jung

I have nothing to say that has not already been said about this stuff. Again I will say I wish all of these clowns would stop talking to the media. I wish the team would issue a gag order and go to formal press releases as the only franchise authorized comments made to media and I would have made it clear that jobs were at stake. Lester really forced this to a new level with his comments the other day...more comments that never should have been made as he confirmed but put barriers around the behavior which of course made those barriers fair game for the media to explore. I wonder how much of this new stuff is coming from Theo guys that are trying to press the Sox to take what the Cubs are offering if only to close down one of the leak outlets and get these guys out of town ASAP.

Come to think of it what could be more comical than the Sox and Cubs wrestling over a deal. I wonder why WWF has not been fighting for the rights to televise.

Jon Lester is clearly one of the top 10 or so pitchers in the league but expectations would have had him solidly in the top 5 and that did not happen. While there has been a good deal of news about Sox minor leaguers taking a step backwards this season, clearly so did Lester. He did not take the reins from Beckett this year and that was clearly the expectation. Josh Beckett has been a very strong, solid and reliable pitcher for a very long time. As i have said before I believe Josh to be going through the kind of transitional period that all but the most powerful of power pitchers tend to go through eventually. Steroids probably forestalled this period for Clemens. Nolan Ryan was strong enough not to have gone down this transitional path, Randy Johnson comes to mind as does Tom Seaver. But Josh is more in the Greg Maddux mold to me and is mid stream making a transition to that sort of a pitcher. I think Josh is fighting more than accepting it and that has been and is something of an issue for him. A tough time not to have a really strong influence as a pitching coach. John Lackey never should have been brought here. I know this looks like Monday morning quarterbacking but just based on his pitching skills at the time and what the Sox had going for them at the time they would have been better served going down a different road. At that point Lester was clearly ready to emerge as a force on the mound for the Sox. They had Beckett still in his prime and Buckholtz as George Harrison to Beckett and Lester's Lennon and McCartney. They did not at that point need to spend monster money on the guy that appeared to be the best SP of that FA season which has been our complaint about many of the FA signings of recent memory. It is just too easy to open the wallet and go after the guy at the top of the list. They should have tried to bring in somebody younger, cheaper and more of a risk, somebody with big upside, great stuff and his career ahead of him because they had the stability at SP to do that. Lackey was not a power pitcher. He was a pitcher entirely dependent on control especially of his slider which is now the pitch that so often finds opposing bats. As for Lackey's clubhouse issues, I have said before that the things Lackey has gone through are things everyday people go through all the time. Lackey for whatever reason felt justified in bringing all of his dirty laundry through the clubhouse. Clearly that must have been the reason why management finally sent him away for awhile saying something like "look John just go take care of this mess. We will give you time to do it" (very generous and very rare I might add) but clearly the implication was that this had gone on bearing down on the team for a long time now and Sox management had had it and was doing this with the intent that he not come back continuing to drag his s*** through the clubhouse. If you allow this sort of stuff to just go on and on you eventually find that everybody feels entitled to drag their s*** through your workplace whatever it is and you also find out that most of us are carrying bucket loads of s*** and suddenly there it is all out there on your floor. You are not running a baseball team or any other kind of a workplace at that point. Instead you have a sponsored group therapy session that occasionally puts its problems aside to do a little work, occasionally!! Hate to lay it all at Lackey's doorstep but there it is. Unless I see evidence otherwise, for me Lackey is the player most responsible for dragging this clubhouse down. His performance on the mound went to hell and he turned out to be clubhouse poison to boot. Lackey shows all the signs of being a big overgrown child which truth be told is the case for many pro athletes as they never have had to grow up.

I can buy that and have said as much in some thread or another. But why does that mean Lester "had to". He did not have to make himself a pawn in management's Machiavellian spin machine just because they make the effort to manipulate him. If he becomes a lackey for management that is his decision. Geez I just realized we will never really be able to use the term "lackey" again in this town without saying much more than intended.

