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6/4-6/6 Red Sox @ Royals Series Thread
redsox04071318champs
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Post by redsox04071318champs on Jun 6, 2019 22:27:45 GMT -5
Compared to the AAA players the Royals had been trotting out in front of their fans for the previous 15 years prior to 2014 and 2015 Hosmer and Escobar probably did look like legitimate superstars to them. I think it's more about the Royals fans who voted 8 starters into the All Star game until MLB intervened and invalidated about 2/3rds of their votes. Oh yeah, now I recall. How silly. I guess everybody on the diamond must have looked like superstars to them. If you're a KC Royals fan, Escobar, Hosmer, Perez, Zobrist, Moustakas, Cain, Gordon, and Morales all look like superstars - they're the guys you'd remember. Because between Brett, McRae, Wilson, Otis, White, Balboni, Wathan, Quisenberry, and their good pitchers there was Bo Jackson for a few years, Mike Sweeney, and a whole lot of nothing in between. I guess that's why they acted like a bunch of yahoos?
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Jun 7, 2019 1:18:46 GMT -5
A 102-pitch ShO is a rare and beautiful thing these days. The most encouraging thing for me re: Sale is that he is very obviously sitting well below his max velocity. If he’s reaching back for 97.7, my guess is the velo drop this year is more indicative of a reduced working velocity than any sort of “typical” velo loss; he’s done this before with Chicago (worked 92-93), and that he’s having some success doing it makes me hopeful that he genuinely is ramping up for a late-season run. Also, Rafi is really just about to become a beast, I think. I can see him contending for a batting title, maybe even chasing a TC, in the next several years. He’s better this year in basically every facet of his game. I still think he becomes an above-average defender at 3b, too. He just seems to really be chasing greatness, constantly taking steps forward. I’m still concerned overall about this team; the performances of Mookie, Beni, JDM, Sale, Rodriguez, Porcello, Chavis’s (fairly predictable) fall to earth...it’s all pointing to 88-90 wins, and a real risk of finishing out of the dance. But if some of these guys...like JBJ getting hot, Sale tonight, Rodriguez the other day...up their game, it’s a whole different story. It’s what makes this team both compelling and frustrating. There’s HUGE talent. An extended groove, and these guys will put up stupid W%s. Like Houston last year, I could certainly see an incredible second half that has them close to or even over 100 wins. If (when) they click, they’ll be nasty. This is mind-blowing and very straightforward.
Obviously, you can predict season Win% based on wOBA and wOBA allowed. That's the number of wins you'd expect from the raw stats.
I just derived a neat formula for doing just that, from the last three years of Statcast data.
[Geekage aside: particularly interesting is that wOBA allowed is not linear; at the extreme low end you get diminishing returns, and at the extreme high the effect of bad pitching is muted. This is unsurprising because inconsistent pitching -- which raises your overall wOBA allowed relative to median -- has less of a negative effect on wins than expected. And the reason this shows up only for pitching is that your worst pitchers appear disproportionately in games you're already losing, while you tend to use the same hitters regardless of score. So a team like the 2018 Astros, who are so deep that their garbage-time pitchers are good, don't get any benefit from keeping those lost games closer.]
It turns out that raw stats explain 86.5% of win totals; the rest is situational karma, balls scored as errors, and other stuff that doesn't show up in wOBA, such as GDP, CS, and other baserunning, on both offense and defense.
Last year the Sox raw numbers had them as a 98.7 win team. If you use xwOBA, you get 101.0. No team in MLB had a bigger positive differential, what Bill James calls Win Efficiency. Interestingly, the Sox in 2017 were second in MLB in Win Efficiency.
So, how about our numbers since the 6-13 start (excluding today)?
wOBA has us with 28.7 wins. Call it 29, and that's three games we've lost due to bad Win Efficiency.
Since it's less impressive in this case, let's go to to xwOBA as more predictive.
Since the slow start, the raw xwOBA numbers have us on a 107.0 win pace. We're putting up much better numbers than last year. And without Eovaldi.
