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Post by chaimtime on Oct 9, 2023 15:49:38 GMT -5
I don't care about hindsight-based analysis. The analysis I care about is whether or not a trade was the best use of assets given the context of the trade. Hindsight analysis doesn't add anything for anyone who knows how to type "www.baseball-reference.com" into an address bar. In fact, through the power of that skill, I can demonstrate (Edit: and it appears that you did as well) that Craig Kimbrel's run was not historic, as Jonathan Papelbon and Koji Uehara both had better years for the Red Sox than his best, while his other two years were good but hardly remarkable.
Regardless, Margot was not way less than they were hoping for. He was a starting-caliber center fielder who played elite defense, which is what they expected. He was traded to the Rays for a reliever coming off a much better season than the one Kimbrel had just had when the Sox traded for him, which was also a bad trade. Margot's trade value would naturally be reduced at that point because he had three years of arbitration eligibility rather than three years at the league minimum and three years of arbitration eligibility remaining for team control. The value calculus is pretty straightforward, Kimbrel provided ~6 WAR for $37m over 3 years while Margot provided ~11 WAR for $12m over six years.
This is what I imagine Incandenza is talking about with people wanting to pretend that Dombrowski didn't give up anything in his trades. Manuel Margot, Mauricio Dubon, and Santiago Espinal would have been incredibly useful for the 2021-2023 Red Sox! Those are good players who have, in sum, outplayed the players they were traded for by a significant margin! They're all on teams that are much better than the Red Sox in no small part because they have those guys for cheap, instead of having to fill those roles with expensive FA acquisitions. The fact that going all-in worked doesn't change the fact that they went all-in, which has long-term consequences.
Agree to disagree. Especially about assessing how trades actually work out in real life. Part of the GM's job is to predict how the assets he's acquiring and giving up will perform moving forward. You can actually see if they're right by waiting a few years and seeing how those players actually performed. You can also play alternate-universe games where you guess how the teams would've done without the trades. It's a results-based business and results actually happen. Imagineering what might have happened without a trade is not worth arguing for me (especially when the real results are flags and ring ceremonies). You wind up saying things like "Margot, Dubon, and Espinal would've been useful for the 2021-23 Red Sox." Okay (putting aside the fact that those three guys are cherry-picked from three completely different trades), who do they replace on those 2021-23 Sox rosters and the rosters that came before those years while you were hoarding them? And what do you do about the deals that brought those other players in? And what are you going to do with the extra money you saved... go out and get the top-shelf closer that you still need? Very quickly it's a big illogical morass, which is my least favorite kind of morass. Seriously, the biggest question is why do you care so much about two utility guys and a glove-first OF? There's only so many spaces at the bottom of a batting order. Did we also hang onto Javy Guerra and turn him into a AAAA RP in your scenario? And Logan Allen, he of the 1.66 career WHIP (I bet he was cheap though)? Who did we drop off the Worcester -- oh, sorry, the Pawtucket roster to hang onto those guys? And who did they displace in BOS from 2019-23? It's so, so silly to me.
I don't think it's particularly illogical to treat a baseball team like a complex system, which is what it is. It's not my fault if that's too much of a "morass" for you to think about. There are a lot of moving parts that are probably better demonstrated via diagrams than via text, sure, but there's a reason why a team of people with very expensive and math-y degrees are earning very large salaries running front offices these days. And for what it's worth, those guys aren't cherry-picked, they're the outgoing prospects in three trades that Dombrowski lost badly from a value standpoint. And like, it's not really hard to see who they replace. They replace Kiké Hernandez and the endless carousel of terrible up-the-middle players that have made up the bench for years.
If "Imagineering what might have happened without a trade" isn't worth talking about for you then discussing the front office in general isn't for you. It's kind of their whole job to figure out if a deal is good enough to commit to, since you can only commit to one. And it's not like nobody said "this was a bad move" at the time. The general consensus was "this better work out for the Red Sox, because that's a lot to give up for a reliever." If you compare that package to other major trades made at the time (is this "Imagineering" or is it a valid form of analysis?) and in recent years, you can see that it's a pretty nasty package to give up. It's a hell of a lot more than the Padres gave up for Josh Hader. It's a hell of a lot more than the Rays gave up for Aaron Civale. It's a hell of a lot more than the Dodgers gave up for Machado (granted, he was a rental). It's comparable to what the Brewers gave up for Yelich.
