Projo SoxTalk with McAdam: Wrapping up the Oakland trip
Click the play button below to hear Sean's comments, recorded this morning, as he was headed for the San Francisco airport and a cross-country flight back to New England. (Steve Krasner will pick up our Red Sox coverage this weekend in Toronto.) Sean discusses Jon Lester, David Ortiz, the Oakland A's future and Bartolo Colon.
Here are some excerpts from Sean's comments:
On Lester:"Even though he did walk three, he did get ahead of most of the hitters and put himself in control to sort of dictate what was going to happen in the at-bats, and you can do that when you can throw strikes with multiple pitches."
On Ortiz: "He did not feel great in Japan -- kind of battled the bug, or a flu, or something -- and wasn't at full strength, in addition to all the demands of the travel. And then you factor in the fact that Ortiz has traditionally been a slow starter; by his own admission it usually takes him a little while to get his swing together when the season starts. So all those things conspired to get him off to a slow start. ... But to be able to knock the first one out and have it be the hit that gave the Red Sox their first two runs yesterday in the seventh inning, must have been something of a relief for him."
On the state of the A's: "They made an awful lot of moves in the offseason, trading Danny Haren, Swisher, Kotsay, and it's clear that they are in a rebuilding mode. When you talk to people in the game, they maintain that Billy Beane did a good job in getting a good inventory of prospects back for those guys, particularly the Haren deal ... and those are the kinds of guys that are going to dictate how good this franchise is going to be in another two, three or four years."
What to expect from Colon tonight: "His velocity was pretty good at Dodger Stadium on Friday night. He was up pretty regularly at 91-92, which is certainly enough for him to be effective at the big-league level. In terms of workload and pitch count, I think they want him to get up to about 75, maybe 80 pitches maximum."
