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Post by fenwaythehardway on Oct 2, 2019 6:43:01 GMT -5
With all the talk about labeling Betts "generational" or otherwise, how about that Sosa kid for the Nationals? Between he and Acuna, they will probably spend the next decade or so battling for the MVP award and succeeding Mike Trout as the best players in the game. Sosa is all of 20, has phenominal plate discipline, serious power, and an excellent hit tool. The name you're looking for is Juan Soto.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Oct 1, 2019 16:23:00 GMT -5
If this is relevant then why aren't they paying near that now and why didn't they continue? Because they can win their division by 20 games while staying under the cap. It was a long road for them to get to that point, not one slash-and-burn offseason. Same with the Yankees.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Oct 1, 2019 16:10:31 GMT -5
World Series outcomes ranked best to worst:
Athletics Brewers Twins Nationals Rays Dodgers Astros Atlanta Cardinals Yankees
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Oct 1, 2019 14:03:52 GMT -5
Well it's kind of hard to argue that the Dodgers aren't being run a lot better now than they were then. The current Dodgers are the model that the Red Sox should strive for, not being stupid with money forever. But just maybe, the Red Sox will spend $400 million. Hold your breath. You're the only person throwing that number out there. This "The Red Sox have to spend $400m a year or I can't be happy ever" is an argument completely of your own making. The Dodgers got to where they are financially by being disciplined and sticking to a plan over a period of years. The Red Sox are making a hard left turn to cutting payroll after making several huge unforced errors on contracts within the past year.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Oct 1, 2019 10:07:01 GMT -5
The board is schizoid, absolutely of two minds. Everyone understands that the minor league system remains largely depleted at the upper level. The hope is that some of the carefully targeted lower rung draft choices they've made will help that situation - maybe. Yet lots of the posts are beating them up for wanting to make it back under the cap thresholds so that they can rebuild. Which is it?There's no secrets here. They're in a bind thanks to the current CBA. I hope the MLBPA sticks to their guns but the issues are enormous. The owners will fight like hell to keep the advantage they have and that likely means stalemate for the next round of negotiations. The Sox cannot possibly bank on that new CBA at this stage. The FO would be failing miserably if they weren't doing - wait for it - strategic planning. It stinks that they can't just re-sign everyone without giving it a second thought, but in the current arena the choices are very limited. That's thanks to the lousy bargain the players signed on to. To your first question, I think they should just suck it up and take the draft penalties. To that second bit, I don't understand how you can possibly give the FO any credit for planning when they created this mess by giving $150m to a pitcher who WAS HURT WHEN THEY SIGNED HIM. You're right, they can't just sign everyone without giving a second thought. Drunk off a World Series win, they did exactly that, and now they're out of options.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Oct 1, 2019 9:44:23 GMT -5
I personally think that the entire structure of the world's economy is disgusting and despicable, but if I let that decide my view on every single thing in life, I would never get any enjoyment out of anything. So instead I deal with sports in terms of reality. Expecting the Red Sox or any other team to all of a sudden spend $100 million more than any other team is just not ever going to happen for a billion different reasons. There's really no point in discussing it and especially no point in anguishing over it. If you're anguishing over it, just stop watching sports and any other form of entertainment because there will never be any economic justice in those areas and you're just engaging in something that will make you permanently angry and upset with zero hope for change. Seems like a total waste of time like complaining about the weather. I mean if you cannot accept that the Red Sox are not going to spend $100M more than any other team, when could you possibly be happy about anything? Go ahead and complain forever about the same exact thing until the end of time. Also, the next million CBAs will never include cable revenues in any "what percentage of revenue should the players get?" debate. You can blame that solely on the US government for not enforcing anti-trust laws and continuing with the ridiculously insane anti-trust exemption MLB has. But even if they did not have it, they do not enforce anti-trust laws at all anymore in any industry. All complaints about the Red Sox not spending $300M+ is a CBA problem and a US government problem, not a Red Sox problem. If the Red Sox had literally any other owner on the entire planet, it still would not happen. No offense, but from the overall tone of your posts, your plan for achieving happiness though extinguishing any flicker of optimism from your worldview may not be working as well as you think.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Oct 1, 2019 9:15:47 GMT -5
