Dojji

I agree that there's absolutely no reason whatsoever to be anything but perfectly satisfied with JD Martinez' offense. I disagree that JD is more deserving than Jose Ramirez, who plays a much more difficult defensive position and plays it reasonably well. JD has been an excellent signing. And in other years he might have been an MVP candidate, but he was overshadowed by even better years by other players. It happens.

I don't mind Moreland. He's a non-problem and with Travis sputtering out, we don't have a viable replacement anyway. I've got my eye on Ockimey as a possible 1B of the future, at least to the point where he's replacing the above replacement level prodution Moreland provides. He and Chavis are the two best chances we have to replace Moreland's production with a competent 1B.

The fundamental question to me is, is his value decreased or increased by neutralizing the dWAR factor. In other words, is the DH position mitigating negative dWAR or suppressing positive dWAR and usually, it's the former.

I agree, but at the very least Wright is a little younger than Pedroia. I think Wright is in the "nice if it works, but signs point to no" group.

True but not particularly relevant: last time I checked there were no knuckleballers on the Yankee roster.

Besides, people here are talking as if GMs don't routinely come into a new job and clean house on prospects their predecessor believed in and they don't. The difference this time is, he managed to take those assets and turn them into an all time great team.

Lost in all the noise is the fact that we'd been in a drafting slump under Cherington for years BEFORFE DD ever got here. Theo had not drafted well in his last few years, and I'm honestly not certain if we have any decent Cherington draft picks in system outside of maybe Devers (was JBJ a Cherington guy? Unsure. DD came in and saw a very top heavy farm system already here. Our drafting and development, especially of starting pitchers, was grim for at least a decade (Brian Johnson is making a bit of noise this year, but until he takes a step forward next year Clay Buchholz is STILL the last relatively successful fully homegrown statrting pitcher this team developed!) Under those circumstances he was clearly going to need to fully reinvent the farm system anyway within the first 3 years of his term as President, no matter what else he did. If he'd gone gentler on the farm it still would have been a wasteland in a year or two due to mediocre drafts, and we'd have no ring to show for it. Just saying, the drafting and development machine breaking down isn't something that happened when DD got here. Some of us seem to have forgotten that outside a few studs in the mid to high minors we were already frustrated with the farm for years before that.

3/24 split 10, 10 and 4 might work for both sides

All will be forgiven if he hits. [NegaJacko]We've all seen players go both ways after a lost year. I will note for the record that being the American League's Passed Ball King for 2 years straight, including a year when you only half-time it at catcher and STILL pass more baseballs than you did in a full year of catching the previous year, is rather discouraging to say the least. Not to mention that his offense has been trending downward since he debuted, and his D is obviously following suit. It's beginning to look like the book is out on the guy, and he's going to have to write a new chapter if he wants to stick around.[/NegaJacko]

It's going to come down to the emotions and prejudices of the writers, is what I mean. Mookie's gonna win it this year, he's a perfect MVP player whose style appeals to everybody, but that's why Ortiz never won one.

You can make these nitpicky little determinations, but ultimately the MVP is an area where perception is 9/10 of the law.

Yankees fans are not the enemy. We're all Americans after all. We're just Americans with different rooting interests. Bit of post-Veterans' Day perspective.

Unfortunately I agree with Jacko on this one. Compare Pearce to Kendrys Morales. That's about the level of production Pearce would provide overall as a fulltime starter and Pierce is a superior defender. Morales is starting.

That's how hope works. There's no reason we can't keep competing, this team has a very competitive shot next year, it's probably going to break camp as a favorite to win the AL East, and there's nothing stopping us from winning the crapshoot that is the playoffs again. Nothing guaranteeing it either, but hope doesn't care about odds, it cares about possibilities, and the Red Sox have one of the more favorable chances to win next year compared to the rest of the league.

It's not so much penalizing a DH for being a DH, but DHs don't even get a chance to provide an important vector of value in baseball, and that has to be understood when evaluating them for most valuable player. Quite frankly whether a player is one dimensional on the field or one dimensional by design is about the same thing to me. We all know Teddy Williams would have been a DH if his era permitted it, and it probably would have helped his perception because his defensive mediocrity wouldn't have been exposed as often. One dimensional players who only play to their one dimension should NOT be rated the same as players who try to play the whole game and risk their weaknesses being exposed. It's one thing if a guy is only DHing because of roster concerns, and that's probably true for JD in particular, but full time designated hitters are less valuable than two way players, it's a simple fact, and to compensate for this they had best provide a ton of value offensively. Ortiz might well be the first full time DH ever to be inducted into the Hall of Fame because he was legendarily good at it. Pretending that DH is a regular position kind of diminishes players like Big Papi in my opinion.

As a former catcher harper has a better than average chance to successfully transition to first base .

It depends on how desperate they are. Sometimes it's worth gambling on a guy like Pearce as an everyday 1B when all your other options are even worse.

Being a DH probably plays against JD, like it always did with Ortiz.

I think it almost had to. The problem with the BC era is that unlike Theo, BC just didn't have the pull to resist a big, ill advised marketing move. Once again, it comes down to the core thing I've been saying in this thread -- if your priority is anything other than winning, be it marketing or farm development or skimming cash off the top, then you won't win. Sooner or later you will have to sacrifice every other priority to achieve the primary goal, and if your primary goal isn't to win, winning will come second -- simple logic. Lucchino's primary goal was the overall financial health of the franchise. He advocated for moves that were as much about keeping franchise value as strong as he could make it rather than building the best 25 man roster or making a solid 5 year plan. And since Lucchino was so much more senior than the GM in the Cherington era, it created a mismatch that allowed him to win arguments when he shouldn't have won them.

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They didn't have to. There was a period of time in 06-07 when Papi did have a very thick middle but he had some kind of heart trouble in the 06 season and after that he took responsibility for his body on his own and slimmed down without needing to be prompted by the team.

There's a difference between marketing decisions and real business decisions. What Lucchino did was a marketing decision, not a business decision. Marketing people might think they're businessmen, businessmen know better. The purpose of marketing is to extend the reach of business. Marketing promotes and enables business, not the other way around. If that gets flipped around and business starts catering to the needs of marketing, disaster is always on the horizon because at its heart marketing is fundamentally faith-based rather than rational, and that's no way to survive in a cutthroat market.

Because we had no reason to get rid of him. Now he's out of options, so we kinda do. Even with his lackluster offensive performance the market for catching is so starved that I doubt he clears waivers. So it's trade him for very little or cut him for nothing. Or have him cling into that 25th spot in the roster despite not really being necessary to the team in any way. Plenty of AAAA options to play emergency backup, I imagine we'll sign one. Better than what? What Swihart actually hits or this illusion that Swihart is going to magically become JT Realmuto any second now? This is not a sufficient reason to keep a 3rd catcher on a roster, never has been, never will be.

Lower AAV because of higher risk. I'm not completely out on Kikuchi, but IMHO just about the last thing this team needs is a lefthanded starting pitcher. Now tell me that the team is in on Dallas Keuchel, which is what I first read that as, and I'd be all over it. If you want a starter on the FA market that you could get on a medium-length contract (3-4 years) it seems to me that Keuchel's a likely candidate. Signing Keuchel to stretch out the middle of the rotation would actually make a lot of sense if we can't bring Eovaldi back, and would put us in a great position to deal with Porcello's potential departure in the next couple seasons..

I'd forgotten that he exists. That said, his fate kind of colors my impression of Swihart's outlook