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Recent Posts
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Post by jmei on Jul 15, 2023 14:51:23 GMT -5
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Post by jmei on Jul 15, 2023 14:18:46 GMT -5
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Post by jmei on Jul 15, 2023 14:08:58 GMT -5
The fundamentals are just so bad. Breaking the wrong way on a ground ball, airmailed throws, can't hold on to catchable balls, balls popping out of the glove. It's one thing if you have statues out there. It's something else when you have guys who should be better but aren't.
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Post by jmei on Jul 15, 2023 14:06:01 GMT -5
Those might not be errors, but that's a bad defensive play from Kiké and a bad defensive play from Devers/Wong.
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Post by jmei on Jul 14, 2023 6:37:07 GMT -5
No, for draftees, they are usually projections and not current grades. Teel would not be an above-average regular if he was promoted to MLB right now.
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Post by jmei on Jul 13, 2023 16:55:18 GMT -5
Walsh's core offensive skills aren't well suited to summer league, where certain skills (ball handling, scoring off the dribble) shine while others (ball movement, cutting) aren't rewarded because guys gunning for jobs tend not to want to play team basketball.
On defense, while Walsh is definitely an above-average defender now with great length, an excellent motor and solid athleticism, he's also pretty jumpy and sometimes defends out of control (i.e., too aggressively). He's going to get a lot of touch fouls (because he's a big gangly rookie) and guys like Jimmy Butler are going to shred him on pump fakes and dribble moves. He might become one of the better defenders in the league in time, but he's not close to there in his rookie year.
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Post by jmei on Jul 9, 2023 11:44:14 GMT -5
I actually think this Red Sox team could be really good in the playoffs if a few things break right injury-wise. Sale, Paxton and Bello are about as impressive of a front three as any team in the league, and Whitlock and Houck are pretty good too. They have a good back of the bullpen that only gets better if you add a converted starter or two. Their lineup is really just missing Story and otherwise has a bunch of guys who can grind out at bats and have a flair from the dramatic. Now, that depends a lot on Sale, Paxton and Story being healthy. But if they are, this is one of the better teams in the AL and has about as much of a shot as any other team to advance to the World Series.
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Post by jmei on Jul 8, 2023 9:54:43 GMT -5
I think Brogdon, Williams and Horford works for salary matching purposes, but then you get real thin at the big man spot.
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Post by jmei on Jul 7, 2023 20:09:57 GMT -5
These are huge runs, all with two outs.
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Post by jmei on Jul 6, 2023 21:12:29 GMT -5
Nice to see the fans having fun out there on a hot, muggy weekday night.
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Post by jmei on Jul 5, 2023 7:32:52 GMT -5
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Post by jmei on Jul 2, 2023 18:36:42 GMT -5
I always like guys getting the time off instead of the AS game. I generally agree, but it’s still one of those things that Hall of Fame voters consider. Would be a shame if the difference between Devers making it into the Hall or not is a few All-Star appearances.
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Post by jmei on Jul 2, 2023 15:40:29 GMT -5
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticize the front office. I’m just here to correct factual misstatements. I actually wasn’t literally counting days. I don’t recall *not* hearing rosy talk. Being told things are much better than my eyes are telling me — when a team is 120-126 since opening day last year… seems far more factually dubious than what I wrote. Or go back to 2020, 236-232. That is pretty consistent. About .500 for 4 years. About .500 for 2 years. About .500 this year. Fans are optimistic about the future. More at 11. By the way, .500 is not exactly a scarlet letter. It doesn’t take a lot to turn a .500 team into a playoff team, which explains some of the optimism.
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Post by jmei on Jul 2, 2023 15:27:46 GMT -5
They were in the ALCS 1.5 years ago. I get a little tired of that. They had a good year, finished in second place. They won a ONE game series, and then they beat the Rays, which is great. Then they lost to the Astros. So they had one solid upset in the postseason. Was it a sign of big things to come? No. Last place since then. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticize the front office. I’m just here to correct factual misstatements.
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Post by jmei on Jul 2, 2023 15:25:34 GMT -5
Verdugo says how’s this for charisma?
