jung

Well there is one additional benefit that comes out of the Sunday rain out. In having Bard skip a start Lester moves to the front of the line and pitches tonight coming out of a five game losing streak and the Saturday disaster. As I have said before, being the #1 pitcher in the rotation is not just about talent. It is about the ability to go out and be the stopper. Make no mistake about it either. There is very little wiggle room in this regard. This is not one of those cases where we can look for some silver lining if Lester does not do the job and the job is pretty well understood. It is goose eggs over significant innings. A #1 for a "contending team" thrown out there in this situation must put up goose eggs for at least 7 innings. Maybe 1 run over 7 innings would be tolerated and if this was 30 years ago, the job would be 8 innings to CG shutout. More than that is a FAIL. Lester has never in my view stepped up to this challenge in the past and that is in large part why I do not consider him a #1 starting pitcher. So Lester has a great opportunity here to bang his flag into the turf around the pitching mound and finally claim that spot as his. Much more important than that it can go a long way to helping this team believe there is at least something they can rely upon, some one thing that does not seem like quicksand under their feet, something besides Ortiz bashing the hell out of the ball and Pedey being the usual Pedey cause that ain't enough. None of what Lester has done so far this year excuses the rest of the team for the piss poor, stupid, selfish baseball that we have seen so far. However if he can do this tonight, it could be a start to healing what is a wounded, damaged team.

Well you can't simply ignore the fact that the players have played stupid, selfish, and piss poor baseball. For example, they have been extremely impatient at the plate going up there hackin' at first pitches constantly. Notice if you will that the Saturday game was one of the few in awhile where they were actually patient at the plate for once (I suspect the result of the players getting together and recognizing that as an issue). This offense particularly without Ells and CC is not good enough to allow starting pitchers to stay in games. They must drive up pitch counts and get to bullpens. Once they get to pens they must remain patient and wait to get a good pitch to hit. However even on Saturday, once the lead reached 9 runs they reverted to their usual hack away process at the plate and patience went out the window again. They are just not committed to it. They have scored 17 runs in the last 5 games including the 9 they scored on Saturday. They will not win many games scoring a bit over 3 runs per game. While the relief pitching has been terrible, the starting pitching with the exception of the 4 and and the 5 has not been great maybe mediocre is an apt description. The entire management of this team deserves a good bit of the criticism for the huge expenditures of money in bogus signings, poor decisions all over the place, the decision to hire V which is backfiring in a big way, the inability to control communications within their own management personnel which in effect means control themselves so that they could at least speak with one voice to the outside world and not wear their dysfunctional tendencies on their sleeves. In the first place you cannot in my opinion, segregate Red Sox Baseball Operations including the GM from executive management because the GM is really micromanaged by LL regardless of who he is. So I think you can divide the groups into All Management and FO, field management and coaches and then the players. I think Management and FO gets 35% of the blame for doing such a poor job of handling the financial assets of the organization, personnel decisions including FA signings, the hiring of the wrong guy to manage, V and doing so for all the wrong reasons, they way they have handled their new GM and for the Machiavellian atmosphere they have created around the departure of Tito and Theo and the hiring of V. I think the players get 45% of the blame for playing like s***, for not even being able to pull together and play like a team and for generally acting like a bunch of spoiled rotten *******s. I think the Manager and Coaches get 15% of the blame for not even being able to make rudimentary decisions correctly and not really understanding how to use their players. Some of the issues there are clearly related to the fact that none of the coaching staff are V guys save one I believe. Frankly even 15% to the coaching staff may be a bit much when you consider you poorly the players have played and how badly management and the FO has performed.

The news is they are already announcing that he will be simply missing a start and will be going back to the rotation. Cook is still in Pawtucket. So they are already going to flip Bard once and then flop him back to the rotation, something I think they can only do one time until dice gets here and then they might shift Bard to the pen for the rest of the season. The issue with that in my view is that if they flip flop him a few times or even more than once and then even with dice they run out of arms...lets say when Buch has his usual mid summer injury....then what? They should either bite the bullet and announce him to the pen for the rest of the season or leave him in the rotation. Letting him pitch a couple of innings in order to fill this gap since he missed his start yesterday is fine but that is in fact what they have been announced. In fact what the said specifically is that Bard will either pitch on the side to fill the gap between starts or pitch a couple of innings out of the pen.

