Baseball on Christmas....

I can't even lie to any of you and say that I am not disappointed that the Red Sox did not sign Mark Teixeira. I wanted him in a Red Sox Uniform pretty badly...and how can you not? His career averages read like this: .290 batting average, .541 slugging %, 36 HRs, and 121 RBIs, along with gold glove play in the infield. The dude is a beast, there is no doubt about it.

HOWEVER, great teams are not made up of a bunch of individual stars making millions of dollars. If the Yankees have proven one thing in the past is that they have the ability to drastically underachieve based on their payroll. I saw a stat on SportsCenter last night which showed the payroll of the Yankees lineup...just their 1-9 everyday projected lineup to be about $124 million. That is an absurd amount of money, and the Yankees might not even be done yet. Crazy to think about how much money they have at their disposal....and to be honest you really can't even hate on them. If you have the money why not spend it? The Steinbrenner kid may just be out of his mind, but at least he wants to win, and he is not afraid to spend national income of Russia trying to do it. The Yankees have scary talent....but it doesn't always translate into World Series rings, and hopefully for the Red Sox Teixeira will just be another overpaid star on an already overpaid roster. Like I said though....HOPEFULLY.

Moving on to how this effects the Red Sox.....SHITTTTTTTTT. The injuries of Lowell, combined with the injuriy / slowing production of David Ortiz really scares me. You can't expect Pedroia and Youk to put up near MVP years again. What you can expect is for the pitching staff to be a little bit better. Beckett will have a better year, and Lester should be a great number 2 throughout the entire year. Dice-K still scares the living shit out of me, but he has proven to be effective. You throw in Masterson and Wake at the end of the rotation along with a solid bullpen that got one man deeper in the off-season and I think they are a solid group. Definitely going to be one of the top staffs in baseball....let's just hope we can put up some runs.

Hopefully the Sox can still land a good bat....there are a couple of guys out there. At this point I'd love to land Adam Dunn and watch him hit 45 HRs and strike out 245 times while hitting .250. Sox need some more production somewhere in their lineup, give me a big bat pleaseeeeeeeeeeee.



And oh yeah....the Rays are still going to be good. The AL East is going to be a battle again, I just hope the Red Sox are still in it October again.



Merry Christmas Eve to y'all. ONE.