cosmos or whatever the f*** they are commiserating with and fixing every bit of gear they have on when they just took an uncontested ball or strike thrown by the pitcher. One foot out of the box max and that one foot back in the box ASAP....PERIOD! - the Manfred Missile....an utter and complete disaster, a travesty of the game and a major fraud to boot. You have a sports entertainment enterprise that bought the company that makes the baseballs, has changed them three times in four years all towards a progressively hotter baseball and a Commissioner and an Administration that claims to know nothing. Not only are they changing the game at its core, creating an utter stats fiasco, extending the length of games, driving the last vestiges of decent pitching out but they are choosing salary winners and losers because the players are not all going to be winners....far from it. This is particularly the case for an entertainment enterprise with declining attendance and ratings. Good luck with that one in this next CBA negotiation. - the way MLB has manipulated pitching along side of the Manfred Missile makes the mound height changes over the years look like kids playing in a sandbox - baseball IS a multidimensional game.....trying to turn it into a one dimensional game is a failure on its face. Will fail to keep fans interested in this game. That is only a matter of time and MLB is driving this game down the rat hole even faster than even I imagined possible. Who compensates the pitchers for that? That is just for starters. The rules around the bags on the base paths, replay as implemented...all wrong headed and counterproductive. Worse, CLEARLY now MLB has no intention of fixing the damage they are wrecking choosing instead to just ride this baby right into the gutter. The game is literally at war with itself. Everything it does that changes the game at its core also slows pace of play and extends game time which they then try to band-aid with rules about mound visits and possible rules about pitcher changes and pitch clocks......BAND-AIDS for a game and a business enterprise that is at war with itself. What the heck.....the remaining investors left without a chair when the music stops will just have a tax write-off. Actually, this is not that much of a surprise. The fabric of American Society, American politics and even American democracy is being challenged and pulled apart in very real ways. What would ever make us think that baseball was immune? The final coup de grace....ITS NOT WORKING. What does it take to get people to pull their heads out of the sand? Both attendance AND ratings are going down and the ONLY demographics keeping this game afloat are the 54+ and 65+ demos. Name me a business enterprise that survives on those two demos? Is it canes, crutches? Is it wheelchairs? Is it oxygen tanks? How about walk in bathtubs? Are any of those representative of major markets? Sort of ironic that the "I have fallen down and can't get up sports enterprise" just about only has left the "I have fallen down and can't get up" demo for a fan base of any scale. The very demos that find this changes most offensive, most appalling are about the ONLY demo's MLB has left obviously because most of us that are part of that demo have been hanging on by our fingernails hoping that MLB turns around. But guess what....not only are WE becoming impatient with this nonsense but WE are soon to be pushing up daisies!

Institutionalizing this nonsense by defining terms like Openers and Featured Pitchers just tells us that MLB is going to ride their party bus right into the ditch....all the way down....all four wheels sinking into the ooze, ratings and attendance and the very game itself tanking along the way. Not going to fix a damned thing! So in this world of Openers and now Featured pitchers how much is a starter that goes 4-5 innings consistently giving up a run or more an inning worth......$20M per? Heck....must be something like that if everybody else is going 1-2 innings consistently giving up a run an inning. DD you prescient dog you. You got Nate for $17M per. Such a bargain........BRILLIANT!

Ahhhh yes....won't it be nice to someday not have the burden as a Sox fan of "hoping" JBJ can hit the magical .250 BA? As we all knew, he is just as hopeless against RH pitchers as he is against LH pitchers. And there it is in black and white....a real accomplishment.

Wind blowing out at Wrigley and Manfred Missile means 17-8 Cubs over Pirates in the 8th and of course STILL GOING. Absurd....utterly absurd, mutated, bastardized baseball.

Well he is not a power hitter as much as the Sox PR has tried to define him that way. It has not helped him IMO. He has not proven so far to be a very versatile hitter. That has to come in time if he is to improve and he cannot let that long stride and long swing inflict itself on him again. Beni has so far in his career only been a decent hitter IMO when the pitcher has to come to him. Notice the Sox offense overall is gone in the tank again. There are fewer hitters getting on around him and pitchers are more often not forced to come to him. He also gets less not more comfortable in the count as the count grows. Sort of the opposite of X. He should turn out to be a terrific doubles hitter in Fenway Park. But if he tries to be a HR hitter anywhere IMO he will fail at that and he has to learn to hit from deeper in the order. I don't see many managers hitting him out of lead off again.

So for only the second Friday of the season we don't have a Sox game. Wanna' know which Friday was the first Friday when we didn't have one? That would be the Friday before the absurdity of the London two game stint with the Yanks. Can we just take these schedulers out and put them in front of a firing squad now? Will somebody remember to pull Manfred out from under the desk where he has been hiding from his culpability in the Manfred Missile and make sure he gets stood against the rhetorical wall too.

Geezuz, we men in the audience finally get some sense at least for what giving birth must be like....its like finally winning a Sox game in 2019.

Sigh....21 pitchers on the staff and they have to go to Work in the 8th.

Wait a few more years....you will convince yourself that BJ must have been a god!

No Problem. Work must be if anything well rested at this point. Then again, there may be no need of him by the time we actually get to the 9th inning.

At the rate MLB is going there will be a last good starter one of these days and sooner than it should be. We will be left with: - Openers - Featured pitchers - What next...Un-featured pitchers - Set up men - Closers Then there be the 1A bunch.....the ever present everyday players that always wanted to throw SOMEDAY. Someday brought on by there being nobody left to throw out of the aforementioned "A" group....or maybe somebody that is still remotely a pitcher should be referred to as the "B" group since there will be no A grade MLB pitchers left. I guess that makes the everyday players that throw the 1B group. We will soon only have hope to ever see an actual pitcher of MLB quality again. As soon as the current crop led by Verlander retires, its DONE.....finished. Maybe the DeGrom generation hangs on for awhile after the Verlander group retires. That will finally be the end. The actual starter will be extinct. What a cluster!