I have probably hammered the players on this board more than my fair share. However the team of player was assembled by this deranged management and FO team and while I don't think V deserves much of the blame for any of this, I still think he was the wrong guy to hire for all the wrong reasons and he has still made some terrible in-game moves along with failed player personnel and media communications decisions. There again though that is V being V isn't it? Should not have been a surprise to anybody. The only thing about V that has been a surprise is that Baseball Genius V has not made an appearance yet. It is not a very good team in spite of its monster payroll. It has a few great pieces but it is so poorly constructed that the whole is not only not greater than the sum of its parts, the whole appears to actually be less than the sum of its parts. While the pitching is clearly the biggest problem on this team, the starting pitching with the exception of the 4 and 5 has been a disappointed and the vaunted offense while being the thing this team does best will likely not come in at better than 3rd best in the AL this year and will more likely be 4th best even with CC and Ells back when they come back. I don't think many think much of this is V's fault. V is just the guy that is the visible front man for management.

I think the most interesting thing about where V is now and where he started is that he has clearly been castrated. In a few short weeks he has had the team wrested from his control by the players and management, the same guys that only gave him a two year contract to begin with did not back him. BC showed some balls for a change in that supporting the players in their drubbing of V was in a sense a criticism of LL as much as anything else. Unfortunately this is sort of a useless point. BC going to the mats over this one does not accomplish much now does it. So while the Sox hired V for all the wrong reasons to begin with, now that he has been castrated, he will not be able to manage the team like they intended him to in the first place. While I would be less inclined to blow this team up I would blow this organization up with relish. They are a mess. You can draw your own conclusions how they got here. It hardly matters. I think you would have to get down to the peanut vendors to find somebody that you would not want to tear to shreds. Their PR and Marketing has turned to s***. Their player personnel organization seems to also be s***. While Theo is no longer here I don't think we see much difference because a)Theo never had much control in spite of all he efforts to make it look like he had wrested some measure of autonomy for Baseball Operations. if I am not mistaken many of the same folks that were in Theo's Baseball Operations have remained so the quality of information coming up the pipe from the rank and file Baseball Operations guys must be about the same Recently I had seen the Boston media types taking a new tact on the whole CC thing as it relates to Ells. I have assumed to this point (and I guess it could still be true) that Theo had jumped on the opportunity to grab CC in part because he felt there was no chance of the Sox signing Ells when his contract negotiation came due. Now I have heard something that threw me for a real loop. More recently some of the Boston media types are claiming that Theo went for CC because he or I guess I should say Baseball Operations had come to the conclusion that Ells did not have the goods at the time, that being before the 2011 season. Now lets face it, Boston media types are more often wrong than they are right when offering their "opinions" regarding anything Sox. However if this is true, it amounts to one of the best examples of piss poor player personnel evaluation capabilities I have seen for a long time because this would mean they got it wrong on both ends of the deal. CC will never come close to justifying the money they are paying him. In fact I think we tend to look at what we are paying CC and overlay a performance curve onto him that he is simply incapable of meeting. CC is not a $142M player and is lucky to be an $80-90M player at best. So again if this is true, not only did they misread CC, but they misread a player that they could look at day in and day out in Ells. Anything they did based on the idea that Ells was a confirmed bust at that point would have been a stunning misread and a quick hook to say the least so to speak. To be honest, they are so bad, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. V has been put out on the front end of this thing and granted he has made some pretty bad mistakes so far, all over the place. He has made poor in-game decisions, poor personnel relations decisions and poor media communications decisions. But what he did not heed on the way in or I guess maybe he chose to ignore was the way Tito went out. This is an organization in disarray willing to eat its young to save its own skin. I can see where this is going to make life easier for the other GM's, Managers and Organizations around baseball though. All they have to do at this point is threaten to trade the player in question to Boston. That will straighten the guy out real fast. "Oh God no, please anything I will do anything...just don't trade me to Boston"!

I would not be if I were him either. Worse than that it sounds more like they are flip flopping him willy nilly. What a mess this bunch is. Must be frustrated by missing casting call for Three Stooges movie.