Let's compare the ball we've played since the slow start with last year, both by wOBA and xwOBA. Let's use wins for last year and season's pace for this year.
wOBA: 12.0 wins better than last year, but -19.9 Win Efficiency.
xwOBA: 6.0 wins better, but -13.7 Win Efficiency.
There's no reason not to expect Win Efficiiency going forward to be below zero.
So here's the bottom-line fact: since the slow start, we've had 107.0-win quality PA and PA allowed. While filling in Eovaldi's rotation slot with odds and ends.
Winning 100 games seems completely doable.
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Post by voiceofreason on Jun 7, 2019 6:50:01 GMT -5
I will look forward to watching them go 67-33 the rest of the way.
Devers is fun to watch, we all hoped/knew this was coming, if these guys all got hot at the same time it would be ridiculous.
Have to also say I love the Xander at 20M deal, hey Mookie how about 25 LT..... and Benny come on man where is your next gear?
Can we play KC every week.....
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radiohix
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Post by radiohix on Jun 7, 2019 7:09:12 GMT -5
Michael Chavis K% is now 32%. Problem is that he stopped drawing walks too. He's never been a patient hitter if you followed him through his MiLB career. I think it's time for him to be sent back down to work on stuff. I was looking into his monthly splits and it's quite terrifying:
| BB% | K% | BB/K | April | 15.4% | 25.6% | 0.60 | May | 9.3% | 30.5% | 0.31 | June | 4.8% | 52.4% (!!!!!) | 0.09 |
There's a very ugly trend here and I think they should limit his playing time now that Moreland is back with Holt taking over 2nd Base and when Pearce get back, they should send him to AAA.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Jun 7, 2019 9:07:23 GMT -5
A 102-pitch ShO is a rare and beautiful thing these days. The most encouraging thing for me re: Sale is that he is very obviously sitting well below his max velocity. If he’s reaching back for 97.7, my guess is the velo drop this year is more indicative of a reduced working velocity than any sort of “typical” velo loss; he’s done this before with Chicago (worked 92-93), and that he’s having some success doing it makes me hopeful that he genuinely is ramping up for a late-season run. Also, Rafi is really just about to become a beast, I think. I can see him contending for a batting title, maybe even chasing a TC, in the next several years. He’s better this year in basically every facet of his game. I still think he becomes an above-average defender at 3b, too. He just seems to really be chasing greatness, constantly taking steps forward. I’m still concerned overall about this team; the performances of Mookie, Beni, JDM, Sale, Rodriguez, Porcello, Chavis’s (fairly predictable) fall to earth...it’s all pointing to 88-90 wins, and a real risk of finishing out of the dance. But if some of these guys...like JBJ getting hot, Sale tonight, Rodriguez the other day...up their game, it’s a whole different story. It’s what makes this team both compelling and frustrating. There’s HUGE talent. An extended groove, and these guys will put up stupid W%s. Like Houston last year, I could certainly see an incredible second half that has them close to or even over 100 wins. If (when) they click, they’ll be nasty. This is mind-blowing and very straightforward.
Obviously, you can predict season Win% based on wOBA and wOBA allowed. That's the number of wins you'd expect from the raw stats.
I just derived a neat formula for doing just that, from the last three years of Statcast data.
[Geekage aside: particularly interesting is that wOBA allowed is not linear; at the extreme low end you get diminishing returns, and at the extreme high the effect of bad pitching is muted. This is unsurprising because inconsistent pitching -- which raises your overall wOBA allowed relative to median -- has less of a negative effect on wins than expected. And the reason this shows up only for pitching is that your worst pitchers appear disproportionately in games you're already losing, while you tend to use the same hitters regardless of score. So a team like the 2018 Astros, who are so deep that their garbage-time pitchers are good, don't get any benefit from keeping those lost games closer.]
It turns out that raw stats explain 86.5% of win totals; the rest is situational karma, balls scored as errors, and other stuff that doesn't show up in wOBA, such as GDP, CS, and other baserunning, on both offense and defense.
Last year the Sox raw numbers had them as a 98.7 win team. If you use xwOBA, you get 101.0. No team in MLB had a bigger positive differential, what Bill James calls Win Efficiency. Interestingly, the Sox in 2017 were second in MLB in Win Efficiency.
