jung

Isn't Alex and his experience here something of a mystery anyway? the guy played very good defense and was not a complete goose egg at the plate. Sorta' makes you wonder what they will take in a guy that can play defense at SS if the record he amassed here was not good enough. OK so he struck out 29 times and only walked 5 times. His OBP and OPS were not good but when you consider his defense, holy cats!! Alex is my poster child for why I don't think Iggy will ever see any real time in a Red Sox uniform. Take 60-70 points off os Alex's BA and keep his OBP and OPS about the same and you probably have Iggy. If Alex was not good enough when is Iggy ever going to be good enough.

Yea I know a spot in the outfield should be a natural for Aviles and I guess if Iggy were still here tonight I would really be pissed if they missed an opportunity to put Aviles out there instead of d-mac. Avlies purposefully put time into outfield play this offseason so it would have seemed a natural to put him out there just to see what he could do especially when comparing his bat to d-macs. I guess I am sort of surprised that the Sox have not already put Mike out there before this even just for a game to see what he can do since the alternative is the almighty d-mac. So of late I have been thinking that the Sox are really really reluctant to give Mike a shot out there for some reason which I cannot fathom. Again if it were not for the fact that the alternative is d-mac I guess I could get it.

I figured this thread had to have something about Oil Can Boyd until I opened it, given his blow up this morning on the EEI, Dennis and Callahan show. Not excusing Can for his behavior or his issues but I really do not like D&C and purposely tune them out these days. No question that while they differ sometimes they are really birds of a feather. I guess it was mostly Jerry that got Can to go through the roof this morning but there is no doubt in my mind that they want guests like Can to blow up regardless of the F bombs that result (which get bleeped out anyway). It is part of the D&C schtick. As Can was slamming down the phone Callahan was asking him if he was at home taking this call smoking a joint at the time, I guess manly because Can had in fact finally lost it and somehow Jerry associates losing it like that with smoking a joint. Actually I don't think Jerry is that naive. I just think he wanted to get that in. Good ol' Gasoline Can Callahan must think he has a budding career as a Sox relief pitcher, the way he stoked Oil Can's fire. Surely there was no really good reason for Can to have lost it like that but it was clear that D&C knew where to go to get Can to blow and purposefully went there. Can contends that nobody tossed him from a baseball team because of his drug abuse and I guess he uses the fact that nobody ever specifically pointed to substance abuse as a rational to let him go. At least that is the gist of what I could take from that part of the discussion. Jerry kept picking at it finally asking Can if he thought it unrealistic to think that none of the team management personnel involved did not at least have an inkling of the issues and that was the end for Can. I guess he thought he had answered the question and did not think they would keep picking at it. I should go check to see who has helped Can with this book of his which is the purpose for the PR campaign and associated radio spots. Mods please feel free to move my post if you think it the right thing to do. Did not want to start a thread on the topic and actually thought I was going to find something on Can here before I opened this thread.

Well there are the 800 or so courtesy tickets that are freebee's but there is nothing the Sox are doing here that is not common practice in professional sports. it is no more of a sham for the Sox than it is for any other major sports franchise. So it is not like they have invented a way to keep the streak going. It might not be as important as they think it is on a day to day basis. However, I do think they want to beat that Portland Trailblazers record and I think they will.

Wow...think the Sox like what they see from Middlebrooks...I do. One thing I really like about some of the young blood the Sox have in Pawtucket and on the brink is that they do not seem to shy from the spotlight. Lavarnway did not gag on his opportunity last year. WMB flashed some glove the other night in a way that made you feel like he wanted to show us what he had....not shy at all. It would be great if we had a place to put Aviles so we could still enjoy his bat and have Iggy still here to play SS, with WMB, Pedey and Agons around the horn. Would that be somthin' to see if only for a game or what?

My God it's the dreaded R word....rebuilding. Anyway, I have always felt that if they do bring up Larvarnway they should only do it if it will not stilt his development. I don't think sharing time with Shoppach would of its own accord stilt his development but there could be other things about coming up that get in the way. The pressure is clearly much greater and that could be tough...although he handled it pretty well last year. I would not really make the R word a factor here. If I could bring Lavarnway up under the right circumstances and make the right deal for Salty I would pull the trigger. However both conditions would have to be met for me to think it worthwhile.

