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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 12, 2024 15:44:01 GMT -5
Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal - in no specific order - are some of the best and best run cities in North America.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 12, 2024 13:54:50 GMT -5
Every time a ball squeaks by a diving Enmanuel Valdez, I wonder why the "logjam" of outfielders can't partially be alleviated by just playing Rafaela there once or twice a week. They already know Rafaela has the chops to play there. They're trying to figure out if Valdez does.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 11, 2024 19:34:04 GMT -5
He's got a very different swing and more patience & power than Verdugo (though he's not fielding or hitting in the rightfield playpen at Yankee Stadium).
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 11, 2024 12:04:07 GMT -5
This is why I’m ringing the bells for draft pitchers use FA for position players The opportunity cost is just way way worse when a FA signed SP is lost for a season and it’s seems like it’s been at more likely that a pitcher is missing a whole season then a position player There's opportunity cost and injury risk to drafting pitchers too. For this to be a good heuristic, you'd have to prove that it's sufficiently more efficient to buy position player WAR than pitching WAR to cover the possible inefficiency of drafting pitchers over position players. Even then, the free agent pool, the draft pool, and your position in the draft can change so much that a simple heuristic isn't useful. We've certainly seen the changes in the pool of free agent pitching talent. That calculation would be constantly changing.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 11, 2024 0:33:37 GMT -5
That "kid" talks like a professional, someone with a clear understanding of where he is and where he wants to be. I believe he'll get there. The team should put together an investment fund to tap for the payout when he gets to that level.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 10, 2024 1:32:03 GMT -5
Good to remember that it's bettors who set the odds for all those "oddsmakers". They just position themselves in the middle of the stream of bets.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 9, 2024 22:27:38 GMT -5
Here in Oregon, Fubo carries ROOT, the RSN with the Mariners' broadcasts. If you have the same situation back there, you can get it on NESN your local RSN, or fed through Fubo. Both are true.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 9, 2024 18:19:28 GMT -5
Starting to feel like it’d be very hard to justify leaving Rafaela off the opening day roster They have three outfielders aside from Rafaela who can play center, and of those two can cover right more than passably. They have left field covered also from any number of combinations. That leaves him available to spell three of the infield positions. If he develops plate discipline to go with the obvious hitting skills, he's really, really valuable because of that flexibility and how good he is defensively.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 9, 2024 0:23:00 GMT -5
They don't have to look very far either, a little more than a hundred miles, for a "super-team" that dug themselves a hole and jumped in. I do see Arizona and SF laying in the weeds for them, and defense matters. But they have so much offensive fire power they'll probably power through the NL West.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 8, 2024 23:20:25 GMT -5
Starts with the NY Post as the source, and goes downhill from there! No surprise. After four titles in twenty years the knives are out. Heyman's is, naturally, pretty dull.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 8, 2024 21:24:45 GMT -5
The bar is set way too low. Here's a list of the pitchers with a bWAR of at least 2 over five years (minus 2020): Year | Pitcher | bWAR | 2023 | Chris Martin | 3.2 | 2023 | Brayan Bello | 3.1 | 2023 | Kutter Crawford | 2.5 | 2023 | Nick Pivetta | 2.4 | 2022 | Michael Wacha | 3.3 | 2022 | John Schreiber | 2.7 | 2022 | Nick Pivetta | 2.6 | 2021 | Nate Eovaldi | 4.3 | 2021 | Garrett Whitlock | 2.9 | 2021 | Nick Pivetta | 2.5 | 2019 | Eduardo Rodriguez | 5.5 | 2019 | Brandon Workman | 3.1 | 2019 | Chris Sale | 2.1 | 2018 | Chris Sale | 6.4 | 2018 | David Price | 3.7 | 2018 | Rick Porcello | 2.6 | 2018 | Eduardo Rodriguez | 2.5 | 2018 | Craig Kimbrel | 2.1 |
Bello already exceeded 2 WAR at 2324. The arrow is pointing up and given good health I believe he can easily be worth a minimum of 3.5 for the majority of the contract years.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 7, 2024 23:18:28 GMT -5
Or on the flipside since Twitterverse is a cesspool they'll undoubtedly be people who complain the Sox didn't pay him enough and blame the org somehow. WEEI was already saying Bello is pissed and they low-balled him. Maybe it's time to revisit some of this, to determine what the goal was here. I'm trying to figure out if the comment lacked a clear understanding of how negotiations proceed or if that was irrelevant. Is it like this all the time on the broadcasts? I'll admit I don't listen to WEEI out here in the West.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 7, 2024 20:44:49 GMT -5
Good analysis for those who've forgotten or didn't know it. Once he got his sea legs he was outstanding into August. Gassed for the last part of it, he faded and so did his numbers. There's a reason to believe that he can get and stay stronger and have that success carry through the season.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 7, 2024 15:37:41 GMT -5
Good to see the optimism. And the spelling malaprop is great: sprint training indeed.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 7, 2024 10:41:51 GMT -5
Why do we have to treat everything the team does as if they're playing to win a news cycle or something? It's very self-flattering to think that the team makes all its decisions out of concern for our reactions (and also that we're savvy enough to see through it), but this is totally straightforward - Bello was saying they were "more or less" close to an extension well before Giolito got hurt. Much like the team was actively trying to sign Devers a year before they actually did, and public stating that it was a high priority - which hasn't stopped people from arguing *to this day* that it was just a PR move following the loss of Bogaerts. (By the way, where would this roster be right now if Devers had walked in free agency? They pretty much to do that extension for baseball reasons; no secret craven motivations required.) If the team were stupid enough to build their roster with short-term news coverage in mind the obvious reactive move after the Giolito injury would have been a Montgomery signing. But the evidently didn't rush to do that. To be fair, it does kinda seem like they are timing this to create a big Dominican Red Sox Baseball party this weekend, which is a different kind of PR/news cycle concern It's dispiriting to have the threads buried in pop-psychology paranoia. That seems to happen over and over again.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 7, 2024 0:49:58 GMT -5
Well maybe they'll both recover. Yamamoto mentioned he was trying stuff out, though the lack of command was worrisome. Rodon's issues seem to be far more serious, with a significant loss of velocity so far.