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Post by jmei on Jul 2, 2023 15:07:11 GMT -5
I’m not sure we realize how close this team is to be very good. Obvioulsy there are some holes but there are also answers to those questions coming. The injuries and some inconsistencies have probably cost us this season. That said there are so many positives and things looking up. I’ve heard that for 2 1/2 years. Sometimes it reminds me of how close we are to total victory in Vietnam. They were in the ALCS 1.5 years ago.
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Post by jmei on Jul 1, 2023 11:15:28 GMT -5
If guys like Van Vleet and Haliburton are getting (super)maxes, Brown is definitely going to get one. He’s going to be very tradeable on that contract if things go wrong so I have no issue with it.
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Post by jmei on Jun 30, 2023 15:55:03 GMT -5
I’m going to confess: my patience is long over. I got roasted in 2019/2020 because I hated the Mookie trade, and many folks just said everything I argued was bitterness. I’d certainly say that was the original sin, since it was so lopsided. But then we get 2020. Then 2022 was terrible. Then 2023 is a flop to date. And here we are, still getting so many of the same arguments. If you go back to the 2019/2020 posts and the give-him-timers or the wait-until-he-clears-payrollers and compare it to the “Mookie-bitter-enders”…. who looks better with time? If this team breaks out in 2025 or 2026, I hardly call that good work. A massive market, huge budget team really should be able to put a serious team on the field every 7 years unless they are totally *mismanaged*. Eh, I’m not sure this level of criticism is fair for an ALCS appearance and two .500ish seasons. The hole was dug for them by having the worst farm system in the league and a roster full of dead salary and expiring contracts for stars. It was going to be painful no matter what front office was here. Given those constraints, Bloom hasn’t been great (or even good), but he hasn’t been awful, either.
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Post by jmei on Jun 30, 2023 15:40:52 GMT -5
Two things: (1) if your injury risk guy is injured, your 6th/7th/8th starters need to fill in, and those guys probably aren't very good, and (2) there's a false dichotomy between injury risk and performance risk. As we've seen at times this season, pitchers coming off injury are no guarantee to perform at that same level when they return, and there's a real likelihood that they're healthy but just not that good anymore (or need time when they're got performing very well on the field in order to round back into form - see, e.g., the fact that Sale, on the year, still has a below-average ERA-). You also fundamentally misunderstand my point. I am not criticizing their signing of Kluber in isolation. I am criticizing the broader idea that the 2023 rotation was in good shape because they had a bunch of options like Sale, Paxton, Bello, Whitlock, Houck, etc. who have high ceilings but low floors. They chose to allocate resources more towards the position player side and the bullpen rather than allocating it to the rotation presumably because they were comfortable with the idea that, even though a lot of their options were high risk, they had a lot of those options and enough of them would work out such that, on the whole, they'd get good performance out of it. They took the same general approach with respect to the middle infield. You, specifically, continue to champion this idea that they had plans A through E and you can't blame them because it took awhile to find the right one that stuck. I am criticizing that logic. The risk of trying to fill a hole with a bunch of $10M or less guys rather than one $25M guy is that you're racking up bad performance trying to find which guy sticks. Sometimes it makes more sense to just sign the good, expensive guy rather than try and go bargain hunting for bruised apples. (Ironically, they were willing to pay more for more certainty for their bullpen, which is one area where I am more in favor of a "spaghetti against the wall" approach.) But this plan, as far as it goes, has worked out! Sale was not a good signing, but that's a sunk cost, and he gave them a good third of a season, so that's something. Paxton, at very low cost, has given them a very good quarter of a season and counting. Bello has been great. Whitlock has been good enough. Houck was pretty good, even if it's still unclear whether he can make it three times through the order, until he got hit in the face by a baseball, which no amount of "reliability" can prevent. And Crawford has emerged as a viable 5th starter. Meanwhile, Kluber and Pivetta, the two "high floor" guys they did have, have pitched their way out of the rotation! But okay, let's go with the notion that by investing money on $25 million starting pitchers you can substantially mitigate the sort of risk you are lamenting. How has that gone for the big money SP signings that were available this past offseason? Verlander (2/86): 57 IP, 4.11 ERA DeGrom (5/185): 30 IP, 2.67 ERA, Tommy John Rodon (6/162): 0 IP So do you think they should have gone with a "reliable" option like DeGrom or Rodon? Or should they have sucked it up and spent 43 million/year on Verlander to be a slight upgrade on Kutter Crawford? Below this tier the best options were... Eovaldi and Eflin. You cannot say it has worked out if they’ve gotten bottom third of the league starting pitching performance to date and are currently running out a four-man rotation. Signing Kluber was a mistake. Relying on Sale to stay healthy was a mistake. Relying on Pivetta was a mistake. Those aren’t the worst mistakes a front office has made, nor can I really excoriate them for it too much since, as separately noted, it’s a high-variance game and this is a small sample size, but you want your front office to be able to beat the market, they haven’t been able to do so consistently and it’s pollyannaish to pretend otherwise.
