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As far as there being a market for Ortiz if there was it was the quietest market I have ever seen. There were as many reports that it was Ortiz agent that was fueling talk that there was a market for him and not teams at all. Given the dead silence since what may well have been agent ******** more than anything else i would lean toward no real market. I have heard the draft picks thing several times here and my problem with that is similar to my problem with the existence of a market. The Sox did not have any reason to believe a team would give up picks for Ortiz. That is in fact exactly what blew up in their faces As for his production, we will again have to wait to see how this pitching thing works out but if in fact we used money for Ortiz that should have been used for pitching then they are making the same mistake that so many Red Sox teams have made. Planning on winning a bunch of 12-8 games is a loser. Won't go anywhere planning on scoring 12 and hoping the other guys don't score 13. No matter what happens from here on out clearly pitching was their biggest need going into this offseason. To have committed more money by far to Ortiz than they have committed to any other unsigned player since the off-season started with as many holes in the pitching department as they have seems ass backwards no matter how you slice it. I do agree that marketing likely had much to do with the Ortiz arb situation or at least had much to do with any interest the Sox have had in keeping him and said so as soon as arbitration for Ortiz was announced. So I agree with you Muggah. I have to believe some amount of marketing influence was a part of the decision.

I "think" they should not have offered Ortiz arbitration at all so in that sense they overpaid by $14-$15M. The Sox have made comments that were suggestive of having decided to be somewhat frugal with regard to this year's FA market just about from the first words out of BC's mouth. They approached signings much like they were walking the walk as well as talking the talk. They very likely had good reason to be frugal this year. I have not been criticizing the Sox for approaching this off season with an eye on the pocketbook. They have spend inordinate amounts of money unwisely of late. While heads have rolled that is almost never the only result from having spent vast amounts of money unwisely. I happen to think the Sox have good, sound reasons for being frugal this year so I don't have a problem with it especially if it means I might get to see some of the young guys come up and pitch at some point this year. That does not mean I am categorizing this year as a rebuilding year. Frankly terms like rebuilding or not rebuilding don't mean much to me. At the end of the day the team is what it is, has to strap it up and play the 162. So I don't much pay attention to terms like "rebuilding". So in my view, Ortiz should not have been offered arbitration and all of the money they have spent on him or I guess will be spending on him if the arb offer draws to an ultimate conclusion, should have been spent elsewhere. That may be the difference in the various arguments. I wanted them to spend the money elsewhere meaning I did not want Ortiz back. I have other reasons than just thinking they can't really afford to drop $15M on Ortiz with so many glaring pitching roles to fill but that is one of the reasons. Guys that are making this $3-4M argument appear to be making an argument based on wanting the player and determining whether or not they are overpaying for him. I did not want him back. So it is all money down the drain to me and if in fact we get nobody other than a few more of these guys on the cheap for pitching signings then I think it would be safe to say that the money Ortiz is getting is the money that could have and should have gone to additional pitching. Geez I don't understand why this is so difficult. There have been folks on this board that have not liked the Ortiz arb offer from the very beginning and did not want the player back. I happen to be one of them. By the way, in part this is part of the larger argument about the value of a dedicated DH and the decline in the value of the dedicated DH. In fact Ortiz is exhibit A in that argument. Have we heard of teams lining up panting at the thought of signing Ortiz? No we have not. Since there is no question in my mind that Ortiz is absolutely at the pinnacle within the category of the dedicated DH, the fact that nobody appears to be making a move on him speaks volumes to where the AL is going with regard to the DH role.

Ortiz arbitration is not a $3/4M mistake in my opinion but what it is or is not will not become clear until these last few pitchers finally get signed by somebody and we either are left recognizing that the Sox were in fact waiting or they get signed by somebody else we are left recognizing that their budget was not as hight this offseason as we may have liked which will finally put to rest the degree to which offering Ortiz arbitration was actually a mistake. I don't think it likely that the price for pitchers is going to fall significantly given the kind of money pitchers are getting these days but it surely might fall some the later into the offseason we get. Everything is just opinion anyway so what does it matter. None of us have careers in sports management but without opinions, its not a board, certainly not one worth looking at or participating in.

