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And also, the pitching. Gotta amass pitching depth. I like what they have in the upper Minors, but think they should sign at least one reclamation project to stash in the minors, see if they catch lightning in a bottle.

Bobby V is beast all by himself, and not reflective by himself of the FO's situation. The Tito story was clearly a plant to s*** on him while he left, per Red Sox custom. Considering how epic the collapse of the 2011 Red Sox was, and how hard the 2012 squad failed, i think they actually got off easy. Look at the difference in media coverage and media ruthlessness between the two markets. This is unheard off for a franchise like the Mariners.

That's kinda the point. It was all about Lucchino. In the Mariners mess it's basically all of the higher ups, and a lot more dirty laundry's being aired. No one accused Epstein or BC of lying on their resume.

I get that. I'm just saying that trying to turn him into an OF (even if it's LF) is a terrible idea. If they signed Drew they could still get him plenty of ABs rotating him between 3B/1B and XB between SS/3B.

No they won't. The whole point of this spending spree is making money. Spending that much would seriously cut into their profit margins.

Well that's your opinion. It's not that easy playing a big-league level OF, even if it's LF.

Eric Chavez, Justin Turner, Wilson Betemit, Chad Tracy are all guys who can play multiple positions, can play a decent 3B and bat LH with recent success against righties.

That's the point. Some guys have a lot of trouble adjusting to, say, the OF after being IF for their whole careers. Even more so with a LF as tricky as Fenway, getting good reads in the OF can be tricky and not everyone can make the conversion Soriano and Braun did, and even they were god-awful for a couple years before fully acclimating.

No they aren't. Yes it is. I will continue to do so, because as it has been repeated ad nauseum one more decent starter and the Sox make the playoffs in 2011, and this is absolutely indisputable, and 2010 was a Murphy's Law year. What's happening here is that you're overvaluing the difficulty of obtaining decent bench players, which is a hell of a lot harder than building SP depth. I don't understand how this fact can even be argued.

Being a "good athlete period" doesn't mean he can play the OF if he's never played there professionally. Mike Trout is a "good athlete period" so why isn't he playing SS? He'd be more valuable there.

This doesn't make any sense. What the Sox lack (A RH platoon partner for JBJ, LH IF who can play 3B) are easily acquirable, and they have MiLB pieces who could either contribute (Bryce Brentz, Vasquez) or could be used to acquire other necessary parts, even in the offseason, without weakening the pitching. You are missing the forest because of the trees. It's a lot easier to acquire offensive players at any position during the off-season, season or even during Thanksgiving dinner than it is to acquire starting pitching. You don't weaken the pitching because you're scared an offensive prospect is going to have growing pains.

Also, many top free agents signed before the WM. That is rare, especially with Boras clients.

But playing him in LF? Seriously?

Yeah but that's beside the point. The point is that you're never going to have MLB-level depth at the ready for all positions. And in all honesty, there's no place where you need MLB-ready depth more than at SP. You can play a SS at 3B, but you can't have an OF starting a game for you.

But he'd never played the position and he was actually not very good defensively there. Playing a guy out of position to fill a need is the direct opposite of the term "depth" as it pertains to baseball.

They had a platoon of Brock Holt and Brandon Snyder and an out-of-position Iglesias take a good amount of AB's at 3B last year, so depth wasn't that good there......

You can't have depth at ALL positions man. You gotta give up something to get something.

As dysfunctional as the Mariners are portrayed in the article? I beg to differ good sir. Other than the Lucchino drama, not even close.

You are conveniently ignoring the part of my post where i do get another hitter, sign Drew and move XB to third. Anyways, this discussion has run its course, since NY will never trade Gardner to the Sox anyway.

The problem here is twofold: How much better than a JBJ/insert righty hitter platoon would Gardner really be? You're overpaying for probably less than a win, and problem number two is that you may negate any gain from Gardner because of how much Dempster objectively sucks. You're better off signing Drew (and 3/30 is probably not enough) then trading a package around WMB (with the depth the Sox have at 3B at MLB and the minors) for that final hitter you lack without weakening the pitching.

You are conflating things. They won't trade both Peavy/Dempster either ways, my point is to trade Dempster (if you will trade one) and keep Peavy, which makes the most sense from a roster construction perspective. It also has little to do with the construction on the offensive side, because you're not trading Demspter or Peavy for a position player who's a clear upgrade over any of the guys we have, or can protect against injury at a key position. You would have to give up pitching depth (both a starter to clear salary and some of the young pitching you want on the MLB roster) to pull off a trade. Simply getting rid of Dempster/Peavy wouldn't be enough to get one of the marquee FA's left on the market. They'd be better off blowing the LT and keeping their pitching in that case.

...so fred, do you agree or disagree with me?

It isn't, because as posted above by both Bellhorn and myself, you can endure the growing pains of a hitting prospect as starters and still win ballgames when usually, if a pitching prospect is getting hammered, you are actively losing games.. It's a very apples-to-oranges comparison, and we are still advocating for (and assuming they will get) semi-platoon partners for these players. How do you platoon a young pitcher you had to throw into the fire because of injury? As for your other point, it's possible to somewhat protect yourself against injury by maintaining as much pitching depth as possible. The Red Sox are a special case because they have so much talent but so many question marks in their rotation. So why would you do away with depth, that just a couple weeks ago you were so keen on protecting as well? That makes no sense. The main issue here is the Dempster/Peavy debate. You could probably replace his (Dempster's) innings with a couple garbage bin pickups, but Peavy's a very good starter when healthy, even though he has his own question marks. Keeping the group six-deep plus the prospects is certainly better than any other option, regardless of how much rationalizing you do for my preference to starting JBJ/XB because WMB is certainly not a rookie anymore. You know what's easy to acquire during the season? A decent OF or IF. You know what isn't easy to acquire during the season? A decent SP.

That's if he's even posted.

What benchmarks are you using to define "average for a playoff team"? You can't just say "well, this is average" without any sort of definition about what average is. My comment came from the idea that it's very rare for a team to have six starters make pretty much all of the starts in a given season, and this can be proven with a little research. In general, i just find your idea of trading pitching depth expecting younger guys to be able to step up right away to be pretty short-sighted considering the three consecutive years of disasters in Sox pitching, and what happened with Webster last year. There's just no need to weaken the pitching staff.