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I put prospects. It seems unrealistic that a player like Garza could be included. Packaging him with Lackey would be my 3rd choice, but I hate the idea of Lackey being paid the majority of his salary to pitch for another team. I think he will bounce back. Obviously the biggest problem is the clubhous piece, but the situation isn't as bad as people are making it out to be. The sky is not falling and this team would be able to win with some key additions and a new manager even if they can't move Lackey.

They didn't hate Theo Epstein as much as you were convinced they did.

I saw somewhere that someone from one of the minor league ranking systems said he would probably be in the top 15 for the Sox. Not top 5 necessarily. That's probably a combination of his age and ability, rather than his current ability. He's almost MLB ready but the Sox have guys with much higher upside.

If you haven't noticed there haven't been a lot of managers hired yet this offseason. The Sox aren't just sitting like deer in headlights unsure what to do about managers and players. The World Series is still happening and the offseason has barely started yet. No need to panic. Also, Cherington is regarded as one of the best GM candidates in the game. He has lots of experience in ml front office work and has been part of a successful organization for years. Don't let the grass is greener mentality take over here... Things aren't falling out of the sky.

Let's use this as an opportunity to use the advanced metrics, shall we? You say "a guy like" Markakis. Okay, following the 2010 season, here are the best RF in the game from 2008-2010: Jayson Werth Ichiro Suzuki Chin-Soo Choo JD Drew Nick Markakis So aside from not being available, he was also the 5th best RF in baseball leading up to that time. He was the 11th best OF during that time, ahead of guys like Granderson, Tori Hunter, Jason Bay, etc., He's not just some guy. That said, between 2008 and 2010 do you know who the 2nd most valuable OF was?

Let's see!

Plenty of people can explain the deficiencies in Bill James' stuff. That doesn't make the task of baseball analysis misguided. It just says that James didn't get everything right.

I would love it if someone would take ORS up on his request... Top 10 players off the top of your head, based on observation of the game... I don't think he's trying to play gotcha, just trying to test/make a point.

Fair enough man. I realize you are typing in a second language (or, at least, I think I've figured that out!). You do amazingly with that. Seriously. You explain yourself very, very well!

RBI are correlated with having scored runs. They are not at all predictive of scoring runs in the future. If David Ortiz has 101 RBI this year and goes to Seattle next year, Seattle would be wrong to value RBI as the strongest indicator of how he will fit into their lineup. You are reading "correlated with producing runs" differently than how I (and ORS, I susped) are talking about it. It is probably more complex than it is worth getting into here, but it is at the very foundation of how teams construct themselves these days and it is beyond dispute. No self-respecting GM or owner would look at RBIs by an individual player as the best measure of that player's value, and all teams rate a players offensive value as that players ability to create runs. They may look at total runs scored as a good indicator of the past strength of the team, but they aren't going to use RBI the way you are talking about it. Your use of RBI is self-referential and, as ORS said, it basically describes itself. My question still stands: why not just use runs? If you are trying to show how many runs a team scored, just use runs. There's no need to use RBI for what you are talking about. I appreciate your intention to not disrespect me, and I don't feel disrespected. I'm not worried about being wrong here. To me this is akin to someone arguing that the Earth is flat because when they put a ball down the ball doesn't naturally roll this way or that, as it would if one theorized that the Earth were a sphere. The Earth is a sphere (or close to it) even if it appears flat. RBI's don't correlate strongly with player value, and player value is strongly based on the ability to create runs. I'm not twisting things, I'm stating a fairly complex fact that is backed up again and again in almost all literature about baseball post-1990. Your chart shows that teams that scored the most runs also had the most RBI. That is intuitive. It is very different from saying that the players who are most valuable are the ones who have the most RBI.

If you had read any of my posts you already read that I agree with you. I'm not "defending" Lackey. I'm pointing out that him being "terrible" and "done" are different from him being the worst in the league. There could be 30 pitchers in the league that are "terrible" and "done" but that doesn't make them the worst in the league. It makes me sick to even play devil's advocate here, believe me.

I'm not hoping to convert you. You understand what I'm talking about and don't use RBI or average as the best way to measure value. WAR doesn't correlate to everything, but it does a better job than Wins or Average. That's the "so".

You don't need to post anything about RBI to answer the question. Take any statistic. If it is a good statistic shouldn't it have an intuitive component to the results it produces? You watch enough baseball to know that a list of those players with the best averages are not the same as the list that you would create, by mind-power alone, of the best offensive players in the league. Same thing with pitcher wins. Sometimes they will match, often times they will not.

No, you don't, but if you were arguing that RBI were the number one stat to predict the best players in the league wouldn't you want the list of top RBI guys to at least resemble your pre-determined list of best players? It seems there should be a correlation if you're saying it is the best stat for measuring the value of an offensive player.

I wrote that about his WAR. "In my mind"... You don't think there's a CHANCE that you are slightly colored by having watched more of Lackey's starts than the other crappy pitchers this year? I'm not contesting that he was a horrible pitcher. I'm also not contesting that he could have been the worst in the league. I'm just saying that I personally didn't watch every pitcher in the league this year and neither did you. I watched more of Lackey than most, and spent more time being disgusted by Lackey than by most other bad pitchers. There's a strong chance that going solely by my opinion would tend toward me favoring or disliking people I watched more. That's all.

Find the list of players with the best WAR over each of the past few years. Tell me that list doesn't correlate very strongly with your impression of who the best players in the league are. Then find the list of RBI leaders. Does that list correlate as strongly with best players? No stat covers everything, but they are getting better and better and are taking more and more facets of the game into account... including the ability to move a runner over, sacrifice when needed, draw walks, not make outs, hit for power, hit for average, field, not make errors, on and on and on.

RBI correlate with a team scoring runs, but they don't correlate with an individual player's impact of creating runs because they do not happen independent of other factors. As ORS said, obviously they correlate with a team scoring runs. So it can tell you that a team that scored lots of runs had lots of RBI. It doesn't tell you that a guy with lots of RBI is necessarily more valuable than a guy with a high AVG or a high OBP. They don't relate well to one another and the non-RBI stats correlate better with producing runs than RBI do.