Ortiz not only notched three hits but he also stole second base today. .. This guy continues to amaze. And according to NESN his $12.5 Million Dollar salary for 2011 is also a steal.. And they do make an impressive case for this.. In 2010 he finished fifth in Home Runs, tenth in RBI’s and ninth in Walks. To me, what’s really impressive is that he had the home run output but wasn’t just swinging for the fences on every at-bat as evidenced by his impressive walk numbers.
And so far into the 2011 Spring Training NESN appears to be right. .. I’m still blown away that this big man of 34 years can still accelerate quickly enough to be stealing bases. Good for him and we wish him the best.
Well we can all let out our breath as it looks like Josh Beckett is going to be fine. .. In case you’ve been too involved with work to keep up on Spring Training, Beckett was beaned by a baseball by batting practice pitcher Ino Guerrero yesterday. As outlined in this Boston.com Article Guerrero was aiming for a bucket behind second base and instead caught Beckett who was shagging balls off guard. Beckett goes down, led off the field with a concussion, has trouble with stairs, the media abuzz.
Imagine being Guerrero? Holy cow, he must have felt like the biggest knucklehead of all time. Got a great little gig going, a little bored and wham. When Becket was beaned his heart must have sank… “Please God let him be OK.” Anyway only a concussion. Not a great thing but a swift and full recovery is expected.
One thing’s for certain and that Guerrero has now become the most careful person on the Red Sox Squad. Stupid things happen. If he does something else that reckless then let’s get rid of him but for now water under the bridge and lets move on with a lesson learned. Stupid things can have big consequences. See today’s post in www.baseballup.com if you want another example (Matt Anderson loosing his career over an injury during warm-up).
Carl Crawford, the Red Sox’s $142 Million Dollar Man is expected to take to the outfield for the first time today. Crawford was late on arrival due to some personal issues.. Issues involving family so hopefully his head is clear and he’s able to focus. We obviously need Crawford healthy, strong and producing as part of a credible run for the 2011 championship.
Also playing today is starter Dice-K. .. What can you say? It’s obvious that Francona and the Red Sox Front Office will be taking a hard look at Matsuzaka early on this year to get some indication as to what his trajectory looks like for this season. .. We also get to see Wakefield today. .. Time of course is not on Wake’s side as he (and all of us) gets long in the tooth as they say. But he has such presence & competence that we would all love to see him contribute and participate fully in this 2011 team.
The Boston Red Sox hung in there, more than hung in there and topped the O’s by an impressive 9-3 victory here at Fenway. It was a team effort but John Lester gave us seven innings of good pitching which by the way extended his winning streak over the Orioles to 12 games. Then you had Youk doing his thing with a homer (his 16th of the season) and three RBI’s and JD Drew coming off a strong, very strong, game on Friday with dual home runs, to give us three hits and 2 RBI’s.
Yeah you can say that they beat the weakest team in baseball at home (see the BaseballUp’s post on the O’s being the worse team in baseball here) but considering the injuries they have to deal with as well as the extent of the victory. .. What can I say, I’m pretty darn well pleased.
When it rains it pours. So Jason Veritek who was suppose to be catching for the injured Martinez (with the thumb injury) gets sidelined himself with a foot fracture. This is getting into the territory of being weird. Anyway the prognosis is that we’ll loose Tek for about 6 weeks. By the way, if you didn’t see it Veritek fractured his foot when he collided with Andrian Beltre.
All these injuries may do us more damage than we can dig ourselves out of later in the year. However, if we can survive with a somewhat even keel or lot loose too much ground we’ll be looking good come the latter part of the season as players start coming off the DL fully rested and ready to play.
Alright, the bad news is that Delcarmen’s appears to have a forearm strain. The good news is that this is probably the reason why his ERA over the last three games has been this side of terrible. Good news because it means that this guy has enough talent to pitch a 4.59 ERA with a troubled arm. Also good news is the fact that the level of raw talent Manny has is shown in this season’s start where he pitched well with only a 2.23 ERA. .. Nice..
So the key here is get him on the DL to make sure he gets on the road to healing instead of harming the arm. Then hopefully getting him back to form by the end of July and into the playoffs. … Now there’s one thing that Red Sox Management may have looked out for.. and that’s the fact that Manny Delcarmen will pitch while hurting (like last year when he finally announced a shoulder problem right before the playoffs). The docs intend to give his arm a full exam tomorrow.
Other Pitching Related Posts:
The old days with Lou Pinella and the New York Yankees. .. This guy (along with Reggie Jackson picking up the pennies we’d toss on the field) gave us as much fun..not from his play but from seeing him get ticked off. .. Anyway we put a post up on BaseballUp.com that has this awesome video of Lou going nuts as only Lou can (“the man who can raise confrontation up to an art form”). Hope you enjoy. Here’s the link.
The Giants have this thing called dynamic pricing which is basically a system that causes ticket pricing to rise with rising demand. In other words they get as much as they can get for a seat. … Sooo with the Red Sox coming to town the ticket pricing has been pushed up and it’s likely that a left field seat will go for up to $57.50. The article describing this is here. What I really get a kick out of however is that when the O’s were in town on June 15th the going price for the same seat was just six bucks.
David Ortiz, Big Papi really had a break-out month in May. During this month he hit 10 homers and had a batting average of .363 with a .424 on base percentage. This as opposed to one homer, a dismal .143 batting average and a .238 on base percentage. So what happened? Apparently nothing. No injuries to recoup from, nothing physical that we can see. However now he sees the ball better, has his old timing & bat speed and … seemingly …. his confidence back. Which came first the confidence or the performance? Who knows? Who cares? The big thing is that the Red Sox now look like a baseball team. This promises to be a good run at least until the annual curse of the All-Star break happens. .. But whatever, I’ll take it.
Previous David Ortiz related posts:
Well, that’s Dice-K .. He’s Up.. and He’s Down. Last night he was down … giving up eight walks in 4 2/3 innings. Ouch!
So what’s the deal? After his last game which was a beauty that came close to being a no-hitter Matsuzaka informed the press that he had figured something out that apparently improved his pitching. And whatever it was, it was a secret that he didn’t want to share with anyone. Bottom line, he changed something either physically or mentally, felt great about the results and had to say something to share his exuberance but he wasn’t 100% convinced that it would stick (or maybe it was embarrassing, who knows) so he didn’t want to say explicitly what it was. .. Got that? Don’t worry I don’t either. But unlike dice-K I know that I don’t have it figured out and am just blathering along.
Either way we had to reach out to the bullpen way too early and with the Yankees coming up we of course need to keep these guys fresh. What we do know about Dice-K is that he has the ability. What we don’t know is whether last night’s not-so-good performance is due to mental stress of some sort or if he’s hurt. Reportedly, he said he was sore in his lower body which could be a good thing. Meaning, his head’s screwed on right and sore may mean sore and not injured. If so, we should be able to get some more good pitching out of this guy in the games to come.