Black was set to take the Nationals job if the money had been better than was offered, so clearly he's shown interest in leaving the west coast if the right opportunity presents itself.
Farrell Fails Again
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Didn't watch last not but how bad did Zeigler really pitch? Game log includes an infield hit, a dribble in front of the plate that scored a run, a ball to LF that Benintendi screwed up, and an intentional walk, which leaves just two singles unaccounted for.
I take back my dumb comment as based on this response you were clearly unaware that he will be starting the game on Saturday and his appearance was essentially his side session.
Now that you are aware I hope you agree that a second inning for Clay wasn't a good idea.
On the other hand, guys like Pedey and Ortiz are vets and have been team leaders for years. If there have not been any such meetings, I would suspect that they believe it's not what is needed. Conversely, I'm sure there is a lot that we don't know about what happens in that clubhouse and a meeting that the press just missed seems quite possible.
As to accountability, lots of guys on this team have said publicly that they are to blame. Price is annoying as hell but he says that frequently. Kimbrel blamed his injury but he also said he was awful the other night. Other guys have too.
I thought Gomes brought a lot to this team. Napoli too. But I don't see a lack of veteran leadership as a huge contributor to the current problems.
One point on Buck. Given the way that game was going, would it have been so terrible for JF to abandon his start and instead focus on maximizing the chances of winning the game on Wednesday night by bringing Clay back? Presumably he could have pivoted to one of the guys in Pawtucket. It's being taken as a given that JF HAD to treat that outing as a side session but sometimes circumstances require an adjustment on the fly. This is really a question more than a comment as I can see both sides. But part of the question is driven by the fact that Buck is finally enjoying some success as a reliever and I have some trouble picturing him being able to replicate that over 6-7 innings on Saturday.
Sure he could have kept Clay in there and then they could have had someone else start on Saturday. It seems to have crossed their minds yesterday when Clay warmed up again. If he had come in I assume they would have started Elias and it seems possible they may end up doing just that since Clay seems to be their best bullpen arm at this point.
Of course if he had brought out Clay for another inning many of typical crowd would have complained that he threw away his starter for Saturday and why would you do such a thing when you have a completely rested bullpen(minus Kimbrel) and all they need to do is hold the awful Yankee lineup to 2 runs in 3 innings.
That assumes Clay is decent, if Clay goes out there the second inning and sucks then there would be three more pages in this thread.
I like the fact that Farrell brought out Clay at all which is highly unusual in a regular season game, that he then turned the game over to his bullpen is simply managing 101.
He allowed hits to 3 of the first 4 batters he faced. That's awful, and a sign that he simply didn't have it last night. He should have been pulled. But hey, there's plenty of season to go and.....wait, there's very little of the season to go and the Sox are flailing around like a drunk in the dark.
Why in God's name, given what we've seen Farrell fail to do with this pitching staff, would we want to hire another ex-pitcher and ex-pitching coach as manager? There's a reason so few of them are given managerial jobs and fewer of them are successful at it. The transition seems impossible.
I get the sense that Ortiz is enjoying his farewell tour and while he would love a long playoff run he seems at piece with whatever happens. Then again perhaps part of the reason we don't hear anything about the clubhouse is because JF is doing that part of the job well.
I wonder if the problem goes back to the prior game. Farrell brings in Ziegler for a meaningless inning (the Red Sox were losing by 5 runs) and then he comes back with Ziegler the next day and Ziegler didn't have his best stuff. While Ziegler hadn't pitched in several days prior to Wednesday's game, he is an older pitcher and it is late in the season--don't send him out there in meaningless situations. If Farrell doesn't pitch him on Wednesday in a meaningless spot, maybe Ziegler has better stuff on Thursday and the Red Sox win the game.
In any event, I don't want to isolate this one decision. More generally, Farrell has a habit of using his better bullpen arms in meaningless situations. In turn, his better bullpen arms aren't always available in key situations where a win or loss is at stake. His poor bullpen management probably costs the Red Sox several games each year.
