Red Sox Reality Check

I don't have time for any exhaustive review of the first quarter of the season. But if you want answers, simple and painful, they can be distilled into two charts. You must click to see the full charts. The first examines Red Sox starting pitching. Forget about no Daisuke or Lackey and focus on what is here. First, the Sox are next to last in ERA. They have allowed almost a run more than the league average. Granted the defense is worse than advertised. But look at the best predictor of future ERA, K/BB ratio. With the league average at over 2, the Red Sox are about 1.66 to 1. This also implies that Toronto is living on borrowed time with their staff. Within the team, you can see where the problems have been, specifically Daniel Bard and Clay Buchholz. Both BARELY exceed parity (1:1) on K/BB. It's easy to understand the K/BB ratio as a ratio examining power and command. So as much as the apologistas want to blame injuries to Ellsbury, Crawford, and Youkilis for the Sox m...

Your browser does not support iframes. They call it 'professional baseball', the major leagues, 'the show'. Unfortunately, our lying eyes tell us that, despite efforts to standardize umpiring, MLB is falling short. In the video above, you see Brett Lawrie "lose it", en route to EARNING a four game suspension. The umpire, Bill Miller, has received neither sanction nor public reprimand for his role. Clearly, Lawrie overreacted, but Miller gives the appearance of injecting himself into the action, quite probably retaliating against the volatile Blue Jays third baseman. MLB, while celebrating the human element (making bad calls is evidently integral in baseball), has introduced boundary call replays , precisely because umpires (like all of us), make mistakes and fans (aided by replays) demand a higher standard. Every MLB stadium has a tool, Pitch FX, designed to analyze pitch location, speed, type, and more, but becomes a tool to study both player and umpi...

Here's the problem, Sox fans. We care too much. Walking around time in your Fenway tees and Red Sox caps, we're billboards for sorry obsession. Sure, you love baseball in the fashion of Bart Giamatti and Bob Costas, the smell of green grass and money in the air. Maybe you should pause to reflect upon what Giamatti actually said,  “[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”   In other words, what we're feeling is normal. Really, why should we care, when the feeling isn't mutual or at least universal. Sure, players bask in the re...

As fans we are outsiders. The saying goes, "what you see here and what you hear here, stays here." That is, baseball players must respect the sanctity of the clubhouse. Of course, sometimes we get the tiniest glimpse of what happens there. Chicken and beer isn't as important as the will to prepare, leading to success on the field. Preparation might be mental or physical, watching film or lifting weights, spending ten minutes a day on sports psychology.  One Red Sox employee told me, the all-too-common attitude migrates from "whatever it takes" to "I've got mine." And that doesn't translate to winning baseball. New players on the Patriots talk about doing whatever it takes to contribute to winning, to working toward a common goal, to get to the Super Bowl. Is that what we SEE with Ye Olde Towne Team? Currently, the Red Sox have one of the worst records in baseball. WYSIATI. What you see is all there is? Fans want players who care as much a...

It's hard not to comment about the mediocre defense the Red Sox are running out there lately. Even worse, the announcers either have been instructed to downplay it or simply choose to. First, nobody chooses to fail. I remember the Steve Lyons mantra about earning the right to fail. But over the weekend, Saltalamacchia's defense led to Aaron Cook's injury via the passed ball, and Salty dropped popups on consecutive days. After all, this is the Big Leagues. Tonight, Marlon Byrd misplayed a long fly to the track into two runs, and Will Middlebrooks turned a routine grounder into a three-base error (no way was it a single). At least Middlebrooks hits the ball. Yes, the errors are worse than the whistling past the graveyard approach to announcing. But when the Royals leftfielder misplayed Shoppach's fly ball into a triple, Eck was all over it. "He's gotta catch that ball". It wasn't that long ago that "run prevention" was to become the Sox...

