Here's the weekly dose of Peter Gammons from his segment on the Mike Felger Show on 890 ESPN. Among other things, Gammons talks about the strategy the Sox seem to be using to give their starters additional rest during the season, and Boston's patience with Dice-K when "there are other managers that would have gone absolutely crazy managing Dice-K."



Also, a good little nugget about Boston's willingness to swoop in and grab Kei Igawa if the Yankees put him on waivers. Enjoy:

Peter, have you seen a drop in offense around baseball this season, and why?
PG: I think two years of testing has had something to do with [offense being down]. You don’t see those big gaudy fifty home run numbers anymore. You lift your head up and look across the board and you see that Carlos Quentin and Mike Napoli and Josh Hamilton are 1-2-3 in home runs. What does that tell me right there?

It’s going on all around baseball. The Angels right now are the best team in Major League Baseball and probably have been for much of the year, and they almost never hit. They pitch and they catch the ball, and that’s about it. The game has changed dramatically and some people saw it. I remember before the 2005 draft the Red Sox people were saying ‘you know what, the game is going to change.

The testing is going to change the game’. And they went out and took Ellsbury, Hansen, Lowrie and Buchholz and they recently became the first team that had their first four picks all play in the same game together.

Do you think it’s changed for the better?
PG: I loved watching those home runs, but it needs to be a different game. I think their needs to be more athleticism, but the problem is because baseball has been run so poorly in so far as helping out minority athletes. Particularly once Title IX came in and you had 17 women’s volleyball scholarships and 10 baseball scholarships for 30 players, it ended the opportunity for college baseball to be a poor kid’s sport.
 
Just watch the College World Series in the next few weeks, and you’ll be able to count on one hand the number of African-American ballplayers playing in the College World Series. That athleticism is something that needs to return to the game now that home runs are being diminished.

I think Tampa Bay emerging and giving the AL East some new blood is a great thing.
PG: All of a sudden it’s the series, the Red Sox vs. the Rays. It’s amazing. ESPN has moved it and they’re doing a game Tuesday night, and all of a sudden Boston and Tampa Bay has become an event.

I think it’s disappointing that they’re still drawing 13-14,000 in Tampa. Back in 1987 when they built that ballpark with the hopes of attracting an expansion team, Peter Ueberroth said the only thing that stadium would be good for would be tractor pulls. Now they’re playing Major League Baseball and coming over the bridge from Tampa makes it really hard to get to, and I realize that’s a problem.

I wonder if it’s really a baseball area. Now if they put it on the juncture of 4 and 75 then you would have something that would attract people from Tampa, St. Pete and Orlando and you would have a big-time franchise. But they were so stupid to get in this battle between Tampa and St. Pete and now it might end up killing the franchise.

With injuries to pitchers like Dice-K and Buchholz, it’s kind of a luxury with their depth that they’re allowed to rest their pitchers a bit with relatively minor injuries when other pitchers might continue throwing. Is there a risk of being a little overconfident there over the course of the regular season, and knowing that they’re going to be in the postseason?
PG: I don’t think that they know it, but what they want is the best performance they can possibly get in August, September and October. I don’t think it’s being done for October, although I also don’t think there’s any question that they won a World Series Championship last season because of the innings that Sabathia had pitched as opposed to Josh Beckett.

You’ve got to be very careful with Lester and Buchholz and you don’t want to those two going near 200 innings. It’s not bad that Josh Beckett had two or three weeks at the beginning when he was getting back. I suspect they’ll be conservative with Matsuzaka over the next few weeks and let Masterson and Buchholz fill in. That won’t be a bad thing.

The way Daisuke goes out and throws for a half-hour in the afternoon on every day that he starts, you wonder how many throws he has in that arm. There are those people in Japan that will tell you that you build the arm up by throwing – and I agree with that – but you wonder how much is too much throwing when you’re pitching in the American League East rather than the Japanese Central League.

Don’t know if you’ve heard my spiel, but I wonder if you just have to make a few exceptions for Dice-K and really let throw more pitches than you’re used to allowing and let him go to 120?
PG: They’ve done that and I think it’s a good idea. That’s one thing that the Red Sox have really done. Ron Guidry was the Yankees pitching coach and he took Kei Igawa and changed his delivery and he’s never been the same. The interesting thing was that if the Yankees put Igawa on waivers the Sox, from my understanding, were going to put a claim in on him.

He needs to go back to doing what he does when he was a very successful pitcher in Japan. I think that they’ve done that with Matsuzaka and allowed him to be himself. I think John Farrell has always treated the 11 or 12 pitchers like you would treat your children. You don’t treat any two people the same way, and they are who they are and you do what you do. You draw the line when you have to draw the line, but I think the Sox have done a good job of letting Matsuzaka be who he is going to be.

I think there are some managers who would have gone absolutely crazy managing Daisuke. That game where he had a 6-0 lead and he starts walking people…Ugh. Most managers would be up to get him out of there and the Sox have been very patient…and they’ve got a lot out of him. I do think he will get better, but it’s very hard to get him to change the way he pitches – especially in the American League East. It hasn’t gotten as good as it should be considering the kind of stuff he has.

On Bartolo Colon, I always invoke the notion that he totally fell off the map after a strong start last season. Do you have any early indication he’ll make it past five or six starts.
PG: I think that what’s been a little surprising is that his command has been so good and he’s been very economical. He didn’t have that kind of command last season. He is a bull and he used to love to throw 140 pitches. He’s figured out that he can’t do that any more and that’s been encouraging.

It’s just one of those things where it was a great signing and a great piece of work by the talent people with the Sox. If it’s five starts then that’s great and if it’s 20 starts then it’s phenomenal. This guy is a Cy Young Award winner and it’s fascinating to watch. He is throwing harder than he did at any point last season, and I know Don Cooper – the Chicago White Sox pitching coach – was pleading for the White Sox to sign this guy. I asked him why and he said that Colon is one of the most competitive people that he’s ever coached in his life.

I swear by him to the nth degree and you’ll remember that he had a very good season with the White Sox before he signed with the Angels.

Are we finding that Manny Ramirez cares about milestones in his career?
PG: There’s no question he cares. He’s asked me a couple of times this year about the Hall of Fame and questions like that. There’s no question that he cares about his place in the game. As carefree as he pretends to be, he does care about records and his place in history.