So, how about our numbers since the 6-13 start (excluding today)?
wOBA has us with 28.7 wins. Call it 29, and that's three games we've lost due to bad Win Efficiency.
Since it's less impressive in this case, let's go to to xwOBA as more predictive.
Since the slow start, the raw xwOBA numbers have us on a 107.0 win pace. We're putting up much better numbers than last year. And without Eovaldi.
Let's compare the ball we've played since the slow start with last year, both by wOBA and xwOBA. Let's use wins for last year and season's pace for this year.
wOBA: 12.0 wins better than last year, but -19.9 Win Efficiency.
xwOBA: 6.0 wins better, but -13.7 Win Efficiency.
There's no reason not to expect Win Efficiiency going forward to be below zero.
So here's the bottom-line fact: since the slow start, we've had 107.0-win quality PA and PA allowed. While filling in Eovaldi's rotation slot with odds and ends.
Winning 100 games seems completely doable.
So, trying to be more cautious ...
The hitters got off to a slow start, and you can argue that there's no good reason to exclude their performance during the first 19 games. (Devers changed his stance after 16 games with dramatic results, and factoring that in might be fair, but it's too much work.) So let's re-run the numbers using the full-season hitting.
The pitching was unimaginably awful through the first 9 games, due to the feared / expected results of limiting the starters in ST. Guys rounded into regular season form at different rates (Price first, Rodriguez, Eovaldi, Porcello, Sale last) and the entire rotation wasn't right until game 25.
If you take the season-long hitting plus the pitching after game 9, it's a 101.9 win team by xWOBA, a 100.0 win team by wOBA. We've actually played at a 95 win pace.
If you start the pitching after game 24, it's 103.3 / 103.4. And that's without Eovaldi.
And we've played at a 102.3 pace, so the bad Win Efficiency amounts to a rounding error (24 wins versus 24.2 expected). Since we were -2 WE from May 24 to June 1 (when we went 2-6 despite having .337 wOBA on offense and .336 on defense), the WE outside the horrendous stretch has been +2 over 30 games, which is in the ballpark of what we did the last two years in finishing second (at +6.0), then first (at +9.4) in MLB.
So take a 103-win team and add in some Eovaldi and a bit of a positive Win Efficiency that the team has featured the last two years, and a 105-win pace seems conservative. That would be 98 wins. Less that that would be a disappointment.
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Post by telson13 on Jun 7, 2019 12:49:26 GMT -5
A 102-pitch ShO is a rare and beautiful thing these days. The most encouraging thing for me re: Sale is that he is very obviously sitting well below his max velocity. If he’s reaching back for 97.7, my guess is the velo drop this year is more indicative of a reduced working velocity than any sort of “typical” velo loss; he’s done this before with Chicago (worked 92-93), and that he’s having some success doing it makes me hopeful that he genuinely is ramping up for a late-season run. Also, Rafi is really just about to become a beast, I think. I can see him contending for a batting title, maybe even chasing a TC, in the next several years. He’s better this year in basically every facet of his game. I still think he becomes an above-average defender at 3b, too. He just seems to really be chasing greatness, constantly taking steps forward. I’m still concerned overall about this team; the performances of Mookie, Beni, JDM, Sale, Rodriguez, Porcello, Chavis’s (fairly predictable) fall to earth...it’s all pointing to 88-90 wins, and a real risk of finishing out of the dance. But if some of these guys...like JBJ getting hot, Sale tonight, Rodriguez the other day...up their game, it’s a whole different story. It’s what makes this team both compelling and frustrating. There’s HUGE talent. An extended groove, and these guys will put up stupid W%s. Like Houston last year, I could certainly see an incredible second half that has them close to or even over 100 wins. If (when) they click, they’ll be nasty. This is mind-blowing and very straightforward.
Obviously, you can predict season Win% based on wOBA and wOBA allowed. That's the number of wins you'd expect from the raw stats.
I just derived a neat formula for doing just that, from the last three years of Statcast data.
