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He pitched better than the final line indicates. Call me an apologist if you will.

Working with the breaking ball in the later innings. Good stuff if ya ask me.

Spoke too soon. But the 3B should've had the Encarnacion grounder.

Bard may be about to earn himself a rotation spot.

Sox dodged that bullet.

He's a butcher at catcher. The cup of coffee he got in the Majors last year doesn't negate it. Let him finish his defensive development and he can come up mid-season.

He didn't question the validity of the metrics, he questioned the validity of the interpretation.

Not at all. The amount of high-leverage and back-to-back appearances Bard was in was not "normal usage pattern", specially for him.

So Bard needs to be held accountable because he became Tito's binky in September and got overused to the point where he became ineffective? That's horrible logic.

Realistic criticism of Valentine =/= disdain. I'm with ya 100% jung.

For the record, the Valentine apologists are going down the same road as the Francona apologists. He's not perfect, he has his shortcomings, and they are showing.

I'm not saying he's not a homer, i'm just saying you're a homer too.

You calling anyone a homer should be the example for the definition of irony in every available dictionary from now until the end of the universe.

Thank you, a much more eloquent response and less conducive to shitstorming.

Just calling a spade a spade "brah".

What happened???? I had to minimize the window because my boss popped up.

You take the good with the bad here: Valentine is a better in-game tactician and will hold players more accountable for their actions, but he'll wear on the players and FO with his insistence of airing dirty laundry at every possible turn. And for the point that we really couldn't have done worse than Francona the last eight seasons, well we could have had Dusty Baker, Grady Little or Ozzie Guillen.

Nice fundamental baseball.

This has been pointed out before: He's obviously fiddling with his secondary stuff. IIf you've watched his outings, you'll notice he's not throwing the heat as often as he did in years past, yet he's still getting a bunch of groundball outs and keeping his velocity into the end of his outings. The whole mechanical analysis i take with a grain of salt because people here are watching him pitch on TV, and we're fans anyways, not pitching coaches. Not to say i don't agree he's flying open, and he's a bit inconsistent, but it's impossible to go as in-depth into his mechanics as some people here are trying to do without first-hand observation. It's just not the same on the TV. As for the rest of the point, my problem is with the proclamation by some people that "they always knew he wasn't a starter" when that sentiment wasn't presented until a couple days ago. And also, less than 15 IP this Spring. Sometimes people have their finger firmly on top of the panic button at all times and want to create a storyline out of nothing.

By the way, i was reading the only report out there about Bard and the BP, which is from CSN saying he "may be headed" to the Bullpen. I'm not saying it's not going to happen, but people here are talking like it's being reported all over and it's a sure thing. Apparently it's not.