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Guys I really don't know how we could have expected 290/25/80 out of Drew. He only exceeded 25 once in the 8 years before he got here. He only exceeded 80 once in those 8 years and while he did exceed 290 I think three times in those 8 years his BA had already showed steady decline in the years leading up to his signing here. I guess I would have expected him to maybe exceed the HR and RBI marks once or twice in the years he was here but there again the number of games he played in each year becomes the one stat that stands out in that regard and once again that trend has been there since the beginning of time for Drew. If he had played even 130 games in 2008, he very likely would have made both of those marks. It is almost like he makes a point of driving a fan completely off the deep end because in 2008 he was having a pretty good year for him and sure enough, his games played falls to 109. Obviously I am joking a bit because I am sure JD could care less if I am pulling the rest of my hair out or not.

Judging from the bump in revenue growth the Yanks got from their building a new stadium you might think the best thing the Sox could do would be to blow up Fenway and build a new park.

It will certainly be very interesting to see how the Sox handle this for 2012. Given the effort they made to first get back down from the 40% tax to 0% and are set up for only paying at the 22.5% rate if they do bust the threshold again, I don't think they will go near the 30% rate with a 10' pole. I don't believe for one second that they lucked their way down from 40% in the WS year to 0% and then 22.5% in 2010. Remember that by waiting to sign AGons they even used a loophole nobody has ever used before to stay under the threshold for the 2011 season avoiding the 30% tax in 2011 . Which is in part why I am thinking they will avoid it this year. The only guys they can consider that would put them in jeopardy of busting the threshold given their needs would be either Buerhle or Wilson because those guys alone won't get it done but they will cost enough to push them over when you add the other player salaries they will need I would think. Do either of those two guys plus what other players you can bring in to fill the holes they have get you there is 2012 such that you can fall back under the threshold for 2013? Lately leaning to trying to analyze this from the perspective of Sox not trading Ells which would seem to make 2013 the optimal year for the Sox to bust the threshold if they are going to, simply because there will be so many more pitching options available to them that year.

User is correct in both posts. I do not believe they will overspend the cap in 2012 because the needs they can realistically deal with this year are fairly specific and not that burdensome from a cost perspective. They would stand a very good chance of going over if they actually made an offer to CJ or Buerhle that brought one of them here but I just don't expect that. They don't have much in the way of cap room but I would hope they can fit a back of the rotation starter with bullpen help and a RF RH bat although I wish I really knew at this point if they are going to gamble on Kalish in RF. Geez though, 3 LH bats in the outfield. If they go with Kalish then that probably means every dime they have will go to pitching. I could understand that. They are I am sure smart enough not to overrun it by just a little bit as that could be a real blunder without knowing what the 2013 cap number will be. You don't want to cost yourself a year over the cap for a couple million $ because if you then go over in the next year you get hit for 30% in that second consecutive year. I do think there is a chance that they might bust it in 2013 although we don't know what the 2013 number is yet. I would guess it will be something like $205M. With the amount of pitching talent coming up in the next FA market and the cost of top notch SP being what it is, I would think there is a chance they would bust it in 2013. That could work out if they don't go over this year and could wiggle back under again in 2014.

I am not sure the question about the Luxury Tax is the right question. It is not a question of our opinion with regard to whether we should bust it or not. The issue is whether or not the Sox will be willing to bust the luxury tax. The Sox worked for four years to climb back off the 40% tax rate they had earned in the effort to win the 2007 WS. They have worked very hard at this and while they were one of only two teams that paid the tax for the 2010 year, they paid at the much lower 22.5% rate because they were below the threshold for both 2008 and 2009. Having avoided the tax for 2011 if they do have to pay the tax for 2012 it will again be at the 22.5% rate. However I do not believe that the Sox think it is fiscally responsible for them to pay that tax. The Yanks have themselves in a situation now where they pay at the 40% rate and they would have to be below the threshold for two consecutive years to get back down to the 22.5% rate again in a 3rd year. However they generate far more revenue than the Sox generate, so much so that much more of it gets to their bottom line. In other words, while they are paying upwards of $18M per year in luxury tax, they are more able to afford it. While it might make sense for the Sox to break it for one year because as long as they miss a year in between as they did in 2011 having paid at the 22.5% rate in 2010, they would pay at the 22.5% rate again in 2012. However if you bust the tax two years in a row you are up to the 30% rate and that gets to be really painful. Another year on top of that and you are back to 40% again. So you have two issues to deal with in this case. First, I do not believe the Sox think it is fiscally responsible for them to bust the tax in any year particularly since their revenue growth has been weak lately contributing to a very thin bottom line. That is how I read the very real efforts they have made to avoid the tax since the 2007 WS year. Second with some very serious SP hitting the FA market next year if you are going to bust the tax it would appear to make more sense to risk doing so in 2013 so that whatever monies you spend your worst case tax rate would be 22.5%. If MLB continues to operate the tax the same way the threshold should be higher in 2013 than it will be in 2012 as well.

