Dojji

Offensively he is. Defensively he's OK -- not a liability, not an asset. The overall package is fantastic, especially because of how hard it is to find offense at all, much less at shortstop. However, "he's a great shortstop" doesn't address my concerns unless you're telling me he's a great defender. What I'm worried about the is purely, defense because we have a number of contact pitchers on the roster, especially in the pen. We've seen this year what happens when contact pitchers are paired with a defense that isn't a major team focus and then relied on to do the carrying. Bringing in a defender to cover short plus one ace to head up the rotation is going to cost a whole lot less than bringing the 2 aces we need to turn this rotation around without paying attention to the fielding.

Our defense is not pretty darn good. It is pretty darn average in fact.

That's the beauty of a guy like Zobrist. If everyone else plays up to their potential you could stuff him into first base and call it good, and if not, you have options to take bad players out of the lineup

You know I just had a weird thought on another thread. We know we need another bat and most of us recognize that the defense needs to be tightened somewhat, and we could always use some depth. Is it time to make a move on Ben Zobrist? Zobrist could solve a lot of our niggling little worries about this and that because of his tremendous versatility and a bat that would upgrade our lineup wherever he was stashed. Putting him at third base would probably upgrade us defensively on the left side like I want, while also putting a 15-20 HR bat with a good OBP behind it into the lineup at the same time. And we'd still have Holt, who's arguably even more versatile (more experience at CF and 3B) but with a slightly worse bat. My only concern with that is that, of course, with so many different things he can do plus a great bat, other teams will eye him for whatever hole they happen to have. There isn't a team in this league without at least one hole Zobrist could satisfactorily fill. It could price him out of our range. Still, I hope the team is prepared to knock, especially after the feeding frenzy for starting pitching is more or less over. He could be a big big help.

Free agent list at third base next year is particularly uninspiring. Good third basemen are just not easy to get hold of but there aren't even any passably adequate ones. We may be stuck with the Panda, unfortunately. EDIT: You know what, with that said, I just realized that Ben Zobrist is a free agent this coming year. Bring him in ostensibly to add some veteran depth to a young outfield, and try him at the corners. He's got the bat for it. He hasn't played a ton of third base but there's nothing wrong with his arm or athleticism. He could probably pick it up no problem.

I really think if he'd gotten neither Hanley nor Panda we'd have seen Bogaerts at third whether he liked it or not, with either Marrero or a big league all glove guy covering short. I'll leave it up to people wiser than I to decide whether or not we would be better off with that configuration, it all depends on whether the shortstop can put up mediocre offensive numbers rather than putrid ones and whether Bogaerts manages to be psychologically fragile enough that he'd actually continue to find ways to fail to hit at third base. Either way I think the team values Holt's flexibility and I don't think his bat (while fine up the middle) would satisfy them at a corner position.

The Royals are carrying their pitching staff with top notch infield defense. They have three gold glove caliber defenders in that infield with all of Hosmer, Moustakas and Escobar among the best at what they do, and they just added Zobrist to that, plus the current best catcher in the American League into the bargain. That has a lot to do with why the mediocre lower middle of that rotation has held up. Which seeing that in action and what it's meant for that franchise is why I'm anxious to see the Sox emulate it. It's also why I'm so hot about our lackluster infield defense. Which yeah, is not a problem, but is also not an asset, and it absolutely needs to be one. The way I see it we need to stop settling for "not bad" at so many defensive positions. We don't have that one two punch in the 3-4 holes anymore that can carry us over defensive shortcomings. The way the standings bear out in this league makes it clear. When it comes to defense, "adeqate" isn't. 9 individually adequate defenders can still yield a wildly subpar defense and that's exactly what happened to us this year. We're going to make some progress next year regardless if Vazquez is healthy and can split time with Swihart. Christian Vazquez has the talent to be one of the top defensive catchers in the league. But if a chance is there to seriously upgrade defensively at shortstop I really hope Bogaerts' fragile ego or the whinging of his agent don't stop us getting that done.

Because it is bloody broken. Neither Panda nor Bogaerts are bad defenders but the combination of meh range and no range is an absolutely awful one, especially for our lefthanders and you can see in the stats without any help from me that our lefties are really getting the worst of it. A lot of those "so many problems" get a lot better the moment our infield defense is tightened.

