Sox Problems Scouting Professional FAs?

Throwing money around is never an answer. With the Japanese players in particular, however, their abilities and body of work is much more firmly established and accessible. Perhaps it is time to readjust how, or how intensely, they have been scouting those players. They may even want to consider with varying weight some nontraditional smaller sampling into their evaluations. For example, in addition to routine evaluations of tools, approach, and how they do vs. international competition, perhaps also examine, say, who are the position players who hit Tanaka well over the last 2-4 years? What does the video say about their at bats? Were they lucky? Were they making solid contact? Is there any overlap with these players and those who hit Darvish well before he was posted? Or Iwakmura? If you get a yes for all three, how is/are these players vs. other elite Japanese pitchers? How are they vs their league average pitchers? Will any of these players be posted in the next 1-3 years? Will any be free agents.

With regards to Carbonell, it's a strawman since I've never seen him live or versus live pitching and I've even said on this board I have no idea what he is other than a great wide-out candidate for the Patriots based solely on his build and speed. But that's not my job. It is their job. If they pass and he's a bust, fine, they did their job well. But if they miss on another guy who "just cost money" again in a position of extreme need (OF) then I would contend that they aren't doing this part of their job - scouting international pros - well.

In this case?  No not for me anyways.  But then again, I didn't think that Nava was that great and most other people on the board do.  The guy ended up signing for peanuts.  As far as his defense goes that would have been mitigated by Fenway.  The one rule of baseball we should always follow is that if you can hit, they will find a place for you (Greg Luzinski rule).

I'm down with making Guidas head scout of professional international free agents. Never gonna miss anything.

Well, presumably, to scout better, they need to scout differently.

The problem is that we don't know how they scout veteran IFAs. You outlined some interesting ideas above, but it is very possible that the Red Sox utilize some/all of those methods already. Whether they use them or not, we don't know if those methods would get you to the desired result (i.e., figuring out that Puig/Darvish/Tanaka are the guys you want while Kei Igawa and Jose Contreras aren't). We just have no idea how they do things, which means we have no idea how to improve the way they do things, which makes this whole discussion kind of pointless.

Yeah definitely since those titles are so distant them methods surely haven't worked.

Don't count on it. I never would've made the Punto trade. I would've just looked for a taker for Beckett even if I had to pay half his salary.

As long as he has a stack of blank checks.