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Post by jmei on Jun 30, 2023 15:28:10 GMT -5
Fair point that my criticism is probably better directed at the middle infield situation than the starting pitching, but the front office made a conscious decision during the offseason that more resources should be put into the bullpen than the starting rotation, and that's a decision that I disagreed with at the time. Bello et al were reasonable guys to put into a rotation, but I think they really ought to have targeted a more established (lower risk) mid-rotation guy to fill out that group rather than Kluber. I don't love playing the "who would you have signed" game since no one knows who would have signed for what and it just invites cherry picking by all involved, but I would have signed someone more in the $15-20M range for the rotation (pushed harder for Eovaldi or Eflin or signed someone like Walker or Senga) and gone cheaper at closer. You need to place the Sox strategy into a context where the winning bid for basically every single expensive pitcher is completely out of line with a day one spreadsheet forecast (and for whatever it's worth, lately these pitchers have been falling short of their projections by a lot in aggregate) If you can fill up your budget with lower-tier bargain signings, and your roster is dire enough that all these 1.5 WAR players can see the field without pushing productive players to the bench or minors, then that's the way to go. It's not a golden ticket to winning, it's a 15% edge in a high variance game., Sometimes you end up with Hunter Renfroe and 2021 Kiké, and sometimes you end up with Corey Kluber and 2023 Kiké. I dunno, the high-variance strategy can make sense if you need to get superlative performance for cheap, but now that 85 wins means a playoff spot more often than not and they (hopefully) get more production from the farm system, query whether it makes more sense to sign lower variance players instead. Especially if your job security is dependent on getting into the playoffs.
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Post by jmei on Jun 30, 2023 15:08:47 GMT -5
This. If you're getting beat out by another team for essentially the same offer then...up the offer unless you have comparable alternative. They did not.Also, this ownership/front office completely failed to read the market in the off-season. AAVs rose dramatically, which should be no surprise since that has happened in the first full off-season after virtually every new CBA has been reached. Add to this that owners were newly flush having received at least $100M per team in revenues from various deals reached by MLB for rights, software, etc. Yet the Sox seemed to be caught off-guard by this. They also seemed to consider that Boston is no longer a destination for top-level free agents anymore. The chance to win consistently with the Sox has been diminished in the last 4-5 years. This is not seen as a playoff team - and they're doing zero to diminish that perception this year, so far. Add to this, Massachusetts also has it's new millionaire tax to accompany its already extensive state income tax and fees portfolio. Pro Tip: when you're offering the "same" salary as teams in tax-free Texas and Florida, your salary is actually significantly less, at least for 81 games a year. I would argue that it's unfair to frame the Eovaldi and Eflin contract negotiations as the Red Sox, "refusing to up their offer". This is from a Chad Jennings' article on the Athletic after Eflin signed with the Rays: "My understanding is that what transpired is that the Red Sox were the highest bidders, but Eflin is from Florida, and so the Rays were given an opportunity to match. If the Florida club put the same offer on the table, Eflin would sign... The Red Sox were not given an opportunity to raise their bid. They also didn’t know until the deal was done that the Rays were going to have the final opportunity to match." On the Eovaldi front, we've been down this road multiple times. Early in the offseason the Red Sox offered him what was reported to be a larger deal than what he actually got, but Eovaldi wanted to test the market. The Red Sox shifted to other signings and then Eovaldi came back asking if the deal was still on the table. The Red Sox obviously did not have that money anymore so he signed with Texas for less. I agree that it’s not a question of them not upping their offer enough, but describing it as “not making a high enough offer” gets you to about the same substantive place. If they offer each guy, say, $5-10M more than they did, does that get the deal done? That’s an impossible counterfactual to answer definitively, but it illustrates that at the end of the day, they could not sign their purported top targets in free agency, which is at least still partly on the front office.