I have not called BC incompetent but this is a board of opinions and in my opinion, offering Arb to Ortiz was a bad move. It does look like they have counted that money as spent or else you would think they would have been more aggressive in their pursuit of FA pitchers. Yes can throw up the notion that they are waiting for the price to drop significantly for the last few pitchers that remain out there in the FA market but does that really make sense. Might the price come down a bit. Yea it might. Given the money being tossed at pitchers does it makes sense that it will be a significant reduction...don't think so.

I guess there is no way to really compare them because the Cards got to the WS and the Phils did not so Carpenter ended up with all of those extra innings to build stats. If the rain out had not given the Cards a chance to run Carpenter out there one extra time I am not sure the Cards are the WS Champs and that was the point I was trying to make. Would have been easier to compare the Phils and their trio to Carpenter if they played in different leagues and made it all the way to the WS. Frankly I don't even know what your point is. Both teams had great pitching and relied on it heavily to make the runs they made in the playoffs. If the Phils had made it to the WS and had won it, don't you think we would be singing the praises of one of one or more of those three Phils pitchers? Did pitching not get the Phils as far as they got? Seems to me you are making my point for me cause I don't know what other point you would be trying to make.

I really do hope we get to see Doubrant pitch this year. He may not be great in 2012 and here probably is not much of a chance of that. However I do want to see some of these guys pitch this year. I could also see Doubrant starting the year with the PawSox in order to get innings in instead of being down at the bottom of the rotation in Boston. If they do that though I don't want to see the Sox take every little misstep the kid takes in the minors and turn it into a rational to keep him down there longer. Get him some inning early down there and then baring serious injury get him up here.

Well not to belabor the point but the Cards had a bigger dog than the Phils had and the way the playoff and WS schedule worked out due to weather and other considerations the Cards got to run him out there more than anybody would have guessed before the playoffs started. You could also make a case that once they got to the WS, that factor was critical to the Cards winning the whole thing.

I think the playoffs can be a crapshoot but they can also be a simple matter of having the big dog pitcher that you can run out there enough times. Just ask the 2011 Cards about that.

It is only a $2/3M mistake if we wanted the player. Are we saying we want Ortiz instead of pitching cause that is what this is boiling down to? In that context it is hard to argue that this is only a $2/3M mistake.

You are correct pumps...the Sox were playing things a little to cute for their own good. The problem with it being categorized as a calculated risk is that there was no upside. They had offense and most particularly plenty of offense from the left side of the plate. If we take our own Sox forum opinions offered at the time as likely to be correct, the Sox were not making a play to keep Ortiz as much as they were attempting to suck up the draft picks from the team that claimed him. I think that was an accurate portrayal of the circumstances. However that just flew in the face of reality. Nobody was going to just give away picks for a guy his age that was going to do nothing but DH. It is over for that era of DH. In fact I near fall off my chair every time I hear one of the so called experts talking about how teams only rotate players into the DH role because they are not lucky enough to have a stud like Ortiz to be their DH. It is like these guys are stuck in some 1990 time warp. That is done. It is not like there is suddenly some shortage of aging stars that could in fact fill that roster spot as a dedicated DH. You don't see it as much anymore because teams no longer want to give up that roster spot to a guy like that. Teams are already beginning to acclimate to the ever increasing difficulties of playing in the modern era, the amount of travel, the scheduling changes, including flexing games in and out of time slots. As much of a grind as the 162 has been, it just gets worse and worse. Teams have to be able to rest players without losing their at bats. If there is one thing that is still true about the DH it is that it creates a tremendous amount of pressure on teams to score runs. We probably do not get to see enough NL games in this town but if you do watch enough of them and see how often team game tactics inning by inning are based on the opposing teams pitcher's spot in the batting order, you then can gain an understanding for how often NL teams work toward the pitcher's spot and how different that is from what we have in the AL. The pressure on pitchers to hold teams down is greater and the pressure on teams to score runs is greater in the AL because there are simply not as many or even sometimes any places where you catch a break in the batting order. Having been an AL city for so long and the DH now having been around for so long I even wonder how tolerant we would be of seeing rallies just evaporate as the pitcher comes to the plate. We have grown pretty used to seeing rallies just continue unabated instead of seeing the pitcher come up, take three quick hacks and everybody run for their mitts to take the field. The other decided advantage that NL teams have when it gets to the WS is that their teams are inherently better balanced teams through the roster. NL teams are forced to substitute around the pitchers spot late in games as a means of trying to build on rallies as opposed to seeing them just fritter away by letting the pitcher bat late in the game. They have to have better depth on the bench because those guys are going to see more action day in and day out. Currently there is a good deal of talk in the major leagues about whether the time has come to rejoin. Based on the amount of inter-league play and teams actually crossing over between leagues, baseball is seriously considering whether or not the time has come for all MLB to have a DH or all MLB to go without. It has become a tough time to make that sort of a decision because cleaning up the steroid issue has created something of a power outage in baseball. Hitting has been effected more than pitching and I suspect there is some reluctance to abandon the DH at this point. That said, I would prefer it to be all one way at this point. Either everybody has it or nobody has it.