So you wanted Kimbrel to pitch the 9th on Wednesday after blowing up on Tuesday, or you wanted Ross to come back out after his 25 pitch 8th?
There are hits and there are ground balls that just find holes. We're past the point of blaming the pitcher for the latter. I know from the box score that one of he hits didn't leave the infield. What I'm asking is if the other two were hard hit balls. Because if not, or if even just one of them was, I'm not really pinning this much on Zeigler.
Ziegler was bad last night. The inning really blew up with the Benintendi misplay, but he was well on his way to his worst relief outing with the Sox.
I agree. The players aren't executing and that's on them. But at the same time, as several of us have been saying over the last few weeks, is the coaching staff not supposed to identify and fix issues? If we accept the premise for the sake of argument that this isn't a good team right now, is all of the blame DD's and/or Ben's? It's either a personnel issue or a coaching issue, and I didn't hear many complaints about the moves that were made over the last year or so.
The manager's job should include getting players to play better. For almost three years now we've all watched as this team has had multiple issues that seem to go unaddressed for long periods of time. It's time to thank Farrell for his contributions and agree to part ways.
To start, I'm pushing Tazawa for more than 20 pitches. The game is pretty much over anyway after he gives up the HR to Sanchez, making it 7 to 4, not an insurmountable lead but, as we know, the Red Sox are not a good come-from-behind team this year and probably won't do much against Betances. Thus, I'm getting more out of Tazawa, knowing the game is lost and I want to keep my other guys as fresh as possible for a game that matters.
You're right, there aren't a lot of options left in the bullpen but Farrell could have managed things differently earlier in the game: get another inning from Pomeranz, get more than 3 pitches out of Buchholz (the Red Sox could always turn to B.Johnson as an emergency starter. He might be a better option than Buchholz anyway).
The disaster was set up by the HRam ramming. I am actually surprised there is not a thread devoted to it (as a HRam supporter I am hesitant to bring it up), but if he just stretched for the ball Sanchez is probably out and HRam is not sore. I guess we can blame it on lack of experience, but HRam didn't stretch toward the ball as is typical of first baseman on just about every short throw. Instead he backed up as an infielder might on occasion to get a good bounce instead of an in-between hop. It certainly was an excellent play by Pedey (it looks like the ball was just too far for X to have made the play), and it would have taken a good play by HRam to scoop the ball, but an experienced/natural first baseman has better than a 50-50 chance to make the play.
"Prospect guys" have been rumbling that the team has no desire to bring him up to the big leagues this year given that he missed half the season with anxiety issues. Put whatever stock in it you want, but my guess is Johnson is not the next guy up right now.
Seriously? Farrell of the Photogentic Jaw, ex-pitching coach extraordinaire and SABR-friendly manager, has 49 games to turn this team around.
I hope you're right in your completely unjustified love of the man, but this season is starting to have the feel of a typical "just can't quite compete" Farrellian effort.
Sox pitchers are achieving mediocre on-field results, inconsistent with the team's above-average peripherals and high overall talent level, while pitching in front of a solidly average infield defense and a superb outfield defense.
Poor mechanics that go unfixed, perplexing bullpen usage, slow hooks. And apparently if Porcello's turnaround reasons are to be believed, poor pitching strategies.
They're 12-14 since the ASB, are below .500 since May and haven't won a single series in 3 weeks. How much more evidence does one need that the Titanic is taking on water?
This is beyond a stretch. Meaningless mop up innings are taylormade for a reliever who hadn't pitched in 4-5 days. Ziegler has over 600 PA with 0 days rest without any drop off in performance. Suggesting Ziegler would be sharper on 4-5 days rest then 0 days would require more empirical evidence than him being 36 and on inning 49 of the season when the results don't support your claim.
The poor mechanics have been fixed. Bannister is now on the field and reportedly has spent time with Erod and Buchholz on their mechanical issues. Like others here the bullpen usage is always going to appear bad when relievers don't do their jobs.
