jung

That is a good point User but I think I just heard the sound of the other shoe dropping. That is the other end of the Sox most recent team building mentality that has created this team as currently configured. Again just to be clear, I would never argue that the Sox should make no FA acquisitions....I would never argue for keeping every prospect either. I would argue that the Sox have become woefully imbalanced both in the number of players it has under long term big money contract (to many) and the number of viable candidates that they have that can be brought up and provide depth ala' guys that work their way up from prospect to MLB player (to few).

While I believe there will be much more that will define the Sox 2012 season than how they handle these three FA SPer's, this is sort of defining moment for he Sox management in that I can't see these guys falling farther except maybe Jackson. I assume he is still looking for 5 years.

For first rounder picks the % for making the big league club it is pretty good. 64% of them make it with 48% of them playing for three years or more. It is a pretty steep slope to the second rounders. Second rounders make it at a rate of 41% with 25% of them playing for three years or more. Third rounders make it at a rate of 31% with 20% of those playing for three years or more. Fourth and fifth rounders both make it at a rate of 21% with about 13% staying for three years or more. Past the fifth round I don't really think there is much there to even talk about. I guess they need guys to fill out their minor league rosters or I am not even sure they would have those rounds. So I will grant you that it is relatively high for first rounders but I have never seen a breakout for high first rounders vs low first rounders and everybody gets a pick. From the second through the fifth rounds, the drop off is not that steep and is virtually identical for the fourth and fifth rounds. At worst 1 out of 5 prospects will make it to your big league team even from those rounds. Again my point is that I cannot see the logic in leaving the system thin of guys that you can bring up for depth into a worse case 1 out of 5 even in the fourth and fifth rounds. That does not make much sense to me when the result is Mike Cameron or some of other dregs that have occupied a Red Sox uniform. In addition since everybody gets a first round pick it still boils down to whether or not you develop them or trade them even in that round.

I completely agree here. This is I think the more significant element of their process than the oft mentioned top picks generated from successive crummy seasons. The fact is that most prospects fall by the wayside never making it to the bigs and I think a studied analysis of the percentages would show that being a high draft pick in baseball does not greatly improve the odds that the player will make it to the bigs but only marginally improves it. Baseball is an extremely complicated game. Even just the physical attributes of hand to eye coordination cull the herd especially for everyday players as the competition gets tougher. In my case, could not hit the curve ball to save my skin. Pretty good fastball hitter but "meat" for anybody with even a decent hook, never mind a 12/6 hook. If you can't hit the curve ball you are often more vulnerable to other pitches not the fastball as well. Pitchers have their own physical issues to deal with as well and then there are the other aspects of the game and then injury. Baseball does not enjoy the ability to simply test a guy for his speed, strength, size, jumping ability and quickness and judge the player to be capable like football. Lets face it, many pro baseball players look like they have been using the one armed curl as their sole training tool. So I am inclined to reward the Rays for having the fortitude to hang on to their prospects and grow them to the point where most of the elements that identify a prospect with a real chance to make it are exposed. It is the willingness to develop that makes the difference. Teams that regularly trade away their prospects more often point to the low percentage of prospects to MLB players as the basis for their propensity to trade them and it is hard to argue against that. Unfortunately like so many things in baseball if you allow yourself to go balls to the walls one way or the other, you end up paying for it. If you really only try to develop players that have identified themselves as not only MLB capable but star MLB capable then you rarely end up with guys that can work their way into your MLB roster and provide more cost controlled depth and more capable depth for that matter. You don't have relatively young, healthy bodies filling those slots and instead have old broken down war horses. I think this is where the Sox have been guilty. Hardly anybody makes it up out of the Sox system that does not get to the All Star team. That is just unnatural and suggests that the Sox are to willing to trade away guys that do not have the imprimatur of greatness stamped on them and leave themselves lacking in players that can provide depth for the MLB team. Having a few grizzled vets around is not a bad thing. If however that is the only way you can gain depth you end up paying to much for it to often and are many times left with a broken heart ala' Mike Cameron. You end up with names on your roster that look impressive but are shells of their former selves, unable to even provide you a decent game now and again or a decent at bat.

Oswalt appears to be at a point in his career where he will be tough to coax into the Sox price range i think. Not to say that Kuroda hasn't got a fair amount of milage on him. Oswalt is pushing for a 1 year deal but so far wants $10M. I doubt he will get it but I doubt he will fall far enough.