I think the whole thing is comical myself. The team fell apart right underneath their noses and their response was things like headphones and a day on the yacht. Now they are playing hard ball with Chicago who already had a deal ready for Theo. This has JH's junk yard dog LL written all over it. This franchise is such a mess. Chicago wants it to be cash, who knows what these screw ups are holding out for but at best they get a prospect, maybe two.

Oh come on....in the first place Lester did not have to say a God Damned thing. If there was one guy on that pitching staff that we have all been willing to cut some slack to other than Buckholtz who was injured a good bit of the time it has been Lester. This was the year Lester should have stepped up and taken the reins from Beckett and he sure as hell did not get that done. I don't give a damn why he did not get it done whether by association with the Sox Rat Pack or because he simply could not make the transition from a star/ace pitcher to the team's number 1 pitcher with all the responsibility that comes with it. But the fact is he did not get it done. So since further comment by any of these goons requires more media attention and more focus on all of this ******** I have the same advice for Mr Lester that I had for Mr Ortiz about a week ago....shut the F**k up.

All we can see and judge in truth is what happens on the field, and when what happens on the field gets as ugly as it got here, people start looking for answers. Hopefully we won't here much more of this, if only they had a better September BS because September was a result not an event in an absolute sense. September was simply the thing on the other side of the = in a very simple algebraic equation. Francona is not dodging the blame as much as people realize that he has always been one kind of manager and the team changed. Can't blame a zebra cause he can't change his stripes. In addition management hung him out to dry by not picking up his option before the season started. We seem to live in this fantasy world where we think the money is just a nice thing for these guys to have while they play the game they love. It is first about the money in the major leagues and we are kidding ourselves if we think otherwise and if we think the players did not take note of Tito being left as a lame duck. Worse if you do want to take Lester at his word for the Red Sox it is first about the money and then about their creature comforts. Lester said that they knew what kind of manager Tito was and pushed it to the limit or least a certain number of them decided to. That is just so f**ked up. Where does the game itself come in for these guys....somewhere after the team golf outings? This is also what will likely drive some trade activity because you can't expect a manager to come in and fix this with so many fat guaranteed contracts. This is a bad mix of guys and believing a manager will change that is just more wishful thinking.

Certainly indicative of a focus on self instead of selflessness and at the end of the day this was as far from a team as I have seen in a long time. While it would have gotten less publicity and we would not have cared about the chicken and drinking if they had been winning in truth the best "teams" win together and lose together. Unfortunately even when a team is winning if it is getting more and more polarized along the way it has no answers when things start to get a little rough. People are already established in their camps and that certainly appeared to e the case in the Sox clubhouse. There have been teams that had polarizing influences in the clubhouse in the past. The difference is that when the ump said play ball, they were all there for each other and that almost becomes a badge of honor for them. It is truly rare for a team to get so f**ked up that whatever polarization there is in the clubhouse becomes the norm even during games....very disappointing.

I never believed the beer and chicken were at the heart of the problem. They were indicative of a part of the problem. As I have said earlier, nobody would have cared about it had they been winning. Lester's comment about having done it all season, even when winning is meaningless. It is when you are losing that you need to rally as a team and as Tito said, they did not do it. At the point when the roof was caving in, slipping off into the clubhouse for a beer and some chicken should have stopped. Being out there on the field while you are getting your heads handed to you by the opposition is not any fun and when it is happening night after night it is time to forget your personal comfort while your teammates are on that field getting crushed. I know for myself if I had slipped off for some "fun" while guys wearing my uniform were trying to claw their way back in a game that they were losing among many lost games I would have known that to be wrong. I would have known that to have a negative impact on the entire team effort and I would not have done it and in fact never did. I have pointed to this particular incident before but for different purposes. In the last of the Baltimore games, the one that Beckett pitched in one of the worst examples of lack of team I have ever seen on a baseball field, Beckett and the rest of the team came back in from a brutal half inning. The Sox had given up either 1 or 2 runs in that half inning and had barely escaped further damage with Beckett doing what he had seldom done all season, pitching out of jam. They were at that point still in the game. The Sox went out there in their at bats and managed to record 3 outs in 6 pitches....6 pitches! Beckett had barely been able to sit down and probably whip his forehead and he was right back out there again. As you might expect the Orioles were elated probably having never seen something like that before. They broke the game open in the very next half inning and that was that. Tito has said several times that he told his team that the time had come to care for each other, to pull themselves out of the abyss and into the post season. What the hell do you people think he was talking about? Do you think he expected some hero to run out there in the last inning and hit a 6 run home run? No....he expected them to pull for each other...to play like a team. They never did it and went down like the miserable dogs that most of them were.