[Geekage aside: particularly interesting is that wOBA allowed is not linear; at the extreme low end you get diminishing returns, and at the extreme high the effect of bad pitching is muted. This is unsurprising because inconsistent pitching -- which raises your overall wOBA allowed relative to median -- has less of a negative effect on wins than expected. And the reason this shows up only for pitching is that your worst pitchers appear disproportionately in games you're already losing, while you tend to use the same hitters regardless of score. So a team like the 2018 Astros, who are so deep that their garbage-time pitchers are good, don't get any benefit from keeping those lost games closer.]
It turns out that raw stats explain 86.5% of win totals; the rest is situational karma, balls scored as errors, and other stuff that doesn't show up in wOBA, such as GDP, CS, and other baserunning, on both offense and defense.
Last year the Sox raw numbers had them as a 98.7 win team. If you use xwOBA, you get 101.0. No team in MLB had a bigger positive differential, what Bill James calls Win Efficiency. Interestingly, the Sox in 2017 were second in MLB in Win Efficiency.
So, how about our numbers since the 6-13 start (excluding today)?
wOBA has us with 28.7 wins. Call it 29, and that's three games we've lost due to bad Win Efficiency.
Since it's less impressive in this case, let's go to to xwOBA as more predictive.
Since the slow start, the raw xwOBA numbers have us on a 107.0 win pace. We're putting up much better numbers than last year. And without Eovaldi.
Let's compare the ball we've played since the slow start with last year, both by wOBA and xwOBA. Let's use wins for last year and season's pace for this year.
wOBA: 12.0 wins better than last year, but -19.9 Win Efficiency.
xwOBA: 6.0 wins better, but -13.7 Win Efficiency.
There's no reason not to expect Win Efficiiency going forward to be below zero.
So here's the bottom-line fact: since the slow start, we've had 107.0-win quality PA and PA allowed. While filling in Eovaldi's rotation slot with odds and ends.
Winning 100 games seems completely doable.
Thank you for the deep dive, Eric. I always appreciate it when you do that. And really, you pretty much hit on the head why I have (possibly/probably) unrealistic concerns about this team: poor win efficiency. Call it bad luck, poor clutch play, pressing, whatever: they haven’t displayed the sort of...persistent? relentless?...drive that they did last year. But as a huge believer in statistical regression, this is very comforting. It’s unlikely that that sort of “giving it away” continues for a team that obviously has the ability to grind. Appreciate the renewed hope! Here’s to a nasty run of whuppins laid down and a rocket to the top of the East.
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redsox04071318champs
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Post by redsox04071318champs on Jun 7, 2019 14:10:04 GMT -5
I wouldn't say 100 wins is "completely" doable. It would be the Red Sox playing out of their minds for 100 games with just about everything breaking right. They managed that feat last year for 162, but that was kind of a once in a lifetime kind of thing.
I think 60-40, which is strong .600 baseball over a full season is a more likely outcome. Perhaps even 62-38 which would bring them to 95 wins.
I have trouble believing that between unforeseen injuries, games slipping in the pen, the potential of those luck factored 1 run games having to break just about right, starting pitching struggles here and there - Porcello and E-Rod will have their share of clunkers, and I suspect so will Eovaldi - less than most other teams, but the point I'm making it not that the Red Sox are not going to be a very good team - because they will, but to expect a strong possibility - or at least that's what I took from the words "completely doable" is really a very optimistic take.
A pessimistic take would be that the same issues that keep hounding the Red Sox will keep hounding them and they'll wind up with 87 wins and on the outside looking in.
I think 93 wins based on .600 ball the rest of the way falls somewhere in the middle with a realistic range going between 90 - 96 wins with 93 in the center.
The Sox are going to have a blazing hot streak which they haven't had yet, and I think they'll probably go through a 8-12 stretch or something like that which makes the possibility of playing .670 the rest of the way highly unlikely.
To me this is what was amazing about last year - Cora said they were locked in from Day 1 until the end of the season. The Red Sox didn't have any major lulls. They coasted a bit in September understandably, which cost them .700 baseball. But that team had alot more margin for error than this year's version does.
