Maxbialystock

Not buying "checked out" because that implies volition. I think the Sox hitters are more than willing to hit the ball. Their problem is lousy preparation. Two best examples are Abreu and Rafaela, neither of whom has made any correction to his approach at the plate. Same goes for Devers, who probably is playing hurt (shoulders)--no adjustments to his approach at the plate. In any case, the Sox rank 3d in MLB in most K's by a team.

To me the D--with Story at SS--is fine, and so is the rotation. I think the hitting stinks because opposing pitching staffs all have good "books" on our hitters weaknesses (some of which are obvious even to us fans). In the last 12 games, the bullpen has been decent in at least half the games.

I hate to admit it, but, were I Breslow, I just might be tempted to bring Jansen back--but not @ $16M/season. On those walks tonight he wasn't missing by much.

Actually, you and I are the only ones holding out hope, and I admit I'm not really hoping. I just can't help rooting for the good guys--and the good guys are whoever is/are on the Sox active roster. Plus right now the Sox are not mathematically eliminated. As for the 2 measly runs by the Sox, I think both were semi-miraculous. With almost all our lefty bats getting K'd to death by the Rays righty pitchers, the last thing I expected was a dinger by Story--righty bat vs righty pitcher. I absolutely do not think any of the Sox have "checked out," especially not at the plate. I do think their vulnerabilities are being exposed/exploited. Oh, and I liked the defense tonight, especially Story and Rafaela in the middle infield. The only infielder who misplayed was Houck being late to 1b on that grounder to Casas.

Heckuva ballgame from beginning to end, but I'll bet I'm the only one to say so. I thought the Rays starter Pepiot was terrific for all 6 innings, but see that moonslav disagrees completely, gives him zero credit, and says simply that the Sox hitters have quit for the season. Wrong! I also thought Houck looked very good and would never have pulled him after 4--but I also trust Cora, and Cora was clearly right to go to the pen. Abreu and Devers both seem the have trouble hjtting fastballs--and clearly the Rays pitching staff knows that. Story scored both runs, one on a dinger and one on a single, SB, SB, and finally scoring off a single by Duran. And he's a plus defender. Definitely a candidate for Sox player of the month.

I don't think there's one right answer. The 2018 Sox prospered in part--or so it seemed--with rest days for everyone. Now Cora says he wants his best players to play everyday, and that could work too. As for the post-ASG record, I think the pitching stumbled for the obvious reason it was always under-resourced, which began last winter when the new CBO dumped Sale--while paying him $17M to pitch for the Braves--and hired Giolito, who has been on the IL the entire season. The hitting has been up and down, mostly, I think because of a lack of experience combined with opposing teams having good "books" on the Sox hitters weaknesses. I do not, for example, think what we call "RISP disease" is accidental. I think opposing teams know exactly how to pitch to our guys when men are in scoring position. To me the perfect example of that is that you have to be just stupid not to know Devers loves swinging at breaking balls, inside or outside the strike zone, and struggles against fast balls. I think a team weakness is how Cora loads his lineup with lefty bats against righty starters and with righty bats against lefty starters. He has good reason to do that, but it can be a problem when the opposing manager brings in righty reliever to replace a lefty starter or vice versa. Duran"s OPS vs righties is .925 and against lefties .665, for example. Devers is 1.008 vs righties and .689 vs lefties. Abreu is .501 vs lefties and .866 vs righties. O'Neill is 1.188 vs lefties and .727 vs righties. Wong's OPS vs righties is .728 and lefties .876.

You have a problem with reading comprehension.

Crawford walked Judge, but at least he tried. He has 3 pitches close to the zone and 2 (#1 and #5) could have been called strikes. 92 pitches, 58 strikes. I think Crawford threw too many fastballs early in the game, which I blame on Bailey. He has a lousy fastball and should use it sparingly.

A hit! A palpable hit! 😃

That home plate ump has screwed Rodon repeatedly.

As soon as I insult Crawford in every way imaginable, he pitches a clean 4th inning.