Well as I have said before I thought the Sox had entered the trade part of their off season a couple of weeks ago. They don't appear to me to be actively considering any FA deals any longer. That said, I am holding out hope that they find some way to trade salary for salary because I have thought for a long time that this is all they are really willing to do at this point. As for keeping any possibilities open for Wake, I can only assume that the Sox are doing so as some sort of a safety valve to being unable to make any sort of a trade that helps their pitching. However I just don't see that Wake is a safety valve. A guy that is just going to go out there and get flamed is no safety valve at all. As for Tek, now ya' got me. I can't find a rational for Tek regardless of what I do. He can't catch Wake so that isn't it. He can't hit at all. He can't throw anybody out. He is just done. I don't get it. Now as far as why from Tek's perspective all you have to do is look at the amount of money teams toss around these days and it is hard to blame a player for trying to get a slice of that pie regardless of the reality of the situation. I still think there is a way out of the Ortiz arb thing but don't quote me on that because I just don't know if the new arb rules take effect now or mid-season when some of the other new CBA rules are going to be implemented. I believe if the new rules regarding arb are in effect now, they can in fact back out of the arb offer. If I am not mistaken this new rule was more an effort to resolve teams and players making handshake arrangements to void arb offers which has happened. I believe the new rule allows a team to back out and gets rid of the handshake agreements between players and teams. However I do not know if there are strings attached and as mentioned I don't even know if this is one of the rules to be implemented mid-season 2012 or one that was to take effect this off-season. If the Sox are able to back out then I would be a little less harsh in my criticism of the Sox for having offered Ortiz arbitration. If not then it is without question the biggest blunder of the offseason so far. Even if they can back out, it would appear to me that having it hanging out there has still had the same effect on the Sox. It looks to me like they are operating under the assumption that they are going to be stuck with Ortiz and have basically allocated that money away denying them any opportunity to use it elsewhere. I thought it was a terrible move that just could not be rationalized no matter how you tried at the time it was announced and I can't say that it has aged any better.....just a bad bad move. Yes teams make mistakes but this was not a year where the Sox could afford many or any for that matter. Making a $15M mistake when they are clearly treating dimes like they are the size of manhole covers really does put that deal into perspective.

I don't think fans generally have some kind of animosity toward Crawford. I think many fans believe the front office made a bad deal bringing him here but at least I don't think fans have taken that out on Crawford. In fact I think Crawford has so far gotten a complete pass from RS Nation for his poor performance to date. That might change this year if he continues to put up numbers suggestive of about a quarter of his current salary. At some point watching him ground out to SS is going to get old.

Right 700...it can't be that. That has not changed I think and the mound has been at this lowered height for a long time now.

I know we spend more time with the Sox than talkin' about baseball generally but doesn't it seem like there are more guys going through and rehabing from TJ these days? The operation has certainly been around for awhile. It is probably perfected or darned close to it by now. That might be having an impact. Maybe it is some credible evidence that working less really does not keep arms from coming apart. Maybe working less actually promotes arms coming apart. At least that is the Nolan Ryan argument to some extent. Just seems like a lotta' guys going through it for whatever reason.

This trade is without doubt BC's finest moment to date. The only thing I wonder about is some complication to Bailey's health issues that has got Oakland nervous....something that won't really show up in his physical but that made Oakland a bit more pliable than they would have been otherwise. Baring that, I think BC has done well for himself here given what looks like a difficult set of parameters handed him by upper management.

