illinoisredsox

Mayer’s not coming up to sit on the bench (which is what Hamilton does most of the time, tonight was his 10th start of the year, most of which have been for Rafaela, not Campbell) . If he’s brought up, it’s because Story or Campbell is hurt. Grissom for Gonzalez, meh. I could take it or leave it. Grissom’s never done much at the major league level and we really don’t know if he can play first, though I understand he’s playing some games there in Worcester, so it could be in the cards. Gonzalez hasn’t really done anything to merit demotion, but he’s a fungible player. The backup infielders are hardly the Sox main problem.

Can someone speak to the cat about what it’s dragging in?

He’s not overrated, but he didn’t have it tonight. Most of the time he does but it isn’t the first time he hasn’t and it won’t be the last. Even Mariano Rivera and the Eck occasionally didn’t have it, and Whitlock is never going to be in their class.

He did what an ace does when he doesn’t have it on a given day: he gave the Sox a puncher’s chance. He kept the score reasonable instead of letting it blow up.

Wasn't there a series a few years ago when the Astros threw 50+ straight fastballs at him? My point being it isn’t a new strategy. But until he proves he can do something with them …

Houdini Whitcomb

There are strikes and there are strikes. Down the middle will be a strike. but the BA will not be .250.

Weissert overall has been okay this year. Coming into tonight, he’s had 10 appearances. 8 have been scoreless and in those 8 he’s allowed 6 runners. All his runs allowed have come in 2 games. Frankly, I’d rather have a guy who doesn’t have it 1 game out of 5 as opposed to a guy who gives up a run every time out or every other time out.

There in lies the problem; Cora has to guess with the 6-7-8 guys in the pen. Unfortunately, he has to guess in real time. We get the benefit of 20-20 hindsight.

He needs to come up with that, but Sox infielders need to make batter throws. He’s pulled a couple others out of the dirt today alone.

Realistically, this game is again on the offense. Two errors in the first followed by a wind blown homer by Abreu are 3 of the 4 runs. After that, 1 run in the 2nd and not a whole lot of chances since.

Not knowing the state of arms today makes that a tough question to answer. Can’t use Whitlock, Slaten and Chapman every game.

Just don’t understand why you aren’t managing in the majors.

They’ve got some nice young players, Even as bad as they were last year, they still won 1 out of 4 games.

Ground ball base hits don’t bother me; it just as easily could have been hit right at someone. Red Sox hitters could take a few lessons from that inning; put the ball in play and maybe something good will happen.

Has been lately. Bigger question was why him today when he tried to go 3 less than 48 hours ago.

Wasn’t even a bad first inning. That ball was blown a good 30 feet to end up over the fence. I’m more concerned about the start to this inning by Kelly. s***, now he loaded the bases.

Beats the heck out of being a minor league player. I’d do it for $750K a year

That didn’t age well.

Two mistakes by Hamilton there. One was going on contact. The second was once he went, he needed to stop and get into a run down long enough that Rafaela could replace him at second.

Smith looks like he could be a pretty good pitcher; he’s only allowed 4 runs in over 20 innings this year and he had good numbers in the minors as well. Time will tell but he may be a break out guy like Crochet was last year for the Pale Hose.

That was a bit unlucky that it hit the base, but it was going to be a double if fair anyway.

Two career firsts tonight. Bregman has his first career 5 hit game. Campbell fails to reach base for the first time in a major league game.

That is an excellent way of stating it. Casas take far too many strikes that are clearly strikes. He's a prima donna who doesn't realize he's just being a jerk with all the it's about me stuff, and he's apparently always been that way. There's a podcaster who played against him for several years when they were kids, and while said podster will tell you Casas was always the best player on the field, he was a jerk even back then. Memo to Casas (and paraphrasing from Bull Durham) when you hit 40/120 a couple times, you'll be called colorful. Until then, you're just a jerk. Dalbec couldn't hit, but he seemed to get an inordinate number of pitches called strikes that were 3 inches out of the zone. He'd be down 0-2 and hadn't see an actual strike yet. Not sure why as he seldom said anything and by the end, he was so tied up in his own head that he couldn't pull the trigger. At least Dalbec could run a little and attempt to play another position. Casas runs like he's carrying the name on his back (Casas being Spanish for houses).