Brandon WorkmanKelly has said he's going to win the AL Cy Young Award.
Christian Vazquez
Xander Bogaerts
Allen Craig
Rick Porcello
Mike Napoli
Joe Kelly
Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez
Dustin Pedroia
Brock Holt
Mookie Betts
Rusney Castillo
Blake Swihart
When the bases are unoccupied, the pitcher shall deliver the ball to the batter within 12 seconds after he receives the ball. Each time the pitcher delays the game by violating this rule, the umpire shall call “Ball.”Has any major league umpire ever enforced this rule?
What I would like to know is how many seconds are saved between pitches, because it's not the time of the games but rather the pace of the play that should, I think, legitimately concern the Lords of Baseball (which now includes the Players of Baseball).Additional reading:
Grant Brisbee: Pitch clocks are (eventually) coming to baseball
Noah Jarosh: MLB's pitch clocks will ruin the game, unless they save it first (Roundtable discussion)
Under a new proposal by Major League Baseball, pitchers would be required to finish their warm-up pitches and be ready to make their first pitch of an inning 30 seconds before the end of all between-inning commercial breaks, sources told ESPN.com.
Similarly, hitters would have to be in the batter's box, ready to start their at-bats, 20 seconds before the end of each break.
Both proposals are designed to tighten the time between half-innings, which has grown, on average, to more than three minutes, even though regular-season commercial breaks during games that are not nationally televised are supposed to last just 2 minutes, 5 seconds.
Baseball officials believe that if play is ready to resume moments after each break ends, they could shorten games by 10 to 15 minutes. Just those efforts alone would bring the average game time to below three hours without enacting any other pace-of-game measures.
1. Mookie Betts/Brock HoltFarrell:
2. Dustin Pedroia
3. David Ortiz
4. Hanley Ramirez
5. Pablo Sandoval
6. Mike Napoli
7. Xander Bogaerts
8. Outfielder (Rusney Castillo/Shane Victorino/Daniel Nava/Allen Craig)
9. Christian Vazquez
The one thing that clearly stands out is we have balance left- and right-handed. I have always liked David in the No. 3 hole. You know he is going to come up in the first inning. I think Hanley gives David some protection behind him. Then you start to create some protection, and we want to keep Sandoval on the left side of the plate as much as possible - so if you sandwich him in between Ramirez and Napoli, you start to have a formidable middle of the order where you're going left-right-left-right all the way through there. ...
I think what Mookie showed in the time that he was in the leadoff spot was very encouraging. His on-base skills have been consistent at every level through the minor leagues. It was the same when he came to Boston. Brock Holt is another guy that could fit into that spot when he is in the lineup on a given day.
I think he got in because of [Greg] Maddux and [Tom] Glavine. I think the fact that they won 14 straight pennants. I think his "Swiss army knife versatility," which somebody said yesterday, I think he got a lot of accolades for that, I think he got a lot of recognition for that. He's a Hall of Famer. And I think the other big thing is that I think he's a Democrat and so I know that, as a Republican, that there's some people that really don't like that. ... Listen, when human beings do something, anything, there's bias and prejudice. ... I do know that there are guys who probably won't ever vote for me because of the things that I said or did. That's the way it works.Craig Calcaterra of HardballTalk sets the record straight with something entirely foreign to Schilling - facts:
For the record, Smoltz is not a Democrat. He has been reported to be "an avowed Republican," and has been courted for political office in the past by the Republican party. Here are Smoltz's political contribution records. Note the little "Rs" next to the candidates names. Oh, and Smoltz once compared gay marriage to beastiality, which tends not to be a pinko-liberal stance.And, right on cue, Schilling now says he was only joking, tweeting:
Ok, let me be very clear. If you didn't hear or see any of it, you are relying on some idiots to report a joke as fact. Reliable sources....You can listen to the interview here. He is not making jokes. Schilling is, yet again, full of shit.
The most seasons with an adjusted ERA-plus of 200 or better of any starting pitcher in history - with five, one more than Walter Johnson. ... The fifth-greatest WHIP of all time (1.05). ... The sixth-best winning percentage ever (219-100, .687). ... A seven-year peak, as computed by the great Hall of Fame historian Jay Jaffe, that tops Maddux, Bob Feller or Koufax and ranks sixth in the entire live-ball era, behind only Clemens, Grove, Johnson, Bob Gibson and Tom Seaver. ... And, finally, there's this amazing stat, delivered by Lee Sinins' Complete Baseball Encyclopedia: Pedro's career ERA, over his 18 seasons from 1992 to 2009, was an unbelievable 2.93, at a time when the ERA of the average starter in the same period was 4.49. So that computes to an ERA that was more than a run and a half lower than the league average. And how many other pitchers in history, who pitched as many innings as he pitched, have ever had a larger differential? Yessir. Nobody.