AGons himself claimed to be fatigued at the end of last season. I do think he was negatively impacted by the HR Derby and I also suspect that he did not want to admit it since DM apparently asked him to beg off before going. Don't think AGons wanted to admit that it had been an issue. That said I do take him at his word about the fatigue. Tito was continually looking for days of rest for him and I strongly suspect they both discussed in private what AGons eventually discussed in public. He got tired. I think teams that are involved in efforts to get to the post season will find the going tougher and tougher with regard to travel and schedule. Nobody cares and in fact if you ask the players themselves if somebody holds the carrot of additional income out to them, they will take the money and try to hold up. That does not make it right though. Different sport but a few weeks ago, the Jets got flexed into a Sunday night game at home. Game started at about 8:00 and finished around 11:30. Anybody that has played organized football will tell you that the day following is a total waste. It takes at least 24 hours to stop feeling like you have been in train wreck. So Monday was a wash. They had to fly out on Wednesday for a Thursday night game in Denver against the Broncos.....not a Sunday or Monday game but Thursday night of that same week. They lost that game which is not a surprise. The point is the network wanted its ratings and the league and the owners accommodated them. These "accommodations" get worse and worse and more frequent every year in every pro sport to the point where they effect players. There was no way that the Jets should have been playing on Sunday night in NY and on Thursday night in Denver. Worse than that it is the very best teams that are abused the most as the networks want the contender's games and want them played when they want them played. As I indicated earlier I think the better balanced teams are already prospering at the expense of the teams that are not as well balanced top to bottom. Ignore it if you want to but the examples are more frequent from one year to the next in every pro sport.

Yea but we were not going to get somebody without some sort of problem at this stage of the game and the way the Sox are playing this offseason. Bailey was maybe as good as it was going to get. Last report was that the Sox were showing no interest in Jackson but that is two weeks old now. Not sure if that is still the case. Madson was always off the table and I suspect he is way off now.

Sounds like a good move for us. We needed somebody and if we only have to give up Reddick to get our somebody that's fine. Maybe they really wanted us to take Sweeney and that is how he ended up in the deal. Doesn't really matter I don't think.

Masterson is a good example and it has been kicked around here quite a bit. However I do think Masterson probably has more potential than the kind of player I am really more interested in for this discussion. Casey Kelly is a bit more ball player than I am talking about here as well. Maybe Fuentes is more like the kind of mid pack player I am talking about. Portland and Pawtucket may have decent years this year and they have the next batch of players that will either be traded away or will move up. Will the Sox trade them or play them? Does all of our support cast have to come by way of FA? The only guys that have come up out of the Sox farm system are guys that become stars and that is in part my point. Every once and awhile a McDonald comes up for a cup of coffee. The only guys the Sox keep are the Ellsbury's, Lester's and Pedroia's, guys that have stardom written all over them. They make it up to the big team. I guess we are going to see more guys come up this year but will this be by design or out of necessity, a byproduct of the wasted free agent dollars of the past few years. In other years would the Kalishes, Redicks, Doubront's etc just be traded away? I do think that 2011 was supposed to be one of those all in years and they were surely the "editors" choice all over baseball as the season started. However I think 2011 makes the point. Teams built with more balance and more depth can stand the grind of the 162 to get to the playoffs. I think a focus on pitching will always be the right thing to do in major league baseball but I think teams that strive for less of a drop off between the starting line up and the guys playing behind them will on an ongoing basis have a better chance of getting to and through the playoffs than teams that expend most of their mindshare hammering out the top 8 without getting much done to support them. That would include in my view how they handle their farm system. As I said in a different post I never had a problem with AGons comment about the grind that the networks turned 2011 into for him. I believe him to be factually accurate in his portrayal of the role the networks play in baseball and all professional sports scheduling and travel in the modern era. I did not like AGons publicly using it as a rationalization for his late season performance but he is factually correct in my view. I think in the coming years baseball teams that ignore this and especially teams that have a shot at winning it all will find themselves with their front line guys just plain done by year end as AGons was this year or injured or both. Teams will have to be better prepared to rest their front line guys during the season so they are better rested and/or less dinged up by the end of the season. At the same time they will have to be able to sub in guys such that the drop off in performance is not so great and they still have a chance to win games while they are resting guys. Some additional thought will have to go into those guys whether they come up or are brought in as more and more the Mike Cameron kind of move looks more like a lurch to pander to the fans and look like they are actually doing something. On an ongoing basis those guys riding your pine more and more actually have to contribute. It appears to me that they will no longer be some luxury that looks good filling out the uniform but can't do much more than that. My biggest disappointment in the Ortiz thing is that signing him leaves the Sox with no viable plan to use Youk and AGons in such a way as to park them in the DH role as a means of resting them. I fail to understand why the Sox seemingly have chosen to ignore the fact that Youk is brittle with age and not capable of playing in the field for anything like the number of games he has played in years past and AGons by his own admission saw his performance drop off at the end of the year due to fatigue. Maybe the Sox are surprised that they are paying a guy $21M per year that cannot take the grind of the 162 but again I think it makes the point. The combination of coast to coast travel compounded by the networks and their propensity to toss teams and games into favorable slots from a rating perspective has changed what is happening to players in a very fundamental way. I think it makes it more important that teams not trade away cost controlled players that have a chance to play in the big leagues even in support roles because those are the guys that should be coming into games when you are resting your top players....not the broken down Mike Cameron's of the world. In fact, the potential star minor leaguers maybe need to stay in the minor's so they get their at bats and don't languish on the bench with the big team. But the guys that don't have stardom written all over them in some cases should just come up. The Cards last year had more guys making league mins than most major league teams. Who are those guys? Did we win a WS last year? Maybe that is a good model. A limited number of stars making really big money that are at the core of the team as opposed to having eight or nine or ten big contract guys. The Sox had Crawford, AGons, Youk, Ortiz, Drew, Beckett, Lackey, dice-K, Jenks all dragging down big money and some dragging down really big money relative to their contributions.