But either way, I think it's realistic to expect the Red Sox to make the post-season.
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Post by pedrofanforever45 on Jun 7, 2019 14:14:35 GMT -5
Yeah 100 wins is doable basically if you believe that unicorns are real.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Jun 7, 2019 17:49:18 GMT -5
I wouldn't say 100 wins is "completely" doable. It would be the Red Sox playing out of their minds for 100 games with just about everything breaking right. They managed that feat last year for 162, but that was kind of a once in a lifetime kind of thing.I think 60-40, which is strong .600 baseball over a full season is a more likely outcome. Perhaps even 62-38 which would bring them to 95 wins. I have trouble believing that between unforeseen injuries, games slipping in the pen, the potential of those luck factored 1 run games having to break just about right, starting pitching struggles here and there - Porcello and E-Rod will have their share of clunkers, and I suspect so will Eovaldi - less than most other teams, but the point I'm making it not that the Red Sox are not going to be a very good team - because they will, but to expect a strong possibility - or at least that's what I took from the words "completely doable" is really a very optimistic take. A pessimistic take would be that the same issues that keep hounding the Red Sox will keep hounding them and they'll wind up with 87 wins and on the outside looking in. I think 93 wins based on .600 ball the rest of the way falls somewhere in the middle with a realistic range going between 90 - 96 wins with 93 in the center. The Sox are going to have a blazing hot streak which they haven't had yet, and I think they'll probably go through a 8-12 stretch or something like that which makes the possibility of playing .670 the rest of the way highly unlikely. To me this is what was amazing about last year - Cora said they were locked in from Day 1 until the end of the season. The Red Sox didn't have any major lulls. They coasted a bit in September understandably, which cost them .700 baseball. But that team had alot more margin for error than this year's version does. But either way, I think it's realistic to expect the Red Sox to make the post-season. They were psychologically locked in pretty much all year, and that is reflected by their winning 9 games more than their stats say they should have. That was unlikely to happen again, as defenders. I'm not counting on that.
But the first sentence of yours that I bolded is just plain wrong. It was unlike other historically great seasons.
We led MLB in offensive xwOBA with .344. The next best club, the Yankees was .333, and the gap between us and them was larger than the gap between them and #9. (We also led MLB in wOBA, with a .340 to .335 edge on NY.)
So, everyone had a great season, right? No, of course not. We finished 29th in WAR at 2B (24th in Batting Runs), 30th at 3B (27th in BR) and 30th at C (excluding pitch-framing) in both numbers. We gave 11 starts to a guy with a 6.08 ERA.
To put up 99 wins worth of stats anyway means that the rest of the team was insanely good.
And of course it's the same roster ... except we have improved the three weak spots.
What you're doing with this reply is taking your intuitive sense of the quality of an ordinary excellent team and factoring in, intuitively, a typical set of problems.
But this isn't an ordinary roster.
JBJ has hugely disappointing numbers offensively, Benny, Betts and JDM mild to medium ones. Where do you think the Sox rank this year in MLB, in xwOBA? Make your guess now and keep reading.
This year we rank 5th in MLB in Batting Runs at 3B rather than 27th, and 15th at C rather than 30th. At 2B, we rank 17th rather than 24th, but that will trend upwards with Holt getting most of the PT.
And it's reasonable to expect better things from most or all of the OF quartet, and in fact it's already started for JBJ (.439 xwOBA and .485 wOBA in his last 9) and Benny (.392 and .406 in his last 7).
What I did with my post was try to assess how great the roster is, with the numbers.
All the things you mention as likely to happen probably will (except going 8-12 in some stretch, which is a results prediction rather than an event prediction). But the numbers tell us that we can and probably should get to 98 wins anyway, just like we got to 99 karma-free wins last year while being below replacement level at three positions (which is, frankly, absurd).
We don't have a legit closer. We didn't last year, either (Kimbrel pitched like Barnes and Walden are pitching this year). That is the one thing the roster lacks. And it seems to be significantly better than last year's roster.
