Links out of Boston as the Red Sox get set to take on the Rays this afternoon..
- The Red Sox are said to have interest in Rockies reliever Rafael Betancourt but GM Ben Cherington won't rule out dealing from the club's bullpen surplus, writes Tim Britton of The Providence Journal. “Perhaps, selectively, if the right opportunity presents. But we’ve got to be careful. Moving anything from an area that might look like there’s some surplus, pretty soon you could scramble and turn around and you’re trying to trade for the same guy you gave up."
- Cody Ross arrived in Boston with one eye on re-entering the open market this offseason, but the outfielder now says that he has enjoyed his time with the club and wouldn't mind staying, writes Rob Bradford of WEEI.com. It would make sense for the Red Sox to hang on to Ross, Speier writes, as he figures to be relatively affordable and could be a bridge for the organization's next group of outfielders.
- Carl Crawford acknowledged that external pressures, including his $142MM contract, are pushing his impending return to the club whether he's "ready or not," writes Brian MacPherson of The Providence Journal. The outfielder's seven-year, $142MM deal runs through the 2017 season.
The post preceding this discusses them trading FOR a reliever…
10.5 games back doesn’t equal surplus to me.
I’d like to point out that they’re 2.5 out of the wild card.
True, but to get that last WC slot they need to pass over 6 teams. (A’s, Indians, Tigers, Angels, O’s, Rays, Jays all equal or better record)
It’s not because of their bullpen, it’s because of their starting pitching (or lack thereof), the inconsistent offense, and their injuries (which has had anywhere from 4 to 9 former Allstars on it…). Their pen is full of guys that buyers would love to snag if the Sox turn into sellers.
Their place in the standings has absolutely nothing to do with the number of relievers they have. Your statement doesn’t even make sense.
Carl,
Return the $30,000,000 you haven’t earned since 2011 and take the rest of 2012 off, please?
Actually, keep the $30m, void the remainder of that ridiculous contract Theo gave you, and leave Boston.
fans are so i dont know the word, whe theo was the boston gm he was god and perfect but at the relationship came to an end everybody began to pick on him, hm. . .
Theo was a horrid GM ever since signing Renteria after the 2004 season. A lot of Boston fans were aware of this, actually. I’ve wanted the team to drop him since 2006.
If you’re blaming Theo for not re-signing Orlando Cabrera, don’t. Cabrera wasn’t going to be coming back due to a serious off-field issue that the media never wanted to talk about in detail.
Renteria (OPS+ of 88 in 2004) was only the first of many awful, awful contracts Theo signed players to in his post-2004 tenure.
4/$40M for a 28 y/o shortstop who had produced 13.5 WAR in the three seasons before he signed was hardly a bad decision
you didn’t forecast renteria’s failure in 2005 and if you did, you did it with a an utterly broken model
renteria goes down as a horrible result, but not a bad decision. lugo & lackey were bad decisions. renteria was a bad break
I guess I’m more talking about contracts that didn’t pan out, as well as the ones that were a priori bad. After 2004 I’m hard pressed to find a non-in-house deal engineered by Theo that produced good results. As it stands, the 2007 Sox won the World Series in spite of Theo (the horrid, horrid Gagne trade), not because of him.
i’ll help
erik bedard (1 WAR in 8 games (4 WAR pace) for next to nothing)
mike aviles (2 WAR in 180 games for next to nothing)
franklin morales (83 innings of 90 FIP-, 80 ERA- ball for nothing)
adrian gonzalez (easily won trade, well below-market extension)
alfredo aceves (for nothing)
matt albers & rich hill (for nothing)
salty (3 WAR in 170 games for roman mendez)
adrian beltre (7 WAR plus blake swihart and top 30 prospect jackie freakin’ bradley for $10M)
marco scutaro (5.5 WAR in 260 games for $11M)
billy wagner (15 innings of 2 FIP 2 ERA ball plus kolbrin vitek & anthony ranaudo for absolutely nothing)
victor martinez (almost 6 WAR in 200 games plus top 15 prospect matt freakin’ barnes plus henry owens) for justin masterson
takashi saito (55 innings of 90 FIP- 50 ERA- ball for nothing)
junichi tazawa signing
jason bay trade (7 WAR in 230 games plus bryce brentz for manny)
that only gets us to 2007, but i think the point is made. several of those are fantastic, friedman-level transactions and the rest are merely solid
and all of that, of course, is added to the shrewd in-house extensions and the enormous, league-leading amount of in-house talent produced by epstein’s regime, which is what afforded boston the ability in the first place to take risks on big tickets like lackey, lugo, crawford
those have been spectacular failures, but they’ve warped your memory. epstein did exactly as he promised: he turned boston into a “player development machine”, made some fantastic acquisitions, and in the process won a couple of world series titles
any summary of his tenure that characterizes him as something less than an excellent executive is leaving out at least half of the story
None of that stopped me from bearing good riddance to the guy who left us shackled with absurdly large contracts, preventing us from filling needs with GOOD players, and ultimately building a franchise that hasn’t won a postseason game since 2008.