Pumpsie, This is an interesting discussion to me because I actually think it is part of the larger discussion about the Sox and their FA and team building approach of recent memory. In fact that is precisely why I think at least for me the fact that on balance the Beckett signing is one of the better ones is relevant. I do think you did get the gist of what I was saying. I did not see anybody on the list that blew me away and made me say that I would have thrown a major effort into signing XXX instead of Beckett although some of those guys have had better results none so much so over the entire period till now that it detracts from the value of the Beckett signing. As we so often mention here, toiling in the AL East presents it own challenges for a SP and there are not that many on the list that have gone that route. I do accept your point about CJ and Weaver as examples. Weaver for sure. CJ probably needs to do it over a longer period. I guess given the Sox propensity to hold onto every star (be he a Red Sox star or a major league star) to long, I am not sure I would have expected them to have tossed Beckett to make a play for CJ or somebody like Weaver but I get that point Pumps. In fact it is in part the gist of my larger argument.

Pumpsie, I saw your post mentioning guys that might be more viable than Beckett but I was going back to the guys that were available at the time of the Beckett signing and maybe I was mistaken in thinking that was actually where the discussion was heading....who else was available at that time and at what price that would have been a better signing than Beckett was. Looking at that list, I just don't know that I would have been all over any one of those guys in place of Beckett.

The more troublesome contracts are ending in the next two years or have ended. That much is true. I had said as much. These contracts are ending and we already know about the ones that have ended. Did not think I needed to review those all over again but did not expect to have the current basket of signed players thrown up as a countering argument either. Although almost incredibly, we have real concerns that are not unfounded that the Sox are still not done with some of the old warhorses. And we all know who they are as well. So lets not suddenly put blinders on and suggest this has not been an issue simply based on the current basket of signed players. As you might have been able to see from the earlier post I am more concerned that the Sox change the direction of their FA and team building approach to one that results in a more balanced team. My point in this regard is still the same. The Sox in my view end up blocking and eventually trading guys that should find their way to the big club maybe not as star players but as integral parts of this team. Instead we end up often blocking them, ignoring them as soon as they hit any snag that suggests they are not the second coming of Tony Conigliaro and eventually trading them. Then we bring in the Mike Cameron's (another guy intended to make the fan base all a-ga-ga over who we have sitting on our bench) and the Jenks of the world who cost to much and give us nothing. But they do make the oblivious Sox fan base oh and ah now don't they. I have seen this discussion in one form or another several times here. Often one of our posters will take a different route to get to the same place that I have gotten to by reminding us that not every signing can be for a star player and not every member of a 25 man squad can be some sort of star player either. The discussion persists precisely because the Sox have crossed the line between signing star players and building a more balanced team. My point is that not only can a team not make every signing for a star player but a team cannot expect every guy toiling down there in the minors to turn into Jacoby Ellsbury. It is not happening. However there are players down there that should turn into integral, contributing parts of this team even if they are not All-Star material. One of these days, probably past the reign of JH and LL this team will become more interested again in building a champion and less interested in eliciting ohs and ahs from the fan base for picking up aging war horses that end up giving us nothing.

