Maxbialystock

Nice break for Sale. 40 pitches in 3 innings: more like it.

Can't make that up. Great story. Small world.

Yep. One more MLB team we can pronounce incapable of baserunning as well as a good little league team.

Offense so so at best last year and dead last in dingers. And you see no improvement? That's not all JD of course, but he is the only new guy. I'm not so sure they are the fools.

Bottom third started that rally.

Rotten top of 1st.

Nice. A would be manager with some flair. Not sure Cora will do it, however. I am so used to him batting 2d, but think that would be a little bold right now, plus Betts and Beni are pretty close to the best 1-2 combo in MLB.

Baloney. this is my story and we have to go by what I remember. Great catch, thanks. I did in fact forget about those errors. And I forgot that Drew was a more than adequate defensive SS. Bogie played 3B.

Maybe not brilliant, but pretty darn good.

Won just 69 games in 2012, the year after the Sox won 90 in 2011. The Sox won 95 and the WS in 2013, but with the same manager lost 71 games in 2014. Henry as owner has fired four managers in 15 years.

If you enjoy watching ball games, especially in person, the eye test is everything, and that especially applies to defense, which is the poetry of baseball. Home runs win ball games a whole lot more often than great defensive plays, but the latter are usually more exciting to watch. I personally have strong memories of the brilliant defense Iglesias played in 2013. Whether keeping him was the best move or not for the team, I wanted him to stay to enjoy watching his glove, footwork, etc. Instead, we have Bogaerts, who is a far cry from brilliant. And yet. He does bust his butt on defense, which he takes very seriously. He is also a much better hitter than Iglesias and this year one of our key guys in the lineup in a year when our offense is doing pretty darn good despite the weak bottom third of the order. So I fall back on that dirty, rotten, stinking no good stat/approximation called WAR which says that over the past three years Iglesias has averaged 1.6 and Bogaerts 3.5 in the WAR department (pun intended). And I remember something else. Iglesias started at SS for the Tigers in the 2013 ALCS when they played the Sox. He was brilliant, of course, but the Sox won that series, 4 games to 2, and they won it with a combination of solid pitching and timely (not not great--the Tigers had a good pitching staff that included Scherzer and Verlander) hitting. The announcers, as I recall, waxed rhapsodic over at least one and maybe more than one play Iglesias made. But that year Lester and Lackey were both excellent in the postseason, and the bullpen was first rate. The postseason team ERA in 2013 was 2.59 even though Peavy wasn't so hot. My point is that the defense was fine without Iglesias because the pitching was more than fine. And guess who played in 12 of the 16 games in that postseason with an OPS of .893? Xander Bogaerts, that's who. He had the third best OPS and the third most runs scored.

Really? You don't think in 2004 Francona inherited a team that hit like crazy and had decent pitching? I sure do. The hitting was still good in 2007 because the Sox still had Ortiz and Ramirez and a pretty good supporting cast. Plus Beckett had a great year and Lester was pretty good too. Then a decline for 4 years, including the collapse in 2011 which cost Francona his job. Yet 2 years and 2 managers later the Sox win another WS. Then 2 bad years and 2 decent years under the guy, Farrell, who won in 2013. Now Cora is looking pretty good 1/4 way into his first season. You can make a fair argument that in the John Henry era the managers are just along for the ride.

Meh. These days we complain about a missed call that is maybe an inch or two off. The vast majority of calls are correct, and that doesn't include the bad pitches that are swung on. Speaking of which, the first and third base umps have the additional duty of determining whether a batter swung or not. My impression of watching endless pitch counts is that the calls are remarkably consistent. On the other hand, I consider reliable comparisons of defensive plays to be borderline impossible.

Then I'm a pessimist. But of course I always have been although right now I am not pessimistic about the team as a whole. But give me time. The best case for JBJ is that Cora appears to think what you think.

What's to discuss? It works.