The “spectacular failures” (you stole my phrase, meanie 🙁 ) of John Lackey and Julio Lugo, along with the laughable overpays to JD Drew and Carl Crawford are Theo’s most recent marks on the town. Boston is very much a “what have you done for me lately” kind of town, and I would go so far as to say that Epstein’s loose wallet left an irrevocable dark cloud over his whole history with the team. It’s the same reason Manny Ramirez, with his two world series rings, got booed the last time he was at Fenway.
(To address the Gonzalez deal: Jed Hoyer was dying to get his hands on Kelly and Rizzo. I have a hard time beliving a replacement GM couldn’t have pulled the trigger on that deal just as easily.)
It was a tale of two Theos in Boston, and unfortunately for him he left too long after Bad Theo took over.
I still have a hard time throwing Lackey into the “bad decisions” category – I guess I’m kind of on the fence (and have been since day one really). It was more money than I would have liked for them to give him, but it’s not really any more unreasonable than has to be expected when signing free agents at the top of their class, and while he shouldn’t have been viewed as an ace, he was a solid #2 coming into his contract.
And no one could have predicted the utter disaster it turned into.
i’ll make a separate category for that one then: questionable decisions that were regretted immediately
Yeah, that fits.
Maybe so. But given that OC wasn’t going to be returning, I think that any suggestions of other SS’s that Theo might have gone after instead of Rentaria is nothing but Monday morning QB-ing. IIRC, Rentaria was the best available at the time and he didn’t pan out. Sometimes you just swing and miss. Sometimes, it’s not the GM’s fault, but the player’s fault, when they don’t perform up to expectations.
I never liked Theo, kid. Trading Arroyo for Pena; signing Jeremy Giambi because he was Jason’s lil bro; trading Murphy for Gagne; trading 3 prospects for RP Mike Stanton w/ 3 days left in the season; signing Drew, Renteria, Lugo, Lackey, Wells, Piniero, Matsuzaka, Penny, Cameron, Jenks, Mendoza, Cameron & now Crawford. Call me nitpicky, but none of those are cheap signings. Theo overpaid so many players on the Sox in recent years that it absolutely crippled what Ben can do for the next 2 or 3 seasons.
Either way, you gotta pay…
So is every other team in the AL
Keeping Ross in Boston is a good idea, considering the fact we may never see the real Carl Crawford until 2014 or 2015.
or as a ryan kalish insurance policy in RF. although where’s the 2014 timetable for crawford coming from?
I may sound crazy to some, but I’m not all that fond of Kalish. He hasn’t shown all that much to me, and I’m annoyed at the idea of an all left-hand hitting OF. I’d rather keep Ross around because he has a decent RHH power bat with a nice Fenway swing. And I wouldn’t shed any tears at using Kalish as trade bait in the right deal.
While I would also be fine with retaining Ross, and using Kalish as trade bait, I don’t get why an all LHH OF would make any difference as long as they are all good players. I also don’t understand not liking Kalish, all of his tools are average or better, and he played pretty well in his first taste of the majors; he just got injured and had to have surgery, so he missed almost a year and a half, and then was thrown back into the majors after only 9 rehab games out of necessity.
Come on, MaineSox. You’re smarter than that. I don’t want an all LHH OF because the Sox are already too LHH skewed in terms of their power hitters with WMB being the only serious RHH power hitter (not counting Ross for this argument). With so many of the team’s positions pretty much locked up, the only positions where the team could add a RHH power hitter would be in the OF (probably RF) and perhaps catcher (i.e. Lavarnway).
Furthermore, the Sox play half of their games in a very RHH friendly ball park, so having some good RHH power bats in the lineup should be a good thing. Furthermore, for a LHH power bat to get solid power production in Fenway, the power needs to be VERY powerful. Decent power will tend to get eaten up by the big RF. OTOH, a RHH power bat with good power can be very power productive in Fenway for the obvious reasons, with a good “Fenway swing”, which I believe Ross has.
