jung

I thought Bay's numbers were pretty good while he was here when compared to his career numbers. His plate numbers have fallen off since he left here but still not bad. Where would you suggest he would play back here....right field? Thankfully he is under contract so it would be a matter of trading for him or paying money for him. One lingering concern I have over the 2011 mess is the number of guys as free agents that might be brought here that extract a penalty for how ugly things got and the risk that it happens again. I would guess that it will be hard to extract any home town discount from guys like Paps for the same reason. Geez we might end up absorbing the opposite of home town discount, the home town surcharge.

I actually agree with that. I guess I just said it a little different way. I don't know who could captain this team right now either and I suspect they would be better off without a named captain. Heck I really and truly prefer not to see named captains in baseball and even if you have them I think that C thing on the Jersey is ridiculous. This isn't hockey or football.

Not only is Jeter a professional, he is their captain. Have you seen the way Jeter glares at guys on the field when they screw up and how they respond? What is Tek going to do, glare out from the dugout? I still don't much believe in captains in baseball but if you are going to have one and depend on him to lead he has to be playing at a high enough level to at least be on the field. Also I am not suggesting that showing your displeasure with a teammate on the field of play works for everybody. However the Yanks clearly respect Jeter and follow his lead. The true leader of the Sox has to be Peddey but he is not team captain and he does not approach leadership the same way Jeter does anyway.

Ya' know what if JH did not say anything then he should have literally said nothing cause he is cutting Crawford's checks at this point which does take me back to where I started. JH should have just avoided the topic of the signing all together because it does not make a rats ass worth of difference whether he was "personally opposed" or not. He is the principle owner of the team. Had he said "my position at the time as principle owner was......etc", that would have been a worthwhile comment. I would have advised against that as well but at least he would not have just added another layer of meaningless gobbledygook. JH being "personally opposed" is as meaningless as my being personally opposed. In fact I find it interesting that he said that "as any member of Sox upper management knows I was personally opposed" because had he made that known at the time to a subordinate, that subordinate whether LL or Tom or Theo for that matter would have been forced to ask JH if the organization was to infer anything from JH's personal opposition to his position as principle owner. if not what would the purpose have been in making his personal opinion known even within the organization. What utter BS.

Yea I know. JH should not have touched that with a 10' pole. He contradicted LL and took a swipe at Crawford that I don't even think he intended to take. I think JH was just trying to say that he was opposed but that his opposition was not based on performance or the player's potential or anything other than what has been said elsewhere,. At the time the deal was under consideration, Sox had plenty of left handed bats going into the season and a speedy left handed bat to boot, Ells. The absolute only shot JH had of pulling off making a comment like he made would have been to preface it or complete it with something positive like "I know Crawford will be a great player for us". Still and all there are no throw away lines from an owner. He just should have left this particular topic alone as I don't see what there was to be gained other than an attempt at taking a swipe at Theo, hanging full responsibility for the Crawford deal around his neck. Once again though why should an attempt to hang this on Theo be so important that you contradict your President and you throw a player you are committed to paying $20M a year under the bus. "A spinning we must go....A spinning we must go....High ho the Dare-io....A spinning we must go" God these guys just don't stop.

Once Crawford's confidence was gone I don't think there was much you could tell from his performance from that point on. Since his plate performance fell apart before anything else did I suspect that if they can fix that his confidence will return and everything else will improve with that.