Price's mechanical issues are still present, as witnessed by his being all over the place on the mound on the recent road trip. He needed Pedroia to fix him the last time back in May, not Farrell or Willis, who never even noticed.
And ERod has his mechanics fixed back in Pawtucket; the major league staff couldn't do a damn thing with him. Bannister had to be brought in to fix Buchholz; supposed pitching guru Farrell got 1/2 a season's worth of terrible results from him first
They are not good at this part of their jobs, which is a huge reason for the massive underperformance of key members of the pitching staff. It's about as big an indictment as I've ever seen.
Farrell is incapable of righting any type of ship. He's more than happy to sit passively in the dugout and watch games implode (cue the staring while on the phone .gif), and then sit passively in his office and not do a damn thing about getting the team to play better. He's extremely smart and good at scouting and other prep, but awful, beyond awful, at getting pitchers to pitch to their abilities. And this lack of ability is going to ruin the season.
Ghoff stated there were issues that the coaching staff haven't addressed so let's just focus on that not Farrell's alleged weaknesses. Whose mechanics need fixing? Eduardo Rodriguez has a 2.80 ERA since July. What pitching strategies are being employed and what can they do differently?
You remember the time a SoSH poster correctly identified how Paul Byrd was tipping his pitches?
Still don't buy the peripheral argument. The pitching staff outperformed their metrics in 2013-2014, both years when JF was still the manager. Unless something has dramatically changed this year, it still seems like a reach to pin the ERA-FIP (for example) split on JF without giving him credit for previous years when it has been the other way around.
ERod went to the minors to get fixed. Farrell and pals didn't do shit.
I dunno, how about : pulling relievers when they have nothing BEFORE they piss away games? How about getting tiring starters out for the same reasons? How about managing to win some games with some fucking urgency instead of sitting back and watching Rome burn, like last night?
A manager is not an innocent bystander. I cannot emphasize this enough.
Byrd was a late-season trade; Price and ERod and pals have been with the team all season. And Paul Byrd sucked anyway, even after TKAA fixed him. Poor example.
Go ahead and throw up your hands and have pity for poor John. I'm done with the guy. He can't manage. I can't possibly see Joe Maddon leaving Zielger out there for 3 hits in 4 ABs last night to lose the game.
I haven't been this disgusted with the organization since Valentine was named manager. And it's a different type of anger: the idea that Farrell is going to watch a once-promising season flame out into nothing because he's incapable of fixing problems or managing with urgency. He might have been the right guy in 2013, after the Valentine fiasco, but no longer. I cannot see it as coincidence that the club took a noticeable leap upward last year when Lovullo was managing the team. Get. Him. Gone.
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I'll ask again- if Farrell isn't the problem then what is? Did Ben and Dave put a shitty team together? Is the pressure of Boston too much for Price, Kimbrel, Buchholz, Kelly, etc.? Unless one is satisfied with the results this year, or the last three years, what is the cause of this under-performance? I think we can do better than throwing up our hands and saying "shit happens in baseball" for three years in a row.
Edit: I guess under-performance isn't the right term if one thinks that the team simply isn't very good and is playing up to expectations, which implies that it's a FO issue and not a management issue.
Edit: I guess under-performance isn't the right term if one thinks that the team simply isn't very good and is playing up to expectations, which implies that it's a FO issue and not a management issue.
He didn't give up a run on Wednesday. Maybe he wouldn't have given up a run on Thursday if he wasn't used on Wednesday in a meaningless situation. We don't know. In any event, I don't want to debate or make too much of this specific example (since it is a rather "thin" example), and this is why I stated the following:
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Decision-making under uncertainty. Farrell is not good at it.
The counter argument is the "manager of men" thing here though. Buchholz probably wants to be a starter, had been told he was getting another chance to do so, and Farrell felt yanking the rug out from under him was a bad idea longer term. But of course, the season is nearing short term, if not there already.
