Barcalounge Skipper - The Red Sox Are Toast

I'm going to have to admit that it's over.  As a fourth-generation Red Sox fan (no pink hats in this household), now hopeful here in the 21st century after the brutal baseball realities of the Nation in the 20th, I feel comfortable with admitting that the Red Sox are toast.  An ambulance-squad's worth of injuries and good but inconsistent pitching have held them back from the 100 or so wins that it appears will be necessary to earn a playoff spot coming out of the American League East.

Now, the Red Sox might win 90 games this year, as suggested by Baseball Prospectus, a total that might be enough to reach the playoffs in a couple of other divisions in baseball.  But the whizzes at BP also place the Sox chances of making the playoffs at about 6 percent, and it's been dropping quickly.  The Yankees and the Rays are just too good this year.  David Price looks like a Cy Young winner, and if BJ Upton or Carlos Pena heat up at the end of the season, the Rays are going to be fearsome.  The great Carl Crawford, in a contract year, wants a ring -- and then he wants to get paid, baby.

Alex Speier of WEEI has written about the $20 million in salary and the roughly 1000 player/games lost to injuries to the Red Sox this year.  The gap right there would cost you about 10 games.  Say what you will about losing Cameron, Martinez, Buchholz, Beckett, and Varitek here and there, it's the loss of Pedroia and Youkilis -- All-Star caliber players as well as past and likely future MVPs -- that has hurt the most.  Statistics aside, as well, both Petie and Youk are home-grown guys who personify the Red Sox Way -- be a strong and steady all around, hard-nosed player who grinds it out every at bat.  But I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said before.

2011 Closer: Daniel Bard

So where do you go from here? To 2011. I suspect that the Red Sox are about ready to trade Jonathan Papelbon, who likely will go into an arbitration process that will result in a one-year contract for $10 million.  I say, trade Paps early, make Daniel Bard the closer (at $415, 500), and spend the difference on getting some arms from the 40 or so middle relievers hitting the market.  I believe the team will re-sign David Ortiz, but it isn't going to be pretty, and Papi isn't going to get the money or the years he wants.  If Adrian Beltre makes 640 plate appearances this season, the Red Sox option for $10 million kicks in for 2011.  Free agent Victor Martinez may go, but the Sox have Jarrod Saltalamacchia in the fold, and, at 25 years old, he still may be coming into his own.  Presumably, with players healthy and a little money thrown at a fourth outfielder, a catcher, and the bullpen, the Red Sox should have the means to get their win total into the high 90s again.


Here's my lineup card, so to speak, for 2011:
     C - Saltalamacchia
     1B - Youkilis
     2B - Pedroia
     SS - Scutaro
     3B - Beltre
     LF - Ellsbury
     CF - Kalish
     RF - Drew
   Starting Rotation: Lester, Buchholz, Beckett, Lackey, Matsusaka
   Closer: Daniel Bard


Half the team is made up of products of the Red Sox player development.  If it works out that way, I think that's always an encouraging sign.  As for the rest of the season, I'm putting my money on the Rays.

Barcaloungue Skipper - PN 2.21 - Plotting for Spring Training

I recall a glorious time in March during the mid-90s when I managed to see four baseball spring training games in two days – at the old Devil Rays’ field in downtown St. Petersburg, at the old Phillies’ park in Clearwater, then the next day at the Blue Jays’ field in Dunedin and the Yankees’ place in Tampa. There couldn’t have been more than two hour’s total driving to all those parks, my total for tickets didn’t crack 40 bucks, and there was much beer and sunshine. And the world was good.

These days, spring training is a bit more swanky here in the land of the Grapefruit League, but it’s still a wonderful way to see baseball in a more raw form. Plus there are guys playing who have three digit numbers on the backs of their jerseys. “Let’s get on base, number one-hundred-and-twenty-one!”


I’ve got the Mets and the Marlins/Cardinals a short drive to the north. I can tolerate the Marlins, and the Cards are fine, but the Mets just suck. What I really do is look for the Red Sox – who train on the West Coast in Fort Meyers -- to come through the area for that rare away game here on the East Coast. And I have my game in sight – March 9 – with Marlins tickets going on sale very very soon. In the meantime, maybe I’ll grab myself some actual Sox tickets. They go on sale this coming Saturday at 10:00 am. I’ll have my redial button ready.

