2012 Baseball Season/Off-Season Discussion

[Falcon]

The Rays are on the verge of coming back from an 8-0 deficit to the Angels, currently ahead 10-8 in the 8th.

Be afraid AL, very afraid.

[Falcon]

Brad Mills fired in Houston tonight along with hitting coach Mike Barnett and first base coach Bobby Meacham.

Look for Joe Pettini to get the interim gig announced tomorrow.

EDIT: It was announced this morning the Astro's AAA manager gets the interim gig, not Pettini as I speculated above.

[Falcon]

The Melky story is getting more bizzare by the day, crazy.

http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/8282185/san-francisco-giants-melky-cabrera-launched-fake-website-ruse-report-says

[Falcon]

Can the Boston thing get in weirder?

Of course it can.

http://espn.go.com/boston/mlb/story/_/id/8282296/report-kelly-shoppach-text-message-boston-red-sox-brass

[tim_m]

Can the Boston thing get in weirder?

Of course it can.

http://espn.go.com/boston/mlb/story/_/id/8282296/report-kelly-shoppach-text-message-boston-red-sox-brass

These guys should be on tv in their own soap opera i swear. Jesus Christ!

[faldor]

Can the Boston thing get in weirder?

Of course it can.

http://espn.go.com/boston/mlb/story/_/id/8282296/report-kelly-shoppach-text-message-boston-red-sox-brass

That doesn't surprise me.  Shoppach barged into Bobby's office early in the season and complained about not getting more playing time.  Obviously he wasn't fond of the man.  Many thought they should've cut him loose when he pulled those shenanigans.  Well, better late than never.  That's one down, more to follow.

[tim_m]

The team is like a bunch of disobedient two year olds who need a nap and a timeout. It astonishes me the boston brass is still letting this go on without cleaning house. If this were the yankees something drastic would've happened by now. The Steinbrenners wouldn't put up with this kinda shit. I have no idea why Henry and Luccino are.

[faldor]

A detailed overview of the mess that is the Boston Red Sox.

http://www.cbssports.com/mlb/story/19825776/wth-red-sox-a-mess-from-top-to-bottom-bobby-v-never-had-a-chance

Wth Red Sox a mess from top to bottom, Bobby V. never had a chance

By Jon Heyman | Baseball Insider

 NEW YORK ? Just a bit more than three-quarters into his first year with the Boston Red Sox, Bobby Valentine looks like a dead manager walking. Though these days, it appears to be a plus he very likely won't have to manage out the final season of a contract next year in an organization where ownership hired him but doesn't fully support him, where at least a couple of his coaches are openly disdainful toward him, and where both the coaches and the players are still given far too much say, leeway and rope.

The noose appears to be readied to be employed this winter on Valentine, a wholly sympathetic figure now. In Boston's dysfunctional mess, he never had a chance.

 General manager Ben Cherington, an intelligent, hard-working young man caught up in a nightmare of a rookie season as GM, has tried to play the good soldier by pretending, at least in the beginning, that Valentine was his call. But no one above Valentine ever had the inclination or pull to bring into line an over-privileged, high-on-themselves group of underachieving players (or even a couple rogue coaches).

The meeting without Valentine present in New York last month, which is said to have originated with the owners but at least had the strong approval of some very key players, may not have been quite the Valentine bash fest it was first portrayed to be. But a mid-to-late-season meeting in which the owners flew into enemy territory to hash it out with the players and not the manager is merely the latest example of the inmates running a failing asylum.

There are some clutch and great players on this team (certainly enough to be better than three games under .500, now 59-62 after the 4-1 win over the arch-rival Yankees Saturday in the Bronx), and injuries have caused a great deal of the underachievement. But that doesn't mean the players know best. Nor does it mean the higher-ups should be listening to them, not when these players haven't won a playoff game since 2008. These are the same guys who treated two-time World Series winner Terry Francona, a guy they supposedly loved, like a substitute teacher last year. They are the very reason a sterner self-starter such as Valentine was summoned to clean up a messy situation that turned to embarrassment in the beer-tinged haze of the all-time September collapse. But for Valentine to work right, he had to be allowed to do his job. His way.

You hire Valentine, you are getting a brilliant baseball mind who knows talent like few others. But you are also accepting a few firestorms, and maybe even a soap opera or two. There's no point to hiring him then a few months later removing his vocal cords.