Well the Sox got all balled up about his performance at the plate and at least offensively if you can't get on base you can't really use your speed. I think if they can fix his plate appearances and get him to stop being such a sucker for pitches that start at the tops of his knees moving down and away from him, he might actually get ahead in a count for change. That should actually be an easier problem to fix than if he was swinging at rising fastballs. I have a feeling that if they can correct his plate appearances and get him back on track there, he will be able to have more of a positive impact on the base paths his confidence will come back and his fielding will improve. DM is a fine hitting coach and a very good baseball man. Sorta' surprised that nothing seemed to change through the season with Crawford. I could be wrong but I think his stance was about the same beginning to end of the season. I could not tell for sure but I thought he did move up in the batters box later in the season. I guess the stance he has must be close to what he has had but something must have changed somewhere as he could not be as successful as he was being such a sucker for the aforementioned low ball moving away. So , he must not be seeing that pitch the way he used to see it. Can't tell for sure what they did but nothing worked. We have had instances in baseball where a guy's vision just starts to decline and nobody had the guts to tell him to go get his eyes checked (thems' fightin' words). Sure enough the guy eventually does go, finds his vision is failing him and gets corrected enough to get back on track again. That would be a hell of a kick in the teeth. Sure wish it could be that simple though. Maybe he can take a shorter off season, get onto working with someone he has had success with before assuming somebody like that is available and come back in the spring in much better shape. Maybe the cure for Crawford is just not something DM has in his bag of tricks.

On one level you have JH and LL contradicting each other about the Crawford deal and that does bother me. While those two guys always want to spin something, lately they just can't seem to get their stories straight. Unfortunately while I think JH was really only trying to talk about the nature of the transaction to some he came off as criticizing Crawford. I really don't think he was trying to isolate himself from a deal for a player that had not performed to this point. JH talked about the same things many have discussed, the fact that Crawford is yet another left handed bat on a team that had plenty of left handed bats. The argument that Ells is the same player is really something of an extension of that argument. While I don't think JH should have gone down this particular road at all, if he had prefaced his comments or concluded them with something like "I believe Carl will be a great ballplayer for this team" then that would have gone a long way to mitigate concerns people have that he was publicly criticizing Carl and his comments would have been taken in the spirit that they were given. It is of course true that the Sox were overloaded with left handed bats and further to the point, Ells is a very very similar player to Carl. The only argument that has ever been offered to counter the comment that the Sox were already loaded with left handed bats and had Ells was that Ells may not have recovered fully from his injuries and the oft used, "didn't want the Yanks to get Crawford". Honestly that never seemed like much of an argument to me when you bounce it off of the dollars spent on Crawford. If you were concerned about whether Ells came back fully or not then maybe you buy some protection against that but committing $142M over 7 years and then only offering that Carl provides insurance against Ells no longer being able to play as expected is pretty thin and Cashman has already been crowing about having played the Sox like a violin. My real worry is that Carl was yet another player that spit out great numbers against all of these player evaluation matrices and any other consideration be damned. The player is there and has great numbers so we are taking him seems all to often to be at the heart of the argument for many of these deals.

Just for clarification Sabathia is a bad example. CC has weighed in at about 309 for a long time now. After off season knee surgery this year he came into camp at 290, 20 lbs lighter but by the end of the year it looked like he had put the 20 back on again and was up around 309 again. He has been at around 309 for so long now that I am not sure he will ever get lighter than that for any significant length of time. At least it will take a significant effort to do so and I don't think he wants to go there. All by way of saying that for better or worse he has been pitching at about 309 for very long time now.

I guess the quote from JH that people are having trouble with is the one that appears to directly contradict the one made by LL. JH said about the Crawford signing "Anybody in upper management at the Red Sox will tell you that I was personally opposed". Trumping LL who had just commented earlier that upper management had all been on board with the Crawford signing. I was in the car when they played the LL tape so please do correct me if I have his end of it wrong. JH's quote is posted at WEEI. Certainly the radio guys were trying to make the case that this was the discrepancy.

