In Response to Re: Red Sox Lineup for the Money is the Worst in All of Baseball History! : Thank you. All of the fans who think they know the Red Sox and the press always point out the "2nd in runs, blah blah blah" argument, but the bottom is this: 1. Against good pitching, they perform like rag dolls. 2. Take away the occasional 10, 14, 17 run games against bad pitching and they are really an ineffective hitting team. I would much rather see the following in our lineup and roster: 1. Get rid of Thomas. This team DOES NOT need 13 pitchers. I'm guessing they are the only team in baseball doing so. 2. Bring up Lavarnway. He's not hitting in AAA, but who cares. Shoppach can't hit. 3. Bring up either Repko or that Ciac?? guy for a 4th bench player. 4. As I brought up in another thread, put Youk on DL and bring up Middlebrooks. Any fan with baseball knowledge would rather see Middlebrooks and Lavarnway than Youk and Shoppach. The FO is worried about selling tickets, but with this aging team, they won't be selling any. If this homestand (TB, NY, Texas) is ugly, the team will be 8 games behind the Rays by May 1.
Posted by ADG
Posted by ADG
So let me get this straight: you counter what you judge as a oversimplified, anecdotal argument ("2nd in runs, blah blah blah") with...two anecdotes?
Sir, you condescend towards people who you claim "think they know the Red Sox", but I guarantee I understand both the Red Sox, and the sport of baseball, better than you do.
Ignorant baseball fans think the best lineups magically get clutch hits every time runners are in scoring position, and always grind it out against tough pitchers. OF COURSE the Red Sox lineup struggles more against better pitchers than lesser pitchers...that's true of ANY lineup. And why don't you actually give some EVIDENCE that the reason the Red Sox score a lot of runs is only because of explosions against poor pitching?
I bet if you looked up the median for runs scores by the Red Sox last year, it would be higher than that of most or all other teams...
Meanwhile, Bill James proved years ago that winning ballgames comes down to two things: scoring runs, and preventing runs. The more runs a lineup scores, the better the team will do...period, end of story. Though some teams can be built around using strategy a tad more to grind against tougher pitching, in the end any single game will be decided far more by random factors than by talent...that's why we play 162 games, and 7 game playoff series! The bigger the sample, the more the true ability of a team shows itself.
The Red Sox have a great lineup, and it's NOT because they score gobs of runs against poor pitching. It's because most Red Sox hitters take pitches, work the count, take walks, have some type of power in their game, etc etc etc. To call the Red Sox an "ineffective hitting team" might be the dumbest things I've ever heard...and I saw "An Inconvenient Truth"!