THe days of getting a superstud are gone, but I do think you could pick up a decent return, depending on what you were looking for. He's still an above average second baseman with a championship pedigree after all. Tons of "vet cred" there.

Theo was a competent if overrated general manager and I'd love him back if I'm being honest.

I don't give a mouse turd about Bogaerts' individual value. His individual value is only a concern if it makes the team better. If we make the team worse to enhance an individual player's individual value then the question must be asked: What the hell are we doing and who needs to be fired? What I care about is, what is better for the team. If we can bring in an elite defensive SS and move Bogaerts to third, that's better for the team right now, no question. It's not like the man has never played third base. He's looked pretty good there, and there's no denying he has the bat to contribute positively there. Locking down the left side of the infield with "excellent and pretty good" instead of "OK and meh" will make the pitching staff better across the board, that's what I'm concerned about right now.

I am not blaming Bogaerts for anything. Moving him to third in favor of an Alcides Escobar type is about upgrading two defensive positions not about some childish effort to assign blame. Our defense left infield is weak, and will not stop being weak with the current cast of characters. That's a fact not an opinion. In my opinion the best way to address it is to bring a defensive specialist in at shortstop. This is because bringing in a defensive expert at third base tends to be significantly less palatable since it's a corner infield position, and we need to upgrade the defense one way or another. Bogaerts has the bat to play a corner infield position if we can find someone with the defensive chops to excel defensively at shortstop which Bogaerts will not do,and we can probably find that kind of player on the market. This is one way to make the TEAM better, even if it does sacrifice a bit of Bogaerts' INDIVIDUAL value. Guess which one matters more to me. As for worrying about how much a defense guy will hit -- I'm worried about how well our offense guys will defend. When the pitching staff is weaker than career levels across the board to the point that it's costing you games one of the things you investigate to solve the problem is the defense. We brought in a rotation of contact pitchers with a mediocre defense behind them last year, wich is one of the reasons the GM behind these decisions got fired. If we want to get the most out of pitchers-to-contact we need to make sure our defense is among the best in the league. Not just decent, not just "tolerable as long as he hits." We need to be among the best defenses in the *league* if we want to start winning a significant number of games again. The teams that are top in the division this year are traditionally the ones that take defense seriously. Top level fielding has become the new exploitable inefficiency because it's now the place where the metrics are the least clear. We are not going to get better as a team without upgrading the infield defense.

Not sure too many of us would have shown up for those 20 years. The Toronto leadership did a lot of wandering in the wilderness in that era.

I think the applicable aphorism is "penny wise, dollar dumb." I think they lose more than they gain breaking up that broadcast team.

Oh it's been an issue. Mostly because no one else on that side of the field has exceptional range either. That's not necessarily Bogaerts fault but that doesn't change the fact that the single best way to upgrade our infield defense is to move Bogaerts to third and bring in a defense guy to cover shortstop. In my personal opinion nothing else we could do to improve the pitching will have a bigger impact than upgrading the infield defense. If you want the basis for my reasoning look at the Kansas City Royals. They don't hide average-ish gloves at key defensive positions in order to upgrade their offense, their shortstop is the traditional highly athletic noodlebat guy, and if you haven't looked at the standings lately, it seems to be working out for them The way I see it Bogaerts is a lot like Jeter was at his peak -- The overall package is excellent and the defense is not precisely awful, but he's there for his bat and his range is average at best, and when you're going to have the other guys cover that side be a pile of ambulatory lipids and a spaz, that's going to cause issues. I think bringing in an elite defensive guy and moving Bogaerts to third would give us two plus defenders on the left side of the infield since I'm confident that Bogaerts' average-for-a-shortstop range will become an asset for him at third rather than being neither an asset nor a liability. Bringing in an elite defense guy would replace two average-ish defenders with two defenders well up to their defensive assignments, and I would expect righthanded pull hitters to average fewer hits to the left side of the diamond as a result which is going to be especially good for our lefties, none of which are excelling with the current infield configuration for *cough* some reason.

Pedroia playing through injury is great, I'm glad he's that motivated, but there's a difference between toughing through the injury, and not being injured. Pedroia's still getting hurt multiple times each year, even if it doesn't take him off the field. That will catch up with him at some point. May already be doing so.