I agree that all of that stuff about chicken and drinkin' would have all fallen off the radar screen if the team had been winning. Nobody would have cared. It has gotten the attention that it has gotten because they were losing and most of them had grown out of condition to boot. The chicken and drinking and the video games became indicative of the lack of effort to turn it around even with a post season appearance still within their grasp. I should point out that even one post season game can be worth a good deal of money to a franchise. Writing this off as a bunch of players slumping is a mistake. They did not slump. They stopped playing. I am going to use an example from plate appearances because as regards the pitchers, their mechanics really did fall apart which is indicative of poor conditioning and lack of focus. But looking at and seeing a pitcher's mechanics suffering can be tough to point out with the exception maybe of Lackey who's slider becomes very hittable when he drops down especially now, weeks later. If you guys remember from watching the games, issues at the plate were not gradual in coming at all. One day they were relatively patient as they had been for most of the year and within no more than a couple of games, they were swinging at everything. They were swinging at balls two feet off the plate, batter after batter, one after the other after the other! With few exceptions like Peddey, Ells and Scuts, they could not get back to the dugout fast enough from a plate appearance. It got to the point where I began to wonder when they would ask the ump to just give them two strikes to begin with to save them the trouble. When that sort of change is so widespread and happens as suddenly as it happened here, that is not slumping. They gave up. They stopped playing. If they could have still been paid I suspect some of them would not have shown up at all. As I recall it became really obvious right around the doubleheader that has been pointed out as being the straw that broke the camel's back for the players. They had their big clubhouse explosion about having to play 14 road games out of 17 and the doubleheader and while they won the doubleheader, that was the end of the season for this team. We or at least I had no information about the clubhouse blow up at that time and I don't think there was any news about it when it happened. But I do remember the time period in question well and I do remember thinking that I could not understand how or why so many of them had become so impatient at the plate all at once. Right from that period to the end of the season the only sprinting I saw was from the on deck circle to the plate and back to the dugout. The low point was one of the games at the end against Baltimore, I believe, when they had a 6 pitch half inning against....6 pitches for 3 outs in a game that they were still in at the time. That is until that inning! Baltimore came to the plate in their half and effectively ended the game.

If it was just his pitching in an absolute sense, I could buy this argument regarding Lackey. However you can trace the beginnings of the clubhouse starting to unravel to his arrival here and in the last few weeks many of the cannons have been pointed at him in that regard. So based on hoping he can turn his pitching around do you want him around to poison your players even further? That is sort of the straw that breaks the camel's back for me. We are all agreeing that he had a negative impact on players as well established as Beckett. Heck if he can drag Beckett down with him what chance does some young guy (not to be confused with the Korean pitcher of the same name) have from escaping that environment unscathed. As for Lackey's personal problems, I have as much sympathy for him in that regard as I have for AGons relative to the schedule. These guys want to come to the big market teams, they want the money that goes with it but they don't want the pressure that goes with it as if you could separate the two. I don't see Lackey coming forward suggesting that he has not lived up to the expectations suggested by the size of his contract and is willing to renegotiate it down. He still expects the Sox to uphold their end of the bargain and as long as that is the case I expect him to uphold his end of the bargain. Every problem he has had is a problem confronted by everyday people all of the time. The only difference is that they don't have $14M a year to help them through the issues. In fact that reminds me, they gave John time off right in the middle of the season in an effort to give him a chance to work through this stuff, something I have frankly never seen before beyond a single day here and there every once and awhile.