Agree completely He needed a whole lot of pitches to get those 17 outs, but he more than did his job--and the lineup did theirs, ditto the bullpen. Since this thread is about Cora, I also think he managed this game beautifully. I would never have started JBJ, but the little sucker came through in part because his manager gave him another shot. He also left ERod in just long enough and brought in Hembree--again, not my choice-- got 4 outs and preserved that goose egg for ERod. Then Poyner and Barnes to finish off the shut out.

Of course it's arbitrary. You gotta draw a line somewhere. I like that standard because it requires a starter to go 2/3 of a game and to limit the damage to 3 runs, which I agree is an ERA of 4.5 but is earned by facing the same lineup a minimum of twice and sometimes three times, which is no mean feat. At the same time, you don't have to be a 10 K complete game ace to get a quality start. Yesterday ERod did go 5.2 and gave up 0 runs, but he also loaded the bases in the 6th, had thrown 110 pitches, and badly needed someone to come in and bail him out. I loved what ERod did and said so on the game thread,but I'm also fine with that not being an official quality start.

Pretty good stuff, moonslav, especially coming from someone who likes stats a lot. And I think your central point is dead on: yes, WAR is certainly flawed, but it's the best attempt so far to measure the whole ballplayer. As I said earlier, the OP misses the real point, which is that, if Trout and Mookie are rated at 3.9 and 3.6, they are both very good and probably too close to call on who is better because WAR is and must be an approximation. The eye test is best practiced by experienced scouts, and even they agree they can make mistakes.

I love your final point because it demonstrates your fundamental misunderstanding of WAR. If one player is 1.0 and the other is 1.3, the real point is that they are roughly the same overall caliber even though one may be the better defender and the other the better hitter. I also object to the implied meaning of "flawed" when you use it because you really seem to mean, "not perfect and therefore to be disregarded." I always liked batting averages, but like OBP even more and OPS even more than that. Each of those stats tells me something that just looking at a player swing the bat will never tell me. Results count in baseball, and stats are for the most part tabulations of results. That said, I do have my doubts about defensive stats like range factor, etc because measuring defense is not nearly as easy as measuring offense.

About where I am. The OP's rage against WAR ignores the fact that it ranks Trout and Betts very close together and presumably includes all five tools: catch, throw, run the bases, hit, and hit with power. Here are some things that might be in Trout's favor: 10 vs. 11 Mookie stolen bases, but 0 CS while Mookie has been caught twice. 3 outfield assists vs. Mookie 2. If you believe all the stuff about how valuable JBJ's defense is, part of that assumes centerfield is tougher than right field. Mookie is part of a very good offense and Trout isn't, so Trout gets walked a lot. Trout is bigger: 6'2" vs. 5'9" Mookie has the green monster, which presumably is good for a righty hitter. He has more than twice as many doubles as Trout. I think both are very good and am delighted one of them plays every day for the Sox. I did see an article online in espn that torqued me, however, because it says Trout could be having the greatest season--using WAR as the measuring rod--in the history of MLB and makes zero mention of Mookie whose WAR is 3.6 to Trout's 3.9.

Pretty neat. Johnson mixed in that slider that Trumbo thought was a curve and would go in the dirt. It didn't and was called strike three. Terrific game by everyone. I have to say people complain about Devers' defense, but I think Nunez is worse at 2b anyway. He gets to stuff, but never to get outs.

Yeah, but that curve worked well and got that popup and Johnson caught the overthrow from JBJ because he did back up Vazquez. Pom never does jack on defense.

How much are they paying Johnson again to fall on his ass instead of covering 1B?

Orioles have the same number of hits, 12, as the Sox today. But all of theirs are singles. Sox have 6 singles, 3 doubles, 3 dingers, and a 5-0 lead. Good game by ERod--5.2, 9 singles, 7 K's, no walks, and no runs. Good call to bring in Hembree, made easier by Erod having thrown 110 pitches.