Still Slow Going

We signed David Ross to a two-year deal worth $6.2 million as a second catcher.  Juan Nieves is our new pitching coach; we are retaining Gary Tuck as our bullpen coach.

In other news, the Pats beat the Bills yesterday, 37-31.

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While I Was Out

The coaching staff has now officially been finalized.  Tim Bogar is the bench coach.  Jerry Royster will take his place as the third base coach.  Alex Ochoa is the first base coach.  Dave Magadan will remain the hitting coach, and Gary Tuck will remain the bullpen coach.  Our new pitching coach is Bob McClure.  The Royals let him go after finishing in fourth place in their division last season, and then we hired him as a minor league instructor and special assignment scout.  Obviously on the surface, this doesn’t exactly bode well.  However, it’s worth mentioning that his professional profile is similar to John Farrell’s; like Farrell, he’s been a player as well as a coach, and he has a knack for evaluating talent.  But by now I have learned how fruitless it is to delve analytically into anything that Bobby V. does before I actually see how it shapes up in action.  Regarding McClure, I’m not sure I know what to think at this point.

We now officially have a closer, and it turns out that it isn’t Mark Melancon.  Melancon will obviously be in the mix, but we traded first baseman Miles Head, right-handed pitcher Raul Alcantara, and, yes, even Josh Reddick to the A’s for outfielder Ryan Sweeney and, more importantly, Andrew Bailey.  Bailey has a career 2.07 ERA and 0.95 WHIP with seventy-five saves and only nine blown saves in his three seasons in the Majors.  He has been injured, which restricted him to less than fifty innings in his last two seasons.  But because we expect him to own the ninth only, I don’t see a problem.  The Bailey-Melancon one-two punch shows considerable promise.  Like Paps, Bailey tends to induce his fair share of fly balls, so Melancon serves as a nice complement to that; in his career, Melancon has induced double the amount of ground balls as fly balls, and only three pitchers last season had a better ratio.

So, to put it lightly, he’ll do.  Now let’s look at Sweeney.  His hitting stats obviously don’t match up well with Reddick’s, but he’s got a solid OBP and he can play all three outfield positions, which we know is incredibly useful.  However, I’m still not happy about that part of the trade because, while Sweeney has obvious upsides, he technically doesn’t even come close to Reddick.  I mean, Reddick has the makings of a Major League superstar.  Of course, we have to moderate that a little by accounting for the fact that he’s young yet and hasn’t seen much action relatively speaking, but still.  I see this trade as addressing our short-term needs rather than considering our long-term needs.  There is a time and place for doing so, but I’m not convinced that this was it.  Again, we’ll have to wait and see.  It’s important to remember that this is Ben’s team now, and he deserves a chance to prove that he has as much foresight as anybody.

Ryan Kalish will miss the start of the season; he just had surgery on his left shoulder to repair a torn labrum.  In all likelihood, so will Jenks, who had another surgery.

The Yankees signed Okajima to a minor league deal; oh, how the mighty have fallen.  The Cubs hired Bill Buckner as a minor league hitting coach.  I hope Theo has fun with that.  Incidentally, in case you didn’t notice, that was sarcastic.

In other news, the Pats have been on an absolute tear.  We beat the Redskins, Broncos, Dolphins, and Bills.  We’ll see if we can convert that into anything of note when it counts.  The B’s have been similarly dominating; we beat the Habs, Panthers (eight-zip shutout), and Coyotes; we dropped our game against the Stars.  We womped the Devils and Flames (seriously, a nine-zip shutout) and lost to Vancouver in a very eventful matchup in which Vancouver was obviously trying to make a statement.  I’d say it was grasping; they may have beaten us by a goal, but the last time I checked, we are still the reigning Stanley Cup champions.  The benches cleared, though.  Five Canucks charged Shawn Thornton for defending a hit teammate, and then all the gloves dropped.  Vancouver coach Alain Vigneault says we’re too physical, probably because the Canucks can’t match us.  By the way, Milan Lucic did indeed take the ice legally on a line change.

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By A Hair

I had high hopes for this game.  Very high hopes.  After all, it is the Orioles, and we are throwing Beckett.  Oh, wait.

Beckett lasted six innings.  He gave up six runs on seven hits, two of which were home runs, the first a solo shot with one out in the second and the second a three-runner with two out in the sixth.  That three-run home run was an inside-the-park home run.  Ellsbury looked like he was about to make a particularly Ellsbury-esque catch, the kind of catch that only Ellsbury could make.  Instead, he collided with the wall and lost the ball.  It was the first inside-the-park homer the Orioles have hit at home and the first we’ve allowed since 2006.  Thankfully, Ellsbury is okay.  The game’s result, not so much.

Beckett walked four and struck out five.  He threw 108 pitches, seventy-one of which were strikes.  What can I say? He didn’t have it.  We’d just played fourteen innings against New York and some terrible games overall this month.  We needed a big night.  He didn’t deliver.

We actually struck first.  The bases were loaded with two out in the first, but Lowrie flied out.  What a waste of an opportunity.  We plated one in the second; Drew led off the inning in the first and was out on a force by Scutaro, who scored on a double by Ellsbury with a little help from some bad fielding.  Lowrie must have felt really bad about that because he homered to lead off the fourth on the second pitch of the at-bat, a changeup he walloped to right field.

We didn’t have many opportunities after that until the eighth, when the bases were loaded with one out and Salty and Scutaro both blew it.  Then Ellsbury was hit in the ninth and scored on a single by Pedroia.

And that was it.  Aceves and Weiland pitched the last two innings.  And they were scoreless.  Not that that counts for anything at all whatsoever, since we lost, 6-3.