Well neither Wilson nor Buerhle would be #4 SP in Boston so I am assuming you guys want the Sox to get somebody else which does make sense. Is that correct?

700 and Elk, I get a kick out of remembering how intense the Yankee/Sox rivalry was in the seventies. Not saying it was not a bit overboard because in truth it was but you really did have to steel yourself for some abuse going to Yankee Stadium as a Red Sox fan and I know we did not make Yankee fans feel welcome here. I got to go to both places in the 60's as well but it was not anything like the 70's rivalry at least I don't remember it as such.

There was film if you wanted to look at it. There was very little of it but it was there. The point being that Wiliams looked at everything, scouting reports any film that was out there, anything. Mantle hardly looked at anything. In the later stages of Mantle's career there would have been the very beginnings of some video that you could look at as well as Mantle did last long enough to make it into the television era. It was almost harder to come by than film but his career did last long enough to make it to the very beginnings of video.

There was no video in the locker rooms but there was video available. He could have studied pitchers if he wanted to. He did not put much faith in scouting reports either. They just did not matter to him. He was as far removed from the Ted Williams school of hitting as you could get. Mantle was certainly not as disciplined a hitter as Williams was by a long shot as he did not quadrant off the strike zone and look for a pitch in the way that Williams did. That said he was not the least disciplined hitter in the Yankee lineup of the times. Berra probably gets that award for least disciplined, successful hitter the Yankees had.

I can honestly say I was not that optimistic at the start but not because I had some crystal ball vision or something like that...it was just the opposite. The Crawford deal really threw me for a loop. I just could not come to grips with how that big a deal could just fall from the sky like that and everything just went off axis for me at that point. Then the national media had jumped all over the Sox as the hands down favorites which I always view as worth at least a Sports Illustrated Cover in bad luck.

Yea I agree about Chicago. Probably makes the money prohibitive to begin with since money is probably one of the few tools a team has to try to pry a guy away from a place that he already prefers. Wonder if that first call to the agent in a case like this tends to be "Hey are we just wasting our time here? Will the player even entertain an offer?" Sorta makes ya' wonder though. Trying to pry a guy away sounds like a sure way to overpay and it is already a pretty thin FA season for SP. Buehrle probably will be overpaid as it is, Wilson too for that matter.

Darn.....I don't know how interested the Sox really are in Buehrle but for once i would love to see how things go when the Yanks and Sox are not bidding against each other for the same guy. Every once and awhile the money gets crazy right away and one or the other drops out early (usually us) but these two teams usually end up bidding against each other to the bitter end. Every once and awhile one or the other is bluffing.

I only caught a piece of the news piece that reported the Sox contacting Buehrle's agent. I thought the report might have mentioned the other teams that have expressed interest so far but I just did not catch it. Did anybody notice if other teams that have expressed interest in Buehrle were mentioned in that same report?

I for one would not be surprised to see player acquisition announcements made before a manager announcement is made. They seem to be taking their time and working a process for this managerial hire whereas their player dealings are likely more straightforward.

Boy Fenway is a tough RF, different than LF but very tough as well as requiring a better arm to boot. Plus Crawford has so many issues to resolve heaping a move to RF on top of everything else sounds like to much to me. I think we will all breath a sigh of relief if he just gets back to the batter he was and the LFer' he was.

