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1. Jose Can Still Seabiscuit Posted: April 13, 2012 at 08:10 PM (#4106245)I'd boo the inventor of leukemia too! What an ass. Jon Lester should get to hit him in the balls with a fastball!
Henry and Werner Skip Liverpool's FA Cup Semifinal
There's a lot of snark in the article between the lines--basically that this is just 1 game out of 162 (even though they mention the 100th anniversary of Fenway celebration).
Despite my mother’s enthusiasm I felt there was a decided lack of “buzz” around the yard.
I can see this. It wasn't exactly ZOMG OPENING DAY AT FENWAY IS HERE. I'm not sure there was an appreciable difference between today and other regular season games.
Awesome. She's like a radio psychic.
Jeter came back and played 119 games says Speier. Out on Mar 31 back on May 13.
Banner on the front of Popeye's on the way to the game: 4 OUT OF 5 PITCHERS PREFER OUR CHICKEN!
That doesn't seem like a good promotion to me, but what do I know?
"Come eat the chicken blamed for the historic collapse last season of your favorite team!!!"
Hopefully it's just more mild dislocation and the rest and rehab will get him back good to go in ~6 weeks. But I'm not holding my breath.
I'll be annoyed if all they do is call up Lin and play McDonald every day. I'd be pretty surprised if Valentine would be ok with that.
*My WAG.
Dan, wouldn't power come more from Ells left shoulder? With the right shoulder stabilizing the swing?
We don't know the kind or extent of damage to Ellsbury's shoulder. Jeter was pretty much fine after six weeks, other players have missed a whole season, others have returned in two months but faced lingering effects. Ellsbury will probably be like one of those three types, and we don't really know at all which one.
How did Beckett look? I can't trust Castiglione to be my eyes.
And apparently that's where the homers were.
Quite glad they traded him away for a reliever who looks to be completely useless.
It seemed like Aceves came in with little to no warming in the bullpen.
I'm more annoyed about Nate Spears, though. I don't think that he's the wrong call, necessarily, but the fact that Nate Spears makes sense as a call-up speaks to what a poor job Cherington did of fitting his depth acquisitions to the existing roster. The Sox are calling up a utility man as a lefty outfield bat. Why do we have four right-handed depth outfielders and no lefties?
I agree with all of that but let me play Devil's advocate for a minute. As the off-season began I think the Sox had a reasonable expectation of Crawford and maybe Kalish being ready at the start or soon after. They've begun working Anderson as an outfielder and a month from now he would probably be the guy called up as a LHB outfielder. Meanwhile, there was some crap luck on the injury front (use luck as literally as you desire) with setbacks for Crawford and Kalish and now this thing with Ellsbury. I also think they DID address the LHB outfielder situation with Kroeger but just got it wrong.
The other thing is tht the Sox could justifiably have argued at the sort of the off-season that LHB outfield was not a place to spend resources. With the entire outfield lefty plus Kalish it should not have been a major priority.
I don't think this is right. The Sox acquired Sweeney, Ross, Repko and Kroeger for depth. The existing roster had McDonald, Ellsbury and Crawford expected back to start the year or soon after. They had Lin in the minors for a defensive backup. How many more OFs did they need to acquire? They lost Drew and replaced him with Sweeney.
Edit: Forgot about Kalish. But he went down in November. Crawford went down in March. What kind of replacement could they have gotten for him then?
The issue for me is that this roster needed a lefty bat from the beginning - even with a complete OF, they needed someone better than Punto or Salty to pinch-hit. (I was posting about this at the end of spring.) The fact that the Sox now also need this lefty bat to play regularly in the OF is just an extra dollop of annoyance on top of the existing, annoying problem.
Isn't that just how we were interpreting it around here? I don't remember the Sox coming out and saying it would be a platoon. I thought that what they said was that Sweeney was the RF.
I think their pinch hitter is Lars. I don't think he'll make it in the OF, but if he does, he'd be an asset.
The bullpen is starting to shake out a bit. Just based on usage I think we can say with some confidence that;
Trusted with important innings - Aceves, Morales, Padilla
Trusted if needed - Atchison
Not trusted - Albers, Melancon
Not exactly sure where Justin Thomas slots. I guess he is "more trusted than Michael Bowden."
Ross's "strikeout"
Says stupid things:
Tito: 0. Never. a players manager. I don't think I ever heard him say something stupid about his players one time. Maybe he got annoyed when called out on a mistake. So bump it up to a 1.
Valentine: 8. Does own up to mistakes at least. So far, but owning up is going to get old at this rate.
Bullpen misuse:
Tito: 7. Chased wins, had a slow hook.
Valentine: 8. Not even Tito would have let Bard walk Longoria. There's character building, and there's letting a gassed pitcher throw.
Pinch-running acumen:
Tito: 5. Tito got burnt more often then not.
