jung

One of the things that helps MLB's slipping and sliding TV ratings is that as most people get older, they often require and get less sleep for better or worse. Since us old folks are the only people watching anyway according to the demographic ratings, hey MLB....look on the bright side. Heck I likely won't be pushing up daisies for at least another 10 years. Manfred might have that much runway.

Rays win, Guardians win, A's win. This just gets better and better. Blowing out my Mint Julep budget.

There is just no way I can tolerate the ESPN crew normally. However in this situation they will be ball washing the Yankmees all night long. NO THANKS! Mute button special. Fortunately my vision is still good enough not to need the audio nonsense anyway.

Well I would probably look at a different set of players with the exception of one: -JD has been far too concerned with his option - Mookie has been far too concerned with how he can possibly make due on $20M per and how he turns $20M per into $30M+ per and the weight of his MVP - Beni was on an at least a half season long whaaaaa fest because "everybody is hitting better than I am.....whaaaaaaaa" - the entire outfield has done NOTHING....repeat NOTHING to support each other. They don't back each other up. In some cases while not backing each other up, they can't stay out of each others way - fat f*** Pearce could not and did not even show up as I guess his WS MVP and his new contract was too much weight for him to bear up under. Apparently that all went to his waistline because for the nanosecond he did show up in the Spring he was a fat cow - Price could not help but leap to the opportunity to engage with Eck again....."my twitter feed.....whaaaaaaaa" f*** you and your twitter feed too. You are a pitcher in transition and while I hoped you were a couple years downstream from where Sale is in that regard, you are as it turns out NOT farther downstream and basically caught up in the same sorts of issues Sale is caught up in. Holt is IMO a consumate professional baseball player. But he is not one of the team leaders in spite of his cheerleading. He just does not play enough to be a team leader. He simply is not near talented enough and you have to be one of the guys at the top of the talent totem pole to be one of the team leaders and/or have some hardware that suggests you should expect to be considered a team leader. Nobody is going to follow Brock or his example. His ASG appearance under specious circumstances since who the f*** else were the Sox going to send that year recedes into the background. Pitchers and Catchers pretty much stay to themselves and pitchers particularly are in better shape if they are seen and not heard. The idea that Sale is the team leader seems pretty absurd to me. Pitching really requires dedication to the entire art of pitching and the craft of pitching. There are too many moving parts. Too many things can go wrong. Most of these guys now start out wrong because there is too much emphasis on velo and spin rate and they are throwing too hard for either their technique or their physical characteristics and as hard as it is to recover a swing that has gone wrong, I don't even want to think about a pitching motion that goes wrong and a pitching approach that needs modification. That is an entirely different animal. Notice that the Sale as team leader thing has pretty much receded into the background now that pitching is not coming as easily to Chris as it has in the past. You can be the leader of the staff but this notion that pitchers or a pitcher is suddenly the leader of an actual full team of baseball players is pretty much some media fantasy that has nothing to do with anything as do most things media related. Sale can scream from the dugout all he wants and the media can notice all it wants to. He is not the team leader and he won't be. So I would point to JD, Mookie, Beni, the entire OF for that matter plus Pearce plus Price as being culpable as guys that were/are much too focused on their own gigs to have really been helpful as it relates to team cohesiveness. Price won't take much flak for it because again he is a pitcher and in spite of the media attention to pitchers nobody really expects a pitcher to be a team leader. The younger guys admire Price's aloofness.....not a good sign for any of them frankly. That is substantively other than X who I include here not at all and Price because he is a pitcher, the bulk of the guys that would be expected to define "team cohesiveness". Then in contrast, the two guys that have clearly performed beyond expectation are the two guys that perform and carry themselves most like teammates on the field, X and Rafi....always talking to each other, X always coaching Rafi on the field, they have without question excelled. At 22, Rafi has clearly struggled with the ramifications of the trade deadline mess and the team's inability to get out of its own way this year. He does not understand it and at 22, well he should not. After last night's second game I thought he was going to pull his own head off his own shoulders he was so beside himself, confused and almost grief stricken. He looked too confused and angry to cry but actually close to crying from the dugout. It has clearly effected his hitting at least and will probably get to his fielding if it has not already. Not his fault. He is 22 for God sake. Remember also that English is Rafi's second language. Christ Americans don't speak good English anymore. So he is probably trying to learn book English grammar which is about as far from what we now speak in this country as it gets.

The relevance of "25 players, 25 Limos" is that expecting the Boston Red Sox to respond to the sort of nonsense the Sox Brass pushed out there in anything other than a negative fashion was laughably absurd. I have no idea what Red Sox brass thinks it has down there in that clubhouse. No idea at all. In fact, Sox fans should be sending out crisis counselors to other MLB team fans because actually the rest of MLB is moving toward the 25 players, 25 limos Sox. While professional baseball is a game of individual athletes just barely cohesive enough to be a "team" the Red Sox are an extreme example of the "individual" aspects of the pro game. They have a grand total of two players that play and carry themselves like they are really part of a team, X and Rafi. Shocking revelation, they are also the stars of the 2019 Red Sox. My God I expect the Sox Brass to at least know its own team. Tale an elevator down to the clubhouse for Christ sake. To pull their uniform management into it was also loathsome, similar to making Tito sit there on his last day at Fenway and be part of that clown show for public consumption. As for Henry the cadaver, that refers to his visage which is normally stone like and he is pretty ancient looking for a guy that is only 69. DD is in fact looking pretty stone like lately. Must be rubbing off on him.

