How about a normal win

That's right, I'm complaining about winning. How about instead of this back and forth, 9 steals, extra innings, Joey McNoName getting the game winning hit stuff, they just get your typical 8-3 victory in 9 innings. Right now it seems like that's too much to ask. Like just winning at all is a lucky thing because these guys have come back from getting pounced on to win 2 in a row so maybe I should just shut up and like it. Nope, it's never good enough for me.

One good thing I did find from all these crazy games is that it at least shows the team has some kind of character because honestly when you look at a lot of these guys as individuals, they're boring as sh*t to watch.

• Drew, despite his well timed grand slam last night, is the epitome of a boring player.


• Beltre may hit the quietest .300 ever known to man.


• Before Cameron was peeing rocks on the DL, he wasn't exactly making heads turn in CF except when people said "Hey, that's not Jacoby".


• I'm already falling asleep in the 7th and a dose of Scott Attchison throwing his high 80's gas doesn't exactly keep me perky.


• Despite Scutaro sounding like a cool, flashy name, his play is pretty mild mannered.

All in all, these guys that we all had concerns about at the beginning of the season due to their lack of ability, well we should have been concerned about their ability to put me to sleep. Maybe 3 wins in a row would keep me awake a little longer.

The ole Switcheroo

It's been made official. Well as official as the internet can be. Jacoby Ellsbury will be sliding over to left field and Mike Cameron will be the new center fielder. That's according to multiple reports, and if there's been multiple, it must be true.

Time for my "baseball fan vs baseball stat guy" debate that I tend to always bring up. A stat guy is going to tell you Cameron is the better fielder with the better arm and the better UZR fielding rating. All this is true as far as I can tell from multiple clicks to various sites with "graph" and "stat" in their titles'. It's what people in the biz (or so I'm told) call "research". The way I see it, you're taking a guy, Ellsbury, that is fast as sh*t and can cover tons of ground and moving him to a part of the field with no ground to cover (in Fenway at least). I don't buy into the UZR rating that says Ells is a poor fielder. Point blank, no matter what kind of break or how bad he supposedly is at reading the ball off the bat, the dude can cover some serious ground and get to balls that the 37 year old Cameron will not be able to get to. Also, with that huge Green wall out in left, it helps to have someone with a strong arm so when those slackers rounding first think they have an easy double you get the LF throwing a strike to 2B to cut him down. So the poorly formed conclusion I'm coming to here is that I value Jacoby's speed over Cameron's overall ability. Like most things baseball, the majority of the Red Sox upper management and I see this issue in different ways, hence the moving of Jacoby. I miss the days that stats were just kind of scoffed at and we all just went by gut feelings, "vibes" and if those couldn't settle the issue then contests of who could eat the most tacos.

So, Mike Cameron?

First glance I found that cool picture of him and just kind of went by "The name" and figured all was good with the deal but now looking deeper into the stats it's more of a toss up.

First off, it's great that he's a member of the Gold Glove club, but you don't exactly have to be a fielding whiz to play LF in Fenway. See Ramirez, Manny. In the case that the ball does get over your head in LF there's that giant wall about 10 feet behind you and if the ball goes over that, well chances are you weren't going to catch it in the first place. In places Cameron has played, the vast wilderness of pitchers parks like Safeco and Petco and CoCo, his range and OF value may have come in to play, but like I said, that's kind of a wash in Fenway.

For some more positives than just his fielding, fangraphs make some interesting points here in Bay vs Cameron. In a nutshell, Cameron isn't quite as bad as everyone is making him out to be and they even go as far as saying this:

In reality, the odds are pretty good that Cameron is going to outperform Bay next season, just as he’s done in most every season recently, and he’s going to do it for far less money.

Well shiver me timbers, Fangraphs.

Then there's the glaring negatives that people are going to recite/yell at you next time you talk Sox shop and they pretty much all revolve around his strike out rate, his career strike outs and his striking outness. Long story short, he is going to swing and miss quite a lot, so we might as well get used to it now.

So what can we expect in LF this year? Ah, who the hell knows.

Good-Bye Jason. No thanks Matt. Hello Mike and John

We saw The Yankees make a move to get Granderson. Halladay is now in the NL and Cliff Lee back in the AL. Bay rejected Boston's offer. Holliday is asking for silly money. What is a Nation to do? How about a whole sh*t load of signings in the matter of 12 hours. Unofficial word is Mike Cameron is the newest member of the Sox, which makes John Lackey's 2 hours and 35 minutes of "new guy hazing" the shortest of any player to date. Word has it Pedroia didn't even have the chance to try and give him a wet willy.

Looks like Cameron, 37 years old when the season starts, will take over the void in left field left by the man we shall now refer to as "The Picky Canadian". It would be insanely optimistic to say Cameron's best days aren't behind him, but hell there's action in Boston and I'm not going to go around ruining it. Cameron's UZR rating falls in the top 12 or so in the entire league, so playing left with that giant green thing behind him we should all be able to expect some solid D.

More to come today? More presents to open?