Dojji

Holt is a damn good utility player, one of the best in baseball at what he does, but what he does doesn't involve starting every day. It's not fair of the team to expose him as if he were a starter, but when the team does that it's hardly Holt's fault. He's a very impressive benchie, kind of a luxury but one a championship caliber team should pay to keep around if they can.

I'm sure there's a few Indian fans that think so -- although I will say that no team's fans (or I should say, no team's media) is as relentlessly negative as Boston's.

Iglesias was never going to get to play full time at his natural position here. Going after Jake Peavy and using Iglesias as part of the bait was the right decision when it was made.

You misread what I wrote slightly. I said his bat isn't as special playing 3B and that's just a fact. At SS Bogaerts is one of the top hitters at his position in baseball and a perennial All-Star candidate. At 3B... he's a pretty good power hitting corner IF.

That I actually agree with. I don't consume sports media of any kind when I can avoid it. I always form my own opinion.

The Guardians had other ideas. Let's be clear. the Sox were nowhere near the overall favorites this year. We were probably picked to beat the Guardians, but we weren't the pick to go all the way by any stretch of the imagination. Everyone who's watched baseball for more than about 0.5 nanoseconds knows that in a short season anything can happen. The Guardians were a competitively good baseball team, and we played poorly and they did not. At the end of the day the Guardians have just as much a right to beat us as anyone else. All you can do is show up in the postseason with a good team, try to keep everyone motivated, and see what happens. I consider the season a brilliant success for Mr. Dombrowski under the circumstances, we dispelled a lot of the stink of the last 2 years, got an exciting young core coming together and learning, we went from a disastrous rotation to one that's competitive, if a bit weak on the top end, and we've got plenty of material on hand to improve. If we didn't go all the way, oh well, 28 other teams are going to be saying the same thing and the lion's share of them have less to smile about than we do.

And lost in the discussion is the bizarre assumption that because Farrell failed to gain HFA, he clearly didn't want it.

Kimmi, before we talk about Pablo improving a position that Shaw for all his faults provided 2+ WAR at, how about we let him have a year where he doesn't provide NEGATIVE WAR? I think Pablo Sandoval's days as a major league 3B ended last year. He tried to play 3B this Spring and wound up injuring himself almost immediately on a routine play. He is simply too heavy to play 3B. He worked around that with sheer youthful energy in the past, but now he's getting a bit older and time and his weight have caught up with him. I'm honestly not convinced he isn't too heavy to play 1B as well, the diving play on which I think he hurt himself is one he'd have had to make at first. But 3B is out of the question until Pablo himself proves otherwise on the field of play, much less positive WAR at that position for a guy whose last 2 years have looked a lot like a guy eating his way out of baseball and being completely unable to play the game competitively.

C: Vazquez-Swihart Umm Leon? Let's not pretend that Leon didn't flat out win the "Vazquez/Swihart controversy" at catcher this year. Before we talk about catcher being split between those two as so called "catcher of the future," I sure as heck want to see what Sandy Leon does in 2017. Maybe fades back into nothingness, in fact that's where I'd lay my money, but Leon has earned a chance to fail at the very least. TBH I see an acquisition here post-Hanley. Travis is not a sure thing and will probably have to battle with Travis Shaw for a crack at the roster, and Shaw beats Travis on versatility if nothing else. As for Devers... he's still got a ways to go before pencilling him into any future lineups. I'll be honest, I see this as Mauricio Dubon's job if at some point we decide to move on from Pedroia -- at least until we draft someone else to play the 2B position. I think it's going to be important to NOT have 2 guys with offensive focus manning the middle infield. If one guy (Bogaerts) is going to focus on offense for the most part and be a more or less adequate defender at best, then I want the other guy (preferably both of the guys around him) to be stronger defenders that can cover the edges of his zone if needed and take some defensive pressure off him. That's why I'd rather have a former SS at second than a future corner infielder like Moncada. Besides, I am a little nervous at just how raw Moncada is right now and how many mental mistakes he made in his brief debut, and judging by how brief the debut was, so were the Sox. Moncada is "wait and see" with me right now. I discussed this in another post, no need to go over it again. Suffice it to say that our future 3B is likely Moncada, that's probably the best place to put him for the time being. Don't see any reason to speculate about Moncada in the outfield at this time. Benintendi is our LF until further notice, and should really be left in place as long as there isn't a good reason to move him. That young outfield excites me, it's going to be important not to mess with them -- doing so would be a classic example of a team outsmarting itself. Not convinced this team is going to maintain a full time DH either, I see.

