Running Red Sox thread

I agree that Byrd should be a nice addition. I dont think I can stand another knuckler in Zink. Bull pen got rocked last night. How do you blow a 12-2 lead? 19-17 seems like a football score. Anyway, it seems like Mikey Lowell got DL'ed. Youk to 3rd, Casey to first. Need to brink up a Pawsox- maybe Bailey.

 

Get well Yaz!!

 

Minnesota now tied in the wild card standings.
you really gotta hand it to the twinkies as an organization. Lose santana and Hunter and go an extended period of time without your perceived new ace, and all they do is win ball games. The team's in perpetual rebuilding mode, never more so than this year, and there they are in the thick of things.

 

Yeah - they really do a fantastic job of developing players. Of course, there is that downside of the system which tried to force a talent like Ortiz to play against his natural skills.

I haven't had a chance to see but maybe 5 games all this year. I'm hoping that the Sox don't gack down the stretch. I'd love to actually watch some baseball that matters now that I might actually be abel to catch some games.

How about Youk being in the mix for MVP talk? Weird. He's not gonna win it, but just to be in the mix is pretty impressive.

 

Sox fans have to be worried, what with the way the staff's been performing. Beckett's gonna miss a start; Wakefield's fragile as ever; Buccholz is done with the big club for this year; and you just don't know what you have in Byrd. I say give Masterson another shot. I still don't know why the Sox went with Buccholz over Masterson in the first place. Now they're thinking about maybe giving Bowden a start. late August ain't the time to be going through this BS. Guess rely and Dice-K and Lester tpo continue their dominance and outslugging the opponent in other starts is the only option.

 

Regarding Ortiz, that was more Tom Kelly than the system. He was a hardass who just didn't like certain players and basically ran them out of town.

 

Mark Kotsay to the Sox ? That's the rumor.

 

It took me a while to find this - this is what was sticking in my mind when I made that comment. From a Verducci article on Ortiz.

"Ortiz had felt stifled in Minnesota, an organization that so emphasizes situational hitting that no Twin has hit 30 home runs in a season since 1987. The 6'4" Ortiz was the square peg who *didn’t fit in the round hole. “They wanted me to stay inside the ball,” Ortiz says, referring to a style in which a lefthanded hitter tries to hit inside pitches to leftfield. “They were teaching that to everyone. That’s why nobody ever hits home runs there. But when you’re young in the big leagues and the coach tells you to do something and you don’t do it and you get negative results, then you’re f-----. They’re going to sit you down.”

The Twins, Ortiz says, so enthusiastically stressed small-ball tactics such as hitting behind runners that “if you moved the runner over from second base [with a groundout], you got high fives in the dugout like you just hit a home run.”

http://bostondirtdogs.boston.com/Headline_Archives/2006/06/ortiz_illustrat.html"

 

Yeah, that's attributed to Tom Kelly: http://www.startribune.com/sports/twins/19269464.html

Kelly still gets blamed for Twins' spray-hitting ways

Boston slugger David Ortiz has propagated that belief by saying former manager Tom Kelly wanted him to hit like a "little girl" during the Big O's six on-and-off seasons (1997-2002) with the Twins.

Last update: May 26, 2008 - 9:06 PM

Tom Kelly managed a World Series-winning team in 1987 that hit 196 home runs, with four players hitting 28 or more home runs. This robust home run production came before what's considered to be baseball's steroids era (1993-2005).

Kelly has been gone from the Twins dugout for seven seasons. Yet, he still gets blamed for being the man behind an approach that causes the Twins to emphasize hitting to all fields at the cost of power potential.

Boston slugger David Ortiz has propagated that belief by saying Kelly wanted him to hit like a "little girl" during the Big O's six on-and-off seasons (1997-2002) with the Twins.

"We tried to get our hitters to learn to drive the outside pitch the other way," Kelly said Monday. "To see a big, strong man such as David turn and put a swing on an inside pitch, we always enjoyed that, too.

"We got a bad break with David when he suffered that hamate bone injury [in 1998]. He was a young hitter, but he was driving some balls a long way. Very impressive.

"Then, he went to Boston and started doing that again. He's turned himself into quite a hitter. He deserves a lot of credit."

It was mentioned to Kelly that Ortiz seems to get a fair percentage of his clutch hits by driving the ball to the opposite field.

"I've noticed that," Kelly said. "And he's never called to thank me."


Players like David Ortiz, Todd Walker, etc who didn't do exactly what he said then ended up being discarded. Kelly was a master of fundamentals and obviously deserves some credit for the organization's success, but at the same time his stubbornness and old-school ways kept them from being as good as they could have been.

 

11-3. Yankees are done for 2008