Now your putting words in my mouth which I don't appreciate. That said its pretty popular around these parts. And from you its actually OK....BUT GET OFF MY LAWN. I did not say any of that crap. You asked me what was different about this circumstance and I told you. I don't give a rats behind what the yankee brass does or does not do. I guess you do. But when the Sox brass pulls their ever PR motivated BS I am usually irritated enough. When they do it and it effects on field performance, now I am REALLY irritated. If they actually cared about the sentiments of the team, they would have done all of that CRAP in private, behind closed doors. But NOOOOOOOOO!!!! This is fenway-world. Lets cart the whole management team including uniformed out there. Heck lets cart out some of the Fenway carnival crew that performs out front of the park "what do you think Red Sox on stilts Man". "Oh I think the team is really pumped up and ready to drive right for the post season...no excuses". "Thank you Red Sox on Stilts Man....thats the way we feel about it up here in the air conditioning." GIVE.... ME.... A..... BREAK! All they did is end up covered in egg on their faces, deep enough to take the rest of the season just to clean off and they deserve it. Right in the middle of hot, stuffy steamy rotten egg summer to boot. Henry was actually the only shocker to me. I don't know if DD and Kennedy convinced him he should add something or if he did it on his own. The entire bunch of them should have said NOTHING for public consumption. Will they learn from it....doubt it.

1) Red Sox, 25 players, 25 Limos....true since Yawkey was the owner and it STILL drives the mentality of this club. Frankly, we are as much to blame for that as anybody 2) Yankee management also did not take the added step of opening its BIG MOUTH in some insane effort to publicly shame the club or sell late season tickets or I DON"T KNOW WHAT! What was Red Sox Management doing and for what purpose? Worse, they even roped Cora into their nonsense. Nor did Yankee ownership decide it was time to raise up from the morgue and open its BIG MOUTH. They carted DD out there, Kennedy of all people out there, Cora out there and in a separate statement, Henry adds the coup de grace. Nicely done guys....nicely done. It blew up in their faces and they deserved to have it blow up in their faces. They either did not know the sentiments of their OWN TEAM or did not think the players were willing to throw them right under the bus???? Probably both were true. Give me a break Red Sox. Does not let the players off the hook but this season, start to finish is a failure of the entire organization, top to bottom.

See my post #171 from last night's game thread. I have something similar posted up on this side of the board as well. Easier to find 171 from last night's game thread. I should add to that one that Henry should have kept his big mouth shut too. We did not need the walking cadaver to rise from his coffin to comment.

Yea....like how they approached the question of the team's sentiments regarding activity or lack thereof around the trade deadline. That sort of "honesty and respect" should carry the day........NOT!

If its a boy he will probably try to name him Astro prompting immediate divorce proceedings by his wife. Price is such a space shot.

JBJ's value to this team is built around the once given that the rotation was the strength of the team. If that is no longer true or if the Sox abandon having 30+ year old Starters (weren't we supposed to abandon that years ago) in transition tying up so much salary then JBJ's value to this team is substantially reduced.

The problem with Mookie is that regardless of what Mike Trout makes, he and his agent are going to want to be compensated like he is the second coming of Mike Trout and he's not.