BTW, I do agree that Kalish was thrown into the deep end too soon after coming off the DL. “Unfortunately” for him, he started off in AAA like a house afire, and I think that that fooled some people into thinking that he really didn’t need a lot more time to make up for all that lost development time. As for his tools, maybe they’re rusty, but it doesn’t seem like his hitting “tools” are MLB ready.
If Ellsbury was traded before next season, I suppose that I could see either Sweeney or Kalish holding down the CF job, at least until Bradley was ready sometime middle of next season or for 2014. But I guess that Kalish just doesn’t excite me much. I haven’t seen a whole lot out of him when he’s been on the big club, unlike other prospects who got chances and shined (i.e. Ellsbury, Pedrioa, WMB, and so on).
Kalish starting regularly looks doubtful for the remainder of 2012
I’m not sure I understand this team, honestly. They claim “buyer” in the media, yet they want to trade away pieces that have been their biggest positive this season.
Trading away bullpen pieces would be stupid. You know what the surplus is for? When Albers decides to pitch like Albers. When Atchinson starts pitching like the AAAA player he’s been for the last 2 years.
That said – I think they should be sellers all the way. Trade bullpen pieces. Trade Ells. Trade Ross, Sweeney, Shoppach, and Aviles.
Atchisson would have been fine all of last season had Francona given him the chance, but Francona had this habit of never using people he didn’t like, so kept him buried at Pawtucket, even when he needed him. If you watch Atch, will notice he has developed a nice cutter.. he had it last year also and was why was pretty fair last season and is a important part of the pen this year, then once again.. Francona and his pets, like mcDonald and Hall were a fraternity group…
Albers you don’t pitch 2 days in a row.. Notice that last night? Velocity drop of 2mph and his slider was awful?? Why did Bobby V pitch him? I dunno.. It’s easy to pick up and Melencon was fresh.. Albers was that way last season also. he needs a day (at least) between appearances.
I do not know albers ratio of inherited runners scoring, but it seems like whoever is on base when he comes in, scores. I think both his victories were like that. Why not use him to start an inning instead?
I agree with using Albers to start an inning also, rather than bringing him in with like 2 runners on and a 1 run game like last night.
Tampa, that place if never been there? Those people to cover for lack of Rays fans at the game (it’s 50-50 Boston when they are in town) clatter cow bells all the time to drown out the Sox fans and it is sooo intense, one leaves with a migraine after a game sometimes.. I sometimes think Rays fans have one permanent that attend games and bring them, or some other disorder that makes them bring them and resort to using them.. It is beyond belief the racket those things make…
Anyway.. The noise from those.. Things.. 1 run game, tying run at second and Albers already used the day before when he generally needs a day off between games to pitch better was a recipe for disaster..
albers is brought in with men on base because he’s a groundballer and they’re looking for a double-play
and since you brought it up, his IS% is 30 which is neither good nor terrible. his DP% is 24, which is more than double the league average
I’d like to point out their weak schedule and the “eye” test. They are like 2.5 games out, but play like they are 6 or 7 games out.
It is appearing Carl does not want to play for the red sox. Why else would he say something like that. He is implying he is not ready and this will give him the ok to get hurt again a week or so after coming back, ending 2012, and probably half of 2013. He must have went to the Carl Pavano no play but get paid school.
NE fans, ready to start it up all again.. I long for the day pre 2004 again already…
crawford has a partial torn UCL, there is no such thing as a “sprain” the team is calling it and he needs the surgery. Did you watch the PawSox game broadcast on NesN friday? Did you see those 2 throws he made to the infield on balls hit to him? He bounced one to the cutoff man.. He cannot hardly throw and wait until he gets to Boston.. There isn’t going to be any throws to the plate, all to the cut off man..
He is pressing, because of people just like… To get to the MLB team because they are under constant pressure to win.. I would prefer he gets the surgery now, even though they *say* the surgery is like 6 months for a non pitcher so he gets a near full year before next ST to get over it.
Crawford has one bad year followed by an injury, and I’d swear he’s more hated than A-Rod. Don’t be mad at the player, be mad at the execs.
You think Crawford enjoys playing crappy baseball? Sure, he’s overpaid at this point, but you all gave up way too quickly. Having fans lionize him like this probably only hurts his willingness to come back quickly.
What do you expect? Hes one of the highest paid players in baseball, with big contracts come big expectations.