There is nothing that happened with Tito that is unusual for managers other than that players, front office personnel and everybody with a mouth or a pen have buried the guy. What percentage of managers remain in their job with a team to retirement, something under 1%? Why do you think they get tossed? Their players no longer respond to them, that is why. Tito had a style, expecting him to change it would have been like expecting a zebra to change his stripes. This team changed around Tito and then the front office left him a toothless lame duck manager for the whole year by not picking up his option. Does nobody here understand how difficult it is for a manager to stand up in front of bunch of overpaid, pampered ******* professional athletes when ownership makes it so obvious that he does not have their support? He has made no bones about having lost the ability to "get to his players". I would make no bones about his in game moves as I have never thought him a situational manager. He handled the nut case Boston media very well and he kept much of the screwed up BS players often have to deal with in this town away from them. Those are the qualities he came with and the qualities he left with. Oh by the way the team managed two WS wins while he was here. We knew the inmates were running the asylum before Lester said a word and frankly given the way dirt that never ever should have made its way out of Sox Admin or HR has been slung in Tito's direction continuing to repeat what we already knew makes little sense. Make no mistake that is where that dirt came from and if it can be linked there positively Tito probably has a breach of confidentiality case he can hang around their necks if he were to choose to pursue it. That would surely be fitting. For Gods sake, the ever spinning Sox front office won't let it go. Is everybody going to turn out to be a of boot licking lackey for them? The only thing I appreciated from the Lester interview is that he himself said he was not the stopper that he expected himself to be as the number 1 pitcher for the team which is exactly what I have been saying about his 2011 performance. I don't care how many pitching matrices say he was an ace. Fine you want to call him an ace call him an ace. However you can't be a team number 1 unless you are a stopper...period!

Lester may have been an ace in 2011, by any standard if he was Beckett was. Did either one of them fit the role of stopper? No! and your number 1 must be a stopper. We did not have a number 1 pitcher in 2011 and if we don't do something about it we won't have one in 2012 or maybe 2013 either.

So John, you guys were doing this stuff all season. So you don't think this stuff has an additive effect that eventually rips you down? He claimed in the piece that he was disappointed in his inability to be the stopper for this team. As I posted in the other thread, so are we, and in fact that is the one thing that changed between 2010 and 2011 for Lester. It was expected of him in 2011. I think it very likely that he needs the cover provided by a number 1 pitcher so that he can pitch well. He may someday be a number 1 but it is not today and I doubt it is anytime in 2012. I think Jon is another guy that would do well to just say nothing. If you can't say this crap is complete fabrication then don't say anything because saying it was exaggerated in the face of the worst collapse in baseball history rings pretty hollow. Throwing Tito under the bus just makes him sound like JH an LL's boy never mind if he is Beckett's boy. Lester in my view is already being cut a fair amount of slack in all this. All he can do is hurt himself. Zip it Jon.

