The Big-Time Trade Target List

Just read the article on OTM about Sandoval maybe wanting to part ways with Boston. It kills me to hear someone say "pay 60% of his salary & give him to SD". At this point we would have to pay like 95%, similar to the Angels paying Hamilton. He is virtually worthless. SD may want him if they only had to pay him 3 or 4 mil per year, maybe. Can't we just keep him on a DL & rehabbing in Pawtucket indefinitely? Just in case Shaw tears an ACL or something.

We need the roster spot more.

Sandoval is done. Get what you can get and move on..
Bust!

Could not agree more. I do think dombrowski is looking hard for a #2.

And Gray has a career 3.60 SIERA to go with his 2.86 ERA.  He's good, but nowhere near as good as he looks in Oakland.  Fenway and the AL East wouldn't be kind to him since his walk/k rates are nothing special and nowhere near ace level.  He might be a slightly better pitcher than Rick Porcello who had a 3.73 SIERA last season.  That's not someone I'm giving up all those prospects for.

All the numbers you look at are not park adjusted.  When you're talking about a pitcher moving from Oakland to Boston, you better.  And none of the numbers period are league adjusted when moving from the AL West to the AL East.  Porcello was a ground ball pitcher too before he came to Boston but probably goes for more strikeouts now.

And I don't care what kind of pitcher someone is.  A 2.71 K/BB career ratio is not going to be an ace.  Gray's HR/FB% would be a lot higher in Fenway and in the AL East like Porcello's is now.

ERA+ is park  adjusted, Gray is at 135 for career, while Porcello is 95 for his career.  Also Porcello GB% had a massive drop his last year in Detroit and has now gone down for 3 straight years.  His pitching change happend before he got to Boston, not because he went to Boston and plays in Fenway and AL East.

There is no reason to believe his GB% decreases playing in AL East and Fenway.  Sure I would expect a slight increase in HRs due to home park and AL East.  News flash Gray has been an ACE level pitcher for last two years with that K/BB ratio.  How does that stop him from being an ACE?  You say you don't care about what type of pitcher he is, but you clearly do.  You think an ACE has to be a huge strikeout guy.

Please go look up Greg Maddux stats, took him till his 6th year to get a K/BB ratio better then  Gray's.

I don't like fangraph war, they overvalue strikeouts, so yea it's going to help your case.  Look at Baseball-Reference war stats, Gray goes from 21 on fangraph to #7 on Baseball-Reference.

So your saying Gray has been luckiest pitcher in majors over last 2 and 1/2 years?  How long do you need before you understand that batters don't make good contact against him.  It's a skill that we have seen a lot of pitchers have.  It's a rare skill sure, but it is definitely something that a pitcher can maintain and not regress to the mean.  It's the reason I love Gray as a  pitcher, I think he'll age really well and can have a very long career.

K rates in baseball overall have skyrocketed since the mid-90s. Today's strike zone is arguably bigger, too, particularly compared to the mid-late-90s. That's not really a valid comparison.

No, I'm not saying that.  I said he relies on luck and a large park and weaker competition to get great results.  Don't you think he'd get worse results pitching in Fenway, Toronto, NY and Baltimore for about 2/3 of the season?

But what, then, is the value of the comparison to Maddux? Maddux was pitching in the majors for those two years while Gray was in college/minors. Maddux pitched in a couple of bandboxes, in an age of increasing offense and smaller strike zones. There's a bigger picture than just looking at K/BB rates. Are you saying that you think Gray is going to further refine his command like Maddux did?

I'm not disputing that Gray is a good pitcher. I don't think he's great, but he might be eventually. There's maybe a 0.1% chance he becomes Greg Maddux, but he could certainly approach that territory. But I think that presuming he will, and trading a bunch of young talent hoping he will, isn't a wise move. I'm the pitchman for the "velocity and strikeouts aren't everything" crowd, so I think I get where you're coming from. I just don't have the faith you do that Gray would translate well to Fenway. Like I said, I think he's Damon in reverse. Johnny was pretty bad his one year in Oakland (low BA, low OBP, not much XB power--including only 4 triples despite all of the space, low assists because his arm was overchallenged in a big OF, etc etc). Damon just wasn't a good fit for that park. Same with Mo Vaughn when he left Fenway...he went from a great hitter to just a very good one. Look at Peavy and Lackey, and what happened to them leaving Fenway. I get the sense that Gray, out of a park (and division) that suit him, and into a small ballpark with unforgivingly small foul territory and the wall in LF...well, he'd turn into a pumpkin.

That's basically what I'm saying.  He'd probably be valued as a top 10 pitcher, but he isn't one.  He's actually pretty similar to what Shelby Miller might become IMO.  Though now that he's in Arizona, he'll have a hard time outperforming his peripherals.

That's a bidding war that I don't want the Red Sox to win.