User Comments, Suggestions, or Complaints | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Advertising
|
Demarini, Easton and TPX Baseball Bats
|
AllianceTickets.com has cheap MLB Tickets. Get all your Colorado Rockies Tickets, Seattle Mariners Tickets, San Francisco Giants Tickets and all your favorite baseball tickets here. We also carry cheap Denver Broncos Tickets, Seattle Seahawks Tickets and Denver Nuggets Tickets. |
For wholesale prices on baseball gifts and equipment, check these stores out! |
Page rendered in 0.3399 seconds
50 querie(s) executed
Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
1. Benji Gil Gamesh Rises Posted: August 01, 2011 at 11:46 AM (#3890121)Tampa has tumbled out of the playoff race, and LA is the only team that has any chance of catching either NY or Boston. LA is 9 back in the loss column to Boston with 54 games to go. If Boston goes .500 from here on in, they'll win 94 games. To tie Boston, LA will have to go 35-19. To tie NY, 33-21. It's a very steep hill - and that's assuming NY and BOS slow their pace down very significantly.
So, getting a starting pitcher for Boston was really about two things:
1) Mitigate the already-low risk that the team would collapse in the final 55 games.
2) Much more importantly, identify a pitcher they trust enough to be able to effectively start a couple of playoff games.
If Bedard is healthy, he's going to be very helpful. If he's not, Tim Wakefield will start a playoff game. That's pretty much the difference.
If you're lucky.
You do realize the last time Bedard pitched a game in Sept or later was 2006?
So you're saying he's due? Woo-hoo!
This year's BOS/NYY "race" (see post 2) is a good example of why I am not a fan of the Wild Card.
Sure, and no one's given the Yankees credit for him either, when talking post-season rotation.
Yankees would claim to block him going to Boston.
They'd take him for just the $. They just won't give up $ and prospects.
I'd like to point out my #13 in this thread. I think the baseball world had ideas about this when the Harden deal fell through - if Mariners' management was smart, they'd have figured that out and extracted a bit of extra value for Erik.
well, they did get the best hitter in the eastern league.
And regardless of whether baseball thought Buchholz might miss the rest of the season or would miss the rest of the season, everyone knew the Sox needed a pitcher. I have a lot of trouble believing opposing GMs looked at the Sox roster and thought they'd be equally interested in an outfielder as a starting pitcher.
Jacoby Ellsbury, line 1.
Though reviewing it once again, technically you still have one out left to avoid losing in that he can still fail a drug test, which was another stipulation I made, so if you want you can wait until the end of the season.
Let me know who you want sponsored. (If Lee put up a 96 OPS+ while on performance-enhancing drugs, I'll still have lost the essential part of the bet, so I definitely don't need to wait for that.)
What actions in the past couple years makes anyone think the Mariners management was smart? You are right of course, which is probably why the Red Sox choose to deal with the Mariners, they are an organization that isn't really known for their collective brainpower.
And he's only Exhibit A in a list that goes to about Q.
Don't you mean Wakefield OR Miller? Beckett-Lester-Lackey-Bedard?
How about former Red Sox pitcher Biff Schlitzer, since you're a Sox fan and the name jumped out at me looking through the list of cheap pages.
Hey...your bet wasn't with me.
Done and done. Well played. I thought I had a little time for Lee to pick up, but not enough. He was probably injured to begin the year, the risk of which I assume was a big part of your making the bet.
He may have been, though I think he has had a tendency to be a slow starter for much of his career.
Mostly I just didn't think he'd be able to cut it playing for a lousy team in the best division in baseball, though he's been showing some signs of heating up lately. Now that he's headed back to the worst division in baseball, he may well have a strong last two months.
