Dojji

Fixed I was fully down with this. Salty wasn't hitting, and if he's not hitting, Ross is the better catcher. Besides, in the postseason, a catcher's defense >>>>>> his offense. Same thing. Nava wasn't getting it done in the playoffs and Gomes was, and neither of them were great defenders. Agreed That year there were no good choices. You had the catcher that was always terrible and the catcher who used to be fantastic but was too old to play at that level anymore. I'll never understand why they didn't make a move for a younger catcher that season.

Well I'd have to check for a presence of gray matter in the crania of those responsible if his option is picked up, just to make sure it's there, so in a sense...

Yes -- because Farrell's departure happened to coincide with the time of year when a basement team starts seriously playing its young players more and getting them experience for next year. I'm speaking of guys like Shaw, Bradley, Wright, etc...

I think people are overestimating Beni just a bit. I predict a sophomore slump. He's not yet fully established, that might not happen for another 2-3 years. Or it might happen next week, baseball's a funny sport. He's still all exciting potential for now though, and I expect he'll have a few "learning experiences" between now and his first All Star Game.

Oh god, not again. Buchholz isn't a "good starter." He's capable of good starts, but that's nowhere NEAR the same thing.

And the fact that that stretch of games happened during no-pressure time when we were already out of contention and were filtering young players into the lineup a lot more often, had nothing to do with why those games were so much better, no it was definitely all Lovullo. Again, because reasons. If it wasn't for a different face behind the bench we would have simply called that run a late surge by a team that couldn't put their crap together until it was too late. Because that's really all it was.

ANY signing contains risk. I would agree with you 100% if you hadn't bothered to mention doubling his salary. Pablo was going to make bank no matter who signed him, his profile was too high to suspect otherwise. Again, I agree with your conclusion, but your reasoning is not valid. This is one of those areas where how you get the answer matters as much as what your answer is.

I dislike judging signing decisions based strictly on the outcome. Judging present value based on the outcome of the contract is fair. Judging the decision to sign a player strictly and only because of the end result is IMHO very wrong.

That issue with Tek happened because Boras screwed up. Everyone screws up from time to time. Boras usually does not screw up. Usually he gets a good deal for his player and earns his commission. We don't like Boras because he takes players we like away from the team. This is because those players are typically worth a great deal of money and can make more money by convincing another team to overpay for them. We all as fans of a team want players to stay with the team until we are done with them. Boras works against that so he gets hated. That's as simple as it gets.

Three data points. If you're using end points of each season to establish a trend, there are only 3 data points here, the definition of SSS

It's not like it's only the agent applying pressure. The pressude Boras applies is counterpressure to the extreme amount of weight a franchise puts on its players to allow them (the team) to maximize their value for the asset rather than making it easy for players to maximize their own value. I'm not so virulently pro-corporate that I want to dump on agents for doing their jobs, expecially when their jobs are so important to prevent the players' rights from becoming a casualty of the ownership and front office.

Yes, but at the end of the day, Boras is a strawman for everyone who wants to blame agents rather than players when a UFA does not choose to come back. Agents are the perfect low calorie target when we're frustrated that a player won't accept the team's best offer and we don't want to hate the team or the player When a player signs with Boras, it signifies that he wants to maximize his income as a player and make hay while the sun shines, and he considers that more important than the good of whatever franchise happened to draft him. That's not what we as fans want to hear, but we don't want to hate the player, so instead the easy (lazy?) choice is to hate the agent. The real decision-maker here though, is the player, and it's important to remember that. Boras' players can and do ignore his advice and do what's best for themselves and/or the team. All Boras' schtick is really good for is preventing teams from cramming team friendly deals down a player's throat in the name of "being a team player" or some such insipidly patronizing nonsense. If a player wants to re-up, he's the boss and Boras will get him the best deal he can. If a player wants to maximize his value by trying the FA market, and we lose him because someone else decides to pay him what he's worth on the market rather than what our ownership wanted to pay -- I have a hard time fully blaming the agent on that one.

sss

For a worthwhile comparison, compare Pedroia's numbers over the last 4 years, which showed a downward trend -- which reversed this year because he was finally fully healthy again.