Oh, we rank 2nd in MLB in xwOBA. And I think everyone feels that we should be better going forward.
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redsox04071318champs
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Post by redsox04071318champs on Jun 7, 2019 23:20:53 GMT -5
I wouldn't say 100 wins is "completely" doable. It would be the Red Sox playing out of their minds for 100 games with just about everything breaking right. They managed that feat last year for 162, but that was kind of a once in a lifetime kind of thing.I think 60-40, which is strong .600 baseball over a full season is a more likely outcome. Perhaps even 62-38 which would bring them to 95 wins. I have trouble believing that between unforeseen injuries, games slipping in the pen, the potential of those luck factored 1 run games having to break just about right, starting pitching struggles here and there - Porcello and E-Rod will have their share of clunkers, and I suspect so will Eovaldi - less than most other teams, but the point I'm making it not that the Red Sox are not going to be a very good team - because they will, but to expect a strong possibility - or at least that's what I took from the words "completely doable" is really a very optimistic take. A pessimistic take would be that the same issues that keep hounding the Red Sox will keep hounding them and they'll wind up with 87 wins and on the outside looking in. I think 93 wins based on .600 ball the rest of the way falls somewhere in the middle with a realistic range going between 90 - 96 wins with 93 in the center. The Sox are going to have a blazing hot streak which they haven't had yet, and I think they'll probably go through a 8-12 stretch or something like that which makes the possibility of playing .670 the rest of the way highly unlikely. To me this is what was amazing about last year - Cora said they were locked in from Day 1 until the end of the season. The Red Sox didn't have any major lulls. They coasted a bit in September understandably, which cost them .700 baseball. But that team had alot more margin for error than this year's version does. But either way, I think it's realistic to expect the Red Sox to make the post-season. They were psychologically locked in pretty much all year, and that is reflected by their winning 9 games more than their stats say they should have. That was unlikely to happen again, as defenders. I'm not counting on that.
But the first sentence of yours that I bolded is just plain wrong. It was unlike other historically great seasons.
We led MLB in offensive xwOBA with .344. The next best club, the Yankees was .333, and the gap between us and them was larger than the gap between them and #9. (We also led MLB in wOBA, with a .340 to .335 edge on NY.)
So, everyone had a great season, right? No, of course not. We finished 29th in WAR at 2B (24th in Batting Runs), 30th at 3B (27th in BR) and 30th at C (excluding pitch-framing) in both numbers. We gave 11 starts to a guy with a 6.08 ERA. To put up 99 wins worth of stats anyway means that the rest of the team was insanely good.
And of course it's the same roster ... except we have improved the three weak spots.
What you're doing with this reply is taking your intuitive sense of the quality of an ordinary excellent team and factoring in, intuitively, a typical set of problems.
But this isn't an ordinary roster.
JBJ has hugely disappointing numbers offensively, Benny, Betts and JDM mild to medium ones. Where do you think the Sox rank this year in MLB, in xwOBA? Make your guess now and keep reading. This year we rank 5th in MLB in Batting Runs at 3B rather than 27th, and 15th at C rather than 30th. At 2B, we rank 17th rather than 24th, but that will trend upwards with Holt getting most of the PT. And it's reasonable to expect better things from most or all of the OF quartet, and in fact it's already started for JBJ (.439 xwOBA and .485 wOBA in his last 9) and Benny (.392 and .406 in his last 7). What I did with my post was try to assess how great the roster is, with the numbers. All the things you mention as likely to happen probably will (except going 8-12 in some stretch, which is a results prediction rather than an event prediction). But the numbers tell us that we can and probably should get to 98 wins anyway, just like we got to 99 karma-free wins last year while being below replacement level at three positions (which is, frankly, absurd).
We don't have a legit closer. We didn't last year, either (Kimbrel pitched like Barnes and Walden are pitching this year). That is the one thing the roster lacks. And it seems to be significantly better than last year's roster.
Oh, we rank 2nd in MLB in xwOBA. And I think everyone feels that we should be better going forward.
