Here's a bit of the segment with Peter Gammons on the Mike Felger Show last week, with the biggest Sox-related nuggets concerning what exactly the club expects/hopes to get out of Bartolo Colon on the eve of his Fenway debut.

If Colon is basically a facsimilie of the Big Bart that the Angels got last year, he'll put up the 3.69 ERA and five wins that he managed through his first six starts before producing a descending string of diminishing returns. Colon ended up with a 6.34 ERA after he simply ran out of gas with the Halos. That span could be just what is needed to give both Clay Buchholz and Jon Lester a blow in what's expected to be long, postseason-worthy summers for each of the young hurlers.

It's worth mentioning that Lester is currently among the 10 in innings pitched with 66.0 and is on pace for 220 plus innings this season -- a hallmark the health-conscious Sox organization will never allow him reach this summer.



Here's Gammons:

You think the plan for right now is to stick with Manny Delcarmen and Craig Hansen and wait for one of those two guys to straighten things out?
PG: They have no alternative.

There are no thoughts to look for somebody else around the league, or maybe make Masterson that guy?
PG: Maybe eventually…but you know they can look down the line, but if you have pitchers of that ability, you don’t go out and say ‘Oh I need to go out and find a guy that throws 85-mph’ because that’s all there is out there.

If you want to trade for Huston Street, who I think was blown out by Ken Macha and clearly isn’t the same guy, but if you want to trade for Huston Street then you’ll have to trade three prime players to get him. And he’s 86 or 87 now where he was 91, 92 or 93 before he started warming up in the sixth inning.

Do you think Clay Buchholz to the DL with a hang nail was inevitable given his innings pitched at this point in the season?
PG: I think it was a good idea because I think both Buchholz and Lester will be shut down at times just like Beckett has been shut down over the last two years. I think they’ll do that with everybody at one time or another, and they’ve got Colon sitting there waiting. I wouldn’t be totally surprised to see Masterson get a shot eventually to get some spot starting or Michael Bowden get an opportunity after he’s been the best starter in the Eastern League this season.

They’ve got a lot of ways to go on that, but if Colon can give them a month then that would be a huge lift. Mike Scioscia told me that last year that when Colon came back he threw great, 92-95 for about five or six starts and then he just ran out of gas. But if he could do that for a month with the Red Sox then that would terrific because he could let Buchholz get back to Triple-A and get the command of his fastball back and you could eventually let Lester start every sixth day or so.

The pitching staff could be a lot better off come September because I still think their pitching depth and the depth of their roster will be their greatest advantage. They’ve got a lot of good players and the depth will really save them as they go along this season. When Brandon Moss comes back and Jed Lowrie comes back, their depth is what separates them from the rest of their division as long as the pitching holds up.

Bartolo Colon seems really intriguing to me because the upside is so high with him?
PG: It is. I know they’ve been talking to Peter Greenberg about Freddy Garcia. My guess is he’ll end up going somewhere else like the Mets where they’ll give him quite a bit of money. Although, Pedro Martinez has now won 27 in four years for $52 million so how long are they going to go on with that. How long are they going to go on with that and bring in Freddy Garcia? How long do you want to go on with another pitcher with a history of arm problems if you’re the Mets?

It’s good to see the Brewers continuing the lay the foundation for their dynasty by signing Ryan Braun to eight long years, and continue a trend of the small-to-mid market teams locking in their young players?
PG: I think it’s a lot of creativity involved, but it also tells you that by and large these guys really enjoy the atmospheres they’re in.

It’s interesting that Kazmir is buying into the fact that the Rays are climbing, and the most interesting one I think was Hanley Ramirez. Hanley is already one of the three or four best players in the National League and I think that his agents felt that the six years, $70 million at this point in his career was probably under-market. I know the union was very opposed to it.

But Hanley wanted a deal, he loves it there and he really buys into the notion that the Marlins are going to be really good in time. I think it’s great that players are saying to themselves ‘you know what…enough is enough.’ I think any one of us can live off six years and $70 million even if the union think it’s undervalued.

I find it interesting to come up with a value for Braun giving up free agency value for him six years down the road when he would have gone to free agency.
PG: First of all I have great trust in Doug Melvin’s ability to evaluate players and he really thinks that Ryan Braun can be Mark McGwire, and that’s if you take away all of the side issues. He thinks he has that kind of talent. The question is what happens if they have a couple of other guys that come along and put up huge numbers.

What does this mean, and will every single one of them have to get a Ryan Braun contract? That’ll be interesting to see, but the game is awash in money and nobody is losing money. Bud Selig’s legacy is that he took a small business and turned it into an extremely wealthy business, and places like Kansas City and Milwaukee and Florida and Tampa Bay have enough money to keep their good young players. And that never used to be the case.