Geez, this discussion has taken an odd turn. I had thought I would just leave the discussion because it seemed to be hitting a stone wall. Then I decided to take a shot at a different tack. Elk I really don't think anybody is saying that Larussa is a fraud. I don't think anybody is arguing that Drew would not have been a more significant contributor to the Red Sox had he played in more games, had he been less inclined to sit for what we would tend to think are niggling injuries, if he had a stronger work ethic ala' the Larussa comment or Remy's etc. However Drew's "attitude" and his work ethic are things that sit one layer underneath the things that a GM is first going to look at and it really should not sit any higher than at least one layer below the things we should look at when looking at these ballplayers. First the GM is going to look at Drew's stats and he is also going to look at the number of games Drew averages per season and Drew's cost and if they meet his expectations there is not much more that he is going to care about. I used his toughness or lack of toughness in my previous post as an example of how a GM might process that information. However i do think you, Elk, tend to roll those elements of argument for or against signing a player into his stats and they stand aside from his stats and simply provide some context. It is precisely because Drew's stats rank him favorably against his current day RF peers for games that the players in question are healthy enough to play in that a GM might look for context and decide to pursue or not pursue Drew as a player for his team. Now I do think you are taking Larussa's comments even farther than he would take them. If Drew were giving Larussa what he wanted then Larussa might not have that much angst about what Drew was not giving him. Larussa is simply saying that for the cost, Drew did not give him enough and Larussa is then giving us his insight into why he thinks Drew did not give him enough, why Drew did not meet HIS expectations. While we are on the topic of Larussa and Drew, the Cards were the first MLB team that Drew played for so it is no wonder that Larussa ultimately expressed disappointment in Drew's work ethic and drive and how Drew was developing as a pro ballplayer. However by the time Drew was under consideration by the Sox he had already established a pretty remarkable record for playing a rather unremarkable % of the available games in any given season. In fact he did better in Boston than he did elsewhere. As far as studying pitchers goes, Mickey Mantle did not believe in studying pitchers. He did not believe in studying pitchers he did well against or pitchers he did poorly against. Mickey Mantle believed in his hand to eye coordination, the quickness in his wrists and in his innate power. He believed that you went up to the plate, you saw the pitch and you swung at it as hard as you could. Anybody would have been happy to have had Mickey Mantle playing in his outfield regardless of the fact that he did not study the game in the sense that Ted Williams studied it. While he played in immense pain due to leg injuries that occurred during the course of play, the fact remains that he took terrible care of himself and there is no telling how much of his immense talent he frittered away in a bath of booze and late night binges, things clearly as damaging to our thoughts about the underlying elements that sit underneath his stats as the things that underlie Drew's stats. Mickey Mantle was still a great ballplayer that any GM would have dearly loved to have when compared to the other outfielders of his day. The point being that at the first order of business it is whether or not you get the job done, whether or not you meet your employer's expectations for the $ he is paying you when compared to other options available to him at the time. If you don't then GM's will ask themselves if you will get enough of the job done to justify your cost or will ask themselves if they can work with you so that you do get enough of the job done but they are not necessarily going to concern themselves about whether or not you are a fraud or had poor work ethic or lacked toughness or any of those things that we like to discuss here. As for Remy's comment, how is Remy to Drew different from Mantle to Williams. Remy is telling us that he would have studied pitchers that he did poorly against and Drew is simply saying that he does not. Whatever Remy thinks about that it is still an element of Drew's makeup that simply provides some context. And while we are on the topic of being a fraud, Drew is not a fraud either. JD Drew has never behaved any differently than he behaved as a Red Sox. His behavior here is entirely in line with his behavior throughout his career. He was known to be soft before Theo and the Red Sox FO decided to bring him here offering him the contract THEY offered him. How is that Drew's fault and how is Drew a fraud for performing like and acting exactly as he has for the bulk of his career? His career numbers look very much like you would expect for an aging player. His power numbers go up marginally as he ages and his batting average suffers marginally as he slows and is less able to leg out hits. No s*** Sherlock. You want a year that he played fewer games than 2011?....2005....72 games. He was 35 years old in 2011 for one thing, on a team that we eventually discovered had turned into a 3 ring circus. Who the hell knows how much that had an impact on Drew's 2011 season. However I would neither vilify him worse nor excuse him more than the bulk of the players on the 2011 Sox. But if you look at his stats for every other year including the number of games played, there is little to distinguish them from his earlier years. The Sox FO brought him here and paid the money and whether we like it or not, he basically performed for that period just as you would have expected if in 2007 you were using his past performance to determine if you should sign him and estimate his performance for the years 2007 -2011. I can tell who would be a fraud. If Theo claimed that he was disappointed or surprised by Drew's performance it is Theo that would be the fraud but I would bet that if you asked him, he would say that Drew performed to HIS expectations. What the hell else is Theo going to say?

Yea I never thought Tito's in game managerial skills where that great. He was not what I would call a situational manager. He seemed to have a particular viewpoint and he never seemed to let the situation complicate matters as that viewpoint was always his guiding light. As for where the team is, if they are smart for a change they can sneak their way out of this current situation. They simply don't have much wiggle room for additional stupidity and will have to be more reliant on luck next year than anybody will like. There is simply not much they can do stupidly this year anyway as it turns out. They don't have any money with which to be stupid. So as long as they can get some kind of manager, get rid of the right guys (no longer hard to identify under the financial constraints) and get themselves a RH bat to play right field, a reasonable SP for the back end of the rotation just ahead of what looks more and more like Aceves and then spend the paltry remains on pitching depth that is just about all they can do for this year anyway. Next year there is a bevy of good pitching talent coming on the FA market and they will have much more opportunity to either distinguish themselves or step into a few more land mines.

