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danr
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Post by danr on Jun 14, 2015 11:56:59 GMT -5
I would deal Buchholz as soon as possible, while he still is pitching decently and has good value.
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danr
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Posts: 1,871
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Post by danr on Jun 14, 2015 11:51:04 GMT -5
Some of you may recall that there was quite a debate here over Iglesias when he was playing for the Sox in 2013 and hitting well above .300 (he was at .330 when he was traded and then hit .259 for Detroit). Iglesias' average was buoyed by the fact he kept getting cheap hits, dribblers, bunts, slow rollers, etc. A lot of people thought he really would not hit as well over time. His average at Detroit sort of supported that argument. There were a number who preferred Stephen Drew.
Of course, now he is hitting .335 with Detroit and could be on the All-Star team. Life's like that sometimes.
I wasn't happy about him being traded because I never liked Drew. However, the Sox won the World Series without him and I think Sox management made good moves that year. Not so much since then...
It is fun to think how the Sox might be different today if Iglesias was at SS and Bogaerts had been moved to 3B in the minors before it might have become a problem for him.
--- I am happy to see Shaw with the team. I hope it is not just a one game thing. I would like to see him get a tryout at 1B. He has been hitting over .350 the last couple of weeks.
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danr
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Post by danr on Jun 13, 2015 17:13:58 GMT -5
I continue to believe that the real Sandoval has not yet played for the Sox. I think he is under-performing his capabilities. It's not uncommon for this to happen to players who sign big contracts with new teams. And this is even in a different league where he doesn't know the pitchers or the ballparks.
I think he will do better but it may take him a good share of the season to make the adjustments.
There has been very little comment here about Castillo. I haven't seen him play, but from listening to the radio and looking at the stats, it appears that he is a good player but maybe not the exceptional one who was expected. Does anyone else have that impression?
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danr
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Post by danr on Jun 13, 2015 17:07:46 GMT -5
Is there any verification of these wild numbers being reported?
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danr
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Posts: 1,871
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Post by danr on Jun 13, 2015 16:57:34 GMT -5
After all that Ortiz has meant to the Sox they aren't about to humiliate him. It seems like he is nearing the end. I think the Sox should and will allow him to end his career gracefully, maybe gradually reducing his playing time. In fact, that seems to have started already. Then they cut a deal after the season that ends his career. He's been a great player, a Hall of Famer, and we are going to miss him. Now, if he starts hitting fastballs again, all bets are off.
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danr
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Post by danr on Jun 13, 2015 9:09:36 GMT -5
Hanley said recently he does not want to return to the infield. He doesn't think his body can handle it. He is an outfielder or a DH, nothing else. I think he is the likely successor to Ortiz. It is just a matter of time, and that time may be sooner rather than later.
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danr
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Post by danr on Jun 12, 2015 23:43:46 GMT -5
While normally I do not think games like tonight's should prompt rash actions, I think it has become painfully obvious that there is something terribly wrong with Napoli, and it isn't the way he holds the bat. I think they should put him on the disabled list for a general checking out and bring up Shaw. He can't possibly hit any worse than Napoli.
I also think Hanley probably should be disabled to let him recover from his injuries and JBJ should be brought up.
It's also time for Johnson to get his tryout, in place of Kelly.
The team needs some fresh blood and a little shaking up.
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danr
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Posts: 1,871
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Post by danr on Jun 12, 2015 17:20:29 GMT -5
I think I was mistaken about Hoyer. After writing that post I did what I should have done before writing, a little research. Lajoie and Shipley apparently were the movers and shakers in that deal. I wonder if that had anything to do with Shipley's departure later? I read several post mortems on that deal that have been written in recent years and they all generally conclude that it was a good deal for both teams, but that the Red Sox got more tangible benefits - i.e. a WS championship. The deal now might look worse if Hanley had continued on the tangent of his first few years, which might have taken him to the Hall of Fame. Shipley's departure (in 2011, which was seven years later) was because he was kind of awful as the Int'l Scouting Director. I've never known much about the internal workings of the Sox management. You guys are much better informed. For some reason I had been under the impression that Shipley was good at his job but didn't get along with some of the team's management. That impression may have been formed before Dice-K cratered. Didn't he also get Tazawa?