That said this is probably not the best time to take away one of the only things that made this season marginally watchable.

I think you add 2 pitchers to the top of the rotation or one to the top and one to the middle, and add a reliever to the top of the bullpen. And then you find a way to give our defense a severe upgrade. My ideal choice would be finding a slick glove to insert at short, finding a way to move the Panda along, and sliding Bogaerts to third base, and running an outfield of Castillo-Betts-JBJ in some arrangement. We need to upgrade our defense more than we need to bring in top arms, and we NEED to bring in top arms. But upgrading defensively at short combined with getting Pedroia back and having Holt as a very defensively capable backup will help the pitching staff a ton. Bogaerts is otherwise decent at short but his limited range is a liability. That same range would probably be average or slightly above at third base. And he definitely has the bat to stick at third, even if it would stand out more as a shortstop. Moving him down the defensive spectrum is a completely defensible move. This team would have won more games if instead of Hanley and Panda we'd picked up a Johnny Noodlebat shortstop with excellent fielding ability. That should be a move we make this year, if we've learned anything. Considering that Dombrowski made the move to bring Iglesias over from Boston for his defense I retain some hope that he'll figure it out.

Yeah and let's be clear about this: A fully motivated Toronto has the power to be a bigger economic monster than we are. They have most of a nation to broadcast to and Toronto's metro area is like half again the size of Boston's, and Toronto's one of the wealthiest cities in the world. If the Leafs keep turning in mediocre seasons and the Jays start to pick up, we could find ourselves the third richest team in the division. Wouldn't that be a shock to everyone's systems.

It's basically half ace money for approximately half an ace. Good deal as long as you're not asking the guy to be your #1

Personally I don't think the team looked all that good on paper. It was deeply flawed in a number of ways right from the outset. Some of them won't show up in a position by position analysis but will show up when you identify how things synergize, or in the case of the 2014-15 Red Sox teams, how they don't. Just as an example: We had a fundamental lack of range and fielding ability on the entire left side of our defensive diamond. IIRC only Bogaerts was consistently over replacement level, and you need more than "replacement level" from the shortstop's position anyway. The impacts are obvious; when right handed hitters can pull happily with better than the usual results what did you expect our contact-friendly pitching staff to accomplish? He did a good job of furnishing quality players in each position on paper but a synergistic analysis reveals several flaws like that in the way the team was put together -- to the point were it looks like the analysis of defensive synergy was all but completely ignored. Those synergies turned out to matter -- a lot.

The thing to do then is to analyze why the expected results were not acheived and maybe discuss better ways to project accurately in future.

Evolvement? That's a new one Every political movement has places where it goes overboard. The pro-tolerance movement is no exception. There are some behaviors you should not tolerate -- what they are is up to normal societal processes to determine, which can include everything from legislation to the grass roots. In everything there is a balance to be struck. My personal perception is that we're reaching a point in this country where in our desire to be tolerant we are beginning to step way too hard on the rights of people who disagree with the popular narrative. Tolerating other cultures and beliefs is good to a point, but in our push for tolerance we are beginning to criminalize disagreement, as if merely holding a contrary opinion is itself intolerant, and that is just not alright. People have to have the right to be stupid. They have to have the right to look at the facts and reach the wrong conclusion as long as they do not deprive anyone else if a fundamental human right by doing so. Not only because you never know when history may well wind up exonerating them but becauese of what rights are and what a right signifies, which is something that CANNOT be taken away for ANY reason. If you have a right to an opinion at all, then by direct definition you have a right to an incorrect one. If anyone does not have the right to an incorrect opinion, no matter what that opinion may be, then no one ever had any free speech rights at all -- not really. Some of us seem to have lost sight of that. What's more, they need the right to behave according to that opinion as long as they do no injury and damage no property. Denying them that right as well is also dangerous to the rights and privileges of everyone else.

Couple that with the ability of our utility infielder to also back up in all 3 outfield positions and we have some unique roster dynamics. It's entirely possible that this team could carry 13 pitchers comfortably for the lion's share of next season.

Mookie's a hitting prospect with tons of talent and potential. I have zero problem with the team putting him in the lineup spot that gets the most average plate appearances per game, just to maximize his reps for the rest of the year.