jung

Lets face it, if this had any other way, some Sox fans would be crying in their beer and we would probably have a few gloating Yankee fans happily posting away. Good starts are better than bad starts. I will take this one every day and and twice on Sunday.

It will not take much for Lavarnway to be a better defensive option that Salty. As long as he develops to a reasonable level at AAA then bring him at that point and Salty becomes trade fodder.

It would be great if Lavarnway did in fact force the Sox hand like by next year. That would be indicative of a rate of progress that few would predict for him but would be most helpful to the Sox I would think.

Wish they were televising today's game. Sat, Sun and Monday games are the first being aired I think.

Why couldn't they? Well possibly because the inherent basic skill sets that make them great hitters of the baseball simply do not make them great strikers of the golf ball. A great hitter of the baseball must be able to see and recognize the spin of the pitched baseball. He must gather and process that data very rapidly and then be able to react quickly enough to get the head of the bat in the right place. Those are all great attributes relative to hitting the pitched baseball that help him not a lick with regard to hitting the stationary golf ball well enough to compete at the highest levels of the game. To go back to where I was earlier, people have different inherent skill sets which they can choose to hone to an extremely high level. You have to have the skill set that matches up to the particular sport to begin with and then must hone it to a high level. As anybody who has played both sports even at the poor level of a rank amateur will tell you, the baseball swing and the golf swing are two entirely different animals. Successfully executing one is no guarantee of successfully executing the other and the higher the level of performance desired the less the likelihood of one skill set helping you in the other activity. Rick Rhoden, a pitcher, probably has enjoyed more success as a golfer than any other baseball player having had at least some level of success on the PGA Senior tour. He has never won a senior event but has a few top ten finishes. He was never able to earn a regular tour card. Ex-niners quarterback, John Brodie enjoyed similar success on the senior tour never having been good enough to make it onto the regular tour. Crossovers are rare for any sport but I don't think you will find more successful crossovers from baseball to any other sport at the highest level of competition and simply don't see a way to prove that hitting a baseball well has translated into or will translate into success pursuing any other sporting activity at the highest level of competition. Without being able to prove that a baseball player can crossover and dominate sports other than very similar stick and ball sports (cricket and softball) I just don't see any way to make the comment (hardest thing to do in sports) stick. I also suspect that if forced to perform at even nominal levels in some sports, baseball players would find the basic requirements for those sports more difficult than hitting a baseball because the inherent skill set they have is simply no help in the other sport. They can hone till hell freezes over in that case and not having had the basic skill set to begin with, it simply won't matter. You can substitute talent for skill set if you want to. You have to have the talent for a particular sport and can then choose to hone it to a high level. However the less talent that you have that is well matched to a particular sport, the less likely that you will be able to simply supplement your ill matched talents with hard work. That they might have or could have made it as pro golfers is meaningless. There is no proof that the inherent skill set that makes them great hitters of the baseball would make them great strikers of the golf ball. If they were lucky enough to have made it in both sports it will have been because they had enough of the required skill sets for either to make it and then chose to hone one over the other, not because the one skill set was sufficient to allow them to perform at the highest levels in both sports. If you want to look at successful crossovers since the two golf crossovers that were able to make any headway at all are John Brodie and Rick Rhoden maybe there is a case to be made from throwing some sort of ball being more suggestive of success playing golf than hitting a baseball would be.

If we are going to focus on just the hitting of a baseball and compare it to other similar stick and ball sports then I would tend to agree that hitting a pitched baseball is likely harder but the only comparisons that are at all relevant in that case would be cricket and softball. But the actual comment was that hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports and that is simply not something that can be proven true. You might be able to make that case if excellent hitters of the baseball could cross over to other sports and excel at the same high level as those participants in the other sport but there are not enough examples one way or the other to prove that point. I would be willing to bet that very good hitters of the baseball would rip a softball pretty good and protect the wicket very well and in short order would likely be the best players on the field. So for my money "hardest thing to do in sports" is simply a throwaway line that sounds great but can't be proven one way or the other. There are to many things across the panoply of sports that are "hard" to do and they are to disparate one to the next.