I can't focus on solutions today. The problems are overwhelming. Hope and pageantry have morphed into predation, with the Sox as prey. The Red Sox announcers regularly tell us about the Red Sox fielding percentage and how they're at the top of the league. Anyone who watches the games recently sees: 1) We see mediocre but not average outfield defense (even routine plays look hard), weak throwing arms, and very few 'good' plays. Ask Daniel Bard. 2) Concern about the catching situation. Not only did Saltalamacchia struggle catching Aaron Cook, he contributed to Cook's injury, and missed a popup. We keep hearing about Lavarnway's limitations...and we keep seeing the Red Sox battery running low . 3) The day-to-day lineup, courtesy of injury, gets exposed. Role and platoon players forced into starting positions has gotten ugly . The Orioles look like the 1966 Orioles on the mound. Are they that good or are the Sox simply making them look good? With Ortiz and ...

Describing the Boston Red Sox as a franchise with the Death of Accountability misrepresents reality. The players have collectively never owned accountability. In 1967 and 1975, the Sox got beaten by better teams, those with Bob Gibson and Lou Brock and the Big Red Machine. Let's forget about late-season baserunning in 1972. In 1986, it's hard not to represent defeat as the ugliest word in sports, choking. 2003 had a unique form of torture, and since then it's been Shangri-La, even when it isn't. Collective failure always belongs to ownership, the general manager, or the manager. Terry Francona wasn't the first to take the fall. Does anyone remember Grady Little? It's never the players who are responsible for their play or their behavior. They're our guys, in psychology, cloaked in endowment effect ...the coffee cup that you would sell at a yard sale for two dollars is only worth a dollar if you had to buy it. It's our cup, and dammit, it's speci...

Let's face it...we must fight the addiction. Why show undiminished love to an organization that treats us as though we're Cinderella and they're the evil sisters? We need our own ' program ' to help us break free from this enabling. Here are our nine steps toward intellectual freedom. We admitted we were powerless over being a fan, that our compulsion needed to be beaten. We had begun with Boston caps, and moved on to jackets, to blankets...like Jimmy Fallon, only worse.  Came to believe that NESN would only lead us to self-destruction.  Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of alternative life choices, playing with our children, walking, reading, and not listening to sports radio. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to the highest living Red Sox charismatic figure, Johnny Pesky, that we needed to change...channels. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortstop and fix our bullpen and lack of player accountability. Made a list of all the times we had bee...

In the movie "Swordfish", John Travolta comments about the importance of misdirection. He couldn't be more right about the current state of affairs of the Boston Red Sox. It seems misdirection comes from all sides, players with an entitlement mentality, absentee ownership, and a manager struggling to imprint his brand on a wayward ship. Even the hero in our story, Dustin Pedroia, reduces himself saying "that's not the way we do things here." In fact, that's exactly how we got to this disturbing place, players dismissing the manager, and ownership bringing a 'task-oriented' manager instead of a 'relationship oriented' skipper. We hear how players are concerned about 'snitches'. In other words, professionalism matters less than protecting each others' reputations. Nobody likes to be criticized. And worse than criticism of performance, impugning one's attitude or "commitment" gets our attention. The mana...

The saying goes, "you win 60, you lose 60, and what you do in the other 40 matters." Tonight, the ball bounced (literally) the right way as a Ryan Sweeney single to right scored @MacDime54 on a bad bounce to J.P. Arencibia. No, I don't think the Sox are a powerhouse, but at least we'll put the total collapse theory to bed tonight. Daniel Bard is a starter. Whatever happened to "I'll do whatever's best for the team?"  Evidently, in a league where the AVERAGE salary is almost 3.5 million dollars, the team doesn't matter? Felix (the Cat) Doubront looked good, although with the relative failure of economical pitching with over 100 pitches in five innings. His curveball looks better than it used to be, and Toronto made him work. As for the slogan for the 2012 season, what it won't be is "Eat More Chik'n"...