Valentine: 6. Does the same things but they've paid off, luck bumps it up one point.
Good use of 'small-ball':
Tito: 3
Valentine: 5 (so far) The very fact that Valentine might put on a squeeze play is an advantage over knowing that Tito won't 99.9999% of the time.
That's just a SSS off the cuff/pissed at Bobby rant. Take it for what it's worth.
Vanover cares more about leaving the park than getting calls right or the integrity of the game. Good to know.
Vanover called strikes on 12 balls out of the strike zone all day. 4 of those were with Ross at the plate.
I will say that once it became clear that 4-8 inches off the plate counted as a strike at least half the time, Ross really needed to start swinging. He could easily be forgiven, though, given that some of them WERE called correctly - and they were all basically the same pitch.
What a stupid way to end a game.
McDonald finally made the cutoff for Similarity Scores on bb-ref. His closest comp is Billy McMillon. He'd be more useful in the days when teams had a bigger bench.
But you can't hit the pitch that's that far off the plate with any authority. There wasn't a single pitch in the at bat that was a clear strike. Pitch #4 was borderline. 8 inches is a good deal in the other batter's box. You just can't even hope to hit that.
A to the first, we have no evidence it was productive to act that way as a manger, and also have evidence that it hurt them last year. As I said in game chatter, today's Bard slow hook was a preposterous thing to have done, but it's actually the first such instance we've had with Bobby V I think. Indeed, he's had some very quick hooks, especially with relievers, that I really liked. Disaster today, I still suspect he's much better than Tito.
And also:
More quotes here: http://www.boston.com/sports/baseball/redsox/extras/extra_bases/2012/04/bard_tries_to_g.html
It was a dumb stupid thing to have done, but Bard is just learning how to be a starter. I think it's too soon to condemn the manager based on this.
In related news, Curt Schilling continues to do everything he can to make me loathe him.
(And I bang my head on a table)
This isn't a frigging movie!!! It's someone's ####### responsibility to put away the macho ######## and realize we're dealing not just with yesterday's game, but also with a TIRED PITCHER who weighs about 150 pounds wet, who is at a career high pitch count, and who we hope to have a long successful career.
As soon as he walks the 9 guy on 5 balls you get someone up and in the game as soon as possible. You don't ask a stupid loaded question like "Do you want this guy?" Give me a ####### break. It's 2012 people!!
Man IM STILL LOVING THAT LOWRIE AND WEILAND FOR MELANCON TRADE! Good job, boys!
Having said that if anyone has any reason for me to believe that this is anything other than a .500 team i'm all for it.
*Acknowledging that Lowrie would be utility/stop-gap here and Weiland would be the 8th starter.
No such bright side to the Melancon trade.
The Sox OF is an interesting situation - Crawford played a full game in extended spring, and he should begin a rehab assignment next week. That gives the Sox, even in a best case scenario, about 15 games remaining with Ross-Sweeney-McDonald-Repko as their outfield. That's 15 more games with at least one of Jason Repko or Darnell McDonald starting in the outfield. I think that's too many. Is it really going to cost that much in talent or money to snag someone's better-than-Repko 5th OF? Given how low the cost should be, I think a move is justified.
I know the Sox and Valentine talked about how much they liked Repko and McDonald in spring, so if they continue to believe in them, they should continue to run them out there. My impression is that they shouldn't believe in either McDonald or Repko, and so they should make a trade.
Why is Astros emphasized? Is it easier to have a higher save rate for a bad team?
If you want to talk about how well Melancon pitched in leveraged situations, we have WPA for that. He was at +1.45, which is not great but solidly above average. (Which is all anyone expected Melancon to be.)
Trading for a pitcher who turns out to be bad is a bad thing, I will be happy to blame Cherington and the Red Sox baseball ops people if Melancon remains ineffective. I'm just saying Melancon's save percentage serves as no kind of evidence that he was going to be bad.
I should say, the Sox usage of Melancon suggests pretty strongly that they started to regret the trade in March. I'm skeptical it's a "can't handle Boston" thing - dude was shaky in spring too, did the fake Fenway atmosphere in meaningless games overwhelm him?
Heh. Isn't that why they built the replica Fenway? To see if peeps can handle it? Maybe they should seed the crowd with hecklers too.
And I sure wish Simmons had told me before I drafted Melancon. Fortunatly I benched him for his second to last appearance and dropped him before last night.
Lowrie has 6 in 25 PAs though. Good for Jed.
That 'web gem' was laughable though. He didn't dive for it, he just fell over.
If Lowrie fell over then got up without the aid of a stretcher that alone deserves a web gem.
Two things;
1. A guy like Melancon never got to close against the Astros last year. So that's one less bad team he is going to face.
2. When a bad team beats a good team, it is likely to be in a close game so the save chance is going to be there.
Save % is a bad stat. And for any purpose you might want to use it, WPA is clearly superior.
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