I have no problem at all with getting Byrd. At age 34 he will likely still seem more graceful in our OF than the stick figures we have been tossing out there lately. A good addition that will bolster this team. It cost us nothing and will make the team better if only marginally. Nothing to complain about in my view.

So much selfish, s*****, stupid baseball

Doesn't matter where or what, they have to play the games they have to play. A change of scenery might do them some good. Just getting away from the scene of the crime might do them some good. Besides Jacko you just love to create these "it is all catastrophic no matter what they do, damned if they do and damned if they don't" scenarios so your credibility in this case is much in question.

They won't do that. Starters are more valuable than closers and start is what he wants to do. More importantly he is showing very good signs that he can do. He will be in the pen very likely the rest of the year and will start next year back in the rotation. He was never going to be in the rotation this year longer than the time it took to get dice back. My only concern is that they cannot flip flop him in one season and given Buchs propensity for injury and the likelihood that Cook is not a long term answer, they will still be short arms even when dice comes back.

Nay ya' wouldn't want to be there. All you would hear is a bunch of marketing and PR ******** as opposed to what you would hope to be hearing. While I am not a mind reader you could just about see it in their faces when the camera panned up to the owner's box last night. They looked to me like two guys mulling over "how the f*** are we going to explain this one" not "how the f*** are we going to fix this mess".

The pen is not reasonable but that was not a revelation from last night's game. If V went to Padilla (who has an injury) because he did not want to use Tazawa for more than one inning (the 8th) then another inning out of Doubront would have gotten him to Tazawa. It is a shame to have to use a starting pitcher because you have no faith in your bullpen but it would not have been a crime to send Doubront out there and at the same time get somebody up so that if he got into even the slightest jam he could be pulled. The simple truth is that with a pen full of arsonists, the best option he had was the guy already pitching at least for that inning and especially if that is what it would have taken to get to Tazawa. May not have worked...all conjecture anyway and last but not least may not even matter. The Sox have much housecleaning to do. Expecting them to make a legitimate run under the circumstances has seemed like wishful thinking for a long time now regardless of how early it is this season. I think some of us have looked at things and called them questions not because they are really questions but because we just don't like the answers so far. I am convinced this team will eventually make some moves this season. Hopefully they will be moves that will help it look better this year and help it set up for next year.

I am not sure but Youk may have hastened his own demise. The very first time I heard stories (all with a positive spin) that he was doing serious weight lifting this offseason I really wondered about that. It was all presented as stuff he either has not done before or has not done in a long time. That part I definitely believed. Hitting has nothing to do with a pair of guns. Hitting is hand/eye coordination, speed with the wrists and getting the hips through. A robust pair of guns out of character with the rest of your body will help you tote the bat up to the plate and back again. I do think he has made an effort to make himself more of a power hitter but I just don't see him as the typical 240-250 average slugger. If you have noticed along with the other things plaguing him at the moment, his bat has looked very slow. That would surely be one possible outcome of a baseball player spending to much time in the weight room. One thing that should not have effected but is there none the less...the one time king of walks no longer draws walks.

I actually think that you will see the Sox eventually making multiple changes to clean this mess up. That is not to imply that they need to or will blow it up. But there are things that have gone unattended here for a long time and to some extent that is reflected in the player personnel. Tek and Wake do not appear to be the only guys that are past it and there are few on this team that have never had it....playing do to injury or another whacky FO move. Nothing about Ells should be a surprise. That was a large joint injury. He might be back sooner rather than later or later rather than sooner.

Another thing I worry about off of last night's disaster is the actual condition of Padilla. There has been no indication that he has recovered from his recent injury as yet (a groin pull I believe). Maybe he should not have taken the ball at all last night. He was held out over that issue the very last time V wanted to use him. If anybody sees anything on Padilla and that injury it would be good to see where he is at present.