I see your point here with one, maybe two exceptions. We still do not have a number one starter. We have three number 2 starters at best or maybe 2 number 2's, one 2a and then Lackey. The other element to this that I think has to be accepted as fact is that there is no chance that we will keep both Ells and Crawford and I am not even sure Ells would even want to stay here past his current contract. Given the lack of a number 1 SP and the fact the Ells trade value has got to be at an all time high (the receiving team still getting the benefit of his current contract numbers to 2014) I have to think they at least have to shop around and see how much they could bring to this team by trading Ells this year. It would be hard to believe that we could end the year all agreeing that at the very least the catalyst that started the fall was the demise of the starting pitching and then do nothing more than dump Lackey (presuming that can be done any way at all) and Wake and look for a 3 or a 5. I don't think trading Beckett gets much done for us though. The most disconcerting issue for me is not Lackey either in the clubhouse poison that he is nor his lack of performance on the mound. The most disconcerting thing to me is that we fully expected Lester to pass Beckett in 2011 and that did not happen. So, do we go into 2012 hoping that a number 1 starter emerges from those three guys and what do we do about needing to eat the innings that Wake and hopefully Lackey will leave behind? Bard or Aceves fills Wakes role and becomes your number 5. The more I say it the more I believe it, I cannot see Lackey coming out in a Boston uniform in 2012 both because of the clubhouse poison and poor performer he has become and because the Sox are not going to let the 100 year Anniversary get sabotaged in that way. I will accept all the other nonsense if there is a chance that Lackey can return to some sort of form but the Sox will have to see evidence of that much sooner than Lackey is going to provide it. Did Lackey look like the kind of guy that would make an effort to start resurrecting himself post haste? I think Beckett will do well to duplicate his 2011 performance in 2012. Does that look like a number 1 performance? Beckett needs to develop another reliable out pitch and even with that as he ages his skills are going to diminish. I expect Lester to come around but sufficiently to be a true stopper which is what you need from your number 1, very questionable and it is not Buckholtz as much as I like him. Further to the point if you are still going to try to get to the post season even in 2013 instead of 2012 without a SP that can take the pressure off the other three, good luck. Our starting pitching would have been ripped to shreds certainly in this ALCS if not in the Divisional Series. I would love to think that Lester is the guy but we can't have our cake and eat it too. We can't separate him from the "lost it from the neck up" group of starting pitchers and then claim that his 2011 was the result of that whole mess. Reports we are getting now are that Lester worked hard in 2011 which means he did not step up. This was the year everybody expected Lester to pull into the number 1 role and that is in fact the only thing that changed. This was the year it was expected of him. Maybe Lester will always need the protection of not being the number 1 guy to pitch well. That is entirely possible, and entirely logical and makes more sense than anything else suggested about Lester. As for the money we have tied up in Beckett, Lester and Buckholtz that is going to look pretty reasonable the way money is being tossed around for starting pitching these days. Obviously the Lackey contract is the ugly duckling. So there are two points about our starting pitching that just can't go ignored. Since when have we or anybody else won a WS without a legitimate horse leading the pitching staff? How can we legitimately think that the problems that we have in starting pitching are down there in the number 3 or 5/6 slot and proceed on that basis? Then recognizing that we cannot expect to keep both Ells and Crawford and Ells trade value may be one thing we need to use.

I wonder what formula the Rangers use to bring their young pitchers along. While I doubt it would be the complete rejection of pitch count that Ryan uses at the highest level I would also be willing to bet that it is some form of "the best way to get adapted to pitching deep into games is to pitch deep into games". Whatever it is, some form of what the Rangers do would sure seem to be worth at least looking into. While the Rangers are a hitting machine it is hard not to admire their pitching.

The boys over at Yawkey Way are very worried about this whole 100th Anniversary thing being sabotaged. Although I would have to say they are their own worst enemies in that regard.

When I wrote "Kind of hard to understand" I guess I should have written "Kind of hard to understand why the Sox can't get this one right either". Boston is only one of the most respected medical centers on the planet and this is an issue that has survived several ownership groups and different medical teams.

Well there is some language in the Basic Agreement for what constitutes an injury so I don't think they can get away with that one.