Story makes a difference in the field--yet again. Didn't he have 3 hits yesterday?

Terrific at bat--9 pitches--by O'Neill when he got the 2 run dinger, which was off a 98 mph fastball above the strike zone. Rodon is pitching tough. He even has a pretty good changeup. Crawford, on the other hand, is lucky to have given up just 4 runs. He stinks today.

There have exactly zero Sox managers who believed (or believes) that a strong defense is the key to winning. Bats first, gloves second, with some exceptions for SS and CF. The Sox this season have been notoriously bad against lefty starters, so of course Cora wants to optimize righty bats. Was that a 2 run dinger by a righty bat I just saw? I like Wong a lot, but I believe most think Jansen is the better defensive catcher. Thus Wong at 1b instead of Casas, a lefty bat.

All 4 Yankees runs were scored off of 3 hits--1 double and 2 dingers--and all 3 hits were off Crawford's fastball. So my question is, "why are the Sox (Jansen, Bailey, whoever) continuing to call for more fastballs from Crawford?" I hasten to add that one characteristic almost universal among Sox pitchers is that none of them has a good fastball.

Back to the game. To me Rodon's repertoire looks a ton better than Crawford's, Hence no hits in 3 innings for the Sox and 3 hits in 2 innings for the Yankees. Interestingly, the Sox have K'd only once and the Yankees 4 times. Torres homers for Yankees run #2.

Perhaps. However, I've been a Sox fan since 1949 and still believe the John Henry era is the best era in Red Sox history. I hasten to add the Cubs were nothing until they hired Theo Epstein away from the Sox. Both teams are flirting with .500 ball, but the Cubs continue to outdraw the Sox, 36,347 to 32,783. Interestingly, the Cubs payroll is 7th in MLB and the Sox payroll is 11th--$230M vs $190M.

Well said. Whitlock was a great find and terrific his first season, all of which was in relief. But he had and continues to have the repertoire of a starter, which is why he was almost certainly thrilled to be given a shot at starting. I'm no expert, but it does seem to me that good relievers only need 2 or 3 good pitchers to be effective. Starters need 3 or 4. I could swear Kenley Jansen sometimes seem to get by with one freaking pitch, but is pretty good at hitting corners. When Kimbrel and Barnes were at their best, they both had good fastballs, over 95 mph, and terrific curve balls. Koji Uehara had the slowest fast ball in the known universe. I doubt that it ever went more than 90 mph, and was normally around 88. But it was nevertheless a good fit with his superb splitter and masterful control.

What failure? The attendance this year is the same as last year and the year before and better than 2021, the year after the 2020 covid season. As long as Sox fans continue to come to the park in semi-droves (almost 33K/game) and pay top dollar to watch .500 baseball, that's what they will get. Boston is reputed to be one of the great educational cities in America, but it has spawned one of the dumbest fan bases around. I say again, the 2012 Sox absolutely stunk and the Sox fans came to games in freaking droves--37,383 per game. Six years later, 2018, the Sox had the best team in their entire freaking history, and the attendance was down to 35,747 per game. I hasten to add that, while I will agree Fenway park is very photogenic on TV, it is also one of the crappiest ballparks in MLB with way too many seats with terrible sight lines.