Pitch counts are another form of the same ******** as 7 run limits. While this is pure conjecture, if they had gotten one inning closer, V might have brought Tazawa instead of Padilla, his acknowledge long reliever. I have never believed in this pitch count ******** or anything like it except in instructional leagues. When your starting pitcher is the best option you have, you don't have a choice. Doubront was still pitching well...he was not being as fine because he was pitching with a 9 run lead and would have come out for the next inning with an 8 run lead. This bullpen has already been proven to be full of arsonists. Neither we nor V needed yesterday's game to prove that. Tazawa is the only guy all be it on a small sample size that you can have any confidence in. At least he has great stuff. I have to admit while the horse was pretty close to outta' the barn for all intents and purposes, that is the first time I have seen Aviles pitch panic stricken before. I have never seen him aim the ball before and aiming the ball is in all honesty the equivalent of a choke job by the pitcher.

Well that does not translate to mediocre or even near mediocre iortiz...that translates to terrible. Acives pitched like he was panic stricken last night. That is the first time I have ever seen him aiming the ball. I have seen him throw instead of pitch but I have never seen him aiming the ball before. Tazawa is about the only guy I could point to and even that is only because he has been good in a very small sample size. Frankly they don't have the starting pitching to win close games or keep teams down to small numbers and you will knock me over with a feather if they end up with the best offense in the AL this year. Not only do they get to miss a game that they really did not need to play tonight but they get to get outta' town. I suspect that is good thing right now.

Down the right field line is probably your safest bet. There is usually only a band of seats just under the roof where you lose just the RF corner by the foul pole. There you are just not high enough or low enough to catch that right field corner but that is it. Usually you can still see the RFer going into the corner from there but just miss the very corner itself.

Well I doubt he has more baggage than V had when V got this job. That book might be as anticipated as Jim Bouton's book when it came out.

When have we ever seen media types do much to jump on the FO in general. They know where their bread is buttered. V is just plain unlikable...that has penalties....and this is one of them.

I agree...it might even been to some extent irrational or it might for that matter have been planned by Tito and Danny Boy. Whichever, they have been at this book almost from the time Tito left so all that venom that is clearly still boiling out of Tito is all going to be in there. Would not surprise me at all especially with Danny Boy involved if that appearance was something like a book preview event...something real authors used to do in the day when people actually were reading books. As far as Tito is concerned, the Sox cost him. So he would not in my view have a moments hesitation to use the Sox to plug the new book. Like I said before he came and after he was announced coming, this would be the big middle finger to the Sox organization. I guess I should have said that this would be the first big middle finger to the Sox organization.

Who gives a s*** for crying out loud. Lets assume this offense is the best element of the game this team plays. That one is not hard to swallow is it? Their pitching is so-so at best and their defense is porous. Tell me where you would rank this offense in this league with both CC and Ells in the lineup? First...wrong Second...wrong third....maybe fourth...more than likely fifth....possible So when the best you have is an element that puts you about third at best and fourth more than likely and you are middling at best if not poor in the most important element...pitching and weak defensively to be honest we are just kidding ourselves. Thank you lucky stars there are two WC teams this year cause that is our only shot at anything that relates to a post season this year.

Best thing for them is to get away from here for a day after that game and associated s*** storm. Although I do think they met as a team before that game as I saw at bats in that game that I have been waiting for for about two weeks. They suddenly showed much more patience at the plate than they had shown in weeks, that is until they got the 9 run lead and started reverting again to their usual tendencies. So I think the team meeting bullet is shot for a bit. I also think this is going to be the hardest Red Sox team to like maybe ever because for the most part the players are not likable and the Manager is not particularly likable either. On top of that they tend for the most part to play s***** baseball so there is not much there even for the baseball purists to like. Interesting that for an organization that is so PR and Marketing conscience they may well have come up with a formula that drives away the pink hats and the baseball purists in equal measure. Man what a FO. While we likely think some baseball guy should come in a clean house I would be willing to bet that any business consultant worth his salt would have a field day with that FO including and most especially management.

Danny Boy has been in the process of writing this book with Tito almost from the moment Tito left Boston I believe. He was certainly there when Tito made the decision to go to the ceremony and without doubt was one of the people Tito consulting about going back. He might have been the very first person he consulted because they are spending a good deal of time together. I am equally sure that Danny Boy told him that he should go both for good reasons that suited Tito and for purely selfish reasons that suited Danny Boy.

I heard something today and really did not believe it completely but one of the radio talking heads was talking about dice in May now. May was first reported several weeks ago and then that was colored as "optimistic" but maybe May is back on for dice.