jung

I think everybody is a little tired and shell shocked from yesterday. I was up in the pen at least three times myself.:lol:

While I know I am just looking for a silver lining here....maybe if they realize they cannot let up at all in their half innings they will put more runs up there. Fact is they really do seem to have to work at tacking something on every half inning.

Hindsight is 20:20 but Byrd should have just lit out for the warning track and found the wall..would have turned that play into an out without much trouble as he had plenty of time.

With everything that has gone badly for V if there is one thing that seems to have worked out pretty well is his success getting a good result from a trip to the mound. He settled Ace a couple of weeks ago and clearly woke Doubront out of his little bit of a snooze getting him to concentrate on making his pitches last inning.

So I think he had 19 pitches there VA. I wonder if V has decided to get more active early in games. Might not be a bad idea.

V might be tuned into this pitch count thing also. That was a quick trip to the mound

I still wonder if Youk actually damaged his chances with all that weight lifting stuff. Suddenly going on a big weight lifting program late in a baseball career when not having done it for awhile is not such a great idea and his bat has definitely looked slower this year. May not make any dif considering what WMB is doing.

Wow does WMB have some pop in that bat.

C'mon NESN can we just not go over yesterday ten times tonight?

Sanchez has got 19 walks and only 15 SO! Geez can we have him start for KC three straight games?

I would think that maybe the upside to only having Miller go one inning in the marathon is that he should be able to give something tonight. Somebody else went 1 inning also I think.....Atch or Padilla???

Canseco playing baseball in Worchester, MA. Wonder if he is just trying to stay in the news.

Goog job mvp....a shot at a Jenks reference! Anybody heard anything new on Jenks. Last I heard I thought he was just going way to the back burned as far as the time it would take to even get him to some sort of a working recovery.

Bellhorn I did not want you to think I was ignoring your post but I think you want SoxSport commenting in this particular instance. If I am wrong I apologize and I will offer a comment but that is SoxSports post that you have copied into yours.

The only option to d-mac would be Sweeney I guess and they are reluctant to go away from platooning. Until and unless they do bring up the kids, I guess they don't really have an option.

At least they got Agons out from behind Pedey. Surprised V had the balls to put Agons that far down in the lineup but that was my preference for getting him away from Pedey as well. I thought the best V would come up with would be to put Agons 3rd and Pedey 4th with Ortiz 5th. This is better. Sox used to play great at home. Now they seem to need these trips out of town. Hopefully they do better on the road like the did last time out. Hey they get another AAA team to play against. That has been the ticket so far. Just aren't that many AAA teams playing in the ML.

Well it is funny how we have come full circle on Ortiz. Those of us that wanted more pitching and thought that we should either find a way to negotiate Ortiz to numbers that gave us more money to play with or thought we should just let Ortiz go really had a hard time making any headway here during the winter and early spring. Now Ortiz has done nothing less than carry the team offensively and now we are ready to let him go for pitching. I was more in favor of negotiating Ortiz to a number that left us some money to play with for pitching...maybe getting him to $18M for two years would have worked as Ortiz wanted more than one year and would likely have found $18M for two years appealing until the Sox got themselves worked up into a panic and went down the arbitration trail. I did not think there were teams that would outbid the Sox for Ortiz as there was an abundance of aging DH types out there in the league and nobody knew Ortiz would come back in the condition he is in now. But there were folks that were totally ready to cash in the chips on Ortiz for more pitching and maybe they had the better idea. Not at all sure who we could get for Ortiz at this point. I would agree that any trade options that would improve the mix of players on this team would be worth considering. At this point I am not sure I would so easily accept the idea that the Sox have an abundance of offense. They have offense but when you consider the guys that are already absent or underperforming I am not sure I see an abundance of offense. Do we want more pitching now because we still think this team could be post season bound? There still looks like there will be more options open when 2013 rolls around and the team will have much more money to play with at that point as well.

So you think that was AGons giving his best effort?.....Seriously....I don't know which would be sadder...that it was his best effort or that he simply went up there, frustrated and defocused, flailed away three times and sat back down again. So that was the best effort our multi-multi million dollar man could give us against the Orioles DH substitute pitcher.....that is what some of you think? I don't think so...I don't think that was anything like his best effort. I am not nearly as disappointed in the result as I am with Agons just giving up. That was still a game....we still could have pulled that out. In fact Agons gave up long before that last at bat. He has the right to a bad game. Any player can have a bad game. He does not have the right to just go up there like some petulant child, defocused, frustrated by the fact that things have not gone his way today, and flail away aimlessly as if the only effort he is really willing to make is an effort to end the game and his participation in it as quickly as possible. He owes the fans and his employers his best effort every time up. He doesn't have the right to turn plate appearances into his own personal pity parties. Do you guys even watch the games....do you watch these at bats? So you seriously think that a professional hitter going up against four different pitchers four straight at bats swinging at the first pitch he sees from every one of them is giving you a focused, concerted effort, his best effort? You honestly think those three swings he took in the fourth and last at bat in that sequence, the one against Designated Hitter Davis was a focused and concerted effort, his best effort? You are willing to accept that AGons can and will just give up because things are not going his way? That is what he did on Sunday in my view...he just gave up. But wait.... I am sure everything is just fine. Agons will just get in front of the microphones again and tell us that was just one more thing that he will "never do again". Frankly that is another indication that Agons is something of an empty uniform. Any baseball player that is willing to pronounce to the world that something will "never happen again" on a baseball field simply has no idea what he owes his team, his owners and the fans the pay to see him play. I need your best effort Agons...I don't need empty, hollow pronouncements that you could not back up if your life depended on it even if you were A-God. Go tell it to King Labron James. If there is one thing I am absolutely sure of it is that King James would understand you completely AGon because you two are cut from the same cloth.

