Oddities Blue and Red

The blue or Yankee oddity involves their batting line-up, which has scored more runs than any team in the league, boasts several hitting superstars, and yet regularly finds itself dominated by the real bottomfeeders on American league pitching staffs. Today it was Baker, who has a nearly 7 run ERA, and only recently returned from well-deserved exile in AAA. And yet having beaten the Yankees 5-1 earlier in the season, for his best effort, he did so again today holding the Yankees to just 2 hits. The term Bronx Bombers takes on a whole new meaning. Jeter smacked an RBI double to continue a really sick streak that he's been on, but the rest of them laid the worst kind of egg. They'd have hit Santana better, I'd wager.

Karsten deserved better, and certainly he deserves to move into the rotation. He's given them solid to excellent efforts each time out.

The Red (Sox) oddity comes from their front office. After last night's game they sat 5 1/2 out of the wild card and had a series against both Chicago and the Twins at Fenway coming up. For those series, Ortiz will be back, Varitek will be back, Pena, will be back, Nixon will be back, and of course Manny can come back anytime he wants because having the sulks is not the same thing as having an injury. Beckett has had 2 good outings in a row, Wakefield will be back in the rotation for the Twins and perhaps for the White Sox. Well you get my point. Boston actually had a shot, not great perhaps but certainly not terrible, at taking the wild card. And if they managed to do so, they certainly had a much better chance, with all of their injuries resolved save poor Jon Lester, of attaining and even winning the Series.

So why in the world under these circumstances does the boy-genius trade David Wells, who has had 4 very good starts in a row, for a minor league prospect. Without Wells and Lester, they have essentially a 3 man rotation once Wakefield returns. But with Wells, and provided Wakefield is really healthy and Beckett has righted the ship, they would have a very good 4 man rotation, and with an offense and defense back at full strength (Gonzalez v. Cora who cares), they would be dangerous once again. If I'm a Boston fan the way I'm a Yankee fan, I'm looking at the ship go down and thinking how can we launch that wild card lifeboat. Two wins over Toronto and the return of the first team would have given me hope if the pitching staff was left reasonably intact. The Wells trade accordingly would piss me off worse than any bonehead move that Torre has made all year, would piss me off worse than any bonehead move that Cashman has made in the past, including the Jeff Weaver trade, would piss me off as bad as the thought of Carl Pavano spending the 19 mill he's already made for trying to sabotage the team he's supposed to be helping. What Theo did, or rather didn't do, at the deadline was misjudgment and mismangement. What he did with Wells is, form the chowderhead perspective, malfeasance. And yet so besotted with his image of youthful acuity are the wankers at ESPN that they continue to treat the move as not only tolerarable, reasonable, even inevitable.

Strangely, as much as I hate Boston, and as glad as I am to see their last big game hope drifting off to the other coast, I find myself bothered by the sheer stupidity and, worse, the calculated defeatism of the decision of Theo (not Einstein) Epstein.