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Recent Posts
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Post by manfred on Sept 6, 2023 20:16:42 GMT -5
So when we are finally eliminated - you all going to keep showing up here? Or will it be like Tampa? When…
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Post by manfred on Sept 6, 2023 18:04:18 GMT -5
Great… Glasnow is fully operational.
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Post by manfred on Sept 6, 2023 15:55:45 GMT -5
I’d take a #15 prospect if that is all there is. It is better than a handful of bad and meaningless starts. I wanted to trade him and didn’t really think deeply about a return. it’s not better than a handful of good and meaningful starts, which your much more likely to get out of James Paxton than a team’s 15th-ranked prospect His last 7 games he has a 6.68 ERA. They are out of it, so the starts are meaningless, too.
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Post by manfred on Sept 6, 2023 13:27:35 GMT -5
I’d take a #15 prospect if that is all there is. It is better than a handful of bad and meaningless starts. I wanted to trade him and didn’t really think deeply about a return.
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Post by manfred on Sept 6, 2023 12:16:31 GMT -5
Well, it depends on how you limit “big market.” But I guess it seems like if it is possible, everyone would do it… so we’d see more teams with close approximations. Philadelphia? Mets? Mariners? Angels? Giants? Padres? Rangers? White Sox? Cubs? Nationals? These are all teams in big markets and/or with deep pockets. The Yankees, too, have gad much *predictably* go wrong. And the arrow is pointing downward. On the Yankees... they were doing just fine until they decided to overpay for several payers at the trade deadline and put a jillion dollars into a giant injury-prone slugger and a starting pitcher with a horrible health history. That is to say: the problem there has been execution, not the principle that the Yankees couldn't have been good in 2023 because they've been successful for a long time and ran out of prospects or whatever.
But like I said, I'll grant that the economics of the league might just be different now, and if a dozen teams are going to be running budgets up to or over the LTT then maybe the competitive calculations change. (Not even clear to me how they'd change exactly; execution still matters, as the Padres and Mets have shown. But it would be a different world.)
I guess that’s the thing… doing fine until not. The Sox had their Jeter/Williams/Mo but had to break it up because of basically one big miscalculation. You are talking about so fine a line that maybe one team has pulled it off. You can’t say execution is the problem as if that makes this exceptional. They didn’t *try* to step back. They built on Judge, their guy, with some smaller guys — then hoped a couple pieces put them over. If it worked… it would be a masterpiece. But it didn’t. And now they have Judge forever, Stanton’s money, and they might secretly hope Cole opts out. But the alternative is to avoid long term contracts, and then they have none of those guys, which keeps you nimble in the future but where would they be without Judge and Cole? Not even .500 (this not being at once competitive now and going forward). The key these days seems to figuring out the balance of live and dead money. You know top players are going to get paid beyond their primes, so how do best eat those years.
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Post by manfred on Sept 6, 2023 10:19:49 GMT -5
The Yankees run was mostly in a different era. They developed a few core guys… Jeter, Bernie, Mo… then traded and spent. And now in a new world of pseudo-caps, they are flailing. The Dodgers may be a unicorn, but it is hard to “model” developing one of the best pitchers in baseball history, for example. I look forward to our equivalent of Kershaw/Greinke, too. But even the Dodgers could be looking at lean years soon. Their pitching is falling apart, they’ve shed stars like Trea, and they’ve invested heavily in guys who will slow down. But one exception doesn’t disprove the rule. How many teams are really covered by this "rule"? Only a handful of teams have the resources the Red Sox do, and if you make one exception for the Dodgers and arguably another one for the Yankees (their "flailing" so far consists in being a .500ish team in a season where a lot of stuff has gone wrong and they're paying for some obvious mistakes) then I'm not sure how much of a rule it is in the first place.
One thing that might be changing is that more teams are willing to join the big-budget tier (e.g., PHI, SDP, TEX). I don't know if that will be a lasting phenomenon or those teams are just going for a window of competitiveness; but if the Red Sox are no longer at the top of the payroll spectrum but more like one of a dozen teams spending up to or over the LTT then that probably makes it harder to build a sustained winner.
Well, it depends on how you limit “big market.” But I guess it seems like if it is possible, everyone would do it… so we’d see more teams with close approximations. Philadelphia? Mets? Mariners? Angels? Giants? Padres? Rangers? White Sox? Cubs? Nationals? These are all teams in big markets and/or with deep pockets. The Yankees, too, have gad much *predictably* go wrong. And the arrow is pointing downward.
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Post by manfred on Sept 6, 2023 9:31:18 GMT -5
I’m not sure that is possible, though. This is not even a criticism of this FO… I don’t think you can be truly competitive without sacrificing. If you make the playoffs 4-5 years in a row, your system will automatically suffer from low picks. That is if you are a 3rd WC, which is marginally competitive. If you are shooting for the WS, you are going to have to do *something* extra… sign a FA and lose a pick, trade a legit prospect etc. A team like the Astros had to tank to build their core. Now they are in a long stretch of excellence. But we have seen some of the attrition, and the writing may be on the wall… they are squeezing out a few last years. But in the meantime, they got their rings. If it's not possible, how have the Dodgers won 90 games every year since 2013 yet still have a highly-ranked farm system? How have the Yankees gone 30 years without ever having a losing record? And this will be only the fifth time in that stretch they haven't made the playoffs. If you are a big-market team and spend your resources wisely enough, and are good enough at drafting and player development, I think it's demonstrably the case that it can be done.