That's just about what happened. When Valentine gave that negative early review about Kevin Youkilis, Cherington erred by publicly siding with Youkilis. Cherington, an earnest, introspective fellow has gone over it in his head plenty of times since, and he's still not sure what he should have done when Valentine publicly questioned Youkilis' drive. But what Cherington shouldn't have done was say aloud that Valentine messed up and was wrong, which is what he did do.

Cherington knew going in he was going to be tested with some manager-inflicted storms (that's part of Bobby V's considerable charm), and Cherington did the standup thing by going immediately to Valentine and telling him he messed up and informing him what he was about to say. The mistake was in saying it.

Meantime, Youkilis had stormed into Valentine's office after hearing about the negative comment and Valentine tried to explain and apologize. But as Cherington believed from the start, Youkilis was a sensitive sort. He didn't accept Valentine's apology, not for a second. So Cherington apologized double in an effort not to lose one of two remaining players who helped bring Boston two titles. Instead, what he did do badly damaged the manager.

Once Dustin Pedroia chimed in by announcing to Valentine and everyone else that's "not how we do things around here" regarding the negative remark, Cherington should have slapped down Pedroia who, unlike Youkilis, is tough enough to take it. It didn't help that Pedroia was predisposed to detest Valentine since he was Francona's pet, confidant and cribbage partner. He is also a star in the stable of the Levinson brothers, a poisonous pair of agents who swore off then-Mets manager Valentine as an enemy after Valentine's very on-point (and if anything, soft pedaled) comment that beloved but troubled catcher Todd Hundley needed more sleep.

Pedroia is a terrific player, but the very reason things were supposed to be done differently this year is that the inmates ran the asylum after Francona lost his grip on things last September. Valentine was supposed to be that change, the very culture shock the team needed after they misbehaved under Francona. But now the players might realize they had it easy before. Some of them talked themselves into hating Francona by the end, but now they miss him.

[faldor]

But how were the Red Sox owners or front office going to take on heroes like Youkilis and Pedroia when it hasn't even gotten the coaches in line? A big part of the coaches' job is to carry out the orders of the manager, and at least two of them -- bench coach Tim Bogar and catching instructor Gary Tuck -- barely talk to Valentine. Whether it be out of loyalty to Francona, a quick dislike of Valentine or whatever, the coaches' relationship with Valentine has turned into a soap opera that shocks Cherington for the news print dedicated to it.

What's even more surprising on its own level is that the discord has been allowed to drag into its sixth month without so much as a coach firing, fine or even a known reprimand. If Cherington could go along with Valentine as manager (at least on the surface), then the coaches, much lower on the club's hierarchy, should have been forced to get in line. Folks around here note that Valentine brings baggage with his history, and his 15-year-old dustup with Tim Bogar appears to have come back to haunt him here.

Though Valentine seems not to have been completely satisfied with the makeup of the coaching staff, he eventually OK'd the holdovers who were under contract and well regarded in the organization -- Bogie, Mags (well-regarded hitting coach Dave Magadan) and Tuck. He talked to all three before agreeing to keep them, but now has to suspect lingering resentment by Bogar over being Valentine's last cut on the 1997 Mets. This became a surprise cause c?l?bre at the time, and apparently it's even come up as a topic in the Red Sox clubhouse recently.

The players undoubtedly felt emboldened to air some complaints in the meeting after seeing what coaches, far down the rung, could get away with. One player complaint apparently involved leaving in well-liked but struggling starter Jon Lester to give up 11 runs in a game against the Blue Jays. The other was a sarcastic remark Valentine made to rookie Will Middlebrooks after a rare two-error inning, which became known after Valentine mentioned it on a radio show.

Valentine has been a Middlebrooks supporter since spring (over Youkilis) and is one of the players seen as a Valentine guy (Jacoby Ellsbury is said to like Valentine, and David Ortizmight be another who does). But the fact that the Middlebrooks story reached upper management gave rise to the question of whether someone else inside the clubhouse is ratting out Valentine. That could well be, but at this point it might be hard to narrow down who the whistleblower could be.

Valentine has become the focus, and Cherington rightly suggests it isn't fair to him since the issues go well beyond the manager's office.

"We're working on six months that haven't gone according to plan," Cherrington said. "It's on us. It's on me. It's on the front office to assess the talent ... I don't think there's been enough focus on the collective shortcomings. Yes, it's the manager. But it's the front office, it's the general manager, it's the players."

