Dojji

Leon handles Wright just fine, but I think Vazquez cracks the playoff roster anyway. Swihart didn't do a good enough job swinging the bat this year to justify a place on the playoff roster over our 2 defensive specialists. With no real offensive standouts, picking up the 2 best gloves makes sense to me.

All forms of wear and tear count. Wright's knee was surgically repaired last year. As we found out this year with Eddie, knees matter. If he's in the bullpen, I think it makes sense to use him in inning-plus relief, but I think it's going to be more important to have Wright ready to go in the Bronson Arroyo role, able to come in and replace a starter at a moment's notice, than it is to try to abuse his mystical knuckleball powers over the course of a series. Besides, Wright is not one of my top 3 relief options, those honors go to Kimbrel, Brazier and Workman. Workman can go 1+ innings but has also evolved into the guy you bring in to strand baserunners, and he's been very good at it this year. Workman to finish the inning and maybe pitch another one, then turn a clean inning over to Wright or Velazquez, sounds like a strategy that works. As for bringing Wright into high leverage innings... eh. He's good, but the knuckleball can be a very inconsistent pitch to rely on in high leverage situations so I'd rather keep Wright in reserve than try to plot out a baseball playoff series as if it was a dance routine..

Stanley was also pretty much done as a high quality relief pitcher at age 30. You don't get brownie points because your manager didn't have clue one how to manage a bullpen and manages to screw you over and destroy your career in the middle of its prime. Stanley was a solid reliever in his era, and Papelbon was an even better reliever in his.

You're talking about a pitcher who hasn't stayed healthy through ordinary use for a full season since he came to Boston. Heaping an extraordinary workload on a body that struggles with a regular workload sounds to me like the exact opposite of smart. Not all knuckleballers can pitch forever. Wright isn't Wakefield. He throws a lot harder than Wake did for one thing, and that comes at a cost. Wright uses his fastball extensively and it's not that much slower than a conventional pitcher's. That means that knuckleball aslde, you should think of Wright more like a conventional pitcher and much less like a Niekroballer like Wakefield. Wright is not a pure knuckleballer, more of a hybrid. If you try to abuse a fastball-knukcleball pitcher as if he was a purebred knuckleball pitcher, I doubt this will end well. If we abuse Wright's arm, there'll be the devil to pay. Yeah it's great when athletes get worked like rented mules, then rise above their own level and pitch tons of top quality innings in the playoffs, but go ahead and track the future performances of those guys, not a lot of them go on to have great follow-on campaigns. And sometimes it ends their careers, like it more or less did with Keith Foulke, who we abused the HELL out of in 2004 and he was never the same since. That being the case, risking one of our few homegrown cost-controlled starting pitchers in such a way is utter folly. If we need multiple innings I would rather share that burden between Wright, Workman and Velazquez than overburden one arm that hasn't stood up to burdens well in the past.

Like I said. Not excellent, but competitive. We'll face bullpens that are better than ours. That's why it's important for our supremely potent offense to get to the starters early and often. That said one Steven Wright more or less isn't going to change this dynamic very much. We're going to have to rely on this pen to see us through with only a very limited ability to make personnel adjustments. We might as well get used to the idea of getting behind these guys because whining about them isn't productive.

JD is going to get paid either way. That's one of the reasons I'm reluctant to overpay for supporting characters. I'd definitely rather risk losing JBJ than be out of options when Mookie and JD come with their hands out.

Yes. Our bullpen is not excellent, but it is definitely competitive. It's the weakest part of a very strong team, that's not the same thing as saying that the bullpen is weak. Our bullpen is the only part of the team that is not elite, but it's still well above average taken as a whole, we have an excellent closer, and we're going to be able to cherry-pick the best of a lot of the options we've winnowed through of the year and ought to be able to assemble a very strong relief squad for the playoffs. If our top 4 options out of the bullpen this year are Vazquez, Brasier, Barnes and Kimbrel, I'll stack that against most of the other bullpens in the playoffs and expect a fair fight. If our bats do their job I'm not all that worried about the 'pen.

I'd go 4 years at 8.5M AAV. So 4/34 The fact is that JBJ is a solid piece, but also replaceable with the 3 other outfielders we have. There's no need to buy high here. I'm hoping that a little more money and one less year might actually offset. JBJ's going to want to be in his early 30s when he goes looking for his next big contract. Going into his age 32 campaign works better for him at the next contract than 33 does.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/p/papeljo01.shtml The Steamer was great in his day, but there is no contest here. Putting it over the top is the fact that Pap did one thing Stanley never did -- pitch the final out of a World Series victory.