With that said-- we've spoken about this in the past. No team goes over the cap anymore for 3 straight years. So for them trying to stay under for a 3rd year just as every other team has done lately is not weird. It would be weird if they bucked that trend. You might be in denial because you believe Henry makes enough but it was always "real." Every owner other than Henry has told you (shown you) that. Setting aside the question of if they should go over the cap, if it's so obvious that they won't, that no team would do such a ridiculous thing, any everyone knows it... ok, well then it was some pretty bad planning to end up where they are right now, yeah? There's nothing about the situation they're in now that wasn't 100% foreseeable when they were trying up what little budget space they had left in injury prone/currently injured pitchers last offseason.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Sept 30, 2019 21:24:17 GMT -5
I really do not want to get into the weeds on a minimum wage discussion at all, I just thought it was a strange example of a thing that it's pointless to be mad about. It was $0/hr until someone got mad about it.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Sept 30, 2019 13:40:48 GMT -5
We have this very strategic plan to extricate ourselves from the situation we volunteered for less than a year ago. So strategic, just more strategy than you can believe. Too much, if anything.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Sept 30, 2019 13:31:03 GMT -5
Here's the complete list of active players who are definitely better than Mookie Betts: 1. Mike Trout It's fine to have this view of Betts - I particularly don't, honestly, but it's definitely debatable. The question is if the winning bidder for his services ends up regreting the inevitable massive contract it'll take to sign him - a la Harper, Machado, and a whole host of other sluggers over the years. If/When Betts' statistical seasons start to hover around 5-6 WAR instead of the recent 8-10, the albatross label will get thrown around pretty quickly. I mean... are we taking it as a given that those teams regret those contracts? Both players had pretty good seasons. Also, 5-6 WAR is a fantastic player.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Sept 30, 2019 12:35:28 GMT -5
It is weird to me how obsessed they suddenly seem to be about getting under the luxury tax when they blew through it so deliberately in the first place. Regardless of what the nominal organizational decision tree is, the ultimate veto point on contracts like Sale's or Price's is the guy who's actually responsible for paying them. Henry signed off on all of this. Everyone also knows that all these rules are changing in a couple years anyway. So basically they're sending signals left and right about trading a generational talent because they don't want to take the luxury tax hit for another couple of years? What, do they have a play to finance? I don't know that Betts can be considered a generational talent. There are a pretty large number of very young players who put up incredible numbers this year. He's really good for sure. I do think the Sox should resign him even if it means basically giving away Sale (and Price) to any team that would take them. Here's the complete list of active players who are definitely better than Mookie Betts: 1. Mike Trout
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Sept 30, 2019 9:21:12 GMT -5
Lynn is Morton-ing a bit too. Age 32 and he had the best fastball velo, swinging strike rate, and strikeout rate of his career. Rangers should really flip him in the offseason, but who knows what they're doing anymore.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Sept 30, 2019 9:05:45 GMT -5
So, right now, despite the underachieving, the Red Sox are a middle of the pack AL team that should have been a bit better, but instead will lose some marquis players, and have no money to bring in the talent that is needed, and little help from the farm at this point - I would expect Dalbec to be the one prospect that can step in and contribute. If John Henry is so hell bent on getting below $208 million, the term "bridge year" might be a kind description of what 2020 will look like. And what sucks is, that I really don't believe, with all the revenue that they generate, that they can't afford to stay well above the luxury tax line. I won't call Henry cheap, because they do spend more than other teams, and they look around and see a team that pays the highest in the league while other teams have far lower payrolls and far more victories in 2019. I get that. They want a Moneyball GM, the modern version, so I guess we'll be seeing WAR/Win $ or whatever the stat is called rather than actual victories be the measuring stick going forward until the time they feel they're close enough to be in a position to go for it. Until their farm system improves drastically it's hard to see that day coming really soon. I don't think the Sox will really be a force in the league until after the upcoming strike settles. It is weird to me how obsessed they suddenly seem to be about getting under the luxury tax when they blew through it so deliberately in the first place. Regardless of what the nominal organizational decision tree is, the ultimate veto point on contracts like Sale's or Price's is the guy who's actually responsible for paying them. Henry signed off on all of this. Everyone also knows that all these rules are changing in a couple years anyway. So basically they're sending signals left and right about trading a generational talent because they don't want to take the luxury tax hit for another couple of years? What, do they have a play to finance?
