SoxProspects News
|
|
|
|
Legal
Forum Ground Rules
The views expressed by the members of this Forum do not necessarily reflect the views of SoxProspects, LLC.
© 2003-2024 SoxProspects, LLC
|
|
|
|
|
Forum Home | Search | My Profile | Messages | Members | Help |
Welcome Guest. Please Login or Register.
Recent Posts
|
Post by manfred on Sept 9, 2023 17:31:55 GMT -5
Is it starting to rain hard again? This game gunna get delayed again?
|
|
|
Post by manfred on Sept 9, 2023 17:13:33 GMT -5
Poor decision there by Story. Missed a chance to show veteran leadership and eat the ball. Gave back the run he saved by stopping the grounder. Pressure to be spectacular if he isn’t hitting?
|
|
|
Post by manfred on Sept 9, 2023 16:47:17 GMT -5
No complaints after one re: Sale.
|
|
|
Post by manfred on Sept 9, 2023 12:58:18 GMT -5
Anyone know the timeline on his toe surgery? Is he going to be able to resume activities on a somewhat regular schedule?
Love his attitude.
|
|
|
Post by manfred on Sept 9, 2023 12:36:58 GMT -5
It is stunning to look back at the Sox since 2018: 2019 they finished 19 games out 2020 they finished 16 out (in 60 games) 2021 they finished 8 out 2022 they finished 21 out 2023 they are 17.5 out. So average of a bit over 16 games out of first these past 5 years. Neither competitive nor fun. Add: we can say competitive means making it in as a WC, but if tou are 16 games back of the division winner (with likely one other WC ahead of you from the division, too), you aren’t competitive. You might get *lucky* in the postseason, but you are demonstrably worse than the division winner. Competitive would be a few games behind. If you don’t think the 2021 team was competitive, I’m not sure what to tell you to convince you otherwise, but that’s an odd statement. And it’s similarly odd to take the term “competitive” and apply it relative to other teams when the Red Sox have no control over other teams’ roster, schedule, spending, etc. So the 95-win 2009 Red Sox weren’t competitive because they finished 8 games back of the 103-win Yankees? Well, first, 8 is half of 16. Maybe that is the outer range of not getting blown out in the regular season… I don’t know. Still the 2021 team was not *that* competitive in the regular season. (Do we look back at 2018 and view the Yankees as close to us? They finished 8 back, too). But secondly, yes, “competitive” is relative. It means you can compete evenly with a given opponent. In the playoffs, those given opponents are teams who finished ahead of WC teams. If it is close (or in your example, it is two great teams), they are likely competitive. If they have not been close all season, it is unlikely to be close in the playoffs. Again, this isn’t football, so funny things can happen more often. But that is still fluky, not a sign of being truly competitive. (Consider that the Sox lost the last 3 straight games to the Astros 23-3 in 2021…. order was restored).
|
|
|
Post by manfred on Sept 9, 2023 11:49:41 GMT -5
It is stunning to look back at the Sox since 2018: 2019 they finished 19 games out 2020 they finished 16 out (in 60 games) 2021 they finished 8 out 2022 they finished 21 out
2023 they are 17.5 out.
So average of a bit over 16 games out of first these past 5 years. Neither competitive nor fun.
Add: we can say competitive means making it in as a WC, but if tou are 16 games back of the division winner (with likely one other WC ahead of you from the division, too), you aren’t competitive. You might get *lucky* in the postseason, but you are demonstrably worse than the division winner. Competitive would be a few games behind.
|
|
|
Post by manfred on Sept 9, 2023 10:53:51 GMT -5
Your missing my point. This is not just a Bloom issue. This was and has been an issue over multiple FO’s. Including those who operated during a CBA in which there were no limits on draft spending 29 other teams didn't take those guys. So, not sure how you can put that on the Sox. Even the Braves didn't in rounds 1-3, which means they got lucky. Luck happens. I feel like as unsatisfying as it may be, “luck happens” is the answer to most of this. If the Sox have struggled since before Theo, it is hard to call it organizational, since that encompasses so many eras of approach and staff. Groome is an example of doing the “right” thing — there is a universe he turns into a frontline horse. Maybe the pattern of acquiring Pedro, Beckett, Schilling, and Sale (again, across FOs) suggests that the one general common ground is conceding that aces are rare enough that they are best left to the whole league to develop… then poach. I think it is actually not crazy to try to develop a surplus of player prospects and then trade for pitching. Players are surer bets. Let the Marlins be your incubator. Not saying not trying to develop pitchers at all… just emphasize players. Even now, I’d be willing to sell a decent number of our player prospects for a potentially elite arm.
|
|
|
Post by manfred on Sept 9, 2023 8:53:04 GMT -5
This is a competitive league. Is "fairly respectable" the goal? They may not be the worst team in the league over the last few years. They may have the 20th best pitching development program in the entire world! You might say that is "fairly respectable" even while the many teams who do it better are far ahead of them in the standings. Okay. But the premise of the post is that the Sox have been *unusually bad* at developing pitching, and while that is indisputably true of the team pre-2017 it isn't clear to me that's the case now. On the totally separate topic of whether it would be nice to develop a bunch of aces - I agree, that would be nice. Or… just 2017? Crawford, Houck, and Bello all got added that year. I say this only because it might point more to luck than a shift that year. Yes there are a few guys in the system, but there have been highly ranked pitching prospects who busted before, so that is not different (until they make it).
|
|
|
Post by manfred on Sept 8, 2023 21:09:58 GMT -5
I really look forward to the year the Sox are fun again.
|
|
|
Post by manfred on Sept 8, 2023 20:57:18 GMT -5
I am not on the Walter train.
|
|
|
Post by manfred on Sept 8, 2023 20:34:09 GMT -5
Can’t even hurt Gunner’s ROY credentials. Total failure.
|
|
|
Post by manfred on Sept 8, 2023 18:17:19 GMT -5
Sox pitchers owe Casas a terrible weekend for Henderson.
|
|
|
Post by manfred on Sept 8, 2023 18:16:02 GMT -5
Does Adley look a tiny bit like Fisk?
|
|
|
Post by manfred on Sept 8, 2023 16:55:13 GMT -5
Isn’t WAR replacement at your position? So Casas being many things that many 1b are should not hurt him as much, no? Am I misunderstanding?
That is, am I wrong that the relative value of your defensive position doesn’t matter? And since few 1b are fleet of foot, his running shouldn’t lower his WAR much? Or am I not getting how it is calculated?
|
|
|
Post by manfred on Sept 8, 2023 8:40:22 GMT -5
I know Gumball is beating Casas in WAR, and folks say that seals Casas’s ROY doom. But in the NL, Mookie leads in WAR, OPS, etc… and I think Acuna Jr will still win MVP. So I’m not giving up on Casas. A strong end… who knows?
|
|
|
Post by manfred on Sept 7, 2023 9:20:44 GMT -5
Guys are dumping on Cora’s postgame comments, but I guess I’m not sure what he is supposed to say at this point. He doesn’t owe the fans a story, so why would he put players on blast? Conversely, if he were really honest, he’d start talking about his golfing plans, which might not fly, either. So into the Bull Durham-isms, and on to the next day.
|
|
|
Post by manfred on Sept 6, 2023 20:21:21 GMT -5
Season in a nut shell. Inability to win games they need to win. Even struggled to win the ones they don’t need to win!!!
|
|
|
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…
|
|
|
Post by manfred on Sept 6, 2023 18:04:18 GMT -5
Great… Glasnow is fully operational.
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|