To recap our predicament, we are now officially tied for the Wild Card with the Rays with two games left to play in the regular season.  In the month of September, our record is six and nineteen with a nine-game drop in the standings, and exactly one month ago today was the last time we had even a two-game winning streak.  On August 17, our Wild Card lead was ten games.  If we don’t right this ship, like, immediately, we will be the first team in the history of the existence of the Wild Card to blow a double-digit lead.  We’re Boston fans.  We believe.  We’ll always believe.  But words can not describe the anger, frustration, denial, and fear that Red Sox Nation is currently experiencing.

We have to win today.  At the very least, Johnny Pesky deserves a happy ninety-second birthday.

In other news, the Pats lost a close one to the Bills, 34-31.  It should never have come to that.

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While I Was Out

Honestly, nothing really happened during the past two weeks.  After blockbuster deals like Gonzalez and Crawford, what else could possibly have happened? Actually, I would have been very pleased to see some sort of move made regarding the catcher’s position, but with so much power added to the lineup already, I think we can weather Salty’s potential lack of production.  That means he’ll have to pull his weight defensively.  I think he will.  Theo is responsible; he wouldn’t send us out with such an important piece missing from the puzzle.  It looks like it’ll be Salty and Tek this year.  Salty will be the official starter, but playing time will be split more evenly than usual.  Like I said, as long as the defense is good, I can live with the lack of offense under the circumstances.

So, really, we’re all set.  2011 is going to be a happy new year for everyone.  Or at least for Red Sox Nation.  I can’t speak for the rest of the Major League community, but something tells me that everyone else’s baseball years may not be so good.

Okajima signed a one-year deal.  Jenks officially signed a two-year deal worth twelve million dollars.  Gonzalez confirmed that his contract demands won’t be effected by the fact that, when Pujols signs a ridiculously expensive contract that is incredibly huge in every way, his own market value will increase.  Instead, he’ll be approaching negotiations from his position in the current market.  Basically, that means that he and Theo will be negotiating during the season, rather than during free agency.  Good man.

In other news, in the past two weeks, the Ducks shut us out, we crushed the Thrashers, we won back-to-back games with the Panthers and Bolts by a goal each, the Thrashers bested us in a shootout, and we lost to Buffalo in a shootout in a ridiculously high-scoring game.  The final was 6-7.  We scored four goals in the first period alone, and the Sabres scored three.  Then they scored two in the second.  Then we scored two in the third, and they scored one to tie it.  That was one seriously hard-earned point.  We are currently first in our division, two points ahead of the Habs, and we are third in the conference.  Very nice.  Very nice indeed.  The Patriots eventually won a close game with the Packers, 31-27, and served some swift and severe humiliation to the Bills, who suffered an embarrassing 34-3 defeat at the hand of the ever-masterful Tom Brady, who is obviously about to win the Super Bowl yet again.

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Short and Sweet

The name of last night’s game was, without a doubt, “Clay Buchholz.” If Buchholz had been an offense, he alone would have scored twenty runs.  That’s how good his pitching was.  It was outstanding.  After a while, I don’t even know why the Other Sox continued to swing.  And there’s obviously the added bonus of the fact that the Yankees lost, so we live to play for October another day.

Buchholz pitched eight innings of one-run ball.  He allowed five hits, walked only one, and struck out five, four swinging and one looking.  He picked up his seventeenth win of the year.  His ERA is 2.33. That’s second in the American League.  (The first is Felix Hernandez.) That ERA is so low, I can’t even understand it.  And he did all of that with 109 pitches, seventy of which were strikes.  That’s a sixty-four percent strike rate.  That’s ridiculous.

He threw his fastball at a maximum speed of ninety-eight miles per hour.  No starter should throw a fastball that fast.  He threw his slider at a maximum speed of ninety-four miles per hour.  You have absolutely no idea how difficult it is to be on the receiving end of a pitch that’s supposed to be an offspeed but that technically isn’t because there are pitchers out there whose goal is just to get their heater up to that speed.  And of course his curveball and changeup were right there working.

He threw nine pitches in the first.  He peaked at twenty in the third.  He ended with eleven in the eighth.  He pounded the zone.  He was aggressive with his repertoire.  If he wanted a pitch to cut, it cut.  If he wanted a pitch to slide, it slid.  And if he wanted a pitch to sail right by any attempt to make contact with it, it did that too.

And he was backed by solid offense.  Papi doubled in career RBI numbers ninety-nine and one hundred in the first; this is his first one-hundred-plus-RBI season since 2007.  Last year he almost made it with ninety-nine.  He would finish the night two for five.  He would almost score a third run in the first on Lowell’s single, but of course he was thrown out at the plate.  When Buchholz took the hill, he already possessed a two-run lead.  In the third, Scutaro scored on V-Mart’s sac fly.  In the fifth, Beltre singled in his one hundredth RBI this year.  In the seventh, V-Mart singled in Scutaro, extending his hitting streak to twelve games.  He would finish the night three for four.  And in the eighth, Beltre tripled in his next RBI, making him four for five on the night.  This is his first one-hundred-plus-RBI season since 2004.  Scutaro ended up going three for five.  Atchison handled the ninth.  6-1 was the final score.

That’s it.  Short and sweet.  The final score was 6-1, and basically we just cruised in every sense of the word.  We’re throwing Lackey tonight.  Remember, if we lose or if the Yankees win, we’re officially out.  Let’s not have that happen.  Seriously.

In other news, the Pats beat the Bills on Sunday, 38-30.  The final score may have been close, but we looked like we had a handle on the game the entire time.  Tom Brady, as usual, looked terrific.

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