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Post by jmei on Jun 30, 2023 12:07:18 GMT -5
I hate to keep responding on this point, but you keep making it, so here we are. Yes, there is something wrong with having too many boom/bust types. A lot of them will bust before you can move on to options B, C and D (and a lot of those options will bust as well), and those games where you played all the busts count, too. I don't think this describes what happened. Every pitcher is an "or bust" candidate. Paxton and Sale were the two especially risky pitchers and they've played well and the Sox look poised to get a decent amount of combined innings out of them. Bello, Whitlock, Houck, Pivetta and Kluber were five pitchers with pretty typical risk profiles that were reasonable guys to put in a major league rotation at the start of the year. Then they had Crawford, Winckowski, Walter, Mata and Murphy as depth. It seems like your complaint is basically boiling down to it would have been better if they had Sandy Alcantara or Gerritt Cole. Well they don't, and it would have been very expensive to change that.
Fair point that my criticism is probably better directed at the middle infield situation than the starting pitching, but the front office made a conscious decision during the offseason that more resources should be put into the bullpen than the starting rotation, and that's a decision that I disagreed with at the time. Bello et al were reasonable guys to put into a rotation, but I think they really ought to have targeted a more established (lower risk) mid-rotation guy to fill out that group rather than Kluber. I don't love playing the "who would you have signed" game since no one knows who would have signed for what and it just invites cherry picking by all involved, but I would have signed someone more in the $15-20M range for the rotation (pushed harder for Eovaldi or Eflin or signed someone like Walker or Senga) and gone cheaper at closer.
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Post by jmei on Jun 30, 2023 11:08:55 GMT -5
I hate to keep responding on this point, but you keep making it, so here we are. Yes, there is something wrong with having too many boom/bust types. A lot of them will bust before you can move on to options B, C and D (and a lot of those options will bust as well), and those games where you played all the busts count, too. I don't think you can say the rotation has been "pretty good" or "worked out" given that it's halfway through the season and Red Sox starting pitchers, as a whole, rank 20th in fWAR and 22nd in RA9-WAR and their playoffs odds are down to 10.2% (which ranks 11th of 15 teams in the AL). I refer you back to my second point in that quote. To make an additional point: for these purposes we need to make a distinction between "boom/bust" types. One type is the Paxton type - he's likely to "boom" is he stays healthy but he could bust by getting injured. In that case the downside risk is not what you're pointing to here - that you get a bunch of bad performances before you figure out who's good. The risk is just that you don't get as many innings as you hope out of such a pitcher. Given how cheap Paxton is that's a very reasonable gamble. The other kind of boom/bust type does carry the risk you're talking about - that's where they might be good but they might suck. So okay... just get a bunch of pitchers who are guaranteed not to suck, right? But that brings us back to the question I put to James: who was the pitcher they could get on a 1/10 deal who was guaranteed not to suck? Or who could they have added who was in their arb years, like Pivetta, who was likewise guaranteed not to suck?
Two things: (1) if your injury risk guy is injured, your 6th/7th/8th starters need to fill in, and those guys probably aren't very good, and (2) there's a false dichotomy between injury risk and performance risk. As we've seen at times this season, pitchers coming off injury are no guarantee to perform at that same level when they return, and there's a real likelihood that they're healthy but just not that good anymore (or need time when they're got performing very well on the field in order to round back into form - see, e.g., the fact that Sale, on the year, still has a below-average ERA-). You also fundamentally misunderstand my point. I am not criticizing their signing of Kluber in isolation. I am criticizing the broader idea that the 2023 rotation was in good shape because they had a bunch of options like Sale, Paxton, Bello, Whitlock, Houck, etc. who have high ceilings but low floors. They chose to allocate resources more towards the position player side and the bullpen rather than allocating it to the rotation presumably because they were comfortable with the idea that, even though a lot of their options were high risk, they had a lot of those options and enough of them would work out such that, on the whole, they'd get good performance out of it. They took the same general approach with respect to the middle infield. You, specifically, continue to champion this idea that they had plans A through E and you can't blame them because it took awhile to find the right one that stuck. I am criticizing that logic. The risk of trying to fill a hole with a bunch of $10M or less guys rather than one $25M guy is that you're racking up bad performance trying to find which guy sticks. Sometimes it makes more sense to just sign the good, expensive guy rather than try and go bargain hunting for bruised apples. (Ironically, they were willing to pay more for more certainty for their bullpen, which is one area where I am more in favor of a "spaghetti against the wall" approach.)