Of course, all those other folks were in the meeting room at the Palace Hotel in New York, just not Valentine.

And of course with Valentine, a natural lightning rod anyway, having only one year left on his two-year deal it's to be expected that the focus is on him. Club president Larry Lucchino has said Valentine will survive this season, but folks around baseball suspect they will again target Blue Jays manager John Farrell, the ex-Red Sox pitching coach who has a year to go on his Toronto deal and is the only man in the A.L. East with a worse record than Valentine, to become the next manager. Boston could be willing to trade for Farrell in the manner that they, in effect, traded ex-GM Theo Epstein, though after all the pitching injuries suffered in Toronto this year the attraction is a bit curious.

Cherington declined comment about whether he's inclined to recommend an extension or perhaps bring Valentine back as a lame duck (both seem like long shots at the moment), saying, "I haven't thought past the next six weeks."

Valentine being Valentine being the interesting one, it isn't such a surprise he's the focus. He's lived his life as the focus. But Cherington didn't just pay lip service to this not being all on Bobby V. Very likely, he's heard from his bosses. Word is, the higher-ups aren't thrilled with the trades that brought talented but injury prone Andrew Bailey, who got hurt right away and just got back now, and talented Mark Melancon, who the Yankees thought was too soft for New York (and is proving that to be the case in Boston).

The clubhouse remains too fractured, just like last September. While Cherington praised the effort on the field -- "I have not seen one time where there's been a lack of effort on the field," he said -- this is the sixth month of abject underachievement, counting the embarrassing September flop.

At the end of last year, some pitchers are said to have suspected Youkilis leaked the info on the starting pitchers' in-game beer-and-chicken parties. There was the Pedroia-Youkilis faction, and there was also the starting pitching faction, led by sullen veteran Josh Beckett, the two-time World Series hero who is looked up to by a generally underachieving rotation of Lester, Clay Buchholz and the injured John Lackey. And also by Cherington, apparently. "I think the narrative that this is on Josh Beckett is wholly unfair," Cherington said. "He's a guy who's been on the mound for our most important games, he's taken the ball whenever asked and he's mostly been a very good pitcher.''

Beckett's also a guy who was caught playing golf after missing a start, who routinely blows off the media and who is the recognized leader of a rotation gone awry.

Under current conditions, with Beckett lording over a rotation that's close to a colossal failure, an influential Pedroia is unlikely ever to be sold on Valentine and a dysfunctional organization that gives way too much rope to the misbehaving coaches and altogether too much say to the players -- even players who never won anything -- Valentine could be the lucky one in that his sentence seems almost up now.

[Falcon]

Thanks for the article faldor, an interesting point of view.

Keep in mind that point of view is from Jon Heyman, the biggest Valentine honk on the planet.

The line that struck me most over the article was this:

"You hire Valentine, you are getting a brilliant baseball mind who knows talent like few others."

That's hilarious.

[tim_m]

ESPN is reporting Carl Crawford will have Tommy John surgery to repair is torn Ulnar Collateral Ligament. He'll likely miss 7 to 9 months.

[tim_m]

Hiroki Kuroda is absolutely on fire. 17 innings pitched in his last two starts one earned run.

[GeorgeSteele]

That Boston/Valentine story was an entertaining read; I remember that Todd Hundley sleep story, very funny stuff (but I was not laughing at the time).

If history provides any context to the current situation, Valentine was also hated as soon as he came in with the Mets.  Hundley was the undisputed team leader and it seemed as though Valentine was out to change that immediately and he did, undermining Hundley with his trademark passive-aggression (and, by the way, I think there was a lot more than the Youkilis situation that triggered Pedroia's 'not the way we do things' comment).  Soon enough, they brought in Piazza (who loved Valentine), kicked Hundley to the curb and Valentine was the boss, which is the only way he'll have it. 

To his credit, once he took control, Bobby V had a very good run with the Mets.  5 straight winning seasons, a couple years in the playoffs, including a World Series appearance with a team fielding a starting outfield of Timo Perez, Jay Payton and Benny fucking Agbayani. 

I wouldn't disagree with that "brilliant baseball mind" comment, he's a very smart guy and a funny character as well, but he's also a ruthless, underhanded prick.  So, in the end, I don't buy the sympathetic tone of that story.  He is a control freak who is threatened by any players who have sway in the clubhouse.  He won't stop until he has full control (actually, he'll never stop) and this is all part of his game. 