I include a photo of the 1912 Red Sox, who trained that year in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The many pleasures of Arkansas aside, it does not appear to have been a particularly hot spring in Hot Springs.

I could go MLB's official website for all my spring training gumbo, but I prefer Spring Training Online, a blog which does away with much off the razzle-dazzle and garbage.

Barcalounge Skipper - PN 2.11 - Jim Rice, Hall of Famer

In Little League, I proudly wore the number 14 -- the dorsal digits of Jim Rice, slugging Red Sox left fielder of my childhood. I was the left fielder for the Farmington Braves. I didn't know then (as I definitely do now) that the kids who played left field in Little League were, for the most part, the hopeless cases. I couldn't hit particularly well, and I couldn't throw very far but had good accuracy. Afer my first season, my coach, seeing that I was bright enough and big enough, made me a catcher.

After my baseball playing days ended when I turned 13, I became a fan of the game. Living in New England, this meant following the Red Sox during those transitional years between what I think of as the Yaz-Fisk period (1967-1980) to the Boggs-Clemens period (1986-1992). Jim Rice, my hero, spans both those periods, as he played from 1974-1989, pretty much alongside the great and underappreciated Dwight Evans (my brother's childhood favorite) who played for Boston from 1972 to 1990. The early eighties Red Sox were sort of fun to watch, kind of, in a Ralph Houk-ishy way. Most of the time, it seemed to me they got the crap kicked out of them by the Brewers or the Orioles.

As with great players of the 70s and 80s whose statistics are now overshadowed by the players of the Juiced Era, Rice's election this year to the Hall of Fame will remain an apparently undeserved honor to fans under the age of 30. I've been the the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, and it's a wonderful tourist attraction, but the history of that institution is filled with flim-flam and fundamental unfairness. I don't have much to offer on the Hall of Fame that hasn't already been said.

Looking back now, when I condsider the years during which Jim Rice played, I understand much more clearly why he kept had a quiet, intense persona in the midst of the Boston sports world. In 1974, the year Rice, a young man from South Carolina, broke into the majors, the Supreme Court also handed down its decision on the appropriateness of busing as a means to desegregating schools. In 1976, the year after Rice helped the Red Sox reach the World Series, Boston was one of the many cities in the United States struggling with civil unrest as it tried to integrate its schools. What's a guy like Rice to think when he opens his Globe in the morning and sees this image on the front page?

The Red Sox, of course, were the very last major league team to integrate in 1959, when they added Pumpsie Green to the roster and used him mostly as a pinch runner and give-the-regulars-a-day-off fielder. A dozen years later, the Sox drafted Rice, who, with the retirement of his number at Fenway on Tuesday night, is the only African-American player so honored by the team. Rice was the only guy on the list. As of today, there is no other black (or Latin player) who could meet Boston's requirements for number-retirement. If David Ortiz plays for Boston for eight more years and reaches the Hall of Fame, he'd get his number on the Fenway facade.

One Saturday in 1982, though, I remember most clearly. The Red Sox, in the midst of not quite winning the AL East title that year, were playing Saturday home game versus the White Sox one hot August afternoon. The game was on national television. Rice, who wasn't having a great year, did hit a double in the bottom of the third to tie the score 2-2. In the bottom of the fourth, a hard line drive went foul into the first base stands. A 4-year-old boy named Jonathan Keene was struck in the head by the ball, which caused serious and severe trauma. Rice climbed into the stands, picked up the little boy, whose head was bleedling badly, and carried him into the dugout, through the clubhouse, and out to a waiting ambulance. As the legend persists now, it was Rice's action that saved the boy's life. That may or may not be so, but there's something in Rice's urgently human action on that afternoon that made so many of us love and respect him.

Later in the game, of course, the Red Sox lost, with Rice grounding into a double play as he so often did. He led the league in GIDP, and would again for three more years. And the Sox, finished not in first place that year, as they so often did. But both the man and the team in those days reminded us of what we were and what we hoped to be -- part human and part hero.