Before I get into the quote above relative to the point I was trying to make earlier, while the home game sell out string is a major part of the Sox marketing effort, it is not as clean as you would expect. When I think of a home game sell out string I think of tickets sold to fans intending to attend and that is not really what you have in that Red Sox home game sell out string. The Sox will by the way do anything to maintain it even in its current somewhat misleading state. As for the free agency thing, these deals do not have to go bust to be very disruptive to baseball generally and to teams specifically. In part the reason Selig has stuck his big toe into Chicago's negotiation with Theo is that regardless of the fact that Theo is not a player, the rate at which salaries for stars of all sorts has escalated in baseball has spun out of control. I was using GM's and FA signings generally in the second to last post I made and then since the Yanks were being put forward by one of our more distinguished members as something of a success story in that regard I asked about ARods contract which by the time matures is likely to look pretty ugly. But I am going to go back to the Sox and stay in one club in this post but for argument's sake suggest that we consider the Lackey and Crawford signings as if those two players were performing more like ARod is performing in New York. Further to the point I am going to suggest that ARod's performance is marginally subpar to expectations. Hopefully we would agree that at best that is how we would view ARod's performance. I am trying to give him the benefit of the doubt to avoid quibbling about marginal issues. So if we overlay that performance onto Lackey and Crawford instead of viewing them as wildly underperforming, those contracts are still a big problem and reflect how broken the free agent system is in baseball. The Sox signed Lackey as a 2009-2010 FA signing purported to be the best pitcher in that FA season. They signed him for approximately $14.5M per year. Crawford came to the Sox as part of the 2010-2011 FA season for approximately $20M per year. Certainly he was near or at the top for outfielders in that FA season. In addition, SP's going into the FA market generally are more highly valued than everyday players. However in that short space of time, the going rate for the best at his position (SP) which had been $14-15M and arguably given to the the player you would have expected to extract the most money from that FA season escalated to $20M for an everyday player. These are two players being valued by the same FO team. That is an outrageous level of escalation in that short a space of time. Free Agency in baseball is broken because it is supported by the current CBA which provided that Basketball cleans up hits house is the most lopsided, poorly constructed CBA in professional team sports. I do by the way think Basketball Ownership will go to the mats over this one as they literally do not have a choice. It has gotten so out of control in Baseball that we are turning guys into fully vested, completely set for life millionaires several times over in the space of one contract with no ability to exert any pressure to perform on those players with contract in hand. Nobody can control their conditioning, there are no consequences for poor performance other than missing additional revenue that the player could generate for himself by meeting certain milestones and there is no penalty for poor behavior other than if a direct line could be drawn from poor behavior to a financial impact on the team and good luck going into court in an effort to fight that battle. A team might have a good chance to win if the guy turned out to be an ax murderer but short of that you would be talking about a very difficult case to prove in civil court. Even that one would be tough to win unless the guy wore his baseball uniform to perform his ax murders and targeted the team's fans. To a man, Baseball ownership wishes they had not agreed to the terms of the current CBA, realized it was a giant mistake, realizes they panicked and were badly outmaneuvered and will very likely be keen to institute a means to eliminate guaranteed contracts giving them the means to exert more control over players. However in truth MLB owners have rarely been tough negotiators and their ability to pull that off is surely in question.

Really...and ARod at $32M per year as he is aging? That contract runs out as ARod turns 42 years old. As good as he is, it will be hard to justify that kind of money into the early exits that the Yanks have already suffered up to this point. As father time erodes his skills, he will be less and less capable of carrying the Yankees into the post season and his post season record is pretty shabby up to this point.

I have seen a few of these discussions comparing the 3-0 Yanks ALCS lead before losing 4 straight to the Sox and the September crash of the 2011 Sox. There is no comparing these two events as they are not even in the same categories of event. While the Yanks did in some sense succumb to growing pressure as the Sox came on in that series in truth that series was as much about the Sox building and growing in confidence one game at a time almost like the sand running out of the Yanks hourglass into the Sox hourglass. Saying the Yanks choked diminishes what the Sox were able to achieve over that seven game stretch. The 2011 Sox did not choke at all. You might make an argument that Crawford had a season long choke but that is it. With the exception of a few players the 2011 Sox simply stopped playing. For the most part it was a team made up out of too many players that had already made their money or had long term big money contracts and low scores for personal integrity. What we saw from the 2011 Sox was as close to a work stoppage as you are ever going to see from a professional baseball team. It is the worst indictment of the current MLB CBA and the damage it can effect via a major market team with the resources of the Red Sox making free agent signings for the most part reliant on pure numbers based player evaluation matrices without ever taking the time to take a peak under the player's hood to see if there is an actual heart beating there. The current CBA has always been a ticking time bomb and this was the year it finally went off. The point being that there is no comparison between the aforementioned Yanks-Sox Championship Series and the 2011 Sox demise. The two things are not even the same type of event.

The way free agency is structured in baseball is inherently flawed. "The only way to win is to not play". I would hazard that while the FA signings tend to dominate these discussions because they are of the highest profile, if you took all of the GM's and reviewed all the FA signing records, they would all suck to some degree with those GM's able to offer the largest contracts over the longest terms having the worst records (that by itself should show you how flawed free agency is in baseball). The new Sox GM is coming from within because JH and LL want to exert even more control than what they had over Theo. In fact Theo is as much leaving now because there is no career path for him in Boston and it is time for him to have more authority than Boston is willing to give him. I suspect Boston was down to its last year with Theo because JH and LL were beginning to wonder when Theo was going to start to get happy feet.