Heck we stayed for the pathos.

And sell it he might. Freaking out is not a relevant term for a businessman who wants a business to run like a business. Anybody that thinks printing money into a fan feeding a furnace raises a concern for a businessman at a level far below "freaking out" but far above just taking it needs to think again.

Oh and before I forget, the current CBA expires at the end of the 2021 season which is both too close and too far away for everybody with an actual dog in the fight. So close you can smell the possibility of another work stoppage which this bunch is just stupid enough to let happen. So far away that given the mess MLB has gotten itself into you have to wonder if the dikes won't start to give way before they get there.

Tomase's point is that Henry might what to get out from under the financial penalty scenario. I can have some empathy for that view. A business that accepts financial penalties on an ongoing basis is like a business that produces a product accepting unreasonable levels of waste and thinking that is just fine. Its not just fine. Its bad business. We are being beaten senseless by teams with half or less our budgets and without the "potential" revenue streams that we have. How do you think that tastes to a businessman? Waste is death to a business and right now the unusual business asset that Fenway Park, NESN , the value of Fenway Group as an asset and that the legendary Sox fanbase represent are being wasted.

Any well constructed team at or near the max no penalty spending limit should cake walk to the best 5 teams in one of the two leagues AND have a farm system given the crap that passes for MLB teams these days. That is not a championship run however. Its a shot at a championship run. I doubt we can expect that of this franchise until they have reassembled some semblance of a complete organization with at least a reasonable farm system. It does not help that the Sox have stuck themselves behind the exact eight ball they were stuck behind with the Crawford contract which John Henry extricated the franchise from, not Cherries who just did the paperwork. Also not helpful, MLB has made a complete shambles of MLB pitching which is now from a planning perspective, utter chaos. Good luck planning your way around that. Now we not only have Openers, but "Featured" pitchers which is wholly disappointing as it suggests a continuation of a FAILED business approach to baseball generally and pitching in particular. The NESN talent team is in turmoil as there is no real replacement for Jerry and their ratings are taking a beating even WITH Jerry. I have no idea where the production team is as this IS the production team that thought Dan Orsillo had gotten too big for his bridges and decided he was not toeing the Fenway Group messaging mantras to their satisfaction giving us OB. The more I see, the more I am convinced they are actually lucky OB was there to bring in. We don't at this particular instant have a Pres of Baseball Ops and won't have a clue where Henry wants to go until one is named. That is such a jumbled mess that we have the "four horseman of the acropolis" now in charge. We thought Closer by committee was a bad idea. Two guys that have known each other for decades could not leave an exec level meeting on good enough terms to plan out a more sensible, sane way out of the particular mess they were in. Question for John Henry. Were you not prepared for what DD had in mind on that fateful night? Frankly JOHN, if you did not know that you could be left in the spot you were in that night, that is as bad is DD not knowing that his baseball team would quit on him when publicly challenged at the Trade Deadline. If you were not prepared for that meeting, avoid the guy for a day. What is this, Romper Room for business execs? My God I have grown to expect Romper Room in the clubhouse. If you DID know what was afoot then take it head on JOHN....not muddling around looking like you are in the dark with your dick in your hand or in a bedmate's ass more likely. But this is supposed to be the age of real business management in baseball, spreadsheets and all that crap with an owner who is .......a successful Financial Wealth Manager and we get Romper Room???? Yawkey could have given us Romper Room. Harrington could have given us Romper Room. I thought we could do at least a little better than that in 2019 with John Henry.....but NOOOOOO! Maybe John is just tired of the whole damned thing. That would not surprise me either.

Tomase raising the rather ugly point that the Sox being a business not entirely built around fielding a championship calibre team every year really may be able to make some sense out of resetting entirely (meaning finally getting back to no penalties as quickly as they reasonably can). That may make some sense as ugly as it might be. Their ratings are already taking a beating for one. For another, a good bit of that crowd at Fenway is not really there for the quality of the baseball as much as they are there for the aviance of the place, the history of Fenway, the carnival out front, a night of entertainment...in this case sports entertainment etc. Does not mean they could get away with being the Baltimore Orioles for even a nanosecond. But they could get away with being much less than they are at much less salary and be just fine working up to another championship run downstream.

Then lets ignore the actual ratings. We could just go there. Does that make it easier for you guys? Do you want to do what.....ignore that I also mentioned the actual ratings? Give me a break.

Anybody that thinks that 3 of the last 4 titles coming with first timers at the helm justifies making a managerial move, needs to rethink that one IMO. Organizational Chaos is not a strategy. Organizational Chaos is just chaos. We are looking at 3 distinct circumstances here: - first championship in a zillion years - perceived steady leadership (Farrell) following chaos (Bobby V), 2013 - a very solid first year for a manager handling a very good team, 2018

I have said it elsewhere in the forum and provided rational for it. Won't provide the my rational again here but just to say it in the "Fire" thread, I would not fire Cora.

I count 11 posters and with this one 110 posts and 800 views in the GT from an August high of 343 posts and 3,469 views and a July high of 573 posts and 3,561 views and a June high of 642/7,528. May's high was 336/3043. I would bet the ratings on this game are going to be piss. As I have often said, we forum posters, don't make a sports entertainment market....not even close. But we do provide a sample over time and the relative ups and downs in GT's are probably a near accurate reflection of what is happening out there for numbers in the market in general. But as for watching.....not many. Just for completeness, the low GT post/view numbers for each month: Sept to date: 84/781 Aug: 33/439 July: 133/1306 June: 141/1414 May: 42/593