I am not sure what happened with the med team especially with regard to Buckholtz. You would think that scheduling an MRI would be so logical given the asset that Buckholtz represents. It takes me back to Ells and the stir that was created because he sought outside opinions and ended up rehabing away from Yawkey Way. Frankly there has been a level of controversy about the Sox med teams going all the way back to Dr. Pappas when Tom Yawkey and then Mrs. Yawkey owned the team. Kind of hard to understand. As for the strength and conditioning guys, there is a big difference between something like pro football and pro baseball. In pro football, there is much more inclusion of conditioning standards in player contracts and the physical risk to players makes them more inclined to a regimen provided by the team. In baseball the strength and conditioning guys are more there to assist the players conduct their own workouts. In baseball the team can prescribe a rehab program for a player and the team can hold the player to that prescribed program. That said, if the player wants to rehab outside of what the team has prescribed he still can do it and teams tend to be fairly lenient in that regard not wanting to alienate the player. The team cannot prescribe conditioning programs in the sense that they cannot include those standards in the player's contract as it would violate the terms of the Basic Agreement and if they can't do that they really cannot do anything. It is truly up to the player. Maybe if the Sox made better help available to the players they would be more prone to take advantage of them but it is up to the player as things stand today. I will be very interested to see what the owners do in this next CBA negotiation. If they just roll over then that will speak volumes with regard to their state of happiness or unhappiness. Ownership has regularly commented that the current agreement really does not work and that they capitulated too soon when they had a chance to make for a more even handed agreement. At the same time at least to date I have not seen them with the intestinal fortitude to make a run at meaningful change.

I was not happy with it at the time because of the money and the similarity to Ells as a player. However if we can trade Ells and bring in more pitching by doing so I would be happy with that. Crawford will never be worth the money he is being paid but he will play better. I didn't like the fact that it literally forces the Sox to say goodbye to Ells and I will be unhappy if they just let Ells contract run out. This is likely the very best year to trade him and if I were the Sox I would be looking to do that.

Are folks thinking that the Giants would be agreeable to moving Cain or would they really try to extract some real pain for Cain and if they get it fine, if not, no deal?

I think 2012 is the last year of Cain's contract. I could be wrong though.

I really don't fault the media or the fans here. Virtually all of the stories are based on actual quotes from named sources that keep tripping over their yo-yo's and would be better served just keeping quiet. The one really ugly ugly story was the one with all that Tito dirt in it that the author claims is coming from a legitimate all-be-it unnamed source within the franchise. Given the stuff that can be attributed to a named source I am inclined to think the leak is from within the Sox organization. In fact I would bet money on it because much of that stuff would be stuff easy to access from a company HR or Admin department but hard to get to otherwise. Yet I have the hardest time believing that some underling just leaked it on his or her own initiative. Sox brass cannot resist the temptation to spin and I understand why they believe in their branding and marketing initiatives and their insistence on spinning everything. However this would have been a good period to just depart from that for once because things were ugly enough as they were. But no, not gonna' do that. Tough to blame the media for doing their jobs. During this whole mess the Sox PR machine and Brass have been both proactive in its interaction with the press and at other times have taken the media's bait in media insistence that so and so MUST make a comment. No....so and so does not have to say a damned thing and probably should not have. The hole they keep digging just gets deeper and deeper and the stink gets worse. Honestly, while some of this has been fun to watch, if it were me advising them, I would have gone to formal press releases completely under my control long ago. If that meant that the Sox could not spin something because spinning often takes a more subtle hand than you can exercise in a formal release then so be it. Let it go. All of these press conferences have been ******** from day 1, right from the day when they insisted on carting Tito out there with Theo, then Tito by himself followed by Tom, Larry and Theo, all the way up to the JH interview. Now the horse is way out of the barn but even at this point if I were their media consultant advising them I would go to formal press releases exclusively for the present leaving the media and the rest of us that might find this somewhat humorous on some level (other than the Tito thing which I think is despicable) to just go suck eggs.