I have always thought these comparisons are meaningless. People are all different with different inherent skill sets that they can choose to hone to an extremely high level. The baseball player has lightning reflexes, hand eye coordination and an ability to process the information about the spin of the pitched ball that he is absorbing and processing at an extremely high rate. The degree to which he is willing to study opposing pitchers will help him determine what is likely coming allowing him to swing at the pitches he has the best chance of hitting if he chooses to approach his hitting that way. Ask him to run a marathon at anything like marathon runner's pace and he will likely be gassed within the first 2-3 miles. The marathon runner likely can't hit a baseball worth a lick. Nothing about what he does involves lightning reflexes and the ability to absorb and process visual information rapidly. There are even subsets that divide inherent skill sets. Marathon runners can't sprint worth a darn and sprinters can't keep pace with the marathon runner over distance. The tennis player may not be able to hit the pitched baseball but can the baseball player hit a tennis ball employing the various spins required to play at a competitive level and can he exhibit the side to side and side to front speed and quickness of the tennis player without having his ankles crumble right underneath him? If we were out there scouring the countryside for these lighting fast processors of visual information if that is the basic skill set required to hit a pitched baseball, how many of them would we find? Maybe there are many more of them than we think there are. the premise is flawed in that regard alone. As usual we assume that since we love baseball anybody that could do it would be doing it.....wouldn't they? How many people zigged instead of zagged and are tennis players instead of baseball players or maybe they are now doing something that is not an athletic pursuit at all. All these variables prove is that people have different inherent skill sets that they can choose to hone to a very high level, so much so that if either tried to cross over to a sport's activity that favors the other's inherent skills he would do well not to embarrass himself let alone succeed at the highest competitive levels. I am reminded of the number of "athletes" that have tried to cross over to golf at a professional level, most with embarrassing results. I think John Broady had the most success in that regard and he still basically failed but at least did not embarrass himself. What about throwing a football would have suggested any success at all playing golf at a high skill level? What does seem apparent is that at any given time, there are very few people that both possess an inherent skill set particular to a sports activity and have honed those skills to the highest level. We have about 500 or so highly skilled baseball players that are just the best there is with thousands more trailing behind them. We have about 1,000 highly skilled NA Football players at the top of their skill set with thousands trailing behind them. At any one time there might be 300 or so male tennis players in the world that can actually win a tour tournament with thousands more trailing behind them. Their might only be 200 or so marathoners in the world that could actually win a marathon should they choose to enter it at any one time with thousands more trailing behind them. There are probably even fewer sprinters that can sprint at the highest competitive levels at any given time. In any case any attempts at cross over at the very highest levels proves for the most part embarrassing regardless of which sport you want to consider. I think the most foolish of the quotes from the piece was this one: Really......suppose this hypothetical "person from another planet" simply possessed more of the inherent skill required to hit a baseball than your average earthing has. Suppose that our hypothetical alien can process visual information at such a rate that a thrown baseball just looks like a slow moving grapefruit coming up to the plate and he can hit it in between reading lines of poetry. Amazing what smart people can convince themselves of at times. Our hypothetical alien might say...."what are you earthlings talking about......nothing hard about this at all. But have you ever tried to hagnart a flinsnard before?"

I think that eventually Lavarnway will be a better receiver than Salty and appears to have a better arm. From where they are today I think Larvarnway will pass Salty as a defensive catcher. I simply have no feel for either as yet from the perspective of handling pitchers. It is very difficult for a young catcher wether its Lavarnway or Salty to handle that role with a staff full of big league veteran pitchers. Somebody just about has to help the young catcher through that transition. Salty had Tek but no telling how he will do this year. Even though he is new to the club, Shoppach will likely provide some help in that regard.

I think the difference will be that the media will be focused on very specific issues this year. That is not the same as the coverage just being generally intense. Maybe they are still called beat reporters but they seem more like gossip columnists to me. I can't remember the last time I actually heard anybody ask a real baseball question or saw an interview where any real baseball was covered. As I mentioned earlier just as an example, we have CC having completely changed his stance. Yet we have not seen any evidence that a single reporter has asked CC any questions about the genesis of the change or anything to do with it at all. This is a guy that got creamed in the off season for his lack of production at the plate. That would likely be a good news story for a change as well. Carl could hardly do worse than he did last year. I would think we would all be pretty excited about him coming to ST with a completely new stance. But nooooooooo. We will ask Carl what he thinks of V so far. That seems a much more provocative topic. Bunch of glorified gossip columnists. We get some stories about who might be coming to the team and who might be traded or signed but even that has a tone of mystery and the copy is often written in a style similar to that used in the tabloids. I would be less critical before spring training started. But there are guys actually swinging bats and throwing baseballs now and there is hardly a difference in the coverage.