[AxlsMainMan]

This is a good article that echoes Faldor in a lot of ways: http://m.espn.go.com/wireless/story?storyId=8284006&city=newyork

[pilferk]

Thanks for the article faldor, an interesting point of view.

Keep in mind that point of view is from Jon Heyman, the biggest Valentine honk on the planet.

The line that struck me most over the article was this:

"You hire Valentine, you are getting a brilliant baseball mind who knows talent like few others."

That's hilarious.

Also keep in mind that every agent not named "Boras" is villanous and evil...according to Heyman.

I'm not saying there isn't good content..but anything Heyman writes, at this point, is suspect because of his obvious relationship with a certain agent and his predisposition for writing favorably about his friends, and sticking pins in voo doo dolls of those he (and his friends) don't like.

[pilferk]

That Boston/Valentine story was an entertaining read; I remember that Todd Hundley sleep story, very funny stuff (but I was not laughing at the time).

If history provides any context to the current situation, Valentine was also hated as soon as he came in with the Mets.  Hundley was the undisputed team leader and it seemed as though Valentine was out to change that immediately and he did, undermining Hundley with his trademark passive-aggression (and, by the way, I think there was a lot more than the Youkilis situation that triggered Pedroia's 'not the way we do things' comment).  Soon enough, they brought in Piazza (who loved Valentine), kicked Hundley to the curb and Valentine was the boss, which is the only way he'll have it. 

To his credit, once he took control, Bobby V had a very good run with the Mets.  5 straight winning seasons, a couple years in the playoffs, including a World Series appearance with a team fielding a starting outfield of Timo Perez, Jay Payton and Benny fucking Agbayani. 

I wouldn't disagree with that "brilliant baseball mind" comment, he's a very smart guy and a funny character as well, but he's also a ruthless, underhanded prick.  So, in the end, I don't buy the sympathetic tone of that story.  He is a control freak who is threatened by any players who have sway in the clubhouse.  He won't stop until he has full control (actually, he'll never stop) and this is all part of his game. 

You said it as well as I could.

He's good with X's and O's.

He's awful (and that's not just taken from his tenure with the Sox) in the clubhouse.  He's does not play nicely with others..especially others who have strong personalities/opinions.

They needed (and still need) someone who that clubhouse will respect, and who also can unite it.  Someone, like, say a former Cards manager who retired last year? Someone like that.

....and if I hear one more writer talk about the Sox injury woes, I'm going to scream.

Yes, they've had a lot of injuries.  Plenty of other teams (INCLUDING the Yanks, I might point out) have, too.

That's an excuse.

Beckett and Lester have been perfectly healthy...and dreadful.  The majority of their injuries have involved their production on OFFENSE...yet they seem to be OK when it comes to scoring runs, so the guys stepping in seem to have been effective.

STOP WHINING ABOUT INJURIES!!

[Falcon]

Thanks for the article faldor, an interesting point of view.

Keep in mind that point of view is from Jon Heyman, the biggest Valentine honk on the planet.

The line that struck me most over the article was this:

"You hire Valentine, you are getting a brilliant baseball mind who knows talent like few others."

That's hilarious.

Also keep in mind that every agent not named "Boras" is villanous and evil...according to Heyman.

I'm not saying there isn't good content..but anything Heyman writes, at this point, is suspect because of his obvious relationship with a certain agent and his predisposition for writing favorably about his friends, and sticking pins in voo doo dolls of those he (and his friends) don't like.

No question about the Boras stuff, have you seen the article Deadspin did on the number on columns Heyman did on Boras clients as opposed to other players with different agents?

It's great, I'll see if I can dig it up if you haven't.

[tim_m]

Derek Jeter with a 4 hit night has now tied Eddie Murray for 11th on the all time list with 3,255 hits. He is no doubt going to be 10th before this season ends.

[tim_m]

The Boston Red Sox soap opera gets worse. They have fired their pitching coach. Assistant pitching coach will take over.

[Falcon]

Derek Jeter with a 4 hit night has now tied Eddie Murray for 11th on the all time list with 3,255 hits. He is no doubt going to be 10th before this season ends.

I saw he scored like his 1800th run as well, that's just insane.