What a baseball world the CBA has given us. No wonder the Players Association is so proud of the damn thing. It has made millionaires out of mediocre ballplayers and has really shaped what managers can do what owners can do, what players will do etc. It just about makes it so that the only control you have is in the balance of long term, big money contract stars vs guys trying to get there that you have on your team. If you have too many of the former and too few of the latter you better make damn sure that the former are guys that have a baseball agenda beyond that paycheck. It would not surprise me that if I were to read every page of the CBA eventually I would find out exactly which urinals an owner can or cannot use on game day. Not saying they should go back to the kind of control a team had over a player in the old days but gosh it would nice if they had settled somewhere closer to a middle ground.

The thing to remember about a good many of the stats used today is that they really are not trying to define a value like "best Sox RF of all time" or "best RF ever". They are trying to value a specific Right Fielder and his potential to contribute to your team's effort on a given day in a given game against those of his peers. In other words, if healthy would you prefer to have Drew in your right field today or some other right fielder of those currently playing. What Tony Conigliaro could do for you does not matter because he is not available to play for you or anybody you might compete against. The stats say that if Drew was healthy on a given day you would prefer to have Drew in your Right Field than more than 50% of his Right Field peers. Now if you were a GM you might say to yourself " Geez if we can just find a way to keep this guy on the field, we would be getting more production out of our Right Fielder than more than half the teams in baseball" or you might say, "the drop off on my team is to great if I cannot keep this guy in the lineup so while I would love to have him, I can't afford to have him because he misses to many games and I can't afford the drop off for the number of times I have to play his replacement".

I just don't know if people are not looking past his lack of toughness and don't look as the actual statistical data. I will be the first guy to agree that he missed to many games and seemed to let the smallest injury sideline him. But you just can't look at the guys numbers and say that he was not above average for his peer group while he was on the field. If you want to contend that his lack of toughness and the number of games missed makes for an overall impression of having less of an impact as a player than he could have had then I completely agree. But at some point you also have to look at the absolute numbers because that is how you value his absence. Maybe looking at RBI's tells you something about how much his absence hurt his total contribution to the Sox effort because just about the only way you can rationalize his RBI totals against his other numbers is to say that he was just not on the field enough. But many of the combined statistical values are designed to form a judgement about the value of the player in a given game on a given day. Looking at those, it is hard to argue that he was just average or below average.

In some sense it boils down to whether you include his inability to stay on the field in any argument of his value to a team or if you just take his stats as they are which reflect what he did while on the field and just go with those. It is hard to just go with those in his case because he was unable to stay on the field for long stretches and regular stretches. There were times when he came back for a couple of weeks to just be gone again. I do think that he often took himself off the field for things that would not have kept other players from playing and I think he did it to a fault. The other side to that argument is the number of times that we hear about a player that played through an injury while his stats suffered for it. But I would content that if Drew did take himself off the field for what most would consider miner ailments that he probably hurt his stats doing that. I season full of fits and starts does not sound like a great way to get in a grove to me. On the other hand his post season stats may be as impressive as they are because he often went into the post season about as well rested as any player could ever have hoped for. Lord knows he would not have played in them if there was even a hangnail out of sorts.

I agree about the managers job and posted a few days ago that I thought the technical aspects of the managerial job are overstated. The guy needs to set the tone for the team more than dictate one way or the other. This is surely the wrong mix of players if you want to get dictatorial. I am more concerned about things like Maddux just taking his name off the list and to what degree guys are a bit shy of coming here at this stage of the game. I was thinking that Maddux may have already committed to the Cubs but I guess we would have heard more about that if that was the case. So, if not isn't Maddux just removing his name because he is just flat not interested? We always think about the Boston job as one of the most coveted in baseball and with good reason. But I do wonder if that is just not the case right now and maybe there is more than one reason for that. I am not sure I would be real thrilled with the way every manager is run out of this town on a rail without fail. It is clearly a very intense baseball environment and I could see guys not really being very interested in being around that. There might be guys thinking the same thing we are about the corner the Sox have sort of painted themselves into and thinking that they would have a better opportunity to succeed elsewhere. Now that we have fully understood the real dollars available to make changes I am in complete agreement with those suggesting that we say goodbye to Wak, Tek, Drew and Ortiz and we pick up a decent RH bat to play RF, get a starter for the back of the rotation and spend the rest of what money we have on pitching depth. Now that is not a lotta' money to go around for folks that have not been following the thread where we went fully through this but it is what it is. We do what we can do for a year and hopefully can hit the jackpot on a serious SP next year when so many more come available and we get another year to catch up on the Luxury Tax Limits. As to the question of busting the Luxury Tax Limit, I don't think there is a team in baseball other than the Yankees, who regularly generate over $400M in revenue per year, that can afford to seriously consider crossing that line. By the way I think the 2011 revenue projection for the Yankees was $430M and I think the Sox projection was something like $240M. In fact while I think the Sox have been very focused on revenue generation in recent years it sort of fell flat in 2011 with revenue growth projections at only about 2% over 2010 numbers.

