Dojji

Not quite. It's not so much that there's more than one way to build a rotation, although I can see how that perception would persist -- while there are multiple ways to acquire rotation talent, the only sane way to build a rotation, is to use all of them at the same time. In other words, there is exactly one way to build a rotation, and that's all the ways, all at once, all the time.

Maybe but that's still pretty ludicrous. Any trade for an ace will include value that will dwarf the significance of even the most projectable of 18 year olds.

Rotation depth is valuable wherever it appears on the depth chart. IF you have a contender, and the opportunity appears to acquire a #3 for a fair price, and your rotation has 4 starters in it yo absolutely do not refuse to acquire that mid rotation guy merely because he's not an ace. The opportunity costs of making a nonmove like that can very easily include taking a contending team and failing to make the playoffs at all. Refusing to make a move because it is not the best imaginable move is idiotic when a team has a chance to win it all.

No we didn't. Anderson Espinosa was a fine prospect, but one top 5 prospect who's at least 4 years from the majors isn't nearly the price any team would ask for an ace type starter in a market this short on supply and this long on demand. You know that just as well as I do, so stop spewing BS you don't even believe yourself. If we had a real chance to bring down a Sale, Quintana, Kluber, etc, right now, and we still had Anderson Espinosa you would be the first one telling us how unproven he was and how many other assets it would really take to bring in that kind of talent. You know it and I know it. You are fooling nobody.

I said at the time of the trade that bringing in an ace would have been overkill and I stand by that. We needed a #3 to extend the depth of our rotation, not a front man. And a #3 is pretty much exactly what we got, with Pomeranz providing exactly average (100 ERA+) innings for us and making all but 1 of his scheduled starts. That's a #3 starter right there, it's what we wanted, what we needed, and what we paid a fair price for, especially considering the 2 additional years of cost control we have on Pomeranz. Considering that our guy won the CYA, it's pretty clear that I was bang on the money, an ace was not required, but the mess at the bottom of the rotation made the decision to acquire a good mid rotation guy obvious. Dealing an 18 year old lottery ticket for rotation depth when you're fighting for the playoffs is a perfectly understandable move, especially when it adds control beyond that one year. Nothing mysterious about it.

lol. But seriously -- if they were drinking legally, the answer is yes. More than one big leaguer has had a great game while drunk or stoned or high on something, if the talent is there, it's there. If Espi can beat the 21-22 year old talent bracket, that's the time when I'll start being super interested in what he can do.

No, Espi might be a pitcher. That's what prospect means. We'll see if he's a pitcher when he's done dominating kids who can't drink yet.

We probably didn't need Peavy. He wasn't taht good for us. At the same time -- a GM has to play the odds. Does adding a former ace type improve your chance of winning the World Series at a time the trade is made? yes, it absolutely does. Do you avoid making that deal for a potentially ace caliber starter because it would involve trading a kinda sorta nice middle of the pack shortstop who can make the occasional highlight reel play? HELL NO.

And this is where your argument fails. The Sox brass did identify Iggy as a startable shortstop, in the sense that he was someone you could start in short without hurting your team. What he isn't, wasn't, and never will be is the kind of superstar you bnuild a team around. Bogaerts? Is. Or at least is beginning to look like that kind of player and already showing a performance level that's impressive enough to dream on. Iglesias was traded exactly BECAUSE the Sox brass realized that Iglesias was good enough to start, and that he wouldn't be starting anytime soon in Boston. When you can either move someone into a position where they lose the greater part of their value as a player, OR you can make a trade, the right move is often to make a trade. All teams do this, and all fanbases occasially tie themselves in knots with the woulda-coulda-shoulda game when they do. It's nothing new under the sun. Anyway, all that needed to happen for the Iglesias trade to reflect well on Cherington is to NOT get as literally unlukcly as mathematically possible on at least one of Middlebrooks, Cecchini and Sandoval. If at least one of those 3 players chooses not to backfire spectacularly, the Iglesias trade would have been the exact right decision. All a GM can do is play the odds, and the odds looked like the team had plenty of resources to solve 3B without moving the best Red Sox prospect since Jon Lester off his best position. if events are sufficiently determined to go against him, that all 3 of the reasonable depth measures he had available to fix 3B at the time are going to backfire on him exactly as spectacularly as possible, there's simply only so much a GM can do about that. How many layers of redundancy does a team need before it's OK to take smart risks that are aimed at improving our weaknesses so we can win World Series? With championships in play (and they are in play now, and definitely were in 2013),One must not be paralyzed by maybes, and that's exactly what not trading Iglesias would have been.

When it comes to wear and tear on the arm, minor league IP is *EXACTLY* the same as major league IP. A good pitcher doesn't pitch differently just because it's the minors he's pitching in.