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Sept 30, 2019 8:43:20 GMT -5
Cole led in ERA and FIP. In 10 2/3 more innings, Verlander had 26 fewer strikeouts, 6 fewer walks, and seven more homers allowed. Cole had a .276 BABIP against. Verlander's was .219 which is partially skill but there's an awful lot of luck involved there as well. It's Cole for me. It's weird how close those two are, yet there's no real argument for Verlander that I can see. Cole is uniformly a tiny bit ahead everywhere. ERA, FIP, xFIP, K-BB%, SIERA, take your pick, it's Cole by a nose. Oh yeah, and Lance Lynn is somehow right there with them. Sure, why not.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Sept 30, 2019 8:29:32 GMT -5
$15 an hour is 1/10th of $300K. And it's still not even close to a livable wage in any city. You're right, they shouldn't have bothered.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Sept 30, 2019 7:59:26 GMT -5
Expecting the Red Sox to spend $300M is as pointless as being furious that the minimum wage for all these corporations that are sitting on many billions in cash isn't $300K per year. They could easily afford it. But that's not how the world works, never has been. Just a total waste of time. It sucks that billionaires want to make money, but that's why they're billionaires. So... not pointless at all? www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/7/13/20690266/seattle-minimum-wage-15-dollarsI don't know why so many people think "things will never change" is some kind of transcendent wisdom when speaking of things that have changed throughout history and continue to change all the time. Speaking of which, JDM is carrying a lot of water for ownership when he buys into this framing: Someone from the MLBPA really needs to explain to JDM what John Henry and co are "able" to afford.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Sept 29, 2019 9:53:13 GMT -5
This sounds exactly right to me. I don't think he was MANDATED to sell for MLB-talent explicitly, but he quite clearly felt pressure to do so, and that probably wasn't just paranoia. Even so, he didn't do a good job on a talent evaluation level either. The Lackey trade has been discussed, they didn't trade Uehara before free agency, he spent too much money on Hanley and Sandoval, and--for a guy with a win-now mandate--he didn't seem to have much sense of what minor league talent he should be selling high on. He did an outstanding job building a system, but really struggled to turn that system into MLB wins. So yeah, I think ownership had a hand in some of the problems in the decision-making process. But the fact that Cherington hasn't gotten a top job kind of indicates to me the level at which the rest of the league thinks the poor decisions themselves were Cherington's. If that makes sense. I was more of a Cherington apologist at the time, but now that the dust from that era has settled a bit... yeah, those were some bad deals. Whatever pressure you're under, at some point you need to make a trade that isn't a disaster. It kind of makes me appreciate what Billy Beane does. Granted I think he has a much more harmonious relationship with ownership, but it is the same sort of pressure to get creative and find a way to improve your team without much room in the budget. The same season Lackey was traded, the A's traded for Jeff Samardzija, along with Jason Hammel, giving up Billy McKinney, Addison Russell, and Dan Straily. They got 111 innings of 3.14 ERA ball out of him. With a year of arb left, they traded him that offseason (with Michael Ynoa) to the White Sox for Chris Bassitt, Josh Phegley, Rangel Ravelo, and Marcus Semien. Semien was immediately the most valuable player in any of the transactions we're talking about and will complete a 7.6 fWAR season today. So for those keeping score at home, during the 2014 season, Beane got a much better return on buying Samardzija than Cherington got on selling Lackey.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Sept 28, 2019 19:02:16 GMT -5
This is the first I'd ever heard Bundy was a possibility, and I'm pretty sure if it were true we'd have heard it A LOT over the years. The decision to get MLB-ready talent in return at that '14 deadline has been mostly reported as Cherington's, but it's hard to know for sure. The only name I remember hearing specifically that they turned down because they wanted MLB talent was Stephen Piscotty. For a guy who clearly understood the value of prospects, Cherington's sudden revelation that trading for MLB was the new market inefficiency (narrator: it was not) always smelled a little fishy to me. My own feeling was that it probably wasn't something he was specifically ordered to do, but that there was an implicit pressure to win right away or lose his job (which of course is exactly what happened).
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Sept 28, 2019 18:52:26 GMT -5
A's blow an 89.7% Win Probability (up a run in the bottom of the ninth, 1 out, nobody on) and get walked off. Now tied with the Rays, but they have the tiebreaker for home field. The Rays have better pitching matchups this weekend, so there's a real chance the A's could blow it. There would be no justice if the Rays' fans get even a single home playoff game. Of course, neither team would seem to have a prayer against the Astros.
I mean probably not, but it's worth remembering that the As have improved their pitching staff a lot in the past month or so. Manaea is back in the rotation, while Puk and Luzardo are being used as multi-inning relievers. Combined with what they already had, that's the kind of bullpen you could ride all the way through October. Again, not the favorites, but sneakily more of a threat than I think they're being given credit for.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Sept 28, 2019 17:40:52 GMT -5
By the way, changing the ball to reduce homers (either by somehow reversing the streamlining that has caused the surge, or reducing the liveliness) without doing anything to reduce the number of strikeouts would be a huge disaster. It's significantly harder now to rally by stringing together a series of hits. The new way you come from three runs down is not to get four hits and a walk in an inning, but one hit and a walk and a three run bomb. You reduce the number of homers to the old level while keeping strikeouts at the current levels, and scoring goes down and it becomes much harder to rally. None of this is speculation. I built a model that explains 94% of annual attendance since the end of the steroid era, and the home run frequency is a big positive. It cuts the decline in attendance due to the decrease in contact percentage almost in half. You think the current game is less interesting than it used to be (which is 100% true), imagine it without the hope that almost anyone in the lineup can get you back into a game by going yard. Epic fail.