You know that's not the reason we don't move a nearly 5 WAR shortstop talent off shortstop. As a third baseman Bogaerts' bat is a lot less special, and that's just the truth. We get more raw wins out of having Bogaerts at SS and a replacement 3B than we do by having Bogaerts at 3B and a replacement at SS. If we can solve the 3B problem without screwing with something special at another position, we need to do it. I'd be interested in seeing if the Red Sox experiment with Dubon at third base at all. It would show what they're thinking.

I agree with Bellhorn. People are making a HUGE leap of logic when they assume that simply because Farrell did not GET HFA, that must somehow mean he didn't WANT HFA. The idea that he wanted HFA but was beaten to it by a combination of events and other teams playing better than we did, seems not to occur to them.

Doesn't work that way. But you certainly lost a bit of yours, sadly.

Be glad when we get a bit deeper into the offseason and the crank theories and hysterical speculation start dying down a bit.

At this point I just assume Pedey's playing through something injury related at all times, and that he has a loose date with his surgeon lined up for late October by March 2nd, details of which injury and what to operate on to be determined by year's end..

Except if you actually followed the team in those 2 years, there was a lot of evidence that the team spent both postseason campaigns pulling together in exactly the way you want to see -- everyone was motivated, everything was clicking for the most part, and in 14 they just barely lost because they ran into Madison Bumgarner in game 7, and in 15 they humiliated the Mets by playing very tight, very smart, very opportunistic baseball. If I can get my hands on key players from those 2 years and add them to my young core, I'm going to be very interested in doing it.

If Theo or CHerington were in charge I'd think we might sit tight and let the young core grow in place, and that one of those two would settle for bringing in patches around the regular talent -- a veteran here, a AAAA guy there, to sort of fill in any gaps created due to injury and whatnot -- and balance the team based around giving the kids as much room to grow as possible. With DD I'm not so sure of that. He knows how important it is to let the youth breathe and start to fill the gaps in leadership without crowding them out with new veterans but he also knows we're tarn close to creating a really special team. I think DD will do his usual, pick a couple guys to target that will, in his opinion, substantially improve the team, and spend whatever it takes to put us over the top. The tricky bit is he might decide that what we need is not a hitter -- for example, he takes a look at our rotation and decides he needs to go over the top again for an ace -- and brings in Felix Hernandez who's as possible a trade target this offseason as he's likely ever going to be, going into his age 31 year, is very expensive, quite a few miles on his arm, and playing for a team that is going nowhere and maybe wants a crack at a winner before his arm falls off. These are things we just can't know yet so we have no idea what is possible.

I'm a fan of the Royals as well as the Red Sox. I think of their players because I like their players. Nothing wrong with that. But the key here is to bring in playoff veterans. If you want to make suggestions on how to do that that don't involve my player fetishes I'm all ears.

You would be doing yourself a disservice if that's all you said in response to Maxbialystock's EXCELLENT and highly thoughtful post.

I was beginning to wonder if you realized that. You're focusing on everything the Sox did "wrong" with no regard of what the Guardians may have done right.

That would be amusing, but I think I would counsel the team to wait until we absolutely know he's absolutely definitely completely not coming back before going forward with the retirement ceremony. There's no reason not to wait.

I think the reason people want to trade Bradley is a gut check about just how streaky he is and a concern that pitchers might have caught up to him and he won't do it again. "Sell high" and all that.

Baseball Ref shows 2016 dWAR at -0.1. Almost exactly replacement level. Not sure what that means for a position where "replacements" typically favor very high levels of defense. Jeter spent most of his career wishing he was that good defensively, that I do know. If X is gonna hit as well as he hit this year, I'll take defensive adequacy to go along with that every time.

Agreed, but I'm of the opinion that the team wasn't tanking as badly as some seem to think in those last handful of games. We tanked one game but we had a lot of games where things just stopped working that had been working all year. The team flew apart at the last minute, and personally I chalk it up to inexperience and nerves among the young core.

Well yeah, and I'm glad to see the Red Sox franchise has dropped some of their absurdly rigid standards for retiring numbers. I still say #24 should be up there too. Dewey Evans deserved a shot at the Hall he never got, he's worthy.

But at the end of the day this franchise knows how to play on the road, so I doubt it was a decisive factor.