One of things that is most commendable about Scuts 2011 especially down the stretch is that you had veterans that carried more weight on that team clearly doing nothing more than filling out the uniforms (in more ways than one) and usually when vets decide to make a point by mailing it in, they make it hard for the other guys not to follow suit. "I don't want to see you birds playing solid ball out there while I'm doggin' it becomes the mantra as stupid as that sounds. The pressure is not often verbal but it is there. Guys like Peddey are immune from that nonsense because he never runs at idle and Ells was working on an MVP season. But Scuts did not have the clubhouse cred to avoid coming under scrutiny and he still played with intensity and focus and put up numbers.

This is why I keep insisting that the Sox have to find a way to move Lackey. You cannot start the year with both Lackey and Beckett still in Red Sox and we would get good value for Beckett but not full value. We keep looking at the dollars we would have to eat on Lackey's contract in an absolute sense and arguing that it is too much money to eat. Well if you have to move one or the other add to the equation the negative impact from not getting full value for Beckett. In my view even if the Sox had to eat all but $5M per year, getting Lackey out of here would be worth it. Just look at when the swamp gas really starting oozing out of the Sox clubhouse and trace it back to who came when. The clubhouse started going downhill gradually from the day Lackey got here. He is clubhouse poison and not much of a pitcher to boot. However I keep saying that he could be moved if we would eat most of his contract based on the give the guy a change of scenery pitch because somebody will take a shot at him for a measly $5M or even $7M. Almost nobody agrees with me and I can see why so I keep penciling Lackey in for 2012 as one of the few guys you can bank on staying but having him here just makes everything else you try to do for SP so much more difficult to try to put together. How long are we going to keep letting this guy screw s*** up? I don't mean to imply that I am not disappointed in Beckett but for crying out loud lets face facts. We would rather have Beckett than get short changed on him in a trade so that we could do what? Keep Lackey because we don't want to eat his contract!! Come on. I will say this...this is not going to smooth over. This is the worst collapse in baseball history and while nobody in the media is going to touch this with a ten foot pole what really happened here was as close to a work stoppage as you are ever going to see from players on a baseball team. They stopped playing! If they could have completely stopped playing and still have been paid, they would have. Not suiting up or not passing a drug test are really the only things that will prevent a pro baseball player from getting what his contract says he will get. Why did they stop?..... In protest over 14 out of 17 games being away with a doubleheader being the straw that broke the camel's back. Poor babies. So this will not smooth over and there will be guys not here next year but please lets not toss Beckett because of the money we are going to eat on Lackey.

No chance of seeing Prince come here to DH. There is more chance of moving AGons to get Prince if you really want him and even that chance is slim to none. Besides, Youk can no longer be depended upon to play 3rd for an entire season yet you don't want to lose his bat. So if the Sox played their cards perfectly Youk would play some 3rd, but not so much that he runs inordinate risk of going down with an injury. If they are still here the 2012 plan will have to include more rest for Youk and for AGons least we are left to endure another second half slump from AGons with associated comments about injury and the schedule and ultimately whether God knows what a 6-4-3 is.

The ever brand conscience Sox top brass will not be happy seeing what happens when and if Beckett is introduced on 2012 opening day right in the middle of their big 100 years PR blitz. He is going to be booed out of the park as will Lackey if he is still around as will a few other of these clowns. That is an issue that top brass will not take lightly as trivial as it might seem to you or I. I don't see rotating Sox manning an fan ass kissing kiosk set up in Kenmore Square but don't expect Henry et al to just sit back and let the boos rain down.