I am not sure the top OPS numbers (900+) is where we should be looking for the effects of the Manfred Missile on stats because you still only get four bags for a single HR no matter how far the ball travels. Notice that none of these players are really challenging the season HR record, however there are now legions of hitters hitting 20 or more HR's to the point where that mark can no longer be a mark of distinction. 20 is now a big so what. 30 for that matter is a big so what. Worse, they have got us thinking that 200 K's for a hitter is a big so what AND ITS NOT! The combination of the Manfred Missile and emphasis on velo and spin rate AT THE EXPENSE of command for pitchers plus the overload shift is driving this game to levels or boredom that are laughable. The recent Paxton/ERod Yankee/Red Sox game provide two sides of this same coin and one of the most boring Sox/Yanks game I can remember in a long time. Erod for example exceeded all sorts of marks for bad stats for a starting pitching especially for BB's for example but literally controlled the Yankee hitters outside of the first inning because he was not even trying to throw strikes. He simply kept completely away from the strike zone and allowed the Yankee hitters to swing themselves out of their shoelaces and out of AB's one after the other in a comical series of futile plate appearances. They were swinging at pitches more than a foot off the plate that never once threatened the strike zone. As a consequence Erod never felt threatened on the mound in the way we have seen him tighten up and throw stressfully in the past because he was never anywhere near the strike zone most of the night.....throwing fewer actual strikes to hitters than I have seen in a long time. He went 6, 2/3 innings on a 116 total stress free pitches. Since when does ERod go 116 pitches? When he is throwing stress free all night....thats when! Paxton for his part threw many more hittable pitches to the Sox hitters, many of them off speed pitches in very hittable locations "wild in the strike zone". However the Sox hitters simply seemed incapable of executing the oldest rule of hitting when attacking a pitcher that has heat but is not necessarily employing it. You look for pitches in a location with less than two strikes, widen the zone with two strikes in order to protect. Deeper into the count allow room in your mind for the thought that the flame throwing hurler may just not be throwing flame on the next pitch and widen your base even slightly in the batters box. Said hitter then can stay back when a goofy looking meatball of a slider comes up to the plate instead of the gas you were expecting and can hit it as opposed to making such poor contact that he is just an out or misses it entirely and is JUST AN OUT. Both examples are simply different versions of the same problem. While the problem starts with the Manfred Missile and too much emphasis on velo and spin rate with little to no concern for command from pitchers, the problem progresses to hitters simply swinging at every pitch as if the count is 2-1. Does not matter the actual count, they are all swinging as if the count starts at 2-1 and stays at 2-1 until they finally hit the damned ball, BB or K. I am not saying that good pitching WON'T beat good hitting. I am simply saying that two teams of "competent" hitters being driven to utter futility and producing hours of total boredom when facing the towering pitching majesty of HOF candidates ERod and Paxton is something different than "good pitching will always beat good hitting". The Manfred Missile and the emphasis on velo and spin rate with little thought given to command for pitchers is also why they can no longer throw inside effectively allowing hitters like Rafi and X and the Dodgers Bellinger and even Sam Travis.....SAM TRAVIS for God sake to simply reach out over the plate with impunity and doink balls to the opposite field. Heck you can doink balls the opposite field OVER THE FENCE with the Manfred Missile. So I am not sure focusing on how many hitters are producing a .900+ OPS as much as it might be focusing on how many guys have moved from .650+ to .750+ and how many guys have moved from .750+ to .825+.

The last time any MLB team had the top offense in baseball and did not even make the post season was.......the 2011 Chicken and Beer Red Sox. Does this look familiar or what?

They deserve it. From top to bottom they deserve it. I said it as soon as I saw the pre-game for the game on deadline night when they carted out the whole exec management team + Cora to tell us how amped up and excited the team was about their chances and how hard they were going to play out the season to get to a WC in spite of Management doing nothing at the deadline. Know how I knew that was all Red Sox PR ********? They carted out Kennedy from the business side of the house too. How the f*** would Kennedy know the sentiments of the team? He knows the name of the hot dog provisioner and that is about it. Who the f*** is kidding who. So management totally painted themselves into a box either without knowing the actual sentiments of the team or assuming that the players DID NOT DARE throw the entire management team under the bus and leave them with their pants around their ankles. First thought I had was RUT-ROW as Scoobie would say. This has got train wreck written all over it. Sure enough, the team fell completely apart from that point on and I have no idea how many more games they will lose before the season ends. Surely the pitching has let them down to a stupendous degree, especially the rotation. But for exec management to be stupid enough to throw down the gauntlet like that and have it bounce back off the pavement and hit them square in the ass is almost priceless.

I still wonder why Alex pulled Walden after only 15 pitches. He might have stretched this pen out a little longer if he kept Walden in instead of going to Taylor who immediately gave up a bomb.

Holt batting for Chavis. Oh how the mighty have fallen

Team meeting: "So how do you like that new set of Miura irons"

Sweet move to Taylor Alex. Saving Walden for tomorrow are we?

Rafi says thank you Mookie

The only questions for our offense are: How far away are we from Rafi. When he bats this time, what inning will it be when he comes up next time. That is all.

Actually because in spite of all the noise about the pen being fine, the Red Sox actually know better.

Perhaps chicken wing should have turned away from the pitch instead of into it.

Ut-oh...Chicken wing with a broken wrist from being hit by pitch. This has such the makings of an ugly day I hope that does not cause some ugly incidents in game 2.

It hardly matters who is to blame at this point. The rotation has been awful. So the first place you go is to the players themselves. But who committed this franchise to these starters? Who decided on closer by committee which has worked in MLB about all of one time that I can remember. I have got a bigger issue. How oblivious to the pulse of this team is the front office? They came out right at the trade deadline and made all kinds of noise about how confident and enthusiastic this team was about itself, its uniform management, its executive management and its chances to get to the post season this year and the team went right out and immediately and publicly pulled management's pants right down around its ankles. How is it that this management was so far removed from the sentiments of the team that they ended up writing checks the team was clearly unwilling to cover fully 2/3rds of the way through the 2019 season? this organization is a mess, top to bottom. IMO, LaVangie is gone, the bullpen coach is gone. Some players will be gone and now there is a much better chance that DD is gone than there was before everybody in management went and shot their mouths off at the trade deadline.