Why bring him in at all? Because it was still a winnable game. There was no point in which that game was not imminently winnable. Why bring a junktime guy? There was every chance that game could have been salvaged even after Tazawa puked all over himself and the rest of the pen couldn't clean it up. If Farrell had brought in a white-flag pitcher with only 1 run down against a team with a mediocre pen such as Detroit, he would have been murdered for THAT as well.

People said the same thing about Daniel Bard, Jacko. I don't know of a single starter that hit 100 consistently and was able to stay in the field consistently. If they exist they are vanishingly rare. I think Kopech either eases back on velocity to gain command, and then maybe starts, or else he stays in the pen.

I definitely agree on the importance of keeping Leon in the lineup as much as possible right now. If this is the real Sandy Leon, you have to eventually start asking the question of whether you should be playing him as catcher at all. He is hitting at an elite level, even if you normalize BABIP, the performance level is still elite, and it's elite regardless of position, not just "for a catcher." At what point is the bat too good to risk the incidental injuries and wear and tear that every catcher always experiences over the grind of a full season? At what point is the play to make Leon the full time DH or 1B and look for another solution at backstop?

There is no way for the manager to look good when a reliever blows the game. Because there's always a different reliever he COULD have brought in, and of course there's absolutely NO CHANCE WHATSOEVER that that other reliever also blows the exact same game in the exact same way. We know that because reasons.

I am so freaking done with Buchholz. I hope he pitches well enough down the stretch to help us get into the postseason and that some other team is tempted to take a low risk flier on him. I am done with that man, and past done. I am ready to see the team move on. We don't ned him. I don't want him.

Back in the day, Kimbrel would have had a 2 year career and been out of hte league with an elbow or shoulder injury. It's absolutely stupefying the level of turnover in those old tyme bullpens you guys laud so much. There's a reason we have these roles. As it is we've already broken 2 relievers this year, possibly a third if Tazawa can't regain effectiveness. The roles are designed to stop us breaking them even more. When we try to push relievers beyond the strict roleplay system, we wind up with Alfredo Aceves and Manny Delcarmen -- guys that look good because they can take it, for a little while, but these guys are never able to take that kind of abuse for more than a year or two. I don't know of a single relief pitcher that can really take an 80+ inning pace for 5 years in a row. Their job seems easy, at least relative to other pro ballplayers, but the burnout rate gives the lie to that pretty quickly, if you're paying attention.

They're pussies who can do things you and I cannot do, and I'll leave managing the egos that allow these guys to go out there and pitch with confidence, up to the professionals.

At this time our 4-5 slot pitchers when everyone's healthy are Pomeranz and E-Rod, either of which can pitch at a #1-2 level for an extended period of time, or at least have done so in the past. This is the thing I like about our rotation. No one is really a lock to pitch brilliantly but every single one of them has done it before.

So you're saying we have our Evans-Lynn-Rice redux in the form of Betts-Bradley-Beni? I'll take that.

On that, I agree. I didn't like the Pablo signing. I also don't like sheer pigheaded ignorance of how the UFA system works, but Pablo was never one of my faborites, I'd thought he was overrated for years before he was signed here.

That is plain and simply the wrong way to look at UFA signings. Pablo was making what he was making because of price controls built into the MLB system for young players, which is a built in incentive to encourage teams to develop young players in the first place. He had reached a point in his career where those price controls went away. Expecting him not to make more money in that environment, in the first year he could FINALLY be allowed to ask for what the market would bear rather than being forced against his will to settle for less money, is either ignorant or literally insane -- take your pick. It's a pity that the moment he started earning a market value for a person of his skillset, the skills went away, but comparing cost-controlled years (or buyout years that young players agree to to get the money rolling early) to UFA years and expecting UFA's to earn no more than the money they settled for only because they were forced to, is ludicrious. The market simply does not work that way, no market does, no market should. UFA's make what baseball players are really worth That's why they are called UFA's, Unrestricted Free Agents. Everyone else makes less because the CBA robs them of their bargaining power. Expecting UFA's to act like RFA's just sets you up for disappointment -- it almost never happens that a player will sign a deal that team-friendly unless they have literally no choice, the only obvious exception I can think of off the top of my head is Tim Wakefield and his perpetual $4M option.