Again, if the Red Sox were to trade Rafaela/Yorke/Perales/Bonaci for one player next month, what would you be expecting back? I imagine it's more than David Bednar, and I'm pretty sure you wouldn't say "well we have to wait three years to evaluate it because those guys might not end up being any good."
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Post by e on Oct 9, 2023 16:15:21 GMT -5
When I knocked Dombrowski for his lack of creativity, some of you seemed confused by what I even meant. After reading all these replies, I'm beginning to understand: you simply refuse to engage in any counterfactual reasoning. They won with Kimbrel, thus Kimbrel was a good pickup, end of story. Logan Allen never panned out, so it wasn't a problem that they threw him in as the fourth piece of a deal. What if they could have traded Logan Allen for something else back when he had a lot of value? Well who knows what they could have gotten for him, so it's not worth talking about. But I want to assure all of you: the Bloominati do not possess a time machine capable of undoing the Steve Pearce trade and accidentally erasing the 2018 championship from existence. Conversations about Dombrowski can be more nuanced than "He won, didn't he?" This is exactly the difference between DD and Chaim. DD targeted who he wanted and made the trades/deals happen. When Preller said "throw in that 18-yo southpaw too," DD blinked. CB would've let that trade die on the vine over Allen and then what? We waste the breakout years by Betts, Bogaerts and Bradley with a bullpen by committee that frittered away the division titles every year? Or maybe there was another top-shelf closer available in a trade that would've only cost Margot, Asuaje, and Guerra but not Allen? Who was that closer, exactly? This is more fantasy than counterfactual to me. !n 2019, Preller packaged Allen and a couple other prospects for a top-20 bust named Taylor Trammell. Dang it, if we had just held onto Allen, maybe we could've packaged him for Trammell! Wait, this is fun!
So I'm not looking to jump on any side of this DD trade history dissection, but I do think its relevant to mention that for every couple of Logan Allen's, you end up with a Fernando Tatis Jr. When posters bring up Logan Allen as a reason why DD may have been too willing to throw prospects into trades, they're not talking about the literal player. They're talking about the low-minor lottery ticket player that has a lot of potential but they're too raw to project any realistic outcome. The vast majority of these guys do not work out, but when they do work out you have an extremely valuable player on your hands. Also if we want to look at just Allen, two years after the trade he became a top 100 prospect and raised his stock considerably from 2016-2018. So maybe the Red Sox hang onto a guy like that a could trade him for even more in the future, rather than being the last player in the Kimbrel deal. I don't love using this hypothetical, but I can see both sides of the argument. To finish off: DD's overall trading history has been more positive than negative. He did bring in key pieces that helped out the 2016-2018 team. He also ended up trading many prospects that busted, while keeping the ones that hit. It's great that it worked out, but is his approach to trading really that sound? Or is there some larger degree of luck that factored into DD being in the green? Say if DD was was given 10 straight years of trading prospects aggressively, would his trade history still look great? Or would he have given up Tatis Jr.? I'd say its somewhere in the middle. DD should get some credit holding onto the right prospects(Devers, Benintendi), but there is a TON of luck involved with prospects in general. At the same time, I think circumstances of a trade should matter. I don't regret the Steve Pearce trade even though it is technically a loss. The production you get in a certain year can be much more valuable than the production you could get in the future. It's all about context.