"Ownership" is John Henry, who only happens to be the most successful owner in MLB since 2002 and the best Sox owner ever. As I've said before, he did not arrive as a neophyte because he had previously owned the Miami Marlins and before that a minor league team. He bought the Sox for around $660M, and they are now worth $4.5B or $5B. I think John Henry is hard to pin down. In the movie Moneyball, which is based on the story of the Oakland A's great season in 2002 and their GM/CBO Billy Beane, who used something like sabermetrics to create that winning ball club, In the movie Billy Beane flies to Boston to see John Henry at the end of the 2002 season and is told he is the best GM/CBO in MLB and is offered a contract commensurate with that--which he turns down because he doesn't want to move away from California. John Henry also tells Billy he has hired Bill James, author of Sabermetrics. However, John Henry did not go the Billy Beane/Sabermetrics route with the Sox. Nosiree. He bankrolled the Sox at a competitive level for close to 20 freaking seasons, which allowed them to end the 86 year drought in 2004 and to win three more World Series, more than any other franchise over the same period. For comparison, the Yankees with their 27 WS titles, have won just 1 in the JH era. That sort of reached a peak with the amazing 2018 season when the Sox won 108 regular season games and then beat the Yankees, 3 games to 1, in the ALDS, the Astros 4 games to 1 in the ALCS, and the Dodgers 4 games to 1 in the WS. The Sox had the highest payrolls in MLB in both 2018 and 2019, but in 2019 they didn't even qualify for the postseason. So DD got fired because--I believe--by the end of the season he needed a lot more money, over and above the highest payroll in MLB, to compete with the Dodgers, a far wealthier team, to keep Mookie Betts, and also to replace Chris Sale and David Price while still fulfilling their pricey, long-term contracts. There was, in fact, no limit to the amount of money DD was going to need to keep the Sox competitive. Thus Chaim Bloom, who came from a franchise, the Rays, who had in fact mastered the fine art of producing competitive teams cheaply. Their payrolls were consistently among the bottom 5 in MLB, and, just as consistently, they competed well in the ferocious AL East. They played in the WS and lost in 2008, their first winning season. Since then, they've made it to the postseason 8 times, including 2021 when they won 100 regular season games and lost--wait for it!!--to Boston, who had won 92 games, with CB as the Sox CBO. The problem for/with Chaim Bloom is that the Rays needed decades to build their system of low payroll but competitive MLB teams. Besides, the Sox and John Henry don't need to go lowball on salaries because the Sox still draw, this year, 32,783 attendance per game despite a .500 won-loss record. The Rays draw half as many. Relatedly, a telling stat. The 2024 Sox are still drawing 32,783 in what is their 3d straight season of probably not making the postseason. That attendance is ranked 11th in MLB. In 2018 when DD and john Henry and Alex Cora built and managed the best Red Sox team ever--which also had the highest payroll in MLB--their average attendance was 35,747, ranked 9th in MLB. Does anyone on talksox care to guess what the Sox attendance was in 2012 when the Sox finished dead last in the AL East with a dipstick (who replaced Francona) as manager? How does 37,567 sound? Does anyone on talksox doubt for a moment JH is unaware of the Sox attendance?

The game threads are a lot shorter, which may not be a bad thing. I resent those "outside" opinions, which is probably a good thing. If moonslav and bellhorn04 give you a thumbs up, you can take that to the bank.

The only sensible remark on this thread. I'm pretty sure I castigated CB as often as anyone, but I think the article is right to defend him. To me this season has turned out way better than it should have, mostly because of Chaim Bloom and despite the idiocies of Craig Breslow, whose two big offseason moves were to dump Chris Sale and pay $17M of his salary so he could be a Cy Young candidate for the Braves and to sign Giolito for $19M/season so he could do absolutely nothing for the Sox this season. Remember the conversation between John Henry and Billy Beane near the end of Moneyball? JH cites how much the A's paid per win in 2002 vs how much the Yankees paid. Huge difference. Right now the Yankees have 86 wins, for which they paid $309M--or $3.7M/win. The Sox have 75 wins which cost $190M, or $2.5M per win. And don't forget that $190M includes the aforementioned $17M for Sale to compete for the Cy Young as a Braves pitcher abd the $19M for Giolito. Plus $22.5M for Story to play maybe 30 games, $7.5M for Chris Martin to earn a WAR (to date) of +0.2, $6.7M for Justin Turner to play elsewhere; $2M for Joely Rodriguez to drag the Sox down with his -0.5 WAR, etc The best thing DD did for the Sox was to fire Farrell and hire Cora. Then CB rehired Cora after he was suspended for the 2020 season. And, lo and behold, the 2021 Sox turned out to be way better than the 2016 and 2017 Sox (about whom ignorant Talksoxers rhapsodize).