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danr
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Post by danr on Jun 12, 2015 16:51:48 GMT -5
You have your history rather mixed up. The trade occurred when Theo was not with the Sox. It was during the time after he quit because of his rift with Lucchino and before he came back. I think this deal was done by Hoyer, not opposed by him, obviously with agreement of the higher ups. Hanley was considered a bit of a head case at the time and he had not done as well as expected at AA. It was considered a hell of a deal for the Sox at the time. And I disagree completely with your contention that long term the Sox would have been better off. The trade won them a world championship. Long term would have meant not winning one. Mike Lowell was a throw-in, a salary dump, and he turned out to be a prize for the Sox. Actually I know Theo technically wasn't with the Sox then, and was probably touring with Pearl Jam, but I have trouble believing he didn't know what was going on at all times. I remember reading that Cherington and Hoyer were against the deal while the veteran guys like Lajoie, Craig Shipley, and Lucchino were in favor of the deal. The younger guys didn't want to give up on Hanley or Sanchez. I think I was mistaken about Hoyer. After writing that post I did what I should have done before writing, a little research. Lajoie and Shipley apparently were the movers and shakers in that deal. I wonder if that had anything to do with Shipley's departure later? I read several post mortems on that deal that have been written in recent years and they all generally conclude that it was a good deal for both teams, but that the Red Sox got more tangible benefits - i.e. a WS championship. The deal now might look worse if Hanley had continued on the tangent of his first few years, which might have taken him to the Hall of Fame.
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danr
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Posts: 1,871
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Post by danr on Jun 12, 2015 16:37:58 GMT -5
I love the playing of the game of baseball. When I can watch it I look at all the little things that go on that make it such a complex game. I am happier when the Sox win, but as long as there is another game coming I'm not despondent when they lose. And I probably started following the Sox long before you were born when the team truly was mediocre, year after year, and with management that made the current gang look like geniuses. Danr, then I'm a contemporary of yours. My first recollection of paying any attention to Major League Baseball was the 7th game of the 1955 World Series, and I first started following the Sox with any interest during The Kid's miracle season in 1957. Been paying attention ever since. I've been to relatively few MLB games live since the mid-90's. I was soured by the strike and the greed on all sides. Would much rather go to minor league games and coach my son's -- now grandson's -- baseball team. Unfortunately, my grandson age 14, just finished his season, and since his team may be breaking up after this year as various members of the team go to various high schools and start playing school baseball, my coaching career could be over. All things come to an end. On my Facebook page today up popped a photo of one of my two nephews and his two sons at Camden Yards yesterday. (I started a trend and all my younger relatives are Sox fans). They live near Buffalo but are in Maryland this weekend because their traveling baseball team is playing at Cal Ripken stadium in Aberdeen. The two boys are baseball phenoms with one of them I am sure wanting to play for the Sox - and he may. It is a little too early yet to gauge his potential but I am told it could be quite good. I sure would have liked to have been in Baltimore with them. We moved from Maryland to Oregon two and a half years ago so that we could be here to see our grandchild born. My wife had cancer and died last year and now I am marooned here, close to my daughter and grandchild, which is nice, but really missing the East Coast. The only baseball in the entire Portland area is a low level minor league team off in a suburb on the other side of the city, and Seattle has the MLB and NESN games blacked out most of the time. But I grew up listening to baseball on the radio and it still is fun.
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danr
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Posts: 1,871
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Post by danr on Jun 12, 2015 13:41:07 GMT -5
I love the playing of the game of baseball. When I can watch it I look at all the little things that go on that make it such a complex game. I am happier when the Sox win, but as long as there is another game coming I'm not despondent when they lose. And I probably started following the Sox long before you were born when the team truly was mediocre, year after year, and with management that made the current gang look like geniuses. Given your Red Sox fan veteran status - I'm assuming going back to the dark days before the Impossible Dream - then I'm really, really glad that you've got to enjoy 3 Championships. If a person is 30 years old, they've probably started following the Sox sometime around 1995 or so meaning that you waited all of 9 years to see them win in it all, and are pretty used to the idea of Sox as Champions, but if you've followed the team for a long time (for me I go back to 1980 when it comes to following the Sox), and you witnessed 1986 Games 6 and 7 (not to mention 1978, Game 7 1975, etc, then I think perhaps you appreciate the Championships in a different sort of way. Ted Williams was still playing for the Sox when I started following them in the later 1950s. I remember his last several years, including his .388 season. I read his book and became a Red Sox fan, helped by my next door neighbor who was a quasi-father to me and was an avid Yankee fan. His father had been a congressman and the two of them were guests in the locker room of the 1927 Yankees and they came out with a ball signed by all the players, which my friend still had when I was a kid. We had a great deal of fun listening to Yankee-Red Sox games and arguing baseball. The Yankees were much better but the Sox got their licks now and then. They had some good players, but their pitching usually was pretty bad. P.S. If you really want to know what it was like to be a lifetime Red Sox fan in Boston in the years before a WS victory, there is a great book I highly recommend, by the late great mystery writer, George V. Higgins: "The Progress of the Seasons: Forty Years of Baseball in Our Town," published in 1989 by Henry Holt. It is my all-time favorite baseball book. He was an incredibly gifted writer.
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danr
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Posts: 1,871
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Post by danr on Jun 12, 2015 13:28:59 GMT -5
I am amazed at the scouting that is being done and the ranking of players, as many as 500. Considering the huge range of quality and competition among school systems and college/university conferences, it is an incredible task to try to differentiate among players with similar stats and performances.