I will try to get back and roll up some names here. However if you just take a quick look at the number of active catchers still playing that were born in the early to mid 70's there are a fair number of targets right there. You have got guys somehow managing to get up and down from that crouch soon to be 40. The shortage of guys that can catch at all is how guys like Rodriguez, just retired, and Posada were still catching so late in their careers...there just are not enough guys to go around. If you want you kid to have a career in baseball, put him in a crouch as soon as he can walk and your part way to a ML catcher. Even though Salty is not a great catcher...heck he is not even a good catcher he can catch and there are so few guys that "can" that even Salty is a commodity that will have some attraction. Plus Salty does have proven power. Believe it or not, even with his hitting deficiencies, the fact that he can knock one out now and again will not go unnoticed when and if the Sox put him on the blocks. I think teams will be willing to gamble that he is better than what they have or better than nothing when their aging catcher finally goes down for the count. I think SI or maybe SI.com has a listing of players by position that also lists their dates of birth. I will likely start there and see who is on the list and then track them to their teams.

Won't get anything for Youk at this point. He either returns to some form of his former hitting prowess or he does not. Salty would get us something though. Did you ever think you would see the day when Salty would be better trade bait than Youk!!! If my keyboard had a stuttering key I would be hitting it now just thinking about that comparison. What is the world coming to!!!

As tempting as it might seem I would not pull the plug either. It is just so easy to look at bull pen issues and go overboard trying to solve them cause they tend to stick out like a sore thumb. Guy comes in...supposed to put out the fire and...boom...kablam....pow....turns into a blazing inferno. There is only so much one guy coming out of the pen can do. Right now the Sox have so many question marks there, it would be hard to decide where to put Bard even if he was there. For example if you put him into the 7th inning, maybe to put out a fire, how tempting would it be to keep him going maybe all the way to the ninth. Well then what have you done? You have just about used him enough to have to put him on the shelf for a few days. We look at Bard's stuff and that is what seems to suggest he should close. The Sox do have guys with stuff though and I think Bard does not offer more than they do in that Bard is likely to be shaky for the first few batters as any of them. That is the real problem in my view with just inserting Bard's name as closer and thinking you have solved the problem. He is not a sure fire solution. He just looks more appealing than what they have done to date. The Sox are starting to make some sense of their pen I think. I would not pull the plug on Bard and I know that is not a popular view.

I guess the only thing I would add to this discussion is that I am not convinced that Bard's desire is the only or even the key element to the Sox decision to have him start. Aceves wanted to start and said so. Is he starting? The team owns your contract...they are going to decide what you are going to do. I think the Sox saw it as in their best interests to develop Bard as a starter mainly because that is what returned the most value to the Sox and possibly because they decided for whatever reason that continuing Bard on the path to be a closer was not going like they wanted it to go. I have no knowledge to support the latter but the former would seem obvious. I do think that Bards desire to start helps but what pitcher does not want to start if he can? Look at this another way. If the Sox were simply going to roll over and develop every pitcher they have that wanted to start, the line would be out the door and down the street. Anyway this is just my opinion but I just think it odd that we would think the Sox would roll over for Daniel Bard.

Boy if the Red Sox have any heart it should be get in line for who they would hate most. f***in' Rays made a big deal out of coming from so far down to get to the post season. f***in' O's made a huge big deal about knocking the Sox out when they were going nowhere! If you remember it looked like they had just won the WS. So I guess if I had to say...it would be the O's. If they don't punch the O's in mouth this weekend, I give up. If they don't rock the O's world this weekend, I will never hear the end of it for my Yankee fan "friends".

Well if he was hurt when he landed it is likely worse than if he bruised it running into the wall. Landing on it wrong sounds more like ligament or cartilage damage, maybe just a ligament strain which would likely be the least worrisome issue. Carted off does not sound good. Sounds like he could not put any weight on it. I have begun to wonder what teams think about these none competition related injuries whether like this one or while engaged in activity that is not even baseball related. Shagging flies is OK. However I know going to the wall is "fun". It is a neat thing to do when shagging flies if you don't have anything better to do. Sounds like it might turn out to be costly fun this time.

I am not sure where Mazz is going with this. Maybe we make the playoffs....if we don't look like we will we could be sellers....no s*** sherlock. I agree that there is no middle class in the league this year which is why I have commented that I think some of the team records at the end of this season could be staggeringly bad. As for Mazz's predictions for players....the only guy I think will not be here is Iggy. I still think they will trade Iggy regardless of what Aviles is doing as Iggy is not the prototypical Sox SS and he is not going to be by next year. He needs about 40-50 points of BA to get there regardless of how good a defender he is and I don't think there is much chance of that happening. I don't like it but it is not my decision and I don't see the Sox changing in this regard. No question that the Sox will be cutting away a good deal of what may already be dead wood for next season but I don't understand why that would be much of a surprise either. UN has been talking about that for months and months now and probably others....he comes to might right away. By the way...I think Salty fans are few and far between so I am not sure that band wagon wasn't pretty crowded before this season.