As for Theo having a career path here in Boston, I have to admit that I had that wrong. I thought there was a chance that if the Sox had their way ultimately Theo would move into LL's job with LL possibly becoming CEO of the ever growing Fenway sports enterprises. In part I thought that might happen because the organization would at some point see less need for LL to fulfill his current responsibilities which as President basically amount to being Henry's junk yard dog. When they first bought the team given Henry's way of doing things, I could easily see why it made sense for him to have a guy like LL around. There was the chance that they would build a new park here for example. Getting something like that done in Boston can be a nasty business and had it happened it would have been a perfect opportunity for LL to clamp his jaws onto something or somebody. I am sure there has been ample opportunity just in the projects the team has taken on in recent years. Seeing how the organization has handled itself particularly in the last few days I no longer thing Henry will want anything but a junk yard dog in the President's position and that is not what Theo would have in mind as a part of his career path. If Henry grows weary of LL at some point he will get himself a new junk yard dog but we won't see somebody like Theo in the President's position. So Theo would not have had anyplace to go within this organization in my view even if LL got himself tossed. I still think this is a convenient separation period for both sides given the circumstances. The only difference in my earlier post on this topic was thinking Theo did have an eventual career path here in Boston.

and I am simply suggesting that given the amount of turmoil and transition this team is in you can't tell me who will be playing where or at all for this team. Excepting Peddey, Crawford, AGons, Buckholtz and possibly Lackey every other guy on that team is up for grabs. So there you have it. You have 5 guys that you can say with a high degree of certainty will be there next year. One of them is a complete bum probably more responsible for the complete collapse of the clubhouse than any other single player. One of them underperformed in spectacular fashion. One of them slide right off into the abyss in the second half, was a complete no show against the teams they needed to beat and says God made them do it. No wait, the schedule make them do it. No wait, injuries made them do it. I am simply suggesting that we will need to get something of an idea for what this team is going to be before just giving them 90 and may I add who would suggest that 90 gets them anywhere anyway. I suspect it might guarantee them a spot in the expanded "runner up tournament" if MLB decides to go down that road but I would not suggest it will get them any more than that. Right now you can't tell me whether Youk will be at 3rd or part time 1st/DH or there at all. You can't tell me if Ells will be in Center or Right or there at all. You can't tell me if Ortiz will be there at all and we have not even gotten to the starting pitching yet which is the biggest problem on this team! There is not a single other team in the Major's with more uncertainty with regard to its roster and rightfully so. Unfortunately the way the CBA allows players under contract to control their own destiny teams are left with very little that they can do and frankly we may see many players gone because there is simply no way to keep many of them together with any hope of having a successful team. While I am not suggesting that all of the remaining players except the five above would be flipped in one year I am suggesting that every other player can be considered a strong candidate for trade or release in some combination and that much roster uncertainty is very rare. I am neither optimistic nor pessimistic until we get some idea for what JH and LL have in mind for the roster. Frankly those two will have much more to say about the make up of this team regardless of who they bring in for a GM because they are not going to give that guy any more leash than Theo had. If anything they will give him less leash. I suspect they are very unhappy about the fact that this is as you have correctly called it a "very unlikeable team" and I suspect that is going to drive their thinking as much as wins and losses. It is entirely possible that they will try to use 2012 as a real fix it year and point to 2013. Its not likely but entirely possible. Ya' want to scratch them in for 90 right now without knowing if they are going to go down that road?

That quote was or was not in the post in question? Followed by a bit of recalcitrance over considering "blowing it up" sounded like using the 90 wins as a possible harbinger to me. I can only read what's there dude.

To be honest I am sorta' getting tired of hearing that they won 90 games in spite of everything as some harbinger of 2012. Here we go again.....all they have to do is throw their gloves out on the field and they win 90. I swear to God we are as F***ed up as they are. It is OK to consider 90 wins in 2011 some sort of achievement if that is what you want to do but using it as some sort of criteria for trying to gauge 2012 is senseless, not when the organization is in such transition.

I am officially more embarrassed by this team from top to bottom than any Sox team in the 51 years I have been following them. I can only hope that the holy of holy's, the stupid damn string of home sell outs finally comes crashing down around their ears next year. Frankly since so many of those seats go to the ticket sales companies, in big blocks early there is every chance that it will finally come to a merciful end next year. Hopefully that might wake somebody up over there. Although I am sure they will do anything to preserve it including cut some sort of inside deal to cover any outstanding seats. That sell out string is one of the cornerstone's of their branding/marketing effort.