(BOSTON) The Boston Red Sox continue to explore options in the compensation battle for departed General Manager Theo Epstein. In the wake of the Red Sox historic September collapse, Epstein bolted to the Windy City and the Red Sox received what many consider inadequate compensation. The primary chip in the deal was minor leaguer Chris Carpenter, who has recently undergone surgery in his throwing elbow. General Manager Ben Cherington has tried to no avail to identify "fair compensation" in the extend and pretend fiasco that the Sox have undergone. Cherington sought permission to throw one pie in the face of Epstein, but could not get agreement regarding the flavor of the pie. In preliminary talks, Epstein also agreed that only Carpenter could throw the pie, right-handed of course.  Looking slightly blue, Cherington threatened to hold his breath for ever-increasing times. This made him look slightly foolish in comparison with the constant chatter from manager Bobby Valent...

The Sox have appeared on NESN several times and last night I watched a few innings via an MLB channel on cable, the YES Network feed. Paul O'Neill and Lou Piniella couldn't have been more complimentary to practically everyone who ever wore a Red Sox or Yankee uniform. Of course, I can only watch a few innings of a Grapefruit League game at this point...with developing wandering interests, neck stiffness, and some blurred vision. You can't expect players to play nine immediately, and you can't demand that fans endure the ordeal that is the Red Sox and Yankees either. It seems as though every hitter is taking an extra pitch, or fouling off some, such that four innings of Felix Doubront seems like a whole game's worth of Denny McLain. His pitch count had to be at least seventy-five, and it's not Japanese baseball so I'm not expecting any eight inning, 150 pitch outings. So how did I watch the game anyway? First, I had to check the travel distance from For...

The Red Sox entertain Boston College and Northeastern today. In a gathering which should provide a lifetime of memories for players, families, and friends, the Sox get out of the box quickly. If only they could have beaten up on the Orioles so easily at the end of 2011. Speaking of beatings, we'll be getting an insufferable number of comparisons between Terry Francona and Bobby Valentine soon enough. How can the media extol the retiring Jason Varitek for his meritorious service marked by great preparation, and condemn (or even hint at) Valentine for excessive work on fundamentals? "Don't Sweat the Small Stuff" might have been a popular book, but the players who don't give away an at-bat, who take the extra base, hit the cutoff man, play better positional defense, avoid collisions in the field, and hold runners on base might actually steal a game or more over the season. The clubhouse 'scrubbing' takes time. And everyone knows, had the Sox won a coupl...

It hasn't taken Terry Francona long to enter the fray concerning the free-for-all that has been the Red Sox clubhouse. He has the opportunity to wear two hats, his ESPN Commentator hat, and the jilted manager cap.  Everyone recognizes that with more freedom (alcohol, curfew, miscellaneous rules) comes great responsibility. Invariably, if one asks adults to behave in a mature, considerate, responsible manner, we sometimes err. Of course, the old saying, "it is easier to ask forgiveness than permission also applies." When we look historically at the adults called professional ballplayers, referencing timeless classics like Jim Bouton's "Ball Four", we know that baseball clubhouses involve not semantics, but some antics. “Throw him low smoke and we'll go pound some Budweiser.” As the new Skipper, you can't take the "boys will be boys" approach. Red Sox management made the traditional "managerial alternans" choice, of a 'ta...

Beergate simply won't die. I really hate the 'gate' suffix, but it fits here, because like it or not, it helped contribute to the perception that Terry Francona got the 'gate'. I'm not very sympathetic to so-called professionals whose immaturity or lack of discipline got exposed, and who then cry foul. Once again, it's not the behavior that's the problem, it's revealing it. I can't imagine that patrons would be happy to hear that their surgeon drank in the doctor's lounge during a 'case', even if it were unlikely that he'd get called into surgery. Rumors of pregame drinking (position player) still exist, although that player's no longer a member of Ye Olde Towne Team. Baseball, like many other professions, is a 'bottom-line' business. You can eat, drink, or carouse your way out of a team. If you have a problem with alcohol, then you'd better perform at a high level when you're not drinking. Sometimes char...