You have to cut strikeouts without boosting walks, and the way to do that is to make the ball heavier and harder to spin. It doesn't change the game at all for hitters and for fans -- every pitcher just seems a bit less good than he used to be. Pitchers have only a small adjustment -- since many have trained with heavier balls, I think it's less of a change than lowering the mound was in 1969.
The game is always evolving. Once home runs go down, batters would stop swinging for the fences on every pitch so strikeouts would surely go down. There might be some short term pain, but the players will have to adjust to whatever is done to the ball. Leaguewide K rates: 1980: 12.5 % 1990: 14.9 % 2000: 16.5 % 2014 20.4% 2019: 22.9% Rising K rates really aren't a juiced ball thing.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Sept 28, 2019 10:43:17 GMT -5
Raise all minor league pay scales from AA down by 100%. In exchange all players signing under age 20 would get one more year before becoming rule 5 eligible. I'm glad you brought up minor league salaries, because it's a real problem (unlike, say, defensive shifts) and fixing it could potentially have a significant and positive effect on the future of the sport, not to mention the actual lives of human beings (again, unlike the shift). But as long as we're just making up solutions, let's go big: Radical expansion. Eliminate the minor leagues. Have something like 90-120 independent pro teams and a relegation system. Minor league compensation solved, but wait, there's more. All the stuff we're talking about with banning the shift, automating the zone... that stuff all just represents slightly better maintenance of a slowly declining empire. You can prop it up for a good long while on the momentum it has, but if you really want baseball to flourish and grow in the future, I think you need to radically rethink the whole enterprise. The world now is personalized media and individually targeted advertisements, so don't fear regionalization, lean into it. Local identity still has a pull that baseball in the abstract doesn't no matter what kind of ball they're using or how fast the pace of play is.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Sept 28, 2019 8:56:31 GMT -5
It's not even clear that Darwinzon has enough control to make it as a reliever, and while I know scouts have given the breaking ball good grades, it hasn't actually played that well in the majors (the fastball actually gets more whiffs even though he throws it three times as often). So sub-par command, a secondary pitch that's been more passable than good, and no third pitch in sight. It's a reliever profile all the way.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Sept 28, 2019 8:36:01 GMT -5
So... the team has no major league depth, no depth in the upper minors, they "need" (love being lied to, guys) to cut payroll, but they're not going to gut the major league roster and since they just got rid of Dombrowski, they're also presumably not looking to trade from the lower minors either.
Seems like they're really following that old engineering wisdom, on time, on budget, and on spec: choose all three.
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Sept 27, 2019 12:17:10 GMT -5
Even some of the less useful and arbitrary stats are worth celebrating when you have a lot of them. Like, someone with 83 RBI might very well be having a better season than someone with 110, so it's not something that I think is a great point of comparison in something like an MVP discussion. But if you have 100 RBI the chances are very good that you're having a good season, so I'm not gonna begrudge celebrating it. Same with 20 wins. Eduardo Rodriguez isn't as good as Jacob deGrom, but I'd be thrilled to see him get to 20 wins. Saves are dumb though, don't celebrate those.I wish Bobby Thigpen's single season saves record was still holding up. It was truly one of the great monuments to statistical meaninglessness. (7.1 k/9, 3.2 bb/9. Finished fourth in the Cy Young voting and fifth in the MVP.)
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Post by fenwaythehardway on Sept 27, 2019 11:35:47 GMT -5
Seems to me that the "ooh a big round number" attitude is more old-school than anything. Now if he was .1 away from a 5.0 bWAR season or something... I know you are kidding around, but this is actually one of my issues with WAR... not as a kind of meta-stat, but there is a thrill in the park when your guy is one away from a cool round number... the pulse picks up at two strikes etc. I can’t imagine working out the math as a fan in the bleachers to get psyched about the .1 WAR. What would a guy have to do to get that? I don’t even know. It just lacks the mystique, the romance. I’ll always take 300 Ks, 200 hits whatever over an abstract data point. But I am an aesthete. I think a beautiful game is bigger than winning and losing. Edit: ok, who am I kidding.... my team winning is a factor in the beauty of a game. I’m not insane. WAR doesn't work at all as a milestone stat: 1. There's no canonical version. A guy celebrating 100 bWAR might have 98 fWAR. 2. You can go backwards. Albert Pujols might get to celebrate passing 100 WAR two or three times! 3. WAR methodologies get tweaked periodically. A guy might pass 100 WAR in February if that's when Fangraphs changes their formula. So, it's unusable for round number milestones. I don't particularly see that as a failing of WAR, it just isn't intended for that purpose.
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