Buch is a good pitcher....it seems to me that his body let him down as he started to move up the ranks of pitchers.....tried to add the weight figuring that would help him and that backfired. Imagine having that FB, all that promise and just not able to maintain it? I will never think about Buch in terms of some sort of trash pitcher or something like that. He has deserved better. I actually do hope he gets out of the AL East because I think he will have a fine career in the NL for example where he won't have to bring an A game every time out.

I would trade Salty. We have seen what he has and it is what it is. We are lucky enough to have Shoppach and if Lavarnway's development will not be stilted by bringing him up I would bring him up and trade Salty. Catchers are much coveted in baseball if they can get in a crouch without falling over. So somebody will want Salty and we may likely be able to package a deal that helps us shore up our weaknesses without hurting us a bit. That sounds like a trade to me.

So are those mystery ghost pitchers getting behind in the count, leaving the real guys to clean up the mess? They are the same pitchers. Bard definitely has instances when he gets to fine or tries to be. Doubront is a bit better in that regard. I still think that most nights they will out-dual the other 4's and 5's that they will face around the league. However that is asking alot' of your 4 and 5. They are down there because they have lapses in concentration, lose certain pitches on certain nights, do things like Bard did last night etc. So having them as the competitive strong points meaning 1s' vs 1s', 2s' vs 2s' etc etc is not all that comforting. It is what it is. They have pitchers that have the potential to be "good" to "very good" pitchers in Doubront and Bard, still learning their craft. They have one very good pitcher (Beckett) that is really transitioning to the back half of his career, no longer strong enough to be a 1 but very competitive with most 2's and better than many of them. They have one good pitcher in Lester that is just overmatched in many cases in the competitive comparison between other 1's and they have Buch who has probably seen his best days but who will still be a serviceable pitcher from here on. Buch is what Buch is now. I am not looking for some big turnaround because Buch appears to be between a rock and a hard place. The more stress he put on that body of his, the more it betrayed him. He gained weight because he needed the weight and then the weight became another kind of stress factor that caused him problems. He has come full circle now and here he is. I think Buch will be a good pitcher for the remainder of his career. Frankly the sooner he can get out of the AL East the better it will be for him. I think Beckett is as solid as he can be. He was not ready for as much of a change as he has gone through one season to the next but he has adapted to it and while you would think he would have more trouble pitching games coming from a background as a flamethrower, he knows more about pitching than the rest of the starters combined including Lester and "pitches" better than any of them. Lester has the best stuff on the staff but he so far for two years now gags on the big moment, the antithesis of of what a #1 needs to be. Where Beckett is solid in the competitive comparisons between himself and other 2's Lester is weak in the competitive comparison between himself and other 1's and the difference still falls on the minus side of the ledger for those two pitchers. How you cobble a "very good" rotation out of that is beyond me. You simply cannot cobble "very good" out of our bunch when there are examples of very good to look at. If Lester and Buch were as advantageous in the competitive comparisons between themselves and other 1's and 3's as Doubront and Bard are in the comparison between themselves and other 4's and 5's and now you have something. Even switch the comparisons so that Doubront and Bard are weaknesses and Lester and Buch are strengths and you still have something. But that is not what we have at least not for this year. These starters have not been a disappointment to me in the sense that I really did not expect more from them. That does not suddenly turn them into a very good staff. Who knows what dice will have when he gets back but while Buch might have been the linchpin at one point, maybe dice will give us more than we have a right to hope for when he does get back. I have my doubts about Cook especially if he ever has to pitch against the metal of the AL East (and I don't mean the O's).