This is where (big) opportunity cost kicks in. It's hard to push aside a guy you're paying that much money to for someone marginally better whose paid many times less. It's the image thing don't you know.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 5, 2024 18:39:03 GMT -5
So is it open-air or does it somehow close into a bubble so that they can escape the Vegas heat?
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 5, 2024 18:36:08 GMT -5
Last year's rotation was a weak point. Only their position players on defense keep it from being the worst part of the team. From last year's starters they have subtracted Sale, Paxton, and Kluber and with the latest news have added no one. Hard to see how this year's rotation will even be as good as last years. And if Crawford, Whitlock,, Houck, and Pivetta are all full time starters, it does weaken your bullpen depth since one or more of those four were in the bullpen for most of the year. We failed to resign Evolve, Wacha, Paxton and traded Sale. Those four plus Bello would seem to me to be stronger than what we have now. Yes, all of our remaining starters could show big improvement this year. But every team in baseball is saying the same thing right now and it is unlikely to happen. It seems foolish to bank on it. Very disappointed in where are now.\ with the starting pitching. The loss of Giolito is no small thing. But the exit of Kluber is a plus, not a minus. And Paxton's early Jekyll and late Hyde helped until it hurt. Sale came on but only after a prolonged absence. What they need is a group that can stay healthy and pile up some innings, and that's problematic given this injury and how it cuts into the starting pitching.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 2, 2024 13:09:16 GMT -5
A real shorstop!
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 2, 2024 13:04:10 GMT -5
To be clear, Bowden is not a "Boston Sportswriter". He's a voice on MLB (Sirius and XM) and I've tuned he and the other voices out for the latter part of the off season. The nearly endless seat-of-the-pants drivel they churn out as they're forced to populate hours and hours of chatter is almost un-listenable. The stream-of-consciousness BS sends them into side-channels from which there's often no exit. It's really an embarrassment as you hear them grasping at verbal straws with lots of "uhh", "and, and, and", "but, but but". Five days worth might give you all of fifteen useful minutes of information. I don't need that.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Feb 29, 2024 22:36:36 GMT -5
I was basically thinking the same thing. What keeps him from being a starter is his lack of whiff. That has been the case in the past and from what I've seen in these 2IP that's still the issue. My guess is: they want to try to tickle some whiff out of him via the "driveline treatment". The chances of success are probably slim, but the upside would be massive. It's a no risk, high reward kind of deal...worst case: he is what he was last year... He had 8.8 K/9 last year. Montgomery had 7.9 and I'll check a few others for comparison. Of course he was primarily a long reliever which may account for some of that difference. But he was very effective over those innings. Add: Seth Lugo 8.6; Michael Lorenzen 5.3; Sonny Gray 9.0; Eduardo Rodriguez 8.4; Marcus Stroman 7.8 Winckowski also also has at least five years on those pitchers.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Feb 27, 2024 14:45:43 GMT -5
He was just starting to recover his velo at the end of last season. He gave the team everything he had so it's good to see him find his way back if that's what happens.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Feb 27, 2024 11:59:31 GMT -5
Really impressed with Anthony and his approach. Here's a 19 year-old who was given a first opportunity to impress major league eyeballs. With plate discipline many of those ML players could use, he shuffles through the pitches he's offered and finds almost none of them worth swinging at. So he walks twice and comes around to score a run.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Feb 27, 2024 9:39:54 GMT -5
You might want to go back and read through the thread. Much of it was just that, irrelevant.
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Post by Oregon Norm on Feb 26, 2024 23:21:15 GMT -5
lol, zero people cared when Garrett Cooper and Tony Kemp signed elsewhere. I could have told you then that they'd be Red Sox if they had ponied up another $200k. Are you saying the Sox should have signed them?
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