Becuase we really haven't had a positional crisis at 1B. Since Rizzo was traded we've had Napoli and Ramirez at 1B and both of them were pretty decent there, not as good as Rizzo at his peak, but really nothing to complain about. We had, and possibly have, a positional crisis on the left side of the infield, so the hindsight brigade wallows in borrowed misery about moves made on the left side of the infield.

The whole point of this argument is wistful hindsight about not trading Iglesias for basically Peavey, and an idea that Iglesias would have covered SS at least adequately while Bogaerts learned third base. It's rivisionist history at its finest, at the time we thought we had no problems at 3B, Middlebrooks was still considered a good prospect and we had Cecchini behind him and if those failed there was always the free market. So 2 prospects and money behind them were our depth at third base in midseason 2013 when the trade was made, why again are we moving our best SS talent in a generation over to another position exactly? Only when both Middlebrooks and Cecchini, and the guy we signed afterward to cover the gap they left, all subsequently imploded within about 18 months of each other, did the hindsight brigadee come out in droves, trying to apply reason to a situation that from our perspective turned out in an absolutely unreasonable way. There was so little reason to expect that all avenues that did ultimately fail, were going to fail, at the time Iglesias was traded, that the hindsight brigade really doesn't have much of a leg to stand on, not that that will stop them.

You got that information from someone who didn't bother to check Pomeranz' minor league innings pitched. Pomeranz was not at his career high in innings pitched when we acquired him, because pitcing in the minors is still pitching, and he'd surpassed that inning total between the majors and the minors the year before.

Nothing has more moving parts than an unsubstantiated assumption.

Swihart had a very slight ding to his left toe in 2015. He was put on the DL to protect our control over Sandy Leon as much as over that very minor injury. The two injuries are very probably complete coincidences. Anyone can sprain an ankle.

WAR, what is it good for?

They can be.

42 mil is a pretty small fraction of 151,428,000 The beautiful thing about the Napoli contract though is the limited years. We got a good power hitter and a gold glove caliber defender at first base, for less money and far less years.

Nope. Because Iggy is nowhere near as great as his flash and dash makes one think -- if he were he'd be Ozzie Smith. He absoutely has the talent to be one of the greats but he seems to have real trouble tapping that talent consistently. Iglesias is a perfectly decent overall SS who I'd be very content with if he were our everyday guy, and he looks like one of the best ever on the rare moments he happens to be concentrating. He's solid, with flashes of genius, but at the end of the day merely solid. He doesn't have the stick to make the overall picture match what we're getting from Bogaerts at the moment.

That's why a new generation of writers is needed. The ones that realize that stats can allow you to build a story.

The only reason to move Bogaerts, who is an average defender overall at SS, is to make room for a better defender. There has been no shortstop in recent Red Sox history who has been a better than average defender at shortstop over multiple seasons, you have to go back to John Valentin to find a shortstop who returned consistently above average value defensively for multiple seasons (Nomar had his moments, but was not consistent). If a decision to move Bogaerts doesn't have anything to do with the presence if Iglesias in Bogaerts' rookie campaign, it doesn't have anything to do with anything at all.

And we don't. Bogaerts made it clear that he was uncomfortable, and didn't play third well, and didn't hit well while playing third, but he certainly tried to play the position his manager told him to play. He just couldn't make the adjustment on the fly while he was still adjusting to playing big league ball as well. It was too much all at once. If they really wanted X to make that adjustment, they shouldn't have done it on the fly, he should have played substantially more 3B in the minors, the same way they did it later with Travis Shaw. Throwing him into the position on the fly, at the big league level, was a tall ask of such a young player.

On the other hand that does also mean that a catcher who can hit excellently is all the more valuable, meaning there's still arguments to be made in favor of all 3 catchers.

That's OK. In 20 years most of the sportswriters will be stat geeks How do I know this? Because sportswriters can only write about what they know. So those who refuse to know the knowable are at a diadvantage. And stat geeks will therefore have more to write about because they're the ones NOT rejecting whole fields of knowledge just because they didn't exist in their father's day so they'll have more material to write about. Once a few more gray-headed editors pass the reins on, an inevitable switch towards stats based writing will follow -- not that every sports article will be replaced with a spreadsheet, because stats guys can talk about the human element stuff too, especially once they get experience with the baseball beat that they've mostly been kept on the outside of until now And can probably do that without looking quite silly as yesterday's sportswriters (or even the-day-before-yesterday's sportswriters like Shaughnessey) are looking these days. Right now these old fogies are living on stories of long ago, but they can only do that because of how relatively recently truly stat based analysis has breached the mainstream, in 20 years, the stat geeks will be able to reminisce as well, and the age of the sports dinosaur will well and truly end.

Yeah that's what I meant by a tiebreaker. No reputable stats guy would put Derek Jeter up for a Gold Glove, but if a future SS GG is about Lindor or another big-name SS, vs an unknown and/or a guy having a year where he plays over his head, and the defensive stat values are a wash, shrugging and giving the first place vote to Lindor isn't particularly inappropriate.