Projo Sports Blog

Click here to listen to Sean's daily audio report, which is audio only today (if we get someone freed up later today, we might be able to add pictures later). The topics: What impresses Sean about Justin Masterson, teams' inability to catch Jacoby Ellsbury clean on stolen-base attempts, fan voting for the All-Star Game, and Sean's favorite road stops.

Here are some excerpts from Sean's comments:

On Masterson: "I think he's remarkably poised and mature. That's one of the things I think that impressed the Red Sox so much even from the first start, where he didn't seemed rattled at all in making his major-league debut, having not pitched above Double-A for more than half a season, on the mound at Fenway against a pretty good team in the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. It was like he was facing another team in the Eastern League, and it was the same thing when he made his second start. So I think the poise and composure and maturity -- all those things, and you know, those things are fine, but you have to be able to get hitters out, and he can do that too. He's got that three-quarter kind of whip-it-like delivery that reminds some people of Dennis Eckersley, and he's got a nice heavy sink to his fastball that makes him very tough, combined with his delivery, on right-handed hitters, and gets him a lot of groundballs. So there's not much not to like about Justin Masterson."

On the All-Star voting by fans: "I think we can go through this and do go through this every summer, where we point to some player who's deserving of an All-Star starting bid and who doesn't get one. You mentioned Josh Hamilton and some guys on the Rays. Certainly Carlos Quentin of the Chicago White Sox would be another person in there. There's some guys in the National League having surprise seasons. Those kind of things you can't anticipate. I think in general, you know, fans are going to vote for players who they recognize, and who have established themselves a little bit. And furthermore, they're going to vote for guys who are on high-profile teams. That's why the Yankees dominated so much of the balloting in the '90s, when they won four World Series in five years, and now that the Red Sox have sort of perhaps eclipsed them as the national team, if you will, with two World Series wins in the last four seasons, their players are benefiting from that. It's never going to be perfect. I think even if the players or coaches and managers did the selecting, there'd be some oversights there. So I think that in general this is a game for the fans, and they get to determine who they want to see, and I think that there's nothing wrong with that."

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