The bottom line is that they've got a terrible bullpen. And that's mostly on Ben Cherington's decision to give Koji 2X $9 instead of giving Miller 4X $10 to beat the Yankmes, and DD's bad luck in this years trades, and the failure to develop anyone except Barnes as a hard throwing bullpen option, and perhaps some on Farrell's erratic usage patterns, slow hooks, and failure to exploit matchup advantages.
Leaving Ft. Myers, it looked like a 83-84 win team to me, as in win a few more than they lose but entertaining team to watch. A few enhancements en route (e.g., Pomeranz addition and Leon's emergence) maybe tacks on 3 more wins. It is what it is, though I'd love to be wrong. A 10-4 or even 9-5 stretch from here would get everyone excited.
Even if you could do a direct substitution, that's still one guy pitching well (Miller), three meh guys (Barnes, Z, Kimbrel when healthy) and a total mess in the back. And that's assuming Miller would pitch well here and not catch whatever is going around in the bullpen that's screwed things up to this point.
Just fire Farrell already so we don't have to see the same arguments rehashed over and over and over and over and over again.
Yes you stated it. But that doesn't make it true.
I didn't see the game. Were any/all of them hard hit balls or seeing eye grounders?
Maddon let Pedro Strop stay in this game after coming in with man of first and two outs: wild pitch-single-walk.
And despite his brighter-than-the-sun-omnipotent brilliance, and Strop's plain as day shit-tastic suckiness that anyone who has been watching baseball for more than 12 minutes could see, Maddon obviously thought to himself: "what would John Farrell do?" So he left Strop in:
Home Run (Fly Ball to Deep LF-CF); Myers Scores; Kemp Scores
And then, seeing how well that worked, he still just sat there, wishing he had a strong chin, while Strop then gave up a single and a walk before being pulled, after turning a 4-2 lead into a 6-4 deficit.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CHN/CHN201605111.shtml
Dokes, I call shenanigans.
A game in May that was the first game of a doubleheader that took place when the Cubs already had a SEVEN game lead in the division is a far different situation than the one that faced the Sox and Farrell last night, in August in a huge slump, rapidly fading away in both the division and the WC and utterly desperate for a win.
Maddon would have yanked Zielger last night, no doubt in my mind.
A game in May that was the first game of a doubleheader that took place when the Cubs already had a SEVEN game lead in the division is a far different situation than the one that faced the Sox and Farrell last night, in August in a huge slump, rapidly fading away in both the division and the WC and utterly desperate for a win.
Maddon would have yanked Zielger last night, no doubt in my mind.
Kimbrel, Koji, Tazawa, Carson Smith -- Barnes, Ross, Layne, Hembree
Kimbrel, Koji, Tazawa, Zeigler -- Barnes, Ross, Layne, Hembree
Kimbrel, Koji, Tazawa, Zeigler -- Barnes, Ross, Abad, Hembree, Buchholz
Those aren't terrible bullpens. Sure, there have been injuries, and DD has reloaded with Zeigler and Abad, both of whom were really good until they got here.
I think the most emblematic pitcher for me in terms of Farrell's ability to make the whole less than the sum of its parts is Noe Ramirez. 11 games of seeing whether or not he could function in a Carson Smith role. Sox go 2-9. (Not saying Noe was responsible for all those losses.)
That's fair. I had higher expectations but your take is reasonable. I saw a very good offense, pretty good pen, good defense, and an adequate rotation. I thought 90 wins was pretty reasonable especially considering that I didn't see any other AL East team that was any better.
I know some people don't like Eric Van, but he has some interesting analysis on soxprospects regarding how Farrell has misused the bullpen. In short, Farrell relies on less dependable relievers at the most crucial time in a game when he should be using his best relievers in those instances.
Some of his arguments/discussion go over my head. . . .
Some of his arguments/discussion go over my head. . . .
