Dojji

I don't think it's that big an issue, like you said, other pitchers have stepped up, and we're going to be shortening the rotation for the postseason anyhow. Looks like Price, Porcello and Buchholz of all people, with E-Rod as the #4 man if we need one. Buchholz seems to have saved his best for last, and the timing for his sudden surge of competence couldn't possibly be better. But remember we didn't just get Pomeranz for this year. Next year and the year after, we still have control of this guy, and he'll have a year's experience as a full time SP under his belt and have a good idea how to train to be able to bear the workload better next season. The trade for Pomeranz wasn't a rental, it was an intermediate-term play to help us get to October and strengthen our rotation for the near future. And it was a move that I think in the end we'll be grateful for, he seems extremely talented, if he can get his arm fully stretched out for full season starting and I think with the right conditioning he can, others have done it (see also: Arroyo, Bronson), get a good offseason training program going and the pitcher has a good idea what to expect, he should be fine over the next 2 years, that's more important than these last couple months overall IMHO,

I think there's just enough value in Clay to tempt a team to pick up the full value of his contract..

Max... max... that is literally his entire job. What you're saying is that he's done his job correctly. How do you statistically quantify disasters avoided? How do you credit errors not made? How do you track pitfalls not fallen into? How do you analyze shipwrecks not made because the people in charge did their jobs? This is actually a real problem with analytics, trying to quantify exactly this thing. Sometimes there's an easy answer (in baseball, you usually have a baseline behavior to compare with) but not always. Usually the best job a manager can do is exactly that though -- walk the tightrope while keeping all the balls in the air and not dropping any. If he can accomplish that in a given game, he's done a good job, if only by virtue of not doing an obnoxiously bad one. If he drops one, we tend to notice, if he doesn't, we often only notice the players, because managing tends to only make a spectacle of itself when it's making head-shaking decisions. The best standard by which you can judge a manager is, if you don't notice him in the game, if the players play and the game resolves and you don't once care about what the manager is doing, then he's had a pretty good game. If the manager becomes the show, something's gone wrong. So yeah, a series of very smooth games in which nothing major goes wrong? Farrell deserves at least partial credit for that, because it's his job to make sure nothing does go wrong.

You can tell the team is going well because this thread is relaxed and usually low on the board.

No. It is astonishingly rare for a pitcher of Sale's skill level and contract status to change hands.

Even when it's the actions of a group? Come on a700, I respect your intelligence too much to let you get away with that one.

I too would be happy to see Napoli returning. I've always liked him. And IIRC he was one of the people that put the team on his back in 13 at several key points. Definitely a guy to have in the lineup when you're in a playoff run.

Except actions speak louder than philosophies. I care a lot more about the philosophy you act on than what you say with your words that you believe, and the two are never quite the same thing.

I don't have a beef with a specific post, but I do have a beef with a specific philosophy, the kind of judgmental, my-team-just-barely-lost-so-everyone's-an-idiot quick twitch finger pointing. If that's your philosophy Southpaw you're welcome to it, but I'm welcome to my opinion that it's idiotic and is symptomatic of everything that's wrong with baseball fandom. The IQ in this thread varies widely based on how the team just performed. If we win it's usually OK, but if we just lost, the air gets stupid in here REAL fast.

It is the natural state of ffans to hate the manager. We love the team and root for the laundry even when it's worn by players we dislike. So when the team fails, and the team will fail, even a great team fails about a third of the time, and if we fail in a way that we can't blame on the usual dedicated scapegoat players, the manager gets it. Not because there is always anything he could have done but simply because the alternative is admitting that players we like can't walk on water and didn't create the universe in 7 days just to have something to stand on to hit homeruns. The manager is the ultimate low calorie snack, it's always easier to blame the manager than look objectively for the real cause of underperformance, and of course if anyone actually bothers to defend him or bring strange, foreign ideas like rational analysis, or strangest of all, an actual sense of freaking perspective, all we really have to do is primly assert that since he's the skipper of the team it's already always his fault anyway, right? And then that weirdo and his bizarre ''logic'' stuff goes away to continue his search for intelligent life on this planet elsewhere, so if course that means you won the argument. Score!