I wish one stud pitcher was all that the Sox needed. I still think the Sox are better off getting one guy for the back end of the rotation just ahead of what appears to be our candidate for moving to the rotation, Aceves and then add some relief and wait for next year to get a stud starting pitcher. There are only two real studs in this FA class, Wilson and Buerhle so they will both end up getting overpaid on that score alone. If they were in next years class of FA SP they would probably not even be high on that list. There are so many in next year's list that even last year renegotiations won't thin that list by much. Whether Ells is part of bring some pitching here or not, I think it more likely that we end up with some package deal of players for Ells if we trade him at all.

I actually think there are two eras of within Theo's time here that differ by pretty wide margins and I don't think Theo is himself responsible for that. I think that there was more focus on winning championships until the Sox won it a second time in 2007. After 2007 there was much more focus on expanding the Fenway Sports Enterprises and the Sox as a brand as a marketing tool and as a revenue machine. Theo did reasonably well in the early part of his stay here and was particularly outstanding with regard to rebuilding the Sox farm system. I would give him a B+ for that period. However from 2008 till today the focus on the brand and marketing appears to have translated into less effort in maintaining the farm system and more on big name free agents. Here Theo has simply not done well. Even his FA successes have been with smaller less PR intense deals. A fair number of those have worked out well, like Ortiz and more recently Aceves and now Scuts. However the big name FA signings of the past few years have all been busts really. Dice-K , Jenks and Lackey are horrible deals. Lackey should never have been brought here. The same can be said for Jenks and the whole screwy PR driven mess that is the Dice-K deal is exhibit A for the way the Sox have viewed FA signings through the prism of marketing. Drew was a bust. Crawford is a horrible deal no matter how you cut it. There is not a single aspect of the Crawford deal that is redeeming and that would be true regardless of how he plays. AGons has had a great year but when you look at how signing AGons effected the direction the Sox had to take with regard to other potential opportunities, I have a hard time calling that deal a success particularly in light of what I think was a propensity for Theo to plan based around getting AGons here. I think Theo cut off other opportunities to reshape the team while they were stillborn. Didn't the AGons deal feel like a forgone conclusion when it finally happened? Much like the Drew deal I think the AGons deal was another that Theo fell in love with. I am not so sure that Theo falls in love with the actual player as much as he falls in love with a particular deal. Now look at where we are. We are stuck with a bunch of everyday player big money contracts one or two good, many bad....recent pitching FA deals that are all bad, with the exception of Aceves.....a depleted farm system with no pitchers really ready to help fill the gap and little money to use in the FA market. We may well be stuck saying goodbye to Ortiz without really being able to replace his bat because we need his money to sign pitchers. So for years 2008-2011 the best grade I can give Theo is a D. The only reason I am not giving him an F is because I think where we are today is a failure of the organization in total including Theo and an F might say that this all should be put at Theo's doorstep. So my split grade for Theo is a B+ for the first semester followed by a D for the second.

The big difference between performance and awards bonuses and signing bonuses are that bonuses in the performance/awards category are assigned in total to the specific year the performance goal or award was achieved. As User accurately notes, signing bonus amounts are pro-rated throughout the life of the contract. Gee Cherington is gonna' have a fun time sharpening pencils for awhile. "Honey I'm home!" "Hi Ben, did you get to write a new contract today sweetheart?" "No not yet. Still waiting to get some money to use to write a new contract". "Don't worry dear. Fenway Park was not built in a day ya' know". Not this bad I know. Although I should have been thinkin' about this when the Sox announced that they were postponing AGons signing until they had actually gotten into the next Luxury Tax Year. Remember that? That was surely a sign that they were bouncing around right at the limits and were only being saved by the fact that the Tax limit keeps going up.