Here's a case I think you could make - and this is not to say I agree - but you could say that, even if this is true, the Red Sox ca. 2020 (or 2022, whatever you think the appropriate timeline is) were in no position to enter into that sort of run of sustained competitiveness because they had a massive hole working its way through the farm system, plus some albatross contracts on the books. Even if the goal was sustained competitiveness they should have just bit the bullet and traded away not just Mookie but JDM, Bogaerts, maybe even Devers to jumpstart the farm system, and then, by 2024 or so in this alternate timeline, they'd be in a great position to start doing what the Dodgers have done.
The Yankees run was mostly in a different era. They developed a few core guys… Jeter, Bernie, Mo… then traded and spent. And now in a new world of pseudo-caps, they are flailing. The Dodgers may be a unicorn, but it is hard to “model” developing one of the best pitchers in baseball history, for example. I look forward to our equivalent of Kershaw/Greinke, too. But even the Dodgers could be looking at lean years soon. Their pitching is falling apart, they’ve shed stars like Trea, and they’ve invested heavily in guys who will slow down. But one exception doesn’t disprove the rule.
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Post by manfred on Sept 6, 2023 9:00:23 GMT -5
Planning around a core of one top 15 prospect who has only achieved in A ball, and a top 100 kid who has also only achieved in A ball is the model of every team that drafted in the top 10, thereby ensuring themselves of enough "potential."It's also how those teams draft in the top 10 year after year, because two top 100 prospects still have a huge attrition rate, especially if they are there based on tools rather than performance (throw Bleis in there too). And even when they get to the pros, expect two years of struggles, like Henry Davis in Pitt the first pick overall and a top 10 prospect. And if your model is to get enough tickets to mitigate the huge risk, then you accumulate them at trade deadlines, rather than make things worse (last year luxury tax, this year holding on to evaporating assets Verdugo, Turner, Duvall, Paxton, (maybe even Jansen) etc.) Instead, we're half-axxing it, either deluding ourselves into thinking we're contenders, or trying to maintain the appearance that we're contenders, thereby failing to get longer range talent. I'm all for tanking to build for the future. But if you do it, do it like the year you got the kid who you are building around -- Mayer #3. Don't expect to outsmart the market by picking at 14-17 each year. This half-way approach will fail, IMO. Well the good news is that alexcorahomevideo is just completely making this up - a theory that contradicts both the team's public statements and any reasonable interpretation of the team's actions, and when countervailing evidence arrives (like the failure of his prediction that the team would run a payroll around $175 million this season), alexcorahomevideo does nothing to update their theory.
The theory that is consistent with the team's statements and actions also has the virtue of being totally mundane: they're trying to field as competitive a team as possible every season without significantly sacrificing long-term competitiveness.
I’m not sure that is possible, though. This is not even a criticism of this FO… I don’t think you can be truly competitive without sacrificing. If you make the playoffs 4-5 years in a row, your system will automatically suffer from low picks. That is if you are a 3rd WC, which is marginally competitive. If you are shooting for the WS, you are going to have to do *something* extra… sign a FA and lose a pick, trade a legit prospect etc. A team like the Astros had to tank to build their core. Now they are in a long stretch of excellence. But we have seen some of the attrition, and the writing may be on the wall… they are squeezing out a few last years. But in the meantime, they got their rings.
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Post by manfred on Sept 5, 2023 22:14:22 GMT -5
Kenley had a bad day but has been good much of the year. He is not a villain.
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Post by manfred on Sept 5, 2023 21:39:48 GMT -5
Who’da thought the closer going for the third straight night who has a trainer visit yesterday might not be at his best?
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Post by manfred on Sept 5, 2023 21:38:15 GMT -5
Well, as they say, this game comes down to who wants it least. That’s what they say, right?
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Post by manfred on Sept 5, 2023 21:20:59 GMT -5
How are the Rays good again?
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Post by manfred on Sept 5, 2023 21:18:57 GMT -5
Retrospect: why bunt ahead of Brujan, who is genuinely terrible? (I mean, it worked… but seems ceazy).
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Post by manfred on Sept 5, 2023 21:17:10 GMT -5
That was a pretty perfect bunt. Casas needs to try to get back, but mostly that was just tough.
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Post by manfred on Sept 5, 2023 20:51:31 GMT -5
Martin remains ridiculous, meanwhile. He’s signed for next year, rught?
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Post by manfred on Sept 5, 2023 20:48:57 GMT -5
Ha! The Rays suck at defense and fundamentals! We HAVE become Tampa north!
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Post by manfred on Sept 5, 2023 20:19:49 GMT -5
I so hate the Rays. They have this great record blah blah… where do those wins come from??
Add: I’ll say it: finishing behind them eats at me as much as finishing behind the Yankees.
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Post by manfred on Sept 5, 2023 20:16:03 GMT -5
Sponge.
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Post by manfred on Sept 5, 2023 19:50:40 GMT -5
That was not good.
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Post by manfred on Sept 5, 2023 19:36:31 GMT -5
JT is like an RBI sponge. If it is there, he takes it.
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Post by manfred on Sept 5, 2023 19:09:46 GMT -5
In retrospect….
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Post by manfred on Sept 5, 2023 19:02:08 GMT -5
I can see how almost right down the middle might be a ball.
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Post by manfred on Sept 5, 2023 19:00:21 GMT -5
When Crawford loses it, it seems like the sign is high arm side. Like he’s not finishing. His night should be over soon.
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Post by manfred on Sept 5, 2023 17:19:50 GMT -5
Is Urias banged up? He looked like he twisted his knee a bit the other day.
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Post by manfred on Sept 5, 2023 10:25:13 GMT -5
Best strike zone judgement for Abreu? That is exciting. He’s been super impressive so far in his cup of coffee. A combination of power and discipline is mouthwatering.
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