Not sure the Jays are right for BC. He needs be in some small market where player development is the major vector to become competitive. Some small market on the outside looking in that needed a 5 year plan to get to the playoffs would be the perfect landing point. The GTA is one of the most impatient markets in MLB which plays to BC's weaknesses. I guess he needed the job so as to not be out of circulation too long, but I don't think this is BC's ideal job and I think he might not be in the GTA that long.

Except that you've traded 3 years of commitment for a character with strong offense, questionable D and solid chemistry with the rest of the team, for 6 years of commitment for a character with strong offense, even more questionable D and no particular known chemistry with any existing team member. I'm not sure swapping out Hanley for Edwin is a step in any particular direction at all, except towards more contract liability over a longer period of time. That seems like a great way to outsmart oneself.

I'll settle with having at least one going at any given time, that's how good teams tend to work -- as long as something's working and the team wins, firing on all cylinders isn't strictly necessary. So you just hope that one man's slump coincides with 2 other people going on hitting streaks, and so on.

It's tempting, except that we don't have a proper successor. We kind of need Hanley, at least next year. We'll see in the following offseason, depending on what Shaw and Sam Travis are up to and who we've traded or signed in the meantime.

Agreed. Hanley has been officially salvaged. If he's happy, confident and hitting at first base, and not usually a liability defensively, don't fix what isn't broken. Hopefully a full healthy year next year will see an increase in offensive production, and better familiarity with the first base job will improve his D. There's plenty of room for optimism as concerns Mr. Ramirez right now.

Bullwhacky. THe problem is it applies in ways that are not easily measured in retrospect. The effect is not so much on the player themselves but on the team around them, and the reason it's so hard to detect is that any team will try to bring in playoff-veteran players if they're in the playoff hunt, because they KNOW it makes a difference to have players who have been there before and can tell the other guys what to expect, meaning a control group is hard to source One example of what I'm rambling about -- When the Red Sox were flailing against the Guardians in 07, and looked like they were going to crap out, the veterans from 04 (Tek, Papi, Schill, etc) called a players-only meeting and settled things down, got people playing with confidence again, squeezed out a win, and got the team rolling again. The result was not improved performance, but preventing UNDERperformance, which is damn hard to measure statistically.

It's the lighthouse fallacy. When Farrell does a good job, we don't notice, because he did a bad job. When Farrell screws up, we notice, because manager mistakes are easy to pick out in hindsight. Farrell's no tactical genius, but he's an average manager with as many assets as liabilities. he's not worth replacing unless you're sure you have an above average manager on standby. And despite Lovullo's SSS last year, we just don't know that.

Not really that concerned about the playoffs TBH. I'm already satisfied with the performance of this team in DD's first season. His job was to make the Red Sox relevant. Even if we're one-and-done in the playoffs, I still consider that mission accomplished -- FOR THIS SEASON. Next season the expectations will increase. And of course whenever we are eliminated, it's going to be disappointing, but I think it's vital not to lose perspective. For now, I'm just happy the team is in the hunt again.

Williams only got there once and was hurt at the time. I love David Ortiz, but let's not get absurd.

Until I posted this, a700 posts were one short of half the total posts in this thread. I'm getting a distinct "jilted lover" vibe here.

Why is this on the Red Sox forum? I posted this topic where it belonged, in MLB discussion.

Wouldn't be anything like the first time a team had to bring a hotshot youngster up short.

We did when he was working under Theo. He's basically getting his old job back.

If you think Marco Hernandez is good enough to play the utility role, and not good enough to groom as a starter for a team that alrewady has Bogaerts and Pedroia (any question of Hernandez playing third base everyday is laughable) then you move Holt because his successor is here. There's no rush. Holt has years to go before he gets expensive. But at his current contract, with the ability to play starting level 2B and/or backup everywhere else on the field other than P or C, if we can replace him with a competent utility infielder and bring in something of value, it might be worth doing.

There's a lot of issues about Moncada that I care a lot more about right now. Seems to me that if you want to obsess about Snapchat of all things, you're looking for an excuse to be irritated. Worry about his baserunning gaffes, worry about his lack of polish, that's fine. Let Farrell worry about dugout discipline.