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Post by Guidas on Oct 9, 2023 16:37:58 GMT -5
Agree to disagree. Especially about assessing how trades actually work out in real life. Part of the GM's job is to predict how the assets he's acquiring and giving up will perform moving forward. You can actually see if they're right by waiting a few years and seeing how those players actually performed. You can also play alternate-universe games where you guess how the teams would've done without the trades. It's a results-based business and results actually happen. Imagineering what might have happened without a trade is not worth arguing for me (especially when the real results are flags and ring ceremonies). You wind up saying things like "Margot, Dubon, and Espinal would've been useful for the 2021-23 Red Sox." Okay (putting aside the fact that those three guys are cherry-picked from three completely different trades), who do they replace on those 2021-23 Sox rosters and the rosters that came before those years while you were hoarding them? And what do you do about the deals that brought those other players in? And what are you going to do with the extra money you saved... go out and get the top-shelf closer that you still need? Very quickly it's a big illogical morass, which is my least favorite kind of morass. Seriously, the biggest question is why do you care so much about two utility guys and a glove-first OF? There's only so many spaces at the bottom of a batting order. Did we also hang onto Javy Guerra and turn him into a AAAA RP in your scenario? And Logan Allen, he of the 1.66 career WHIP (I bet he was cheap though)? Who did we drop off the Worcester -- oh, sorry, the Pawtucket roster to hang onto those guys? And who did they displace in BOS from 2019-23? It's so, so silly to me.
I don't think it's particularly illogical to treat a baseball team like a complex system, which is what it is. It's not my fault if that's too much of a "morass" for you to think about. There are a lot of moving parts that are probably better demonstrated via diagrams than via text, sure, but there's a reason why a team of people with very expensive and math-y degrees are earning very large salaries running front offices these days. And for what it's worth, those guys aren't cherry-picked, they're the outgoing prospects in three trades that Dombrowski lost badly from a value standpoint. And like, it's not really hard to see who they replace. They replace Kiké Hernandez and the endless carousel of terrible up-the-middle players that have made up the bench for years. If "Imagineering what might have happened without a trade" isn't worth talking about for you then discussing the front office in general isn't for you. It's kind of their whole job to figure out if a deal is good enough to commit to, since you can only commit to one. And it's not like nobody said "this was a bad move" at the time. The general consensus was "this better work out for the Red Sox, because that's a lot to give up for a reliever." If you compare that package to other major trades made at the time (is this "Imagineering" or is it a valid form of analysis?) and in recent years, you can see that it's a pretty nasty package to give up. It's a hell of a lot more than the Padres gave up for Josh Hader. It's a hell of a lot more than the Rays gave up for Aaron Civale. It's a hell of a lot more than the Dodgers gave up for Machado (granted, he was a rental). It's comparable to what the Brewers gave up for Yelich.
Again, if the Red Sox were to trade Rafaela/Yorke/Perales/Bonaci for one player next month, what would you be expecting back? I imagine it's more than David Bednar, and I'm pretty sure you wouldn't say "well we have to wait three years to evaluate it because those guys might not end up being any good."
I agree, though you can do both, as people do here. It's like when the Sox traded Benintendi for Cordero, Winckowsi, De La Rosa, Gambrel and Frankie Valdez, a lot of it said it was a crap deal at the time, while some said, "Let's wait and see." So in the immediate sense, it was a crap deal. The remaining 2.0 years of Benintendi = 4.5 fWAR/4.8 bWAR, while Cordero (-0.9 fWAR/-0.8 bWAR in those two years) and Winckowski in those two years (0.0 fWAR/-0.4 bWAR, so together generated -0.9 fWAR/-1.2 bWAR. But there's still the long view, which still looks like mostly crap because Gambrell may be a mop-up/6th inning reliever down the road or may be a AAAA guy, De La Rosa looks like an org arm and Valdez has been released. Still, Winc may generate 4.6 fWAR/6.0 bWAR by, 2028 or 2029 to make it a wash. Winc did produce 0.8 fWAR/1.9 bWAR in 2023 so he just need 4+ more seasons of that performance bWAR-wise, but if you're an fWAR fan, it gets more dicey.
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TearsIn04
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Everybody knows Nelson de la Rosa, but who is Karim Garcia?