If you still have the link, would you post it? I looked for it and didn't find it.
Who are the better relievers though? I assume Kimbrel even though he hasn't been great, is Barnes a better reliever, how about Ziegler?
Doesn't it work both ways though? Farrell didn't remove Porcello last week as the game thread was primed to explode at the first baserunner and he went 1-2-3 in the 8th, Farrell DID remove Kimbrel in the 9th of a save situation and Barnes saved the game, and Farrell also removed Erod last night and we know what happened. When relievers over and over as has been the case recently there isn't a manager in the game who is going to look good. He's pulled many a reliever, possibly too soon, only to have the new guy pour gasoline onto the fire.
I'm not sure I'm in agreement that "Farrell and pals didn't do shit". Is the AAA staff not in alignment with the major league staff? Are they not pals? You don't think the major league staff had specific instructions on things to work on? And really, isn't AAA exactly where a guy like ERod should be fixing his issues since every game matters at the big league level? I'd rather he suck there than continue to cost the Red Sox games. And really, if the guy is fixed, who the hell cares who fixed him?
http://forum.soxprospects.com/user/221/recent
His basic argument is that Farrell is slow to react to what pitchers are actually doing, and leaves them in fixed roles - so he used Taz rigidly at first (instead of in high leverage situations) then burnt him out and afterward began to use him in actual high leverage situations.
At some point he argues that the Sox have a #10 bullpen that gets #20 results. I don't know about the actual numbers/data, but that basically aligns with my impression that Farrell manages his BP by rote.
Edit - See SJH's warning below. However, I do think there's a good point to be made out of Farrell doggedly using his "second best man" in the 8th inning of a save situation. I think it's axiomatic that a bad bullpen strategy can lead to losses. And I'd feel much better if we had 2 or 3 less losses at the moment.
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I would urge people to take every single thing Van says with an enormous grain of salt. His methods here in the past have been...messy, to say the least.
Hasn't Black already proven himself as an exception to this though? I'm not advocating he be the next skipper or anything, but he already has a track record as a good manager, doesn't he?
Black was a manager for 8 full seasons and part of a 9th. He's had 2 winning seasons in that time. Each time he had a winning season his team totally collapsed the very next year. His lifetime winning percentage is .477
So I'm going to with "no, he does not."
And please God - no more former pitchers who can manage.
Though to Black's credit, losing in San Diego is kind of everyone's gig.
Bochy was 951-975 there, with the one World Series appearance.
I'd rather give Varitek the reins if they can tempt him into it.
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I don't have time to look at that Van post, but I was wondering about that issue the other day and looked at Fangraphs' LI stats for the Sox bullpen. In the aggregate level at least, it looked pretty normal... the better guys were used in higher leverage spots overall. It would take some pretty granular analysis of changes in leverage and WE over the course of each outing, not just at entry and exit, to say more... a project I am definitely not equipped to tackle at the moment.
What did stand out to me in the overall stats was that the Sox have one of the lowest pull rates in the majors, and also some of the worst performance YTD in hi-lev spots relative to pitcher baseline (the clutch stat). This is descriptive rather than predictive, but together these two observations could be taken as a suggestion that, though the overall leverage mix is pretty typical across the staff, Farrell's rigidity and lack of imagination has led to poor situational matchups at crucial times.
Someone else could look at the same stats and say the players in the bullpen have repeatedly shit all over themselves for no good reason. But it probably merits a deeper look.
What did stand out to me in the overall stats was that the Sox have one of the lowest pull rates in the majors, and also some of the worst performance YTD in hi-lev spots relative to pitcher baseline (the clutch stat). This is descriptive rather than predictive, but together these two observations could be taken as a suggestion that, though the overall leverage mix is pretty typical across the staff, Farrell's rigidity and lack of imagination has led to poor situational matchups at crucial times.
Someone else could look at the same stats and say the players in the bullpen have repeatedly shit all over themselves for no good reason. But it probably merits a deeper look.
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