Red Sox should make Papelbon a starter in 2007

	Jonathan Papelbon has had a banner year out of the bullpen, but the Red Sox will need starters next season. Damian Strohmeyer/SI

What do you think the Red Sox will do with Jonathan Papelbon next year? It doesn't make any sense to put your best pitcher in the bullpen when you have a rotation that can't reliably get you to the closer.
-- Dennis Quinn, Vancouver, B.C.

I totally agree. I would not rule out his pitching one more year in the closer's role, especially with Craig Hansen's development looking like it's on a slower track, but the Red Sox want to get Papelbon in the rotation as soon as they can. This is assuming there is nothing wrong with his shoulder long-term. I assume he'll go to camp next year as a starter, because you can always move a guy from the rotation into the bullpen once the season starts, but going the other way is much harder.

Do you know for certain that Ryan Howard is completely clean? It would make us feel better about ourselves if we could say that the last decade doesn't count, but hiding your head in the sand doesn't make you disappear. Five years from now, when you learn that players from this era used Enhancement X, will you erase the record books again? We need to adopt the most stringent testing methodology available and work to stay ahead of the curve from this point on. We also need to accept the numbers as they are and apply our own personal filter to their significance.
-- Frank Muscat, San Francisco

You seem to be saying the same thing I did. You don't know for certain if Howard is clean, just as you could substitute virtually any athlete's name in place of Howard's in this age of Floyd Landis, Justin Gatlin, Marion Jones, Barry Bonds, et al. And I do accept Bonds' numbers for what they are: impressive but, to some degree that cannot be determined, fraudulent.

Send your column to Ford Frick. He is the only person who counts home runs with asterisks the way you do.
-- Heffrey A. Lowin

There never was an official asterisk from Frick, nor will there likely be one with Bonds. That's not all that important. What is important is the mental asterisk people affix to Bonds.

What do you think of the recent about-face by Blue Jays GM J.P. Ricciardi? When he first came to town, he waxed poetic on his three- to four-year plan to get the once-proud Blue Jays back into contention. And he was going to do so employing the fundamentals of Moneyball. Last year Uncle Ted opened his wallet and gave J.P. additional money to spend, and although I think he made only one mistake (see: Burnett, A.J.), this past week he has openly admitted that with his current payroll the Jays cannot compete in the AL East. What took him so long to arrive at this conclusion, and do you think it spells the end of the Ricciardi era in Toronto?
-- Jeff, Hamilton, Ontario

I think Ricciardi knew in his heart that this team needed a perfect-storm scenario to compete in the AL East. He knew they'd be better, and they are on the right track. Really, their offseason moves have largely turned out to be pretty good. But I think people underestimate how hard it is to know that every year you have to win at least 95 games to hang with the Yankees and the Red Sox and their enormous resources. People in the game have waited for the Yankees to implode with aging, overpaid players, but they keep fixing any cracks that show up -- taking on all of Bobby Abreu's contract is a good example -- while finally hitting on young players such as Chien-Ming Wang, Robinson Cano, Melky Cabrera and Scott Proctor.

Whoa, there. Regarding payrolls, you suggested that the Twins and the A's need only to beat teams with payrolls similar to theirs. If you take a look at the teams with the third- and fourth-highest payrolls, you'll see the Angels and the White Sox. Those teams' payrolls are about 60 percent higher than their aforementioned division rivals, about the same as the difference between the Red Sox and the Yankees. I'd argue that difference is even more significant for those teams, as it's the difference between signing big free-agent contracts for your Vlad, Thome and Konerko types, and watching them leave like Giambi, Tejada, Izzy, et al.
-- Tim, Oakland