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Post by jmei on Jun 30, 2023 10:31:25 GMT -5
Put more simply: It would've been malpractice to add Song to the 40-man roster. Beyond stupid. He hadn't pitched in three years still didn't have a waiver. It costs the Phillies nothing to pick him and see what happens. If you want to talk about Brasier and Ort, etc., the much better discussion is whether they should've protected Thaddeus Ward. I think you can absolutely ding the Red Sox for that and many here have. But for not protecting Song? C'mon now. Thanks for the summary, clarifies a few things. Still...this wasn't my point. My point is this: either a mistake was made or it wasn't. How anyone came to that conclusion is their business (I didn't really intend to go down the rabbit hole of rehashing the whole situation) but if a mistake was made you can't leave Bloom out of the discussion. If there was no mistake, which seems to be the prevailing thought, then why so mad? There are several people firing off at Dombrowski, Manfred, etc. If Bloom made the right decision, then people are just creating vitriol out of thin air over the loss of our 2nd (3rd?) best rule 5 pick. Nobody is taking shots at the Nationals GM is for taking Ward. If anyone is mad because of Song's situation, I would argue that he's getting treated better than Ward at the moment who has been getting pummeled recently and probably should be in the minors. Meanwhile, Song is getting the royal treatment while getting paid mlb salary. To redsox04071318champs' point, this seems to have more to do with how the situation kills the perception of DD and Bloom than the situation itself. It can both be the right decision not to have added Song to the 40-man roster and still be mad because the Rule 5 draft rules have a dumb loophole in them that allowed someone like Dombrowski, who is willing to push the spirit of the rules, to exploit the letter of the rules.
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Post by jmei on Jun 30, 2023 9:59:53 GMT -5
I hate this. Miami is 48-34 and of the three starters they used in the series, the 2022 Cy Young winner is having the worst season. The Red Sox defense and roster construction issues are real and should be criticized. Using limited financial resources a boom/bust reclamation project like Kluber instead of an innings eater to a staff that already had Chris Sale and James Paxton was very, very stupid. If Chaim Bloom got fired today, like within the hour, I don't think anyone would be shocked. It's not a good enough roster and he's had enough time to be responsible for that. But losing games to a Marlins team that is clearly better than them isn't an effort thing. It is 100% my pet peeve when people immediately write off bad playing to bad effort. Jarren Duran is probably the best example of this, he plays a bad outfield at 100 miles an hour. It's not at all an effort thing, it's that trying hard hasn't yet made him good at it. This team is playing hard, they just have huge holes that no amount of hustle is going to overcome. Well here's a unique complaint... and I don't understand it at all. First, Kluber was like their Plan D after Eovaldi, Eflin, and Heaney all turned down the Red Sox' putting the best offer on the table. Second, Kluber had a dodgy health history, but that hasn't been the problem with him this season. I think he was generally regarded as a high-floor/low-ceiling type option - the opposite of a boom/bust type. Third, they had Pivetta as the innings eater, but his underperformance goes to show that being an innings eater is not a guarantee of adequate performance (or good health, for that matter). Fourth, the rotation has turned out to be pretty good, following the limited depth in the early season when Whitlock, Bello, and Paxton were all on the IL. If Houck doesn't get in the face with a line drive they look very solid top to bottom. Fifth, just conceptually I don't think there's anything wrong with having several boom/bust types, provided you have enough of them. If it works out with just one or two of Paxton, Sale, and Kluber, that's enough; and that's more or less how it's gone.I hate to keep responding on this point, but you keep making it, so here we are. Yes, there is something wrong with having too many boom/bust types. A lot of them will bust before you can move on to options B, C and D (and a lot of those options will bust as well), and those games where you played all the busts count, too. I don't think you can say the rotation has been "pretty good" or "worked out" given that it's halfway through the season and Red Sox starting pitchers, as a whole, rank 20th in fWAR and 22nd in RA9-WAR and their playoffs odds are down to 10.2% (which ranks 11th of 15 teams in the AL).
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