Good points. However,-- 1. The 2021 Sox won 92 games in the regular season and beat the Yankees and Rays (100 wins) to get to the ALCS, so of course they were better than this year's version. In fact, it pisses me off that almost everyone on talksox forgets how successful the 2021 Sox were. In my opinion, they were way better than the 2016 and 2017 Sox, both of whom got their clocks cleaned in the ALDS. You guys keep screaming, "they won the AL East! They won the AL East!" But you forget that both years they only won 93 games in the regular season. The 2021 Sox won just 1 fewer games, 92, and then they blew away the Yankees in the wild card and the Rays in the ALDS. 2. Despite the Rays and Jays, the AL East still has the best won-lost record in MLB. 3. The Sox should be worse than the last two years because the payroll is smaller and because they have a complete idiot of a CBO who dumped Sale, currently competing for the NL Cy Young for the Braves while being paid $17M by the Sox, and picked up Giolito, who's getting paid $19M to do nothing. Plus Story missed 5 months thanks to the injury in April. Plus Casas missed about 100 games because he recklessly swung a bat a pitch. How dumb can you be? As a result, as I keep reminding everyone, the Sox have had pretty much a no-name roster--with Devers and Jansen being the exceptions. 4. However, the no-names have done better than expected. Duran was a freaking All-Star and his WAR is 8.7. Despite shoulder issues, Devers WAR is 3.9 and was higher, Abreu's WAR is 3.0, Rafaela's 2.7, Hamilton's 2.7, Wong's 1.6, Gonzalez 1.6, O'Neill 2.9, etc. Plus the rotation, despite the Gioliito for Sale fiasco, is almost decent with Houck (WAR 3.2), Crawford 2.4, Bello 1.2, and Pivetta (1.6). The bullpen stinks, of course--mostly because Breslow did almost nothing last winter or in July--and the infield defense has been lousy (Sox lead MLB in errors and unearned runs). Nevertheless, the Sox rankings in team ERA and runs scored are both higher than both the 2023 and 2024 Sox. 5. Plus today is September freaking 14th, and the Sox just took 2/3 from the Orioles, lost two very close (and winnable) games in Yankee Stadium, and today took the 3d, 7-1. Half the talksox board or more wanted Yoshida DFA'd, Devers put on the IL, Story not brought back in September, etc. But all three are making a difference despite their imperfections--and you better believe the rest of the lineup and the rotation are also making a difference. Even the low-down, no-good, rotten, stinking bullpen has had it's moments--like, for example, today and in game 1 Thursday. Plus games 1 and 3 vs the Orioles. 6. This season ain't over no matter how many times Fred Lynn says it is. These no-names (I should have included Story and Yoshida as non-no-names) are not quitters, nor are the non-no-names (Jansen, Devers, Story, Yoshida, and maybe O'Neill--and, OK, Duran too). Tomorrow it's lefty Rodon vs toughie Crawford, and I freaking can't wait.

Whattalotta from the OP. Right now, with Story back and playing well at SS, Rafaela is still the best outfielder on the team and the 2d best SS. While I could not agree more with his indiscipline at the plate, Rafaela also has the 4th most total bases on the team, 3d most rbi's, tied for 4th most dingers, 4th most runs scored, 3d most SB's, and tied for 2d most triples. Last season he played in just 28 games, and this season he's played the 2d most games on the Sox, 142. I therefore do not agree that the Sox "went wrong" on Rafaela. Yes, the indiscipline is a problem, but it's countered by all the other pluses as well as the real possibility he can fix his "swing at everything." Did I forget to mention Rafaela's WAR is +2.7? The Yankees paid Jacoby Ellsbury I think around $150M for 7 seasons. He played four and in those four his WAR's were 3.3, 1.9, 2.8, and 1.7. That's a total of 8.7 which, if divided by 7 seasons, averages out to WAR +1.2.

Nicely said.