Media hounds are going to be all over this team this year looking for dirt to fling. None of them even ask baseball questions anymore. "How do you feel about your chances this year" is about as close as they get to a baseball question. I wonder if we are seeing the death of the beat writer whether pulp or digitally based. Seems to me those were the guys that used to ask actual baseball questions.

Well Crawford seems to have gone from very complicated even painful looking to much simpler presuming that new stance of his is slightly closed. What he had seemed really odd to me cause his upper body was square or as close to square as he could get under the circumstances and his lower body was way open. He was twisted at the hips and waist in order to pull that off. Hope this works much better for him. Still waiting for media to ask him about the new stance. God forbid they actually ask a baseball question for a change.

Geez as the last gasp of the off season with ST games right around the corner, the MLB soap opera has been heating up so much the league might have a hard time making games interesting to casual fans. Now the collector in the HGH overturn has commented about what he did or did not do. Tito commented on what V did. V commented on what Tito said. Then Tito backs off of it today (probably a mistake for a guy with a media job). Maddon let us know what the Rays were not. V starts digging at the Yanks while commenting on Tek's retirement. Reality TV has got nothin' on MLB. Come to think of it maybe there is a TV show in this for Uncle Bud.

From what I can see NESN is going to have the Saturday, Sunday and Monday games and will also be doing those 2 hour trimmed down game replays in between just like they do during the regular season.

The fly in that ointment is that the people that employ him aren't asking him to say or do a damn thing. This is all media BS and he is doing it in a way that is what they would consider PR poison. At least when LL lies through his teeth he does it elegantly. Josh crying foul about the media making it an issue of his family vs baseball is just such an obvious red herring and is a clumsy effort on Josh's part attacking a none issue. Nobody knows where he is going with that either. I think the Sox would let that slide but the constance of his threatening demeanor with regard to the "leak" when in fact the only people he can really confront are his fellow teammates can't be going over well in the offices of upper management. I suspect they believe or maybe even know better, even better than Pedey, that the leak is not a fellow player so Josh.....where the hell are you going with this? The point being that I don't think Josh is going to get the satisfaction he seeks bulling around JH's player china and once Josh has expended that effort, what other of JH's possessions does he start to bull around in and to what extent can V rein him in and effectively make the same point I am making here....Josh.....where the hell are you going with this?

Have it your way folks. Remember you heard it here first. Beckett is a relative bargain for what he represents as a pitcher and I want him here. But if he keeps this up the Red Sox of JH will off him between this year and next. Unless he has a totally crummy year, teams will look at him as a relative bargain as it relates to pitching generally and may consider him a bargain even if he does have a crummy year. If he stops now I think the Sox will keep him. But I literally mean one more expletive laced interview of the type he just had were he is lashing out at phantoms and I think he will be gone before the beginning of 2013. As I said earlier, I agree with Pedroia. I don't think it possible that a player was actually the leak anyway so I have no idea where Josh thinks he is going with this stuff. While I think just Josh's tone and his unbridled anger as he punching away at phantoms is going to get him booted outta' here lets just suppose for a second that some clubby or whomever discussed the clubhouse stuff with somebody in upper management and it was somebody in upper management that was actually the leak. Right or wrong if that is the case, Josh isn't doing his chances for sticking around Boston much good by bounding around like a bull in a China shop. This is JH's china we are talking about. Frankly I would way more believe that the source was actually out of management than a player. I think the chance it was a player is so low that it just about does not even register on the scale of probability.

All this stuff aside, Beckett is still a very effective pitcher that the Sox have at a fairly reasonable price when you consider what pitching costs these days. That said to be honest I think that he is one more expletive laced interview away from writing his own ticket out of town. We are talking about the ever image conscience Sox here. It has been a long time since this was Tom Yawkey's team. Frankly I am not sure he even wants to be here any more. I don't want it to happen that way and I just wish Beckett would let it go. If not, I suspect that this will be his last year in Boston and the Sox will simply move him in the offseason.