Where would the Red Sox have been if Pedro Martinez had stayed in Montreal? How much different would those seven years - 1998-2004 - have been? If Pedro is not in Boston, does Manny agree to leave Cleveland? Does Keith Foulke sign? Does Curt Schilling agree to a trade/contract extension? Does David Ortiz agree to stay?***
The fans loved him immediately. His first start at Fenway - his third start in 1998 - was a two-hit, complete game shutout. Right away, there were chants and fans waving signs and Dominican flags. Pedro soaked up all the adulation and gave it right back. He was never shy about his love and respect for the city and its fans. He loved pitching in Boston as much as we loved having him in our uniform. And when he wasn't cold-blooded on the mound, demanding your constant attention, he was dancing on the bench, being taped to a dugout pole, simply enjoying himself.
We were spoiled. Martinez pitched so well, for so long, that when he became merely the best pitcher in baseball, we were disappointed. He had set the bar too high.
In the 1999 regular season, he allowed more than 3 earned runs only twice in 30 starts. He allowed 0, 1 or 2 runs in 24 of 30 starts!
After 12 starts in 2000 - on June 19 - his ERA was 0.99. 0.99! Some of the season-ending numbers for Pedro in 2000 (and the second place finisher):
Batting Average Allowed: .167 (Hudson, .227)
On-Base Percentage Allowed: .213 (Mussina, .291)
Slugging Percentage Allowed: .259 (Colon, .371)
Home ERA: 1.84 (Mussina, 2.90)
Road ERA: 1.66 (Wells, 3.24)
Hits Per 9 Innings: 5.31 (Hudson 7.52, only 3 AL pitchers below 8.00)
Baserunners per 9 Innings: 7.2* (Mussina 10.8)
Strikeouts/Walk Ratio: 8.88 (Wells, 5.35)
*: New major league record, breaking the old mark set by Guy Hecker in 1882.
And finally, perhaps Martinez's most overpowering start: September 10, 1999 - 17 strikeouts in a one-hitter at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees did not hit a fair ball on any of his final 52 pitches. During the final two innings, with their team losing 2-1, even Yankee fans were on their feet cheering.
There were 37 players who scored four runs (or more) in a game at least once in 2014. Our man Jose Molina, on the other hand, scored four runs all year. In 80 games. And in 247 trips to the plate. Do you even have to ask how many other players in history got that much playing time and scored that few runs in a season? That would be none. Of course. ...Xander Bogaerts is one of Christina Kahrl's 11 "picks to click" in 2015:
We guarantee Boston's Mike Carp will never forget his first and only trip to the pitcher's mound (April 24, against the Yankees). He faced seven hitters -- and walked five of them, making him the only man in the past 90 years to walk five hitters in one inning. Amazingly, he only gave up one run, thanks to the miracle of a Brian McCann double-play ball in the middle of all that.
No more distractions, he's a shortstop and gets to settle in. ... [I]t's going to be fun to watch as Bogaerts quietly clouts 50 extra-base hits ... Skip any disappointment, his stardom begins now.Rusney Castillo batted .405 in 10 Puerto Rico Winter League games. Alex Cora, manager of Criollos de Caguas, said:
He's ready to play in the big leagues. Mentally, we were very impressed with his approach. He didn't try and pull too much. Most of his hits were back up the middle, right-center. Defensively was the part that caught our eye. He did a really good job in center field. He has a feel of where to play guys after that first at-bat. We liked what we saw.Also: Building the bullpen.
Boston's busy offseason has been much discussed. Many believe the Red Sox still need to pick up another starter to anchor the rotation, but FanGraphs already projects them as the best team in the division [87-75].
That may be surprising after this past season's last-place finish, but general manager Ben Cherington has done a nice job reconstructing his starting rotation. Rick Porcello, Wade Miley and Justin Masterson aren't flashy but should be a durable and reliable trio (especially if Masterson's knee, which bothered him in 2014, is healthy).
Plus, the Red Sox can dream on these possibilities:
1. Mookie Betts, All-Star. Yes, he's that good.
2. Xander Bogaerts, All-Star. His rookie season was a disappointment. He also just turned 22. It all comes together this year.
3. Rusney Castillo does the job in center field with a solid all-around season (that 87-win projection actually includes Castillo being only a replacement-level player).
4. David Ortiz has one more big season. ...
The Red Sox have tried to erase the painful feelings of their botched Jon Lester negotiations by completing a flurry of pitcher transactions. While that's unlikely to fool people who still just want Lester back, the pitchers acquired (or reportedly acquired) — Wade Miley, Rick Porcello and Justin Masterson — all have one thing in common in that they generate a lot of ground balls. Before that, they acquired Joe Kelly, who also generates a great deal of ground balls. Are ground balls the hip new thing on Yawkey Way?Also: The Ground Game: Searching For Market Inefficiencies (SoSH, December 12, 2014)
The Boston Red Sox reached an agreement Thursday with free-agent pitcher Justin Masterson, sources told ESPN's Buster Olney.And somewhere Joe Castiglione is smiling and thinking to himself, "Cookies!"