Eric, I hope you're right, but I don't think that anticipating about 93 wins is that big a mistake compared to anticipating 98 - 100 wins based on what is now a 33-30 record. Too much has to go right and I think you're not accounting for the unanticipated variables that happen all the time. For instance, JDM's back isn't right. Might not be right for a long team which will affect his numbers. Moreland is still hurting and Pearce is too. The production at 1b might really pale in comparison to last season. Benintendi hasn't really been a force offensively since the 1st half of 2018. Betts could have a season that's not too far removed from his nice but not awesome season of 2017. Now you can counterbalance that somewhat with improvements at 3b and catching with Devers taking a huge step forward and Vazquez seizing the catching job. Walden and Workman haven't had long track records of sustained success. Maybe they sustain it. Maybe they don't. Right now Brasier is struggling. With more exposure that could happen to Walden and Workman. Maybe Hembree has upped his game. Maybe he's just having a hot month - based on his track record it's probably the latter. The pen has hung in there, but will that continue? You might not concern yourself with that, but it's not something that's impossible. Then there are crazy things that happened last year that can't continue. After going 0 for 2017 in the grand slam dept the team smashed 10 of them last year. They had some ridiculous figure of holding the opposition to 0-30 or something like that when they loaded the bases. Stuff like that - not happening in 2019. Perhaps they don't do as well in 1 run games or get the clutch hit or get the big out like they did last year. You can chalk that up to karma. Odds are the karma won't be anything like last year. There are so many variables, it's so hard to count on 98 - 100 wins. I don't think it's chicken little to be more conservative about what their likely win total and place in the standings is probably going to be. I'm not even sure you're accounting for improvements made to the rosters of the other strong teams in the league. Tampa and New York have improved their rosters as well. Minnesota has taken an enormous step forward and Houston is still Houston, albeit banged up right now. The Red Sox aren't going to roll over those teams and they will trip over some of the not so bad teams. They should crush the Baltimores, Detroits, KCs, and Torontos of the world. Am I also don't agree with your assessment of Rick Porcello as some sort of ace. He was in 2016, but he hasn't been before or after that. On a really good team, he's a #3/#4 starter. I know you have stats designed way more useful than this, but the bottom line is he'll put up an ERA probably between 4.25 - 4.75 which is about league average, which means that there are a good number of pitchers surrendering less runs per 9 innings than Porcello. What he's great at is chewing up innings and there's a ton of value in that. Some might be better at the rate but not at the quantity. An ERA of 3.75 in 100 innings isn't more valuable than 4.25 in 200 innings obviously. It's like he's Tim Wakefield without the knuckleball. You could count on Wakefield to give you average to slightly above league average for a large quantity of innings - dependable as hell. There is a lot of value in guys like that, but while I'd agree that Porcello is the ace of the Royals or Orioles or Mariners, that wouldn't be the case with the average to good to great teams in the league. I'm sure you'll rip my argument apart, but the bottom line is how many runs you give up per 9 innings. I doubt Porcello gives up a lot more or less runs projected than by most stats. He's got value, but a ace or #2 starter? Not a team with playoff aspirations.
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Post by soxjim on Jun 8, 2019 11:02:46 GMT -5
Redsoxchamp-- I'm with you on this. OfC no way we are better than last year. And imo - I think a very, very, very, very slim chance we see 98 wins. More like as you say - a 92- 93 win team. We've got 33 games left with Yanks, TB and Minny. That's 1/3 of the season. Anyways-- fi sox can get into the playoffs - they're a huge threat.
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redsox04071318champs
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Post by redsox04071318champs on Jun 8, 2019 11:07:14 GMT -5
Redsoxchamp-- I'm with you on this. OfC no way we are better than last year. And imo - I think a very, very, very, very slim chance we see 98 wins. More like as you say - a 92- 93 win team. We've got 33 games left with Yanks, TB and Minny. That's 1/3 of the season. Anyways-- fi sox can get into the playoffs - they're a huge threat. Yup, if they can get a head of steam up going into the playoffs, produce a different vibe than they have most of the season, win the big game against Tampa, and if they're playing their best ball of the season, then yeah, to quote Kevin Garnett, anything is possible.
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