Playing Pepper Answers

As mentioned previously, the Cardinals blog C70 at the bat at Cardinal70.com hosts an annual series where bloggers from each team answer some specific questions in previewing their team's seasons.

To see how other Red Sox bloggers, Steve from BosoxInjection, Christine from Boston Red Thoughts and Rebecca from Fenway Fatales answered these questions, take a look at the Red Sox "Playing Pepper" page at C70 at the bat.

Below are the questions with the answers that I provided. As always, I welcome your comments, thoughts, hate mail....

World Baseball Classic Alberta Connections

The World Baseball Classic is starting soon, and Team Canada is hoping to add to its accomplishments in the International stage.  In the inaugural WBC in 2006, they shocked the world by upsetting Team USA.  More recently they won bronze at the World Cup in 2009 and again in 2011 and beat the US to take Gold at the Pan-Am Games in 2011.  Last fall Canada's Junior Team won Silver at the IBAF 18U World Championships.

Now they are ready to compete in arguably the world's biggest international baseball stage in the 2013 World Baseball Classic.

Playing Pepper Preview

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled... oh, wait. I'm distracted by the title. Let me get back on track:

Every year, Daniel Shoptaw, who runs a Cardinals blog at C70 at the Bat, and is the former President of the Baseball Bloggers Alliance, does a project he calls Playing Pepper, where he gets other teams' bloggers to preview their team.   As a member of the Boston chapter of the BBA  I am honoured that once again he has asked for my input in previewing the Red Sox.

Last year I was eerily Nostradamus like in forecasting the 2012 version of the Red Sox. You don't need to look here to see for yourself how accurate me and my fellow Red Sox bloggers predictions were, you can trust me.

This year I will be answering the following questions:

1. How would you grade the offseason?
2. What are the expectations for this club throughout the fan base, besides much less drama than the last couple of years?
3. Who do you expect to be the most pleasant surprise to be for the coming year?
4. What rookie will make the biggest impact in 2013?
5. What will be the final record of the team and where will they finish in the division? 
6. What one thing from your team are you most looking forward to watching?

I expect that this will be posted sometime over the next couple of weeks.  Stay tuned and I'll update this post with my responses, or keep checking at C70 at the Bat as other team's previews start being posted.

UPDATE: my responses here