Even more, there is much going on in amateur ball, the traveling teams of young kids and teenagers that are augmenting the development of players. I have two grand nephews who live in the Buffalo area and both are baseball phenoms. They travel all over the East competing in various tournaments and they aren't in high school yet. During the winter they are hitting and throwing in indoor facilities. So even though it is a cold weather climate, they are playing an enormous amount of baseball and developing skills much earlier than it was possible to do when I was a kid.
I am finding it harder to assess drafts now than in the past when, for the most part, the best players were gone very early. Now because of the ridiculous structure of the draft, and its financial constraints, there probably are better players - at least players with higher ceilings - being drafted after the 10th round than those drafted between the third or fourth and tenth rounds.
Most teams seem to be following the same strategies - of getting the best player available in the first couple of rounds, but then drafting the college players with less leverage and who are likely to sign for well under slot, with maybe one or two exceptions. Then after the 10th round, the high ceiling high school kids who aren't yet superstars start getting drafted.
I do not understand the competitive balance picks. How does St. Louis get one?
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danr
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Posts: 1,871
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Post by danr on Jun 12, 2015 12:48:26 GMT -5
Do you enjoy watching overpaid mediocre baseball players performing? I love the playing of the game of baseball. When I can watch it I look at all the little things that go on that make it such a complex game. I am happier when the Sox win, but as long as there is another game coming I'm not despondent when they lose. And I probably started following the Sox long before you were born when the team truly was mediocre, year after year, and with management that made the current gang look like geniuses.
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danr
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Posts: 1,871
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Post by danr on Jun 12, 2015 12:42:44 GMT -5
I assume you realize that even to win the second Wild Card spot, the Sox probably would have to win about 88 games? I'm not sure that's true. I suspect 88 wins might come close to winning the division, and 85-86 wins might win a second Wild Card spot. That may be the case, but the fewest wins by the second Wild Card team so far in its brief existence was 88, I believe. And it appears that there are about five really good teams this year, maybe six who are playing better than 85-win ball. In any case, as presently constituted, this Red Sox team is not going to come close to 85 wins.
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danr
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Post by danr on Jun 12, 2015 11:24:19 GMT -5
Does anyone understand why Bautista is taking up a roster spot that might be filled by someone with some promise? I just looked at his career and what is most remarkable about it is how long it has lasted without any performances of note. Even if he pitched now as well as the best time in his career he still couldn't improve the Sox pitching. So what is the point?
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danr
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Post by danr on Jun 12, 2015 11:20:34 GMT -5
I assume you realize that even to win the second Wild Card spot, the Sox probably would have to win about 88 games? To do that, the team would have to go 61-40 the rest of the way, a winning pace of .604, which is higher than the winning percentage of any team currently.
Things like that have happened in baseball, even with the Sox once upon a time. But with this team, so many things would have to improve that it truly would be a miracle if it occurred.
The only way I can imagine this happening now is if the Sox traded all their good prospects in the minors in the next few weeks for established quality major league players and replaced the position players who are not performing, as well as adding at least one ace starting pitcher and maybe two. That would be so out of character, and so short-sighted, that the odds of it happening are close to zero.
That is particularly true because the foundation for a multi-year championship caliber team already exists and that team is not far away. Maybe not next year but very possibly beginning the year after.
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danr
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Post by danr on Jun 12, 2015 9:25:58 GMT -5
Tazawa is not going to bring another Rodriguez. That kind of deal happens only about once in a decade. It takes about that long for GMs to stop thinking that they might make the same kind of mistake that Baltimore made.
The truth is the Sox have no players we would want them to sell who would bring significant value from other teams. If the Sox are going to make trades that add value to the team, value will have to be given up, and that means the top prospects or the young guys on the team now.
Barring a turnaround very soon, a significant improvement in the hitting,this season is going to be lost. If that becomes obvious, then some players should be jettisoned. But there won't much value coming in return. The value will come, if it comes, from making room for some guys at Pawtucket, or by making bigger deals that include good players on both sides.
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danr
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Post by danr on Jun 12, 2015 9:14:49 GMT -5
It was Lucchino and Bill Lajoie who were proponents of the Beckett/Lowell for Hanley/Sanchez deal. Hoyer and Cherington (and Theo) were against it. It worked in 2007, but long-term the Sox were better off had they not made the deal. Still they wouldn't trade back their Championship, though. That was a good deal for both teams. You have your history rather mixed up. The trade occurred when Theo was not with the Sox. It was during the time after he quit because of his rift with Lucchino and before he came back. I think this deal was done by Hoyer, not opposed by him, obviously with agreement of the higher ups. Hanley was considered a bit of a head case at the time and he had not done as well as expected at AA. It was considered a hell of a deal for the Sox at the time. And I disagree completely with your contention that long term the Sox would have been better off. The trade won them a world championship. Long term would have meant not winning one. Mike Lowell was a throw-in, a salary dump, and he turned out to be a prize for the Sox.