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Post by TearsIn04 on Oct 9, 2023 17:49:01 GMT -5
Now I understand what you're saying. You're pointing out that D-Dom's talent evaluation acumen was so sharp that he sold high on three guys who have since combined for 10.5 WAR in eight years. I'm kidding. But only half kidding. Don't we all wish that BC had identified Henry Owens, Anthony Renaudo, Allen Webster and Lars Anderson as overvalued assets and moved them for something useful? And shouldn't we be thankful that D-Dom identified the right assets to move to fill a glaring need on a GFIN team? Again, put the list of prospects he didn't trade next to the list of those he did trade and tell me which one you like more. As I noted in a previous post, he didn't lose much future production in all his prospect trades combined. If you produce the success he did and the two best players you gave up were Yoan Moncada and Manny Margot, I'm Ok with that. What should he have done for a closer going into the 2016 season when that position was a must-fill need on a team that was ready for a big run? Take a look at that winter's free agent RP and tell me who he should have signed. Give it to Koji for another year and try again next offseason, probably. Kimbrel wasn't actually any better than Koji was in 2016 anyway. I don't think downgrading from Kimbrel to Mark Melancon or Greg Holland would significantly outweigh whatever separate addition they could've made using the package they gave up for Kimbrel. And I'd probably still rather pay what it took to sign Chapman or Jansen that offseason than the prospect package it took for Kimbrel, who was still on a large contract.
Margot and Moncada provided more WAR than Sale and Kimbrel under their team control years. I know you don't care much about salary considerations, but it kinda matters that Sale and Kimbrel have been paid a lot more money than Moncada and Margot over that time period even if they don't give out a trophy for the $/WAR World Series.
Regardless, as fenwaydouble said in stronger terms, the argument isn't "DD made terrible trades." It's "DD prioritized getting his guy rather than maximizing his assets, which had negative long-term consequences that could've been mitigated with more creative management."
We all love Koji but no, I wouldn't entrust the closer's spot in a GFIN year to a 40 year old guy coming off a season with only 40 appearances unless the guy's name was Rivera. I agree D-Dom prioritized getting his guy. That's what he was brought here to do. It was right spot for that mentality and he executed it well, as the results show. And yes, the results count. The winter of 2023-'24 would not be the right time for the D-Dom mentality and next winter might not be either. But if MM, Roman Anthony, Little Raffy and Kyle Teel appear in the second half of 2025 to be ready to make significant contributions, and Casas and Bello, are the studs we hope, then the '25-26 off-season will be the time. I thought Bloom was the right guy to hire in the off-season of 2019-2020. But he fell short of what I wanted in a forward-looking, organization-building POBBO. It was time to move on. Let's find the right hybrid executive who can do both. I'm not convinced that D-Dom would have proven himself incapable of a better re-build than Bloom if he had been given the chance. The next POBBO will start with some of the same problems Bloom did. He'll inherit bad contracts and a significantly worse roster than Bloom inherited.
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Post by keninten on Oct 9, 2023 21:33:20 GMT -5
If some of you are going to speculate about the Kimbrel trade. I`d like to hear your opinions about the Mookie trade. What if the Sox had taken Graterol instead of Wong and Downs? Of course DD would have done it different than Chaim did.
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redsox04071318champs
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Always hoping to make my handle even longer...
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Post by redsox04071318champs on Oct 9, 2023 22:03:47 GMT -5
If some of you are going to speculate about the Kimbrel trade. I`d like to hear your opinions about the Mookie trade. What if the Sox had taken Graterol instead of Wong and Downs? Of course DD would have done it different than Chaim did. Maybe he would have, maybe he wouldnt have. I think if he were forced to trade Mookie, his asks could have been different. How he evaluated the talent he was seeking could have been different, so it's hard to say.
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Post by Underwater Johnson on Oct 9, 2023 22:55:46 GMT -5
Agree to disagree. Especially about assessing how trades actually work out in real life. Part of the GM's job is to predict how the assets he's acquiring and giving up will perform moving forward. You can actually see if they're right by waiting a few years and seeing how those players actually performed. You can also play alternate-universe games where you guess how the teams would've done without the trades. It's a results-based business and results actually happen. Imagineering what might have happened without a trade is not worth arguing for me (especially when the real results are flags and ring ceremonies). You wind up saying things like "Margot, Dubon, and Espinal would've been useful for the 2021-23 Red Sox." Okay (putting aside the fact that those three guys are cherry-picked from three completely different trades), who do they replace on those 2021-23 Sox rosters and the rosters that came before those years while you were hoarding them? And what do you do about the deals that brought those other players in? And what are you going to do with the extra money you saved... go out and get the top-shelf closer that you still need? Very quickly it's a big illogical morass, which is my least favorite kind of morass. Seriously, the biggest question is why do you care so much about two utility guys and a glove-first OF? There's only so many spaces at the bottom of a batting order. Did we also hang onto Javy Guerra and turn him into a AAAA RP in your scenario? And Logan Allen, he of the 1.66 career WHIP (I bet he was cheap though)? Who did we drop off the Worcester -- oh, sorry, the Pawtucket roster to hang onto those guys? And who did they displace in BOS from 2019-23? It's so, so silly to me.