It does look kinda' odd in left and center. The mini wall looks kinda weird and the effort at a center field triangle seems more like it is a left center triangle unless I am just not seeing it correctly. Right looks OK. Have not seen anything of the infield or OB.

Bringing his hips back around and cocking his bat at the same time seems such an awkward maneuver. If you are just trying to close the whole front side at least everything is moving in unison. I am really interested to know how he got to this stance and how much he thinks it will help him. Now if he is slightly closed then he really does not have to do more than hitch and cock his bat which would seem way less awkward. I never questioned his stance last year as awkward as it looked cause I just figured ....well its his stance. Surprised the media has not asked more about it. Damn Boston media....tell us more about who the rat is but we really aren't interested in a $21M player changing his batting stance completely. Don't have any questions to ask about that topic.

Could not trade him but I do think V will end up having to do something to try to "manage" how the Sox players deal with this lingering situation that Beckett seems to actually be fueling. The thing is, I agree with Pedey. I can't imagine the "leak" coming from a player either, any player. So that means a coach or front office guy or a clubby.....somebody other than a player. So, where does Josh think he is going with this?

All of the views I have seen of CC's new stance have been from the side but it actually looked just slightly closed which is quite different from last we saw him when his stance was way open. The side view is not the best but he does look more comfortable in that stance. He was so far open before that it looked like his hips were twisted oddly for him to maintain such an open stance with the lower body while keeping the upper body square. I have seen guys with open stances before but I can't remember noticing that much of an effort to square up the upper body by twisting at the hips. I am more used to seeing guys open their stance and open their upper body as well and then as they start their swing bring the whole front side back to slightly closed. Can't remember seeing a guy try to keep his upper body so squared up and his lower body open like that. Come to think of it, I wonder how a guy keeps from flying his hips with that previous stance. Hips are open right from the start. Wonder if one of his former hitting coach/buddied got CC into this more traditional looking stance.

Is this the first we heard of Aceves being pumped to start? I think so. Bard commented last week that he told the Sox his preference was to start or close. He sounds pumped about starting. I know that at least for me, if he deserved the job I would want Doubront to get the 5th slot and Aceves to stay in the pen. If Aceves really does beat him out then I guess I can't argue about it. Aceves goes to rotation.

I for one would have preferred 5 pitchers as well but it did not happen that way. I think I am going to be OK with it if Doubront is the guy. I will consider that a victory for the development program and be happy to see the guys that were brought in fill the depth role. As long as Doubront earns it what is wrong with a guy out of the system becoming the number 5? I recognize that we end up with an unproven 4 and 5 but it looks like that is where we were going anyway.

Just saw a blurb that said Bailey strained a lat while taking his physical today. Should not be a problem but is kinda' funny.

On the one hand clearly how Josh performs is more important than what he says or does not say. It would help his team for his issue to not be hanging over them because it is a distraction. It is just not something they need. Worse than that, the way he is commenting suggests he has not put it behind him either and maybe he can't until the players clear the air amongst themselves. But Josh is making no bones about carrying this around with him even to the point of picking at imaginary issues. Nobody that I can recall has asked Josh to sacrifice his family considerations for the team. But I think there is an expectation that he would manage the same balancing act we all have to manage. This idea that Josh is angry because people are expecting him to put his family second is just a huge red hearing and a means for Josh to do what Josh likes to do....avoid whatever the issue is by attacking on some other meaningless and irrelevant front. All of that will be fine if he pitches well. Although I don't know who else but Josh can keep this crap off of his teammates. Seeing him in a tee shirt....he looks a heck of a lot like he did when he finished last year weight wise and he is gaining this growing reputation now for being effective for half a season as well as his odd even season thing. As I said early today I also don't know if hitters are going to take his comments about taking extra time on the mound and spit them right back at him in the form of continually stepping out just as he is about to throw. That is another topic that I wish never saw the light of day. If he is taking to long on the mound and batters step out the ump is going to turn to Josh to get on the rubber and throw the ball.

I don't think Josh is helping himself either. It would be so easy to just do a "Lester". Today he commented that he does not think he has to change anything. What does that mean? Does it mean he is still headed for the clubhouse in the 7th? Does it mean he is still going to have these unexplained weight gains during the season. Is he still going to have trouble closing out the season like he did against Baltimore last year? This is what I have meant about certain players making their entitlements more important than the team's performance and maybe even their own. He is just not willing to give an inch.