jung

Crap...best pitch Brooks has made all night to get X

Rafi made the last out right. Still middle of the order. We should send Brooks back to his mommy this inning.

Brooks....how many sliders do we see these days that are just spinning up to the plate....just utter sludge.

He is wild in the strike zone. When you get away with so many pitches right down the heart with little to nothing on them.....its luck.

Gotta give it to Country Joe....As dizzy as he is, especially out umping a base, he is one of the best left in the biz behind the plate. There are buckets and buckets of ML umps that would have called strike 3 from Rick to end the inning a ball.

Did not have the heart to break it to you but Rick had been lucky more than good. Luck running out.

Bozo the President was just up here. They had the whole arena cordoned off with orange dump trucks. Visually poetic......BARF!!!!!

The last start right after Eck commented that Rick "is pitching" a building fell on Rick's head. Not sure that is a helpful comment Eck.

Joe West behind the dish. Probably the safest place for him. Compared to the sludge MLB usually tosses out there, Joe is not a terrible ball and strike caller. Plus this has the added advantage of keeping him away from wandering around amongst the fielders and baserunners.

Well Brooks does not appear adverse to throwing the ball right down main st...I expect more runs to come. Then again Rick is throwing it right down main st as well.

1. Jonathan Villar (S) SS 2. Trey Mancini ® LF 3. Anthony Santander (S) CF 4. Renato Nunez ® DH 5. Jace Peterson (L) 2B 6. DJ Stewart (L) RF 7. Rio Ruiz (L) 3B 8. Chris Davis (L) 1B 9. Chance Sisco (L) C 1. Mookie Betts ® RF 2. Rafael Devers (L) 3B 3. Xander Bogaerts ® SS 4. J.D. Martinez ® DH 5. Andrew Benintendi (L) LF 6. Christian Vazquez ® C 7. Mitch Moreland (L) 1B 8. Marco Hernandez (L) 2B 9. Jackie Bradley Jr. (L) CF

Its Rick's turn in the rotation tonight. Does he try to throw a 4-seam tonight (a total failure in his last few starts) or does he ignore it (works better for him, sort of).

None the less, all the AL teams mentioned in both posts are well ahead of us in the standings while we have the #1 offense in baseball. There are not a lotta' places to to see where a team is losing games.

This is what Manfred actually said: “There is no evidence from the scientists the baseball is harder,” Manfred said Tuesday at a meeting of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. “The basic characteristics of the baseball, as measured by the independent scientists who we asked to do the study, provides no support for that. What there is support for is the drag is a little less, and when you have less drag, it goes farther. “We had a spike (in homers) this year. We went back to those scientists and they said, ‘Look, you have baseballs with less drag.’ We’ve acknowledged that, said it a number of times. We went back to the scientists and said, ‘We need to figure out why.’ That is hardly an admission from the commission of MLB WHICH OWNS the company that makes the baseballs. Notice Manfred said absolutely nothing about the seams simply stating that the baseball's "have less drag". "Really Rod...so how is that? Why do they have less drag?" Manfred: "We need to figure out why". "My ass Rod. You own the f***ing company dickhead."

You are right about that.

Though Henry is paying a lot more money for the privilege we have the same problem the other mid-pack to lesser teams have. We just don't have enough pitching though we are paying through the nose for pitching. We should not be here based on the talent. But here we are. So now we are needing to catch competitors without the pitching we need to go on a serious run. We obviously can't get there without a serious run. Instead we win 2 lose 1. We win 1, lose 2. We win 3 lose 1. That just won't get anything done IMO. Win a few, lose a few would be fine if this was still April and we were not chasing.

JD Drew was a good acquisition. So was Steven Drew for that matter.

They had to go 31-12 with the teams they are chasing going 21-21 to get to the last WC. Since then they have won 2 and lost 1. So now regardless of anything else they have to go 29-11 from here unless the teams they are chasing totally tank (not likely in this league full of stiffs). If they rattled off 8 more in a row to make a 10 game streak they would have to go 21-11 the rest of the way from there to get to that last WC spot. Even if they are out of their trade deadline, Price twitter rant induced doldrums, IMO they just don't have the pitching to make 29-11 kind of run from here. The pitching is why they have not gone on a single prolonged run this entire year and they really have done nothing to resolve that. I love Nate because he at least challenges hitters but a carton of eggs is less fragile. Sale has found it...Sort of. Price is on the shelf. Porcello no longer has a four seam FB and ERod is well on the way to losing his four seam FB. BJ is a big so what. Lets not even start with the bullpen though they are at least not the dead weight of the rotation.

Nate is simply not somebody you can rely upon with that cranky wing of his. We can afford Sale as long as we don't heap mountains of other crap overpays on top of him. Time to go for DD as the chances that DD won't attempt to heap more crap contracts on are slim and none and I seriously doubt Henry wants to "monitor his Pres of Baseball Ops close enough to manage that.

The farther away they have gotten from the trade deadline and Price's incoherent twitter blather spat, the better they have played. They were bound to come back to some state of normalcy the farther they got from those events. The problem is they still won't end up with enough wins to be anything more than a bloated payroll mid-pack team this year.

As I have pointed out before, at least Nate does challenge hitters, a rarity these days.

So not to disparage the Sox hitting efforts today because its not their fault. We have had two Manfred Missile opposite field doink shots that crawled over the wall even WITH the Manfred Missile and as bad a pitching effort by Goody to X as we are ever going to see. Goody goes 0-2 to X and proceeds to fidget and nibble his way to 3-2 and then just lays a hanger right over the middle of the plate. Welcome to Manfred League Baseball. Wake me up when something that has the word Compete on it happens. I will be right over here doing the Rumpelstiltskin till then. I guess it is too early in the day for the Guardians as they are nowhere to be found today.

DHern challenges hitters....trade him....not a fit here.

Vaz was way up the handle of the bat to get on that pitch. Where will JBJ be in similar circumstance.......???????

Rafi is a solid fielder now. Could even be a future great fielder if he wants to be. I do not agree with Spear's comments in his new book or about his new book that tutelage is expected at the ML level now. Tutelage always happened at the ML level just not from square 1! There is really nobody that can take you from square 1 to polished at the ML level. You are just going to bump along as you would have at AAA, if anything slower because AAA or AA is probably where you should be playing that young and that raw a talent. Rafi for his part was a complete mess when he came up and stayed pretty close to a complete mess because nobody as a ML coach or player was willing or able to take him from where he was to where he needed to be.....until X took him under his wing and immediately started to pound on him about his pre-pitch preparation and his footwork. That is stuff Rafi should have had when he got here. Its literally that basic to playing the position at any serious level of baseball.