almagest

Thanks for the help! We sure need it right now

This might be the longest at bat I’ve ever seen

At least get him to third

Peters has swung at 5 balls in this at bat so far

Yeesh

You were saying?

I'll give Braden some slack because he's a rookie. Not gonna judge him too harshly yet. He's gonna need to stop switch hitting and/or fix his swing to not pound everything into the ground though.

This is really hard to watch.

Hey look you can use challenges

Yeah that awful strike call flipped the at bat.

SIGH

Ok come on now!

Only one of the pitches to Vargas was a strike.

0 for 7 with RISP, 7 LOB.

I do not want to hear any more about Colson's good defense.

I looked into what pitchers have done since the deadline by fWAR, and you have Kay at 0.3, Fedde at 0.2, Burke and Urquidy at 0.1, Castillo at -0.2. Of the pitchers traded, here's who would be an improvement (or match Kay): Skubal (duh) 1.4 Mahle 1.0 Holmes, Kremer 0.5 Peralta, Soriano 0.4 Griffin, Gausman, May 0.3 Everyone else at 0 or negative. Casey Mize (-0.2) and Robbie Ray (-0.3) at the bottom. In the absolute best case scenario, if the Sox had 100% foresight at the deadline, didn't trade for Castillo, grabbed Mahle and made the same changes the Braves did and one of Holmes/Kremer, they'd have about another win at best, maybe two (+1.6 fWAR), assuming the offense did their job. If they didn't know how to fix Mahle they might have another win. (+1.1 fWAR) I also checked the bullpen pitchers traded, but from what I can tell the Sox bullpen hasn't been bad. about a 3.5 ERA since the break. TL;DR - the entire team can't be slumping on offense and win.

Cubs up 9-1 after 4 on Pittsburgh. Either the Sox just caught the hottest pitchers on their staff, or they're just not good right now.

Can’t even hit a homer right

Can’t even hit fastballs.

If that's true he needs to realize it's a huge mistake and stop it. Taylor has been his high leverage guy and he didn't use him. Hicks has been rocky lately but has done well enough to be trusted. Murphy and Richards came in when it was too late but did well.

Hagen Smith is opening. Don't know who is coming in after.

At least pitching wasn't the problem last night, for the most part. Lack of offensive execution, poor lineup construction and some bad luck was the killer. The Pirates also managed their bullpen better, treating that game like a playoff game. We didn't have the same urgency after Martin left. If they can take today's game they'll be 2.5 up again. One game at a time.

Eisert with five strikeouts Jesus Christ

Can't handle that 90 mph heat

This is a big strike zone