The 28-year-old right-hander had a difficult 2014 campaign, struggling with a knee injury that landed him on the disabled list with the Cleveland Indians and later in the season was relegated to the bullpen by the St. Louis Cardinals, who acquired him in a trade-deadline move.
The Red Sox were in the Jon Lester sweepstakes until the very end, but they finished second to the Cubs.Gordon Edes, ESPNBoston:
The lefty agreed to a six-year, $155 million contract Tuesday that will reunite him with Theo Epstein in Chicago, MLB.com has confirmed.
Boston's last offer to Lester was for six years at $135 million, according to a source. ...
With Lester now off the table, the Red Sox could pursue one of the other two premier pitching free agents on the market -- right-handers Max Scherzer and James Shields.
However, Scherzer's final price tag could wind up higher than Lester's. ...
Red Sox owner John Henry had flown to Lester's Atlanta home twice in recent weeks to meet with him.
General manager Ben Cherington's pledge to rebuild the starting rotation just became exponentially more difficult as the Red Sox were outbid by former Larry Lucchino protege Theo Epstein for the services of Lester, whom they had clearly and repeatedly identified as their top pitching target this winter. ...
Shadowing whatever moves Cherington makes will be the perception that the Sox badly mishandled negotiations with Lester, an integral part of two World Series champions and a homegrown talent who ranked very high among the team's all-time best left-handers. ...
No Sox officials responded to requests for comment Tuesday night, but soon enough they will be called into account. They will be hard-pressed to prove that they can build a pitching staff without Lester that will be as good as one they could have had with him.
The Jon Lester talks have entered the final turn, with an expectation that a choice will be made no earlier than Monday night and no later than Tuesday, according to sources involved in the negotiations.It was reported that the Red Sox made Lester an offer of 6/130.
Lester has drawn interest from the Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, San Francisco Giants and Los Angeles Dodgers.
The reason ESPN reporter Keith Law got suspended last week was stupid: He defended the theory of evolution on Twitter, kindly and calmly, to his co-worker, creationist Curt Schilling, and ESPN punished him for it. ...
After word got out that ESPN suspended a reporter because he defended the theory of evolution on Twitter, the sports network went into damage control mode and pretended that they suspended him for a completely separate reason. They didn't know what that reason was, but promised it was definitely not about making their creationist employee look like a neanderthal. ...
Well, Keith is back and his very first tweet makes it abundantly clear that he was indeed suspended over evolution.
"And yet it moves" — the famous words, written in Italian, of astronomer Galileo Galilei, who was dragged in front of the Catholic church and banished to a life of house arrest for suggesting that the Earth moves around the Sun. After his sentencing, Galileo was said to have stomped the ground and looked up at the sky, uttering the words, "And yet it moves," in defiance of what religious officials had forced him to accept under threat of violence.
[Law's] experience still illustrates that science and rational thought are not always welcome in our society. ...
There is a vein of anti-intellectualism that runs throughout our society, and it insulates itself from criticism by punishing those who dare mention facts, figures, science, or data. ...
Fortunately, there is a silver lining. No matter how much these science deniers wish it wasn't the case, the truth is still out there. The Earth still moves.
When I found out about the Diamondbacks wanting to trade me, there were only two places I had interest in going: Philadelphia and New York. I found out through the grapevine that Ruben Amaro, Sr., had no interest in bringing me back to Philly, so I figured if I was going to leave Arizona, it would be for New York and New York only. We were actually doing a charity event at my house in Arizona for the SHADE Foundation and Mr. Colangelo and Joe Garagiola, Jr., were both at the house. Sometime that day, I heard that Tito was interviewing in Boston. During the night, there was some small talk with Joe and I said, "Listen, I heard that Tito was interviewing in Boston. If that actually happens, I would probably be interested in the Red Sox as well." He left and went to talk to Mr. Colangelo and came back about ten minutes later and said, "Actually, we have a deal in principle with the Red Sox already. They're going to fly out and they'll be here on Wednesday to talk to you." I was like, ". . . OK." This was Monday or Tuesday; Thanksgiving was Thursday. It happened that fast. I told Shonda, "They're not kidding. Boston's a legitimate possibility." Then the whirlwind started.
Off the top of my head, I had pitched in Fenway before. After I'd become established I came there in interleague play one time. I don't remember the game. I threw like eight innings and gave up seven or eight runs one night and ended up getting the win. I remember the park feeling incredibly small. Being a fly-ball pitcher, that's generally not a good mix.
Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer came to the house the night before the meeting and dropped off a note from Bill James, with a statistical breakdown on how I would have fared in Fenway given my spray charts and hitting charts from the year before. And Fenway was actually better than Bank One. That was the first time that I realized that Bank One truly was a hitter's park. That was clearly part of the sales pitch.
We started off the discussions and it was Larry Lucchino, Jed, and Theo. That was Wednesday. We talked and made some overtures about potential salary and things like that. There was concern about salary and the fact that they weren't going to be able to pay me more than Pedro. I didn't care about that. I was going to be paid well no matter what. Larry actually made the first offer. I remember him pushing over a document and it said "Plan A" on it, or something like that. I looked at the numbers for about five seconds and I said, "Oh, that's nice. Can I see Plan B?"
Theo kind of chuckled and Larry looked at me like, "We really don't have . . ." and it was kind of awkward. We broke for a little while and we came back and they made another offer and it was not even remotely do-able. We talked, and kept talking, and talked into the evening. I remember calling Joe Garagiola that evening and saying, "I don't think this is going to work and I don't want you to be pissed if I end up coming back there to Arizona." He said, "If the worst case is that you're our #2 next year, I can deal with that." He was very cool. It made it very easy for me. He was awesome about it.
In the background, at the same time, I got a call from a person locally who was well-connected with the Yankees and that person informed me that Brian [Cashman] was going to be calling me in the near future and that they were interested. Very interested. I ended up having a couple of conversations along those lines, in which I was told if I let a certain window run out, I could basically fill out a blank check. Which was obviously interesting. That was a nice fallback, if it didn't work out with the Red Sox.
The problem was that at this point, I had sat with Theo and Jed long enough to really like both of them, and so I started to kind of want to go to Boston. Wednesday night, we were disappointed. My wife and I were talking and we really didn't think that this was going to work because they were nowhere near the number that we needed to be at.
Larry left. We talked to Theo and Jed that night and found out that they had nowhere to go for Thanksgiving, so we invited them over. They were adamantly trying to say "no" [to decline the invitation] and I said, "These contract discussions are completely off if you guys don't show up." So they came over. Jed was really sick that day and we spent most of the day watching football, talking. Not about baseball. Just talking. I really liked both of them and I could see that from an analytical standpoint Theo and I were birds of a feather. He believed in the things I believed in to be a good pitcher. We believed in data and stats the same way. There was a lot of common ground. We talked through the night. We parted ways on Thursday and felt this was not going to happen. That's when I talked to Joe [Garagiola] and said I don't see this as a possibility.
But then, as I understand it, Theo made a call to John [Henry] and Tom [Werner] and spoke to them about it. I think that I had given them a ballpark number that I was going to need. The big number for them was the AAV – the average annual value of the contract. They needed it to be under X and in my mind – given where I sat in the marketplace – I was already taking an under-market contract. Which was fine, again, but I wasn't going to take too under-market, just because I knew that I was going to have a lot of bearing on the free-agency that winter, on players that were out in the market. I had a number in mind, but they weren't anywhere near it.
Theo went home and got Mr. Henry to change his mind and then came back and asked if they could talk. At the same time, I was talking to the other party and we were setting up a potential Saturday get-together as soon as the Red Sox window of opportunity ran out.
They came back over and put an offer on the table and the one thing about Theo and Jed – I think from both ends – when it was Theo and Jed and I – there was no . . . we weren't negotiating to get to a better number. I told them, "This is my number. I'm not trying to milk any of this or any of that. This is my number. If this number isn't OK, then I understand, but it's just not going to happen." They came back and worked around it and that was when I asked about the incentives and the clause with the World Series bonus. I guess by the end of the day, I knew that was why they were there. They weren't there to trade for me to pitch and come in and help the team. They were there to trade for me to come in and help the team win a World Series.
It was a real unique moment, I think. They were sitting in the living room and – people think this was orchestrated, but it wasn't – we were in the room where my World Series trophy was sitting. It was actually sitting in the background between Larry and Theo, and I said, "Listen, I know for a fact that from a financial perspective, you guys can go wherever you need to go. I guess what you have to figure out is what kind of value you place on that" – and I pointed to the World Series trophy. "You're bringing me there to win one of those. And I've done it against the team you can't get past. I know there's some value there. You guys are going to have to decide if it's worth it." And ultimately they did.
I want a new challenge. I made that choice to be here in Boston because I need a new challenge; I need to lead that team, with the legacy they have here, the fan support they have here. That's why I had to make sure that I made the right decision. It took me a long time. Now I'm here to help them be in the postseason again.The Red Sox also presented Hanley Ramirez:
