What Can Be Done to Fix the Sox?

Exactly. It makes no sense to talk of putting David Ortiz at 1b very often. About 10 games per year there is his maximum. He would probably break down if he were to play there more often and his bat is a lot more valuable, even now, than his glove, so there's no sense in risking injury to him just to have a body at 1b.

I know there are a lot of people who want Ortiz gone, but I would say, he's one of the Red Sox best source of power against righties. Take him out of the lineup and that leaves Sandoval as your primary source of power against righties, which is a scary thing.

Honestly, if the Sox had to choose between dumping Ortiz and Ramirez, I'd rather see the Sox get out from under Ramirez's deal. I'm sure Hanley can be a productive DH in the upcoming years, but I'd rather have Ortiz short-term and try to replace his offense a year or two down the road. We're talking DH. Anybody with a decent stick can do it, and I don't think it should necessarily have to cost $20 million plus per year.

But this is all theoretical nonsense anyways. No NL team will want Hanley, and no other team in the AL will look to pay $22 million over the next 4 years for a DH. The Sox would have to subsidize that contract and they're not going to do that, so he's not going anywhere.

David Ortiz's contract will vest and he'll be back next year in search of his 500th homer, a milestone that will help him in his case for Cooperstown. He's not going to be traded, nor does he want to. He is a Boston icon and at this point doesn't belong in another uniform any more than Derek Jeter would have other than the Yankees.

The Sox will have both of them next year, and they need both of their bats, as Ortiz can still hit righties well, and Hanley can still generate offense.

Ortiz, perhaps, and Farrell or whoever is managing them might have to convince Hanley to try 1B or else they'll have to suffer with him in LF.

Meanwhile a domino effect is that with Hanley stuck in LF, the Sox might never find out what they have in JBJ or Castillo.

Both of those guys need to be in the majors now playing every day. The Sox need to know what they have with these guys. I don't know that Bradley has much left to prove in AAA and they can most certainly use his defense. We need to know if he can be a viable major league hitter. Wasting ABs in the minors at this point doesn't answer that question. We need to see him every day in Boston.

Rusney is 28 years old and what should have been the best years of his career probably are years where he didn't play. Now he's starting to hit the downslope of his prime and the Sox still have no clue about him, and compound the issue, by giving ABs to a reserve mediocrity such as DeAza, which is really aggravating. Castillo needs to play every day.

It's almost like - why did they sign this guy if they're not going to use him? Was it in response to losing out on Jose Abreu?

The outfield should primarily be Betts/Bradley/Castillo or Castillo/Bradley/Betts. With the Sox dead in the water, this would be a perfect time to find out about them, plus these guys, if nothing else, can cover ground in the outfield, which would be a big help to the pitching staff. Having Hanley in LF gums up the works. Having him DH removes the best power lefty bat that mashes RH pitching out of the lineup. I hope he can play 1b and that he doesn't pout about it because we know he doesn't want to do this, and of course, we have no idea if he can even handle 1b.

Pedroia? He's historically been not so clutch. Granted, it's mostly just by chance IMO

Well, that's good. We wouldn't want him to "understand" something that doesn't exist, right?

It absolutely exists when you're adjusting to the majors. I'm not saying if Johnny Gomes goes deep off of a LHP, you play him the next day.

But if Castillo hits a HR and a single in the last inning of one game, benching him for De Aza the next is just stupid.

Yes, I know their ages so I don't need to be spoken down to.

I also know Hanley Ramirez has an injury prone history and I don't know that he'll age as well as Papi did. Do you really know that? So I don't know how effective he'll be two years from now. Two years from now, there might actually be a better option that Nava or Hanley Ramirez to slot in the DH spot.

If I can only keep one guy on the Sox, I keep Ortiz. I'll take him over Ramirez in the short-term, but I think this is a dumb exercise as neither is leaving anyways.

At least if Ortiz gets pathetic he'll retire soon. If Hanley is an injury problem or declines more rapidly than you expect we're stuck with his contract longer. Like you said, he's a sunken cost.

Maybe momentum isn't the right word, but it is a fact that baseball players almost universally hit well in streaks. Few, if any, hit near their average week in and week out. So when a player does well it might mean the beginning of good streak.

For example, if Pedroia gets three hits in a game the odds are good that he will go several games getting more than one hit a game. Look at what Napoli did that one week, which moved his BA by more than 50 points if I recall correctly.

Few baseball players perform well if they don't play regularly. Holt is a very notable exception.

It isn't likely that Castillo is going to show his potential unless he gets to play regularly. The only reason I can think of for him not being in the lineup tonight is that he must be injured.

You say this as if it were some special property of baseball. It's not - it's inherent to any Bernoulli experiment. If you toss a coin 10 times you are exactly as likely to get HHHHHTTTTT as you are to get HTHTHTHTHT. Or, for that matter, HHHHHHHHHH.


Wrong, wrong, wrong. This is utter bull**** that has been refuted many times over.

Except in this example, the coin has no knowledge of what happened in previous tosses, like a batter would. We don't really know what's going on in a player's head during at-bats or how their body is feeling. Consecutive at-bats are not entirely independent events, and do not occur in the same, controlled environment over and over.

I won't pretend to know anything about whether the streak hitting is true, but just pointing a few things out. 

The thing is, just because you think "hey I got a couple of hits last game, I'm sure I'll get a hit here today" ... doesn't actually help you get a hit. If you believe otherwise, bring the evidence.

It has been shown that, for the general population of MLB hitters, streaks are not predictive (See Chapter 2 of The Book). It's possible that there are individual hitters (Napoli?) for whom it is different - if you want to present some research on that I would love to read it.

The point is that streaks are a natural occurrence in Bernoulli sequences even without any fluctuation in true talent level. If you think they are caused by something other than random variation, you are likely deluding yourself.