I just don't see how this position is defensible. They did not value their farm system enough to keep them from trading off many prospects in pursuit of big name high ticket stars. They have been very top heavy although that is soon to change unless they stockpile more big names as some of these contracts expire. Even their second line players have often been name players that they have paid to much to for very poor if not non-existant performance. Guys like Mike Cameron and Jenks come to mind here. I count these guys as well when I think of the Sox as a top heavy team because these are guys that were expected to produce at a certain level, were paid more for their past performance and apparently for their names and they produced complete goose eggs. As far as their farm system is concerned the Sox have had a tendency of late to bury guys down there. They either end up getting blocked or seemingly forgotten if they hit any sort of a snag down there at all. In many cases these are the guys that end up being dealt away before ever getting a chance to help this team. Instead of getting a guy that comes up through the system and becomes our backup outfielder we end up with Mike Camerons, guys that we paid too much to that gave us virtually nothing. We end up with useless slobs like Jenks. The guy gives us absolutely nothing yet we are now left hoping more than expecting that he will come through in 2012. One of our other posters said it better than I am when it comes to the position that we are left in. We end up putting all of these bums on the plus side of the ledger for 2012 which I guess results in a sense of optimism. However in reality the chance that all of the guys that have been underperforming up till now are going to suddenly turn it around is rather slim. More likely some of them will and some of them won't. In the meantime, the guys that have been getting older and more brittle are older and more brittle still, like Youk or just plain older and just as likely to become to old right before our very eyes as anything else. If Ortiz does get signed and falls on his face we will all just be saying things like "well after all he is 36-37 years old and guys his size tend to age very quickly once the aging process really does take hold". No s*** sherlock. This is some sort of surprise?

Boy I am not sure you would have done enough better than Beckett to make it worth talking about. Kenny Rogers was available in that same year I think. Could have gotten Roger Clemens back for what it is worth. Bartolo Colon was available. Don't think I would really have jumped through hoops to latch onto one of those guys as opposed to Beckett. On balance I am just not sure we can complain about Beckett and his contract. We have so many others that have been so much worse.

the degree to which the payroll runs deeper into the roster is sport dependent. Football is basically there already. Most football teams have one or two guys making top money for their positions. The Pats have two guys, Logan Mankins at Offensive Tackle and Tom Brady at Quarterback. The bulk of the rest are in the middle ground and there are a significant number making close to league mins. Football might be in its own category though since they play once per week for 17 weeks and the sport is brutally physical. Football players are modern gladiators. Hockey is already there with much more payroll going deeper into the roster. You might argue that Hockey is as brutal as Football but Pro Hockey has one very significant injury issue, concussion, and then it falls way behind Football after that. Eventually I think Pro Hockey will make a combination of rule changes and equipment changes that will relieve the concussion problem. Hard plastic pads and wooden or fiberglass boards mashing directly into faces and heads wearing almost meaningless helmets is the problem there. The league will likely legislate play around the boards and/or will make major equipment changes to soft padding that protects but does not act as much like a weapon. Equipment changes should have a big impact. Basketball is not there but pro basketball is a basket case (pardon the pun). They would have been better off blowing up the whole thing and starting from scratch. Worse commissioner is all of pro sport...corruption on a grand scale....inmates running the asylum....a giant mess. The big 3 star formula is not really cutting it in pro basketball unless there is a decent supporting cast. Celtics are a good example. The Celts big 3 simply could not stay on the floor long enough last year and there was nothing really behind them. As a result the Celts went through huge scoring binges and would go 3 and 5 minutes at a time without being able to score a single basket from the field. Baseball has a number of teams with multiple high priced stars and other teams for which the whole team payroll is taken up by the top three guys on the big payroll teams. So baseball is definitely not there at this point as far as payroll generally going deep into the roster.