JBJ rallied well after a very rough start and turned in a fairly satisfactory year. He did enough offensively to justify his spot in the lineup so he could earn his paycheck defensively. For JBJ, I know he's capable of more but if he does at least that, I'm not gonna be too hard on him. Not a good year, JBJ, but good enough.

Not "condemned." Simply not necessary. Overcomplicated plans are the opposite of what brings victory in the playoffs. Keep it simple and build in redundancy. That way rather than trying to make the entire playoffs one great big set piece battle, you're set up to improvise as the situation changes. It's a higher level of strategy that requires a good manager to pull it off, but fortunately for us, we have one. There's every chance that Wright could wind up making a very solid contribution in the 2004 Bronson Arroyo role. But scripting his appearances reduces your flexibility and playoff viability for no good reason.

No need to reinvent the wheel. We have a solid knuckleballer to play the long relief/spot starter role. It's a good thing. Next year he will once again compete for the rotation. He might start in the postseason if there's an injury. For now he's going into October as a member of the bullpen in the long relief role.

Acck hiss!!! Don't do that! Sure we've won the division, but that's not the championship any of us wants.

There's nothing wrong with having the second-best shortstop in all of baseball. Bogie rocks

Our franchise high water mark for wins is 105 in 1912. If we can surpass that, it will be the best season in the history of this very historied team. Do you think we can get there? And also, do you want it to be a focus of team effort to get there or are you more concerned about the playoffs?

I'll definitely take an adequate glove to go with his middle of the order type bat. He's not the return of Nomar that I think some of us were hoping for, but he's an excellent player at a position where good offense is nearly impossible to find.

Worth thinking about: Iglesias is about to hit the market if the Tigers don't ink him this offseason. We have some holes in our infield defense unless Pedroia returns healthy (ha!) and it might just could be time to bring Iggy home.

Never bought the Iglesias-Bogaerts controversy. If we'd kept both, we would have found playing time for both, especially since there's nothing wrong with Bogaerts' bat in the DH position or his glove at 3B. Right now, Bogaerts is wirth 3.2 WAR, and Iglesias, thanks to his fantastic glove, is worth 2.2 WAR. Bogaerts wins, but Iglesias is worth his salary too.

I disagree. The only reason we're even having this conversation is because we're in the playoff hunt. Look what happened with other teams and star players like Yoan Moncada and Mike Moustakas. It's very normal to most teams around the league to call up a rookie a couple years before you expect him to produce at a big league level. The problem with this team is that there is N-E-V-E-R going to be a plan to have that rebuilding year where the goal isn't to win championships and the team can give the struggling rookie time to find his feet. it might happen accidentally but is never going to be the plan in the preseason. So no matter when Devers was promoted, he would be promoted into exactly this kind of environment, having to learn the game all over again at MLB speeds, in the middle of a playoff hunt, with hypercritical fans nanoanalyzing his every mistake. More time in the minors wouldn't have changed that very much. And I'm saying that as a guy who was very much against Devers' initial callup. I wanted him to finish last year in the minors. Even in my plan though, he's in the majors in some capacity by now. There's simply no point in extending his stay over incremental improvements when the next step in his career is right in front of him and the only way to really learn what it's like to be a big leaguer is the hard way.

Imagine if we'd given up on Xander Bogaerts one of the million times fans on here decided to be down on him -- including as recently as last year. And yet Bogaerts went through an even more significant learning curve than Devers has, at least to this point. I know it's not the nature of fans (short for "fanatic") to be rational, but there's no need to raise it to a freaking art form!

No, he wouldn't learn anything more in the minors. He needed a fanbase that allows young players to make mistakes without making histrionic statements about how badly they suck. Too bad he doesn't have one.

Nunez is not a starting 3B. Again, you're letting mismatched expectations run amok in your mind. We expected a lot of Devers and little of Nunez, that is the ONLY reason that Nunez looks so good to you. As for Dalbec and Chavis... let them get to the bigs and produce, and then we'll see. Besides, Moonslav is right. WAY too early to give up on Devers

Devers needs experience. I'd work him in as a reserve for now, but at the end of the day we either need to give Devers the job or sign a fulltime 3B, because Nunez is being pushed beyond his own red line right now. Nunez is a reserve infielder -- a good one, but he gets exposed when he's asked to start for too long Besides, Rafael Devers is still a (slightly) better offensive option over a full season. Don't let low expectations on Nunez and higher expectations on Devers blind you to this. If he can stay healthy, he's our starting 3B going forward. Nice to know our reserves can get the job done when called upon though

What's wrong with having an open spot on the 40 man? It means we can make a waiver trade at the deadline, or even after, without sending a man on our 40 back.

Long and short of it -- Buchholz is actually in an odd position where the better equipped a team is to deal with his peculiarities, the less likely that team is to actually need him.