I don't think it's particularly illogical to treat a baseball team like a complex system, which is what it is. It's not my fault if that's too much of a "morass" for you to think about. There are a lot of moving parts that are probably better demonstrated via diagrams than via text, sure, but there's a reason why a team of people with very expensive and math-y degrees are earning very large salaries running front offices these days. And for what it's worth, those guys aren't cherry-picked, they're the outgoing prospects in three trades that Dombrowski lost badly from a value standpoint. And like, it's not really hard to see who they replace. They replace Kiké Hernandez and the endless carousel of terrible up-the-middle players that have made up the bench for years.
If "Imagineering what might have happened without a trade" isn't worth talking about for you then discussing the front office in general isn't for you. It's kind of their whole job to figure out if a deal is good enough to commit to, since you can only commit to one. And it's not like nobody said "this was a bad move" at the time. The general consensus was "this better work out for the Red Sox, because that's a lot to give up for a reliever." If you compare that package to other major trades made at the time (is this "Imagineering" or is it a valid form of analysis?) and in recent years, you can see that it's a pretty nasty package to give up. It's a hell of a lot more than the Padres gave up for Josh Hader. It's a hell of a lot more than the Rays gave up for Aaron Civale. It's a hell of a lot more than the Dodgers gave up for Machado (granted, he was a rental). It's comparable to what the Brewers gave up for Yelich.
Again, if the Red Sox were to trade Rafaela/Yorke/Perales/Bonaci for one player next month, what would you be expecting back? I imagine it's more than David Bednar, and I'm pretty sure you wouldn't say "well we have to wait three years to evaluate it because those guys might not end up being any good."
Good point. And guess what? It worked out! 108/119 in saves (90.8%) in three all-star, division-winning seasons and 6/6 in the playoffs. And they didn't seem to miss Margot in the OF. He had a .721 OPS in his rookie year (2017) and has never been over .700 since. That's bad. He isn't even a regular starter in TB (and misses about a month a year to injury). Good glove though.
Maybe you don't have to go out and get Chris Young or Rajai Davis or Gorkys Hernandez or ever play Brock Holt or Blake Swihart in the OF if you keep him through those years that (in real life) he was a starter in SD. He would've been a decent 4th OF on those Sox clubs but then who was your closer from 2016-18 if Kimbrel wasn't there because you hung onto Margot? Matt Barnes? Heath Hembree? Joe Kelly? Hell, just pretend you went out and found a different top-shelf closer from outside the org because this is all make-believe!
I don't pretend that DD did everything right. He screwed up the budget by giving out Thank You contracts to Sale and Eovaldi, which ultimately led to trading Betts. But one thing he did do right was the Kimbrel trade. Keeping Margot would not have made near the impact that Kimbrel made. FFF.