Great, Lester had a solid performance...is he a better pitcher today than he was a month ago? He is what he is. Taken as a group the Sox have good/middling starting pitching this year ranked against the AL in general . The Rays have great starting pitching. They may even be able to withstand that train wreck of a bull pen they have because they have great starting pitching. We will have to see on that one. The problem for the Sox when you look at starting pitching, the most important element of baseball, is that there are a fair number of staffs between the Rays and the Red Sox. You can hit till the cows come home it all begins with the starting pitching. If you don't have really good to great starting pitching then the next thing to have is a great bull pen. If you don't have a great bull pen the next thing to have is offense and that is what the Sox could have. Right now the Sox have hitters but they really don't even have offense. They will have more hitters when CC and Ells come back but that is no guarantee that they will have offense. As has been witnessed in the last couple of games, good pitchers do not have to worry about good hitters. The only hitters good pitchers have to worry about is good hitters that are also smart hitters. Good pitchers can and will keep good hitters dancing at the end of a string and unless they are also smart hitters, they won't get you very far. Truly good offense and good hitting involves being able to work the count to a pitch that you can handle and then handling it. Without that at the end of the year you end up with a bunch of very impressive batting averages and no wins. I suspect this team will record many wins because there are so many s*** teams in the ML's. They will even win a few games by out-pitching the other guy' starters. However I could not place them as a better than 92-90 win team before. Now I am struggling to see how they get to 90 wins with this team unless they have a real good look in the mirror and smarten' up at the plate because offense is what they could have if they smarten' up at the plate. They have to become a team that can hit behind runners, move runners along and work counts. If not, prepare to have a bunch of independently good hitting stats that roll up to going home at the end of the season. With the exception of maybe Pedey they are not good enough to just go out there and do as they please at the plate. I have said this before but the propensity to build a team around Fenway Park was masked for its weaknesses in the steroid era. We are going back to a time where pitching and defense are once again as important as they were before the steroid era began. Take a look at the Sox record of accomplishment for that period and that is what you are looking at again. But that is a discussion for another day. The team they have is the team they have. It must win on offense or it will not win enough to matter.

It is a give or should be that every team has its challenges and will have some injuries. I really only care about how the Sox are playing. To me it is a team built to win games on offense and they need to play smarter baseball to win games. Offense is not just hitting and I just don't think this team is strong enough to bludgeon teams to death, even with Ells and CC whenever they come back. They need to make good on all of this fundamentals and new found team cohesiveness crap cause they still can't lay down a bunt, still don't hit behind runners, still don't play situational baseball worth crap and are so noticeably impatient at the plate that even the NESN fanboys are commenting on it now. Play smarter baseball so you don't get beat by a team that just has a couple of good pitchers cause that is all the A's brought to the table. Couple good not great pitchers, no offense and a porous defense but those A's pitchers kept the Sox hitters dancin' like puppets and that is all they needed to win 2/3. Can't win on offense when the offense wakes up at about the 5th inning if at all. C'mon Pedey, get these guys playin'. They will follow him if he knows what to do and when to do it. Hell of a burden for a guy that already has to bail their ass out of the fire on a nightly basis but I don't know who else to look to on that team.

I think the Sox will have to consider the season a failure before they make the suggested moves. Youk and Salty were in the opening day lineup. Hard to imagine a ML team of the caliber of the Sox bumping two guys outta' town that were in the opening day lineup without first concluding that the opening day lineup was a failure which is the same thing as saying the season is a failure. Don't even know what the hell Remy's replacement was talkin' about last night...claiming Youk's importance to the middle of the Sox lineup cause pitchers have to pitch around him....seen many pitchers pitching around him lately? I see RH pitchers just droppin' that slider on him to dust him off. LH pitchers are still pitching around him I guess. Anyway unless Youk completely collapses I don't see that move coming and if he hits again, I don't see it happening either cause that is how the lineup was designed. Salty is a catcher and as long as every ball does not go bumping past him or over him or around him and he can get the ball back to the pitcher, some team will always be available for Salty. Maybe Salty would be an OK move as he has already worked his way down to platoon catcher from every day catcher. That didn't take long now did it? We have seen everything Salty has to offer and if we can get help this year and Lavarnway will continue to improve catching up here instead of in Pawtucket the Sox should go for it. Iggy might be a way easier move. As I have stated in other posts I do not believe Iggy will ever see significant time as a Red Sox SS. I did not qualify that by adding the possibility of injury but that is likely the only way Iggy sees any time as a Red Sox SS. Does not matter what Aviles is or is not doing. Maybe this stint up here gives the Sox a chance to showcase Iggy's skills if he ever gets into a game but beyond that they should trade him since they are not going to use him.....ever.

Pedey is mr unreal.

There we go d-mac...thank you sit the f*** down

f***in A's throwin the ball all over the place....lets see how we f*** this up

Beyond staggering that we have only given up 4 runs considering how poorly Bard pitched and with the defensive lapses behind him. This team needs runs to win (no s*** sherlock right). But seriously we need to crank out something like 4-6 runs anyway to win a game. Wonder if Mortenson has more games in him like this. Best news of the night is the new guys! Maybe there is a message here for the Sox FO. Are you guys listening???????

Man this game Suckssssssssssssssssss!!!!

That right field corner is hell to play. Dewey makin it look so easy just says what a great fielder he was.