Lavarnway had 7 PB is 62 games caught in 2011. He has had 1 PB in 40 games so far in 2012. Salty has had 2 PB and pitchers have been charged with 9 WP in the 16 games that he has caught so far in 2012. They may keep the WP records for pitchers/catchers in the minors but I have not found them as yet. Then there is the avalanche of dropped pop flies, poor throws, mental errors and various and sundry other defensive errors that Salty makes including a distinct inability to get up out of that crouch and move out from behind the plate on any plays right in front of home and his ineffectiveness just calling the game and providing a good target for pitchers. Add to that the fact the Salty is not hitting and I would take the risk on Lavs. He may be as bad as Salty. However we already know that Salty is terrible and Lavs has not caught so badly in Pawtucket this year that there is no chance of his being better than Salty. If he is just as bad defensively there is every chance that Lavs will hit better than Salty is hitting. No matter how you cut it, Salty is so terrible at this point that it is worthwhile to take the risk that Lavs will be better. Frankly Salty is catching so poorly and hitting so poorly that even with Shoppach's obvious problems hitting it would at this point be worthwhile catching Shoppach more just to inject some calm into the situation for the pitchers. At this point the pitchers must not have any confidence at all in what Salty is doing back there. In fact I think there is ample evidence that the O's may be the first team this year to have purposefully been trying to take advantage of Salty's deficiencies. I think we are likely to see more of that as it gets around the league that Salty is just plain terrible.

In my experience nobody in this town will ever dump on a player that shows up every game and plays hard. But when guys check out the way Agons checked out today....all bets are off. If you take at bats against salary, JH paid over $28,000 today to see Agons flail at three pitches from the Orioles DH/part time pitcher and scurry back to the dugout as fast as his little legs would carry him after six other plate appearances today that were not much better. In most cases today, AGons could not end his plate appearances fast enough swinging at first pitches four at bats in a row and in most cases swinging at anything that was close to being a strike. At least on other days, you could surmise that maybe Agons was trying to hard to wall ball and picking at pitches from the outer half out. Today, it did not matter where they were. Anything that ended the misery of batting for AGons as fast as possible was good enough for him today with each successive at bat worse than the one before it. As far as I am concerned AGons deserves to be criticized when he so blatantly checks out. Not performing and packing it in are two entirely different things. I have rarely seen a more gutless, heartless performance by any baseball player anywhere in any uniform. Surrender takes different forms and different shapes depending on the circumstances. In case nobody has ever seen it before, that is what surrender looks like for a baseball player. You want to vent about clueless Boston fans....vent about the clueless Boston fans that insist that AGons is as clutch a player as Pedey. Now that is truly clueless.

Of course good ballplayers can have a slump. Good ballplayers cannot just phone games in like Agons did today. Agons swung at the first pitch no matter where it was in 3 out of his last 4 at bats today and in the 4th at bat against the other team's 1st baseman/ DH/Pitcher went down on three pitches, flailing helplessly at the last one not even getting close to a swing that would have accomplished anything even if he made contact. AGons packed it in, phoned it in, raised the white flag. That s*** may have been good enough in sunny every day, never rains San Diego and that is exactly where he should have kept his s*** act. It's not good enough here.

Dan Schaughnessy is on Comcast with that other dweeb, Felger. For once I agree with him...most of this can be chalked up to bad baseball...bad bad baseball. Take the three wins against the twins away and they are 8-16. Danny boy wondering what Agons really means to this team. Does he just look like a bigger Wade Boggs? Does he look like a guy that will ever carry this team, even for a game or so....Did they overpay for Agons in salary and in players traded...valid questions right now.

And there are some pretty hefty paychecks in the "just collecting their paychecks" group right now. One of the worst things (in my opinion) about the way some teams implement Bill James principles is that they don't look under the uniform to see how the player ticks. James does not necessarily look at how numbers are generated and I think it is very common to ignore splits and decide that they are meaningless. "If player XYZ can produce these numbers generally, he should be expected to produce them in every situation". Well maybe he will and maybe he won't. It reminds me a little of the Giambi situation in the book and movie "Moneyball". Remember that Beane was just trying to replace Damon's numbers and did not care that little brother Giambi was a head case, heartless *******....eventually Beane ended up deciding that the numbers part of Giambi's contribution was not as important as the heartless ******* part and got him outta' town before he did more damage than he was already doing. Boy do I see alotta "love those numbers" and have no idea what is under the hood in the way the Sox have implemented James formulas.

I would not take a bet that involved this team's FO, players, field managers , grounds crew, peanut vendors..........

Pedey wears his heart on his sleeve and he is the consummate believer in the them vs us thing as far as team is concerned. What we don't know is what he is saying in the locker room. Pedey should keep his mouth shut when it comes to s*** with the press. What you just heard from him was Pedey's ill phrased, No Comment. Whining about having to get on a plane might be the sort of thing a couple of teammates might say to each other, not the kind of thing any of them should say in public. He is just not good with the media in situations like this and he clearly is not savvy enough to separate his life with his teammates from his life as a Red Sox player but outside those clubhouse doors. Now if he starts to phone in games like AGons did today, then I will find his behavior inexcusable. Until then I would just advice him to learn these two words...No comment.... and leave it at that. We want Pedey to lead the team. We in no way expect that to mean he is the spokesman for the team, a job for which he is wholly unqualified. I think when these guys get things like Pedey's weekly gig with EEI, they think it is because they are "good" with the media. Being provocative and good are two different things and give the media a choice between provocative and good, the media will take provocative every time. Why the hell do we think Marchand has his gig with EEI! I assure you it is not because of his polished communications skills?