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danr
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Post by danr on Jun 11, 2015 13:26:21 GMT -5
Also, pitchers are throwing more first and second pitch strikes and the Sox are receiving fewer walks than in any season in many years. I calculated the average walks per game for the Sox each year back through 2003. This year the average is 2.85, the lowest rate in that period. Last year's rate of 2.92 was the second lowest. The rate has been dropping since 2009 when it was 4.07. The rates in the World Series years: 2013: 3.59, 2007: 4.25. 2004: 4.07. The drop from the peak year of 2007 to now is nearly one and half walks a game, or about 30 percent fewer walks. The trend you identify is somewhat obscured by the fact that there are fewer plate appearances per game these days, as strikeouts are up and hits are down. As a percentage of all plate appearances, the Red Sox offense's walk percentage is down somewhat from its heyday, but not as much as the above would suggest: 2015: 8.5% 2014: 8.6% 2013: 9.1% 2012: 6.9% 2011: 9.0% 2010: 9.2% 2009: 10.4% 2008: 10.1% 2007: 10.7% They look different but they aren't. Walks per game is a numerical result of the percentage of walks per plate appearance. And there really has not been a statistically significant decline in plate appearances, at least for the Sox. They had 6358 plate appearances in 2010, 6166 in 2012, 6392 in 2013, 6226 in 2014 and at their present rate they will have 6325 in 2015. The average number of plate appearances per game: 2004 40.2 2007 39.67 2010 39.25 2012 38.1 2013 39.4 2014 38.4 2015 39.0 Since 2007 there has been a 32 percent decline in the number of walks per game but only a 1.6 percent decline in plate appearances per game. I think that shows that the decline in walks is related to something other than the decline in plate appearances, which has been entirely insignificant. And the decline in walks does not track with hitting, which has been up and down during this period.
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danr
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Post by danr on Jun 11, 2015 11:11:58 GMT -5
There are a couple of developments this year that I think are partly responsible for the hitting problems of some of the Sox players, particularly those known for good strike zone judgment and patient batting, such as Ortiz and Napoli and maybe Betts.
The strike zone has changed. It is lower and sometimes wider than anytime I can recall. And maybe as a result of trying to adjust to the new strike zone, umpires are not as consistent in their strike calling.
Also, pitchers are throwing more first and second pitch strikes and the Sox are receiving fewer walks than in any season in many years. I calculated the average walks per game for the Sox each year back through 2003. This year the average is 2.85, the lowest rate in that period. Last year's rate of 2.92 was the second lowest. The rate has been dropping since 2009 when it was 4.07. The rates in the World Series years: 2013: 3.59, 2007: 4.25. 2004: 4.07. The drop from the peak year of 2007 to now is nearly one and half walks a game, or about 30 percent fewer walks.
I can't watch many of the games here, but I have listened to the radio broadcasts of nearly all of them. The radio guys constantly are commenting on the strike zone and, in particular, the problems that Napoli and Ortiz seem to be having with it. It seems that most of the time Napoli has two strikes on him before he swings the bat. Napoli never has been known for complaining about the calls of the umpires but he is doing it quite a bit this year. Ortiz always has been a complainer but the calls this year seem to be bothering him more than ever.
I think the hitters are having a very hard time adjusting to the changes, in part because the new strike zone is not consistent. It isn't clear how far below the knee it has gone, and it changes from umpire to umpire and from inning to inning.
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danr
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Post by danr on Jun 10, 2015 20:32:45 GMT -5
Has anyone noticed that whatever it was that Napoli fixed seems to be broken again? It's like he isn't even in the lineup.
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danr
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Posts: 1,871
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Post by danr on Jun 10, 2015 17:35:09 GMT -5
Of the 39 Sox draftees, 12 are from high school: 1 pitcher, 5 OFs, 2 2B, 1 SS, 1 3B, 2 C.
Overall: 11 OFs, 1 1B, 3 2B, 2 SS, 2 3B, 3 C, 12 RHP, 5 LHP
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danr
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Posts: 1,871
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Post by danr on Jun 10, 2015 12:34:50 GMT -5
Nelson is the first SS drafted by the Sox. The kid can hit but that high leg kick may be a problem against better pitching.
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danr
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Post by danr on Jun 9, 2015 21:42:50 GMT -5
This is only the third time since 1999 that a shortstop was not drafted in the first ten rounds. The other times were in 2013 and 2003. I guess they figure they have enough shortstops for a while.
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danr
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Post by danr on Jun 9, 2015 17:15:38 GMT -5
He's another academic all-american. Played two summers in the Cape. Good hitter.
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