Oh, I can answer that. You see, whenever I picked up an X-ray, I'd always hold it like this. [picks up Clay's X-ray photo to demonstrate. His thumb falls right where the fracture would be] My thumb must've covered up the fractrue every time. [chuckles] I'll show myself out. [leaves]
Look, I understand how we're not there. We're not employed by the Sox. There are a lot of variables with each case....it just seems to me that after an X-Ray, an MRI would be the next logical step and one that should have taken place a long time ago. It's not an arcane procedure. It's not a one-time thing. It's not exploratory surgery. And this isn't the first time I've heard "We thought it was (X) and decided to do an MRI and found it was (Y)"...weeks later.
What are B through Q? I don't ask to be a smartass, I'm generally curious because it seems to me that everytime someone says "oh the stupid Sox medical staff" they mention Ellsbury (which in fairness seemed to get botched) but I don't know what else the Sox blew. Just thinking back to recent years;
2008 Mike Lowell was either a mess up by the medical staff or a great job to get as much out of him as they did
2010 Dustin Pedroia may have been a case of a mistake. I think it was more likely a stubborn guy refusing to admit he was hurting when he came back
2011 Kevin Youkilis has been battling a lot of injuries and I think the Sox are doing a good job to keep him in there.
Just some high profile ones there but I think the complaints about the medical staff get overblown.
Q is probably an exaggeration, but I'm looking at a list of players who didn't have injury problems until they reached the big club via promotion or trade:
Lester (to a lesser extent)
Buchholz (the present biggie)
Lowrie
Matsuzaka
Tazawa
Doubront (WTH's wrong with him anyway? Heard nothing.)
Heck, even Crawford, who with the exception of 2008 was very durable.
That's a lot of players.
The problem is there's really not a good way to tell if the medical staff is doing a good job without more information, like what the expected outcomes would be with the particular injuries they faced. They could actually be miracle workers with what they're facing, but you would never know it. Plus you can only compare them to other teams. Injuries are going to happen. Lowrie's always had a history of missing time, and the other guys on that list are pitchers. If that's the list, I'd say that's actually pretty good.
They really missed Ellsbury last year, but even if they'd made the diagnosis perfectly right off the bat, I don't know if the treatment would really have changed things that much. Broken ribs take forever to heal.
How do you blame cancer and being Mr. Glass on the Red Sox doctors? Just because someone gets hurt doesn't mean the doc's effed up, it's when there are misdiagnoses that questions occur. I think Ellsbury and Buchholz were clear mess-ups, and probably Matsuzaka (although much of that might be on Matsuzaka himself).
Nah, I've been here long enough to know there was a pretty good chance I would be doing just that.
To take the list in #35 and 36 quickly;
Lester - Seriously? Cancer?
Buchholz - At the moment this seems to be a fairly complicated thing. I think Dale raised some good point on this one earlier.
Lowrie - Hard to say what the medical staff could do about this guy. He certainly seems pretty fragile.
Matsuzaka - I think this is an issue of communication and goes two ways. Whether it is with Tito/Theo/Coaching staff or medical staff I don't know but I suspect the cultural differences were a part of this. I think there is enough blame to go around.
Tazawa - Pitcher has Tommy John surgery, film at 11.
Doubront - PeteAbe (I think) said recently that Doubront was out of shape when he showed up in Ft. Myers this year. This feels a little like a planted story (and I'm not one to make "ooh the Sox are evil and devious with the media" leaps too often) but his season has progressed like seasons other guys have had (Schilling, Beckett) when they were out of shape.
Schilling - I think there is probably a compelling argument that major arm surgery on a 40 year old pitcher who is signed to a one year deal is not the best course of action for the club. My guess is this is more on the Sox FO than the medical staff. I suspect from a purely medical standpoint surgery made sense but there was not a lot of motivation for the Sox to try that when there was a chance of a mid-season return with R&R. (working off recollection).
Just as an aside they have kept J.D. Drew pretty healthy throughout his time here and Josh Beckett is heading towards (knock on wood, knock on wood, knock on friggen wood) his fourth 200 IP season. I don't know that the medical staff deserves much if any credit for those things but I think they deserve as much credit for the successes as they get blame for the failures.