I said yesterday that I would not at all be surprised if the Sox had at that point the best offer in front of Kuroda and they are being nudged upward as a part of the process. I think Kuroda would have been gone by now if there is not a very active but subtle competition going on for his services with nobody coming in with that offer that completely seals the deal. I would bet that the possible suitors are offering incentive laden contracts and those could be difficult to parse one to the next if you are Kuroda and his agent. That said, you would knock me over with a feather if there is not a legitimate offer from somebody in front of Kuroda right now. I will be very surprised if there is no announcement on Kuroda by Monday.

And that is where most of the banana peels for this team are waiting. No team can stay healthy. In the case of the Sox they are almost configured not to stay healthy and they are as ill prepared so far in this team as they were in 2011, maybe even a tad worse.

I am glad some of the younger guys will likely pitch this year even if they are pressed into service. Not saying they will be world beaters...not saying they will all pan out....but I am glad we will get to see what they can do. One more arm like a Kuroda will not prevent some exposure for some of the younger pitchers in the organization so I am not weighing one against the other.

I am somewhat surprised that the Yanks have not done more to shore up that rotation for 2012. Any opinions? Do we think the Yanks feel like guys for which little was expected made headway and will make more in 2012 or do the Yanks think they got lucky in 2011 thus emboldening them to try to get lucky again in 2012?

Come on now guys. BC has to search far and wide to get these guys. Sometimes he even has to dig....... Oh lets' say about 6' to find them. Never thought "night of the living dead" would describe an 8:00PM start at Fenway.

Have a question for JacksonianMarch if he is out there today. Have been reading from a NY blog today that the Yanks are considering expanding their budget for this year. The piece basically said that the Yanks have not been involved or engaged with any of of the FA's left on the board because they have not wanted to expand their budget. I guess at 50% tax rate the league has finally hit on a number that even compels the Yanks to push back from the table. I have to admit I was simply looking at the Yankees player by player as the media would report that the Yanks were not involved in discussions with one guy or the other but I did not think they had put the brakes on completely. As for the story that they are considering expanding their budget, I am taking that with a grain of salt. Might be true...might not. Was not even thinking about Yanks spending in these terms to begin with. Anyway presuming that the Yanks unwillingness to expand the budget has been real I am wondering how Yankee fans have accepted that in New York. Has there been a shrill outcry demanding more spending or have fans mostly been accepting? Has the Giants in the post season combined with the Jets soup opera been enough of a distraction that it has dampened fan interest and outcry for the moment? Has that not been a factor one way or the other?

Good grief the NY Jets are having their 2011 Red Sox moment right now. Sanchez is being crunched apparently by his fellow teammates. From what I can see so far, Sanchez and by extension the whole Jets management team is being thrown under the bus. May even be uglier than the Sox 2011 closure. At least the way the Sox left 2011 with the exception of Lackey who catches a break via TJ the rest of the Sox could be welcomed back. Lackey is not the team leader anyway. Sanchez is the Jets QB. Can't see him coming back from this. Depending on where Jets management come down, they may end up tying themselves even more to the boat anchor that Sanchez has become and some of them may not survive if they go down that road. Ryan is probably on thin ice as it is.

Anybody listen to the WEEI Pedro Martinez yesterday? Those "stars of the past" interviews tend to either be terrible or really interesting since the ex-player himself now either has a different perspective or provides us a view that he simply could not provide when he was an active player. Anyway I would recommend the Pedro interview. One question that was sitting right there to be asked, based on some of his comments was whether or not he thought more work would benefit pitchers in their desire to avoid arm injury ala' Nolan Ryan or whether a less Ryan-esk like approach made more sense to him. Based on Pedro's comments if the question was asked I think he would have favored Ryan's views on the topic. Hate it when a really interesting question is there to be asked and the interviewer opts to go off on some meaningless tangent. It is on balance a very good interview though and worth a listen I think.

I do think we will know on Kurota soon, maybe even today if he is going to hold to his own timeline. As I posted earlier a couple posts above the tone of the recent media clips suggests to me that there is at least at chance that the Sox have the best current deal (whatever it is) in front of Kurota with his agent doing some last minute shopping for something better. If not however I do think much becomes clearer with regard to any additional SP FA moves that the Sox might make.

If you want to nit pick at it we could likely go back to a number of both our posts and find places where we could have been a bit clearer. I could have written that passing on Kuroda at $8.5M would just about prove that and it might have been marginally clearer. In fact I seem to recall that you chastised me once for misspelling a player's name but only one page later I found you guilty of exactly the same misspelling. I simply decided to ignore it. Some of this just gets silly after awhile.

