jad

I think there's an obvious reason why the charge is often made. Now mind you, I don't think Boston is in the same league as, say, the football team from Washington, and obviously things are improving since the days of Pumpsie Green. But it was the last baseball team to integrate, and that legacy is still with us, just as it is in D.C. I spend a lot of time in LA, and hear fans hurl invective about the Dodgers all the time (less so now that that a-hole McCourt is out of the picture), but I never hear that particular accusation; so it's not as if the charge is just tossed about at random.

What is even more ridiculous is that sports do NOT use electronic aids where it would actually help and cause no delay: e.g., electronic calling of balls and strikes. Or spotting of the ball in football (where the linesman more or less eyeballs the spot, and then we have the elaborate ritual of bringing out the chains for a measurement).

'Necessary'? For what? There were blown calls before replay and baseball was fine. So was football and basketball. The only sport where replay has worked is tennis, where it doesn't slow up the action and it prevents a lot of b.s. arguments. I hate it. ANd I hate particularly the way it is used to micromanage plays: e.g., the worst case, when a player slides into a base and as he bumps over it, momentarily loses contact while still over the base. As Bob Costas noted, that play has been called safe for over a 100 years, and it's absurd to change it now. As for 'getting it right', who cares? The plays it is used to 'investigate' are bang/bang plays--essentially, coin flips. No one draws up a bunt to beat it out by a nano-second; no WR draws up his catch to tap both feet 1 mm inside the sideline. If you're trying to determine who the better team is, or who plays better that day, those calls are purely matters of chance, and all replay does is delay things. Alas, now that betting is becoming legal everywhere, I expect we'll just get more of it.

Well yes, I do agree with that, but that was like 'expecting' Crawford to be an MVP and hitting .300, or expecting JD Drew to have hall-of-fame years, rather than just perform as he always had performed. AG hit his customary .290/.300, no? (The phrase I heard consistently was 'he didn't fit in', and I'm pretty sure I know what the sub-text of that is when used in this area.) . I also think that he gets lumped in with Crawford, simply bec. they got rid of the contracts at the same time, but there's really no comparison as to performance.

I never did understand the vilification of Gonzalez, who was always a consistent hitter and performed exactly as he could have been expected to do while in Boston (well, I did understand it, but that had to do with the racist history of RS and their fans, not anything Agon did on the field ...)

It's our version of the cry ubiquitous on NBA boards: "Once LeBron gets here ..."

JBJ has gone back to the high leg kick, which seemed to work for a while, then led to a series of Ks, mostly on belt-high fastballs. Not sure why the adjustment he made last week (that odd looking toe tap), where he began to make contact, was scrapped.

Just let him learn. The hysterical quest for the ideal 3rd baseman over the past years as I recall led to names such as Todd Frazier, whom many spoke of as the next Brooks Freaking Robinson. Still hitting his customary .220 at about 10x the cost of Devers.

My favorite retaliation for breaking some dumb-ass code was when someone threw at Nunez because he had previously taken a big rip and missed. Like it's an insult to swing hard.

Obviously they brought up Judge too soon, and they may as well just DFA him, as after last night's 8Ks, his value is way too low to get anything for him in a trade.

Well, yes. I have great nostalgia for the old days too. But overlaid on that is the uneasy realization that the RS, which I loved, were a deeply racist organization--the last MLB team to integrate. There is no way to gloss over that. The only way I justify my own oblivion to such things is that hell, I was only 10 when Pumpsie Green finally got on the field, and I grew up as an extraordinarily naive kid in a liberal household (e.g., I thus assumed, watching the school desegregation newsclips from the mid-50s, that of course all those rednecks were yelling and screaming because they were applauding the black kids finally getting to go to school.)

And JDM?

Uh oh.

Who cares? He's 3-3 with a SB! Bradley, on the other hand ... oh well.

I disagree. 50.1/49.9 is essentially 'leaving it to chance'. The decision (right or wrong) has nothing to do with which team is better, or who made the better play. It's a coin flip.

In tennis, it works. It makes almost all other sports close to unwatchable.

Hey. Don't look at me. It's them. It's them!

Shoulda dove fer it!

Ha! Yup. I was alive, but blessedly too young to see Pesky hold the damn ball!

Acc. to what FredLynn has posted, what happens in this last-ditch-effort procedure is not really 'healing', so there's no getting the body back to normal. Hard to blame the medical staff for this. (And just an aside--didn't Mookie come up as a 2nd baseman? I haven't been following this, but has that obvious solution been rejected? I realize he's become a gold-glove RF, but this shouldn't be a disqualification.)

I do! My grandfather, graduated from college in 1898. He claimed his throw to second was awesome. Big Sox fan (although he must have been around well before they were). I'm not sure he's available, but I'm pretty sure he's not under contract elsewhere.

LPGA here as well (Maine), just switched to the game. (But Sox on, as always, on vipsports.eu.)

Thank you, Youk and JasonBay, for the block function.

Dude. It was you who brought up dumb-ass pop psychology a few posts ago in this very thread. But trust me, your insistence on being an annoying troll and an ******* is not something I can help you with.

You find a lot of things fascinating (e.g., the opinions and banter of fans of a different team) that most normal people do not. In fact, those same people might consider such fascination signs of deep emotional issues that you may want to take up with a professional.