Tim Wakefield, author of two hundred career wins, the third highest win total of any Red Sox pitcher, and apparently a very good man, retires.  Other than dying, the best way to earn great praise is to retire. Make no mistake, examining Wakefield's entire body of work, from his illustrious beginnings in 1995 for the Sox, to post-season contributions, and charity work, he has a great, supportable narrative . But the past two seasons , he became more of a liability than an asset, especially when the Sox ran him out there time after time (eight) in pursuit of victory two-hundred. One can argue that the horrendous start, the Wakefield 200 tour, and the September collapse all had roles. Similarly, let none of us forget the Jacksonian "what have you done for me lately" attitude that baseball fans live. I never felt that he was out there just picking up a paycheck. Maybe that's harsh, in light of the 'good soldier' ethic that might have entitled Wakefield to a f...

It's never just about the Red Sox, because there's an equal concern about perception. This weekend, the New York Yankees went nuclear, acquiring Pineda and Kuroda to solidify their rotation. The Red Sox have responded recently with the "ten dimes equals a dollar" approach,  going to the dime store for the Cook, Germano, Silva, and Padilla bargain basement rotation builder plan. The AL East must be selling tickets to the bat rack. To be fair, the Sox had squandered spent a fortune on pitching including the Matsuzaka and Lackey deals, and are suffering the "once burned, twice shy" reaction, coupled with 'diversification'. You can't be spending all your dough on Ye Olde Towne Team when you've gotta support Liverpool, NASCAR, and whatever the next M&A play is. It's not as though the fans are screaming for a new right fielder or shortstop. A lineup of Ellsbury, Crawford, Pedroia, Gonzalez, Youkilis, Ortiz, Salty, Scutaro, and RF TBA...

Most people answer to somebody. Evidently, if rumors are to be believed, that doesn't apply to certain professional baseball players. The Red Sox will announce hiring Bobby Valentine tomorrow, and the ink isn't even dry on his contract, and ostensibly some 'stars' already have their nose out of joint. Did Bobby Valentine say that Joe Blosox wasn't the greatest hitter/pitcher/baserunner? Even the best ballplayer (or any other profession) makes mistakes. Hitting .300 (failing seven times out of ten) can still make you an elite ballplayer. Perhaps the question is what standard a professional ballplayer should be held to. Play hard Play smart (situational baseball) Show up on time Prepare yourself to be successful (rest, conditioning, etc.) Respect the game Respect the organization Respect the manager Be a good teammate If you can't adhere to these basic requirements, then let the front office know, so they can try to move you to an organization where...

The Red Sox haven't called (formally) to eliminate me from their managerial search. Okay, so I have no experience playing Major League Baseball. From a medical standpoint, I might be considered underqualified, too, because I am not a Pediatrician, and the childish narcissism in the clubhouse needs constant attention. Alright, then, my continued monitoring of copper probably hasn't really gone over well with John Henry. The commodities magnate undoubtedly has his own take on copper (which hasn't performed all that well lately), although coffee could be at an inflection point. And no matter what your individual taste says, "America Runs on Dunkin'". See how I fit that plug in perfectly. Conversely, the most disaffected man in the clubhouse, needs a cribbage partner. I guarantee that I can bring on the challenge to Dustin Pedroia at least at the level of Terry Francona. There's no way I'll be getting any "19" hands against the Sox' spir...

The Red Sox hire a new manager, but behind the scenes, the battle rages. We have Rocky Lucchino training hard with Scrabble, Brain Trainer, and free weights. In the other corner, Ivan (Ben) Cherington trains with caffeine, an iPad, and Carmine in his corner. Rocky knows that he has the upper hand, while the "GM in Name Only" Cherington, sharpens his knives pencils to do battle for his candidate. The Sox are defining themselves by this GM search, as a methodical but indecisive, assiduous but plodding cabal of dissidents in the affront office. The glitzy candidate, Bobby Valentine, gets dissed because he MIGHT actually criticize the players. God forbid that guys who miss cutoffs, run the bases at times like the Bad News Bears, and sometimes showed all the professionalism of a chimpanzee dance troupe take heat from...anyone. Do you think Patriot players try to undermine Bill Belichick if they don't like the play calling or defensive strategies? Do you think Ross Ventr...