Hall of Merit: Most Meritorious Player: 1899 Ballot

Here are the specific rules for this election:

Candidate Eligibility: Any North American professional baseball player is eligible for the Most Meritorious Player (MMP) award including players on independent teams. Voters should consider the player’s on-field contribution to Major League Baseball (MLB) team(s) in that season only. If part of the season was spent outside MLB, that value may be considered as well. However, the player’s on-field contribution should be judged in relation to the ...

Sox Therapy: One Step Forward

For the first time in 2022 the Boston Red Sox are starting to look like the team we have expected to see.  They have gone 5-3 over the last week and change and they have done so while playing five of those games against last season’s World Series combatants.  After what can best be called a nightmare start the Sox are pulling it together.  The offense has gotten hot scoring 46 runs in the 8 games and save for one memorable inning Tuesday night the pitching has been very good as well.  The call ...

Sox Therapy: Unacceptable

We can bicker about this that and the other thing but the simple reality is that the Boston Red Sox are not performing anywhere near where they should be and are in a position that on May 8th they are already in a world of hurt.  Trying to figure out why this is happening is beyond my skillset.  The talent on this roster is sufficient to be considerably better than they are.  Even if we accept that they overachieved last year, and no one would really argue that, they are not a 70 win team ...

Hall of Merit: Most Meritorious Player: 1899 Discussion

No World Series yet so no postseason consideration.

Player			BBR WAR
John McGraw		8.0
Ed Delahanty		8.0
Jimmy Williams		6.9
Chick Stahl		5.6
Jesse Burkett		5.8
Honus Wagner		5.8
Bobby Wallace		5.5
George Davis		4.9
Joe Kelley		4.5
Willie Keeler		4.8
Napoleon Lajoie		3.8
Tom Daly		4.6
Roy Thomas		4.9
Bill Dahlen		4.6
Fred Tenney		5.3
Jake Beckley		4.6
Lave Cross		3.6
Ed McFarland		4.0
Jimmy Collins		3.9
Kip Selbach		3.7
Jimmy Sheckard		3.6
Elmer Flick		4.2
Mike Grady		3.2
Ginger ...

Hall of Merit: Most Meritorious Player: 1898 Results

Congratulations to Kid Nichols, the Most Meritorious Player of 1898!

Sox Therapy: Well At Least April Is Over

To be fair I also considered “that sucked” as a title for this piece and frankly that would have been just as accurate.  Sometimes there are things you can say and sometimes there aren’t.  This is one of the latter times right now.  We can talk about the failure to get a right-handed bat in the outfield or a platoon partner for Bobby Dalbec but the reality is that the problems on this team are the guys that we shouldn’t have to worry about.  Xander Bogaerts (.918 vs .862) and JD Martinez (.906 ...

Sox Therapy: Lining Up The Minors

With the big club clicking like a well-oiled machine (shut up, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it) I thought it might be a good time to take a look at what is happening on other teams who go by “Red Sox.”  And just in the interest of keeping it simple let’s acknowledge here and now that all numbers in this piece suffer from small sample size warnings.

1B - Triston Casas - AAA - Honestly there is no way that Casas wouldn’t be the player I would focus on here.  Bobby Dalbec is not exactly ...

Hall of Merit: Most Meritorious Player: 1898 Ballot

Here are the specific rules for this election:

Candidate Eligibility: Any North American professional baseball player is eligible for the Most Meritorious Player (MMP) award including players on independent teams. Voters should consider the player’s on-field contribution to Major League Baseball (MLB) team(s) in that season only. If part of the season was spent outside MLB, that value may be considered as well. However, the player’s on-field contribution should be judged in relation to the ...

Sox Therapy: Predictions of Ridiculousness

Last year towards the tail end of the season I charted the Sox’ path to 92 wins.  In what turned out to be a bit of serendipity the Sox in fact wound up with 92 wins on the dot (thank you Raffy Devers).  With that bit of good luck I had planned on doing a semi-tongue in cheek prediction for 2022.  I didn’t quite get around to it but what the hell, 16 games isn’t that far.  With that in mind here is my 2022 Boston Red Sox prediction!  It will likely be fun to see how accurate the overall is (I ...

Sox Therapy: The First Big Test

The 2021 Red Sox were in many ways a bully team.  They had their way with lesser opponents finishing with the third best record in the league against sub-.500 teams but the 7th best against teams over .500.  They also led the league in games played against teams over .500 (94) courtesy of their division.  Not much is changing schedule-wise in 2022 with the AL East being a grind so if the Sox want to ascend to last year’s success they will need to beat the best.  After a relatively mild early ...