FredLynn

One or more of our legitimate SP will miss significant time due to injury this year. You can almost take that to the bank. It would be an incredible stroke of luck if that didn't happen. So we should all be prepared to see lots of dung on the hill this year.

I don't think it would be in the best interests of the ownership to broadcast that we are just a little over the cap. Knowledgeable fans would raise hell. I think that the obfuscation is intentional. And yeah, its frustrating.

With luck we had a reason to dump Scutaro's salary: to get under the cap. If we ended up over the cap by just a little there are going to be a lot of very pissed off fans in Beantown.

To be fair, here are the current Las Vegas odds: http://www.betvega.com/world-series-odds/

One source is the last power rankings that listed us as the 8th ranked team. The people who cover baseball for a living have also written numerous opinions that we are lagging this year. Who do you consider to be an expert?

I mean getting rid of the relics on the team, Wakefield and Varitek. I mean cleaning up the clubhouse and getting good personalities in there to police the misfits. And I mean allowing some of the bad contracts Epstein saddled us with to expire, all in preparation for making a real run next year.

Yup. It is. I admit it. Our GM said it too. Frankly, I hope is true and that as a result we stay under the cap in preparation for cleaning house this year.

As to the state of the team right now, EVERYONE who has half a brain, including posters here and on other board, including sports writers, and INCLUDING OUR OWNERS, GM, AND MANAGER, know that our pitching is weak and could use improvement. The owners have simply decided to turn off the money spigot (and hopefully stay under the cap), so Ben Cherington has no money with which to obtain another good SP, which EVERYONE knows we need. I don't expect him to be honest about this. Does anyone here really expect him to say to the beat writers that gee, we could sure use Oswalt or Jackson, but we just don't have the money to buy them? Come on. By the same token does anyone really expect Valentine, who is not stupid, to admit publicly that the team as currently constructed is defective and is a couple of pieces away from being a serious contender? Of course not. He CAN'T say that. We are not getting another SP; what you see is what you get. And when one or more of our three SP goes down, we will be seeing lots of the likes of Germano, Cook, Maine, Silva, and maybe Padilla (he is about to be arrested for failure to pay child support for his 10th kid). With those guys on the mound no lead will be safe; no number of runs will be enough. As Bill Belichick says, it is what it is.

The odds are that that will not happen. Anything COULD happen in baseball, but some things are more likely than others. Most experts do not rank the Red Sox higher than either the Yankees or the Rays right now....or the Angels or the Tigers or the Rangers and so forth. Gird up your loins. Its going to be a long long summer.

He gets this year. Maybe all of it; maybe part of it. If he cannot show us more, he is gone. Same with Bowden.

What I am saying is that so far he has not pitched well enough to deserve a ML roster spot. This is his last year (or part of a year) to show us something. He will not get 180 innings to do it either. He will be in the pen, most likely, and get about 40 innings or so. Its make or break time, and his performance so far has shown me nothing to be optimistic about.

Quote: Jason Bartlett has been available this winter and the Red Sox could pursue him, Stark writes. However, the shortstop will earn $5.5MM in 2012 and the Red Sox aim to stay below the luxury tax threshold. Where does this come from? Some here contend that they are already over the cap. Stark thinks we are under it. No one really knows, it seems.

We can debate back and forth about how to evaluate talent and how to assign a monetary value to it. Some of us may have thought that Crawford was worth it; some thought he was too expensive. Maybe someone even had no reservations about Lackey. But in the end, its the GM who has that job. We can afford to be wrong; he can't. In the case of our former GM he was wrong all too often and left this franchise in a financial bind that will take years to get out of. Epstein was not very good for this team.

I think that he had to recuse himself from those negotiations. As soon as he had a job lined up with the Cubs he had two allegiances, and you can't do that. Pretty stupid, eh? Allowing him to leave without a deal in place caused all our leverage to go out the window. The Cubs, for whatever reason, wanted him dearly and he wanted them. We had them by the cajones and let go.

I think that Crawford will have a good season. Not worth all the money he is being paid, but a decent season. I am more concerned with the STUPID contracts awarded to stiffs like Lackey and Jenks. We also cannot afford Ortiz. What's that add up to? About $35M? Thanks you Theo Epstein.

How much did Crawford run last year? In general, I don't think this franchise is overly enamored with the stolen base.

I understand.