I repeat: If they pass or have passed on Kuroda for $8.5M

Yes but it is Kuroda, Jackson and Oswalt that have fostered all the stories of the Sox waiting for one or all of them to fall to some number and they are all starters. If they pass or have passed on Kuroda for $8.5M then I would say they are out of the running for Jackson and Oswalt as well and what SP they get will come by way of trade. Again, I do not believe any of the three are going to or were going to fall to the level that I think the Sox have been looking for and passing on Kuroda at $8.5M just about proves that.

Wow if this is true this is truly discouraging news. If the Sox were unwilling to belly up to the bar with a competitive offer under these circumstances, it tends to support my comments that they really were looking for these guys to fall to something like $5M which I don't think is going to happen. $10M seems high but $8.5 would seem a very reasonable one year contract number. I will say one thing though....a quick read of the available most recent announcements on Kuroda raises the possibility in my mind that the Sox may in fact have the best 1 year deal on the table for Kuroda right now and his agents might be shopping him around the available candidates looking for a little improvement. I think that might be as likely as anything else at this point since a number of likely suiters seem to have fallen away. However if it does end up being that he goes elsewhere for something like $8.5 for a one year deal, maybe a little less, then my opening comments in this post are more like what I am thinking.

Thanks Bellhorn. I had lost track of the second and third year numbers. The big changes in the new system are in the first and fourth years and those stuck in the depleted memory banks.

My point is that I think there are so many other banana peels that this team can likely trip over next year...with the health of their #4 pitcher only being one of them. I know we love to look at our glittering stars and dream about how it would take very little for them to simply play to form and there we are skipping our way to the post season. I don't think this is very well constructed team. I am inclined to think that it is poorly prepared to withstand adversity and I am not convinced that V is the answer. In fact i would also not be surprised if by year end we were trying to string him up by his fingernails on this very board. My problem is not that there is no chance of them making it. My problem is that the chance that they will go nowhere is as good as the chance that they will get to the post season if not better.

I think that at the moment we are about $2M under the cap but once you get this close it is very hard to be definitive unless you have been tracking it with full knowledge of all the particulars. When they cut it this fine I would not be surprised if it is hard for the teams themselves to keep track of the numbers. News media in this town ask so many whacko questions, that one would actually be a good one to ask for a change. They are just right on top of it though one way or the other. I do think they would likely be going after Kuroda harder at this point if they were in fact over. What is the point of playing so close to the vest if they are already over. It is a bit disturbing that the later report today was that they were not even in the running. That may not matter though. Unless they have made it painfully obvious that they were not interesting his agent would surely give the Sox one last shot at him. Been saying for weeks now that they were never in the running for Madson so that much is no surprise. Kuroda would push them way over....there would be no doubt about it at that point. If they do go over this would be year three in a row...I have not looked at it in awhile but I think under the new tax structure three years running earns them some number like 27.5% I think. Year 4 would yield a 50% tax rate. Year 4 is the big upside change in the rate. I do think it is kinda' funny that we are making a 5th pitcher the linchpin to a successful season. Even if we do land him I suspect we will look back on these days and laugh at how much we have put this deal at the center of the universe.

The latest on Oswalt was that he has been peddling himself as available for a 1 year contract but at $10M plus. If he is bargaining from there I don't think he falls into range for the Sox. That has been my opinion for a long time now. I don't think the three guys left fall far enough for the Sox...hence whatever they get for a SP has to come by way of trade. I would absolutely go nuts if the Sox gave Jackson or anything like Jackson 5 years or maybe even 3 years. I guess 3 years would be OK. This is the one truly outrageous side of contract negotiation in MLB these days. The terms are so long you are just about giving money away in that last year of any of these contracts.

OK, I just found the thing at the WEEI web site. I guess they are saying that they are not close and that the earlier story was baseless. I did read in the same piece something I had not read before. While I had seen where the Sox had claimed to be waiting and hoping that Kuroda's price would come down the other comment attributed to the Sox was that "they would have to shed payroll elsewhere" to consider him. That sort of puts more bite into concerns that the Sox are looking for the remaining guys to really drop in price. If they are already talking about having to shed payroll elsewhere then they definitely have an upper limit in mind for spending and they are very close to it right now. Thanks iortiz. I must have been reading it at WEEI as you were posting it.

What did WEEI say about Kuroda? Did they say he is signing with somebody else or that Sox are not at all close? What was it that basically took the earlier story 180* the other way?

Ya' gotta' figure that as these guys disappear off the board the Sox are getting a shot to put a bid in. It is no secret that they are looking for pitching and it is in the player's and the agent's best interests to give teams a shot to put in a bid. If Maholm is disappearing elsewhere then either the Sox did not want him or do not like his asking price and that's that.