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Post by rhswanzey on Oct 10, 2023 0:25:43 GMT -5
I don't think it's particularly illogical to treat a baseball team like a complex system, which is what it is. It's not my fault if that's too much of a "morass" for you to think about. There are a lot of moving parts that are probably better demonstrated via diagrams than via text, sure, but there's a reason why a team of people with very expensive and math-y degrees are earning very large salaries running front offices these days. And for what it's worth, those guys aren't cherry-picked, they're the outgoing prospects in three trades that Dombrowski lost badly from a value standpoint. And like, it's not really hard to see who they replace. They replace Kiké Hernandez and the endless carousel of terrible up-the-middle players that have made up the bench for years. If "Imagineering what might have happened without a trade" isn't worth talking about for you then discussing the front office in general isn't for you. It's kind of their whole job to figure out if a deal is good enough to commit to, since you can only commit to one. And it's not like nobody said "this was a bad move" at the time. The general consensus was "this better work out for the Red Sox, because that's a lot to give up for a reliever." If you compare that package to other major trades made at the time (is this "Imagineering" or is it a valid form of analysis?) and in recent years, you can see that it's a pretty nasty package to give up. It's a hell of a lot more than the Padres gave up for Josh Hader. It's a hell of a lot more than the Rays gave up for Aaron Civale. It's a hell of a lot more than the Dodgers gave up for Machado (granted, he was a rental). It's comparable to what the Brewers gave up for Yelich.
Again, if the Red Sox were to trade Rafaela/Yorke/Perales/Bonaci for one player next month, what would you be expecting back? I imagine it's more than David Bednar, and I'm pretty sure you wouldn't say "well we have to wait three years to evaluate it because those guys might not end up being any good."
I agree, though you can do both, as people do here. It's like when the Sox traded Benintendi for Cordero, Winckowsi, De La Rosa, Gambrel and Frankie Valdez, a lot of it said it was a crap deal at the time, while some said, "Let's wait and see." So in the immediate sense, it was a crap deal. The remaining 2.0 years of Benintendi = 4.5 fWAR/4.8 bWAR, while Cordero (-0.9 fWAR/-0.8 bWAR in those two years) and Winckowski in those two years (0.0 fWAR/-0.4 bWAR, so together generated -0.9 fWAR/-1.2 bWAR. But there's still the long view, which still looks like mostly crap because Gambrell may be a mop-up/6th inning reliever down the road or may be a AAAA guy, De La Rosa looks like an org arm and Valdez has been released. Still, Winc may generate 4.6 fWAR/6.0 bWAR by, 2028 or 2029 to make it a wash. Winc did produce 0.8 fWAR/1.9 bWAR in 2023 so he just need 4+ more seasons of that performance bWAR-wise, but if you're an fWAR fan, it gets more dicey. If Wincowski compiles 4.5 fWAR in three pre arb and three arb years, but never puts together a single season close to Benintendi’s 1.7 in 2021 (or his 2.8 in 2022), are those two entities equivalent to one another? Is it so difficult to find .5 to 1 WAR players that reasonably significant assets need to be traded away in order to acquire them?
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Post by Guidas on Oct 10, 2023 8:01:57 GMT -5
I agree, though you can do both, as people do here. It's like when the Sox traded Benintendi for Cordero, Winckowsi, De La Rosa, Gambrel and Frankie Valdez, a lot of it said it was a crap deal at the time, while some said, "Let's wait and see." So in the immediate sense, it was a crap deal. The remaining 2.0 years of Benintendi = 4.5 fWAR/4.8 bWAR, while Cordero (-0.9 fWAR/-0.8 bWAR in those two years) and Winckowski in those two years (0.0 fWAR/-0.4 bWAR, so together generated -0.9 fWAR/-1.2 bWAR. But there's still the long view, which still looks like mostly crap because Gambrell may be a mop-up/6th inning reliever down the road or may be a AAAA guy, De La Rosa looks like an org arm and Valdez has been released. Still, Winc may generate 4.6 fWAR/6.0 bWAR by, 2028 or 2029 to make it a wash. Winc did produce 0.8 fWAR/1.9 bWAR in 2023 so he just need 4+ more seasons of that performance bWAR-wise, but if you're an fWAR fan, it gets more dicey. If Wincowski compiles 4.5 fWAR in three pre arb and three arb years, but never puts together a single season close to Benintendi’s 1.7 in 2021 (or his 2.8 in 2022), are those two entities equivalent to one another? Is it so difficult to find .5 to 1 WAR players that reasonably significant assets need to be traded away in order to acquire them? Personally, I don't think so as my opinion is that it was a crap deal all around. However, according to bWAR Winc did put together a 1.9 WAR season in 2023, so there is some hope for those who take the long view. Anyway, every GM/POBO makes bad deals. But, no risk, no reward.
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