Interesting, I have liked the idea of Volquez since one of our other esteemed members offered him on a list of potential pitchers. I thought he was the most interesting for the Sox from that list so nice pick there I think. I think your analysis of the Ells/Crawford situation is interesting because isn't that the thing that just leaped off the page as soon as that deal was done. Here you have Ells coming into his lasts years under contract and what the heck are you going to do with him when you are paying Crawford $20M. I agree that with some help Crawford should come back. If Ells had flopped and Crawford had played reasonably well I guess you could make the case that Ells would not have the trade value he is going to have. I have never been sure how long Ells wants to play here. Maybe Ells is gone when he gets his chance anyway. I had put Ells on my available for trade list because his value is so high now, I am unconvinced regarding how long he really wants to play here anyway and because we have two guys in Ells and Crawford that are sort of the same player. I agree about 1/10 for Ortiz and would hope 3/36 gets it done with Paps. I am anxious to get outta' the dedicated DH thing but if Youk is gone my concern for resting him leaves town with him. Based on what happened this year I do think we must plan on more to much more rest through the season for AGons. Keeping Youk allowed for more of a rotation at 1st, DH and 3rd. I think AGons needs enough rest through the season that we have to have a decent option at 1st base so that we don't lose too much production. AGons probably needs to play 1st most of the time, DH some of the time and rest some of the time. Of course somebody will probably have to hypnotize somebody to take Lackey. I have argued that the "change of scenery" is the argument to make and if he stands a better chance of pitching to decent numbers in that park in SD then all the better. That is a nice effort man and the result would be an interesting team worth watching. If we ever got lucky enough to get to the series in 2012 Ortiz would leave a pretty big hole in that lineup and we have the same problem again in inter-league games, another reason I am anxious to get outta' the dedicated DH thing. That looks like an "interesting to watch while trying to set up for 2013" lineup to me....certainly a lineup that can compete. I am tired of these "gonna make the ALCS by throwing their gloves out onto the field" lineups anyway. The Lackey thing is iffy and generally moving around that much pitching into and out of the organization can be tough but the resulting team looks pretty good. Again nice job.

A captain (without C on uniform) can be OK if you have the right guy on your team for that job. But if you don't have the right kind of guy then it becomes a negative not a positive. It has to be one of your everyday players that starts for one thing so that narrows the field. Of those guys, Peddey is too single minded and best used as a leader by example. Youk is too caustic and I don't think he would want it. AGons is simply not a guy I want in the kind of role we think of for captain. Ells is a bit distant. Both Salty and Larvarnway have enough to do just handling their catching assignments. It sure as hell is not Crawford until he gets his own house in order. Bay might be fine if he came back in part because he would be coming back although he would not be a captain in the Jeter mold. Not sure if Ortiz will be here and he seems to have entered a period in his career where his focus is on how he finishes out his career. Remember these guys are not drill sergeants. There is just so much they can do at least the way things are in major league baseball. There are a certain number of players that the manager cannot get in the faces of, never mind a captain. That is why there is so much focus on personal responsibility because there is very little you can do with a player under contract particularly if he has a long term contract at big money. it is simply to easy for him to tell you to go s*** in your hat. The guys that can pull off effective captaincy in baseball are few and far between. I can't for the life of me remember if he was one but Dewey Evans would have been a good Red Sox captain for example. Nomar comes to mind MaYBE, maybe Remy for a short period., Barrett maybe for a short period.....Yaz. At the same time that I think Evans would have been a good one I don't think I would have wanted Freddy Lynn in that role. You can't be too much any which way. You can't be milk toast and you can't be fire either.

They are probably already doing this to some extent but given what happened here I would think he would want to parse the team a few different ways to see what he really has. As part of that process especially after this season I would meet with the players that were under contract to try to gain some understanding for their expectations for the coming year. Once I had all of the data if it were me (as if I know what the hell I am doing) the first order of business would be making offers to the top free agents from my team. These are the guys going into the FA market from my team that I have decided to make a real serious effort to keep. You want to get an offer out to them so that you get a dialogue going ASAP and get counter offers back ASAP so you can make some judgements about how far apart you are. Paps is likely in this group.