I do think that we can identify a more specific problem of bad communication between players, trainers, doctors, and management. Matsuzaka was apparently pitching for a really long time with serious things wrong in his elbow, but it wasn't identified as a clear problem for years. Pedroia tried to come back way too quickly and blew his recovery - he should have been warned against that, he should have been honest and clear about what he was feeling, and it never should have happened. The Ellsbury thing may have been a definite medical ######, but it was also a breakdown in communication where Ellsbury and his doctors and his management couldn't get on the same page about his diagnosis, rehab, and recovery. Tazawa pitched for a couple months - in the majors no less - with a torn elbow ligament. That's got to be identified earlier, and players have to have a culture of presenting problems like that honestly to medical staff. The Schilling problem seems pretty clearly to have been a case of a player not listening to his doctors, or his doctors and management not being clear about what Schilling needed to do.
I think people blame the medical staff alone for problems that are deeper and not necessarily precisely medical. There's a culture of not being wholly honest with doctors and trainers, a problem of poor communication from medical and training staff to players, and a problem where management doesn't seem to know how and where to step in and demand certain kinds of rehab or medical intervention.
Overall, it seems to me that the DL trips of Buchholz, Lester, and Lowrie are mostly cases where the system functioned pretty well. Lester's minor problem was immediately presented, correctly diagnosed, and a rehab program was implemented which everyone agreed on, and seems to have been entirely successful. We don't know how successful Buchholz and Lowrie will be at coming back from their injuries, but everyone seems to have been on the same page in presenting and identifying problems.
I don't think that identifying players who were healthy in the minors and hurt in the majors is very helpful. The sample is way too small for one - injuries happen at least semi-randomly, and seven players hardly makes up a pattern strong enough to reject the null hypothesis of randomness. Further, the majors and the minors are different, especially for pitchers. Pitchers are on very short leashes in the minors, because it doesn't matter that much whether the team wins or loses. In the show, it's a matter of balancing protecting a pitcher's arm with the need to actually win games. You'd expect there to be pitchers who are healthy in the minors on strict inning and pitch counts, who might get injured in the majors when they're stretched a bit based on the need to win today's game.
Further, and maybe Schilling said something about this (I don't know), why knows if a 40 year old pitcher would want to go through a Tommy John surgery and the year of grueling, boring rehab that comes with it.
EDIT-and now I see post 35. Disregard all this I guess
Agreed...but how do we acquire that extra information?
I'm talking about Lester's yearly trip to the DL, not cancer. Also, Mr. Glass wasn't glassy before arriving to the bigs.
Wasn't this Lester's first trip to the DL since the start of 2007?
Gawd, isn't that the truth. "Shedding the culture of 'Real Men play with injuries'" should be the new market efficiency. Supposedly Youk endangered his career last year with his odd thumb injury.
But doesn't the whole Wright thing -- which predated the Buchholz injury (early June; Wright was finally diagnosed with the fractured back in mid-May) -- kind of cut against giving the Red Sox medical staff a break here? I mean, if I had a player with a "phantom back injury," and a star player down the coast had, a month earlier, just been put on the DL with a stress fracture in his back and (presumably) similar symptoms, I'd hope that maybe it would occur to somebody to propose that as a possibility and check for it. I'm more inclined to cut the Mets' medical people some slack, because to be honest I can't remember the last baseball player before Wright with an injury like this. I kind of think Wright's situation might have put it on the Red Sox' radar screen -- especially when they went as long as they did without coming up with any explanation. I mean . . . duh?
My point is, it's not the easiest thing to simply order particularly an established player to take an MRI.
Another problem that people forget is that diagnostic medicine is hard. Sure, there are times when it's straightforward, but that's often not the case. Just to have an outside shot at being competent a doctor has to be smart, alert, wise, humble, has to very, very diligently keep up with the literature... There are a remarkable number of incompetent doctors practicing, but one reason for that is that medicine is damnably difficult.
You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.
<< Back to main