Dojji

you must have clicked the wrong link Kimmi, the Soxprospect link takes me to Baseball Reference where Pablo is listed at the old weigh in of 255 pounds, probably taken years ago and 20-30 poinds less than his actual weight like most players' "official" weigh in. Even at 255 poinds, for a guy who's 5'11" that's a pretty freaking big dude, easily at least 40lbs overweight, probably more like 60, and as he ages and slows down his weight is going to be more and more of a hindrance for him. Add to that the rumors that he may be as much as 40 pounds heavier than his official weight (which isn't that far off everyone else's actual relationship with their official weight) and you've got problems on the way. One simply cannot play an athlete's position when potentially up to 100 pounds overweight

you won't get a straight answer until you ask a straight question.

Except people have been making that argument without any humor at all, in deadly seriousness, and you're treating it exactly the same as the frat boy humor and ignoring them all alike. That's on you Kimmi. That's your decision. you can't simultaneously blast people for the fat jokes, and also refuse or fail to engage in those not using the fat jokes as if they were, that just gives off the impression that you are trying to utterly fail to have a discussion as loudly as possible, drown the whole mess in white noise of your own and pretend that that means it somehow doesn't exist.

the harm is in playing a 3B who can't play up to standard due to his weight, risking injury and nearly guaranteeing a lower chance to win baseball games, sinking the team in the standings in a season that's up for grabs, in the hope that his condition will improve over the year when it didn't last year, and when there's a 3B who's earned the time and is able to play from day 1, already on the roster. As I said in another thread, kimmi, it is incredibly unusual for a veteran to lose his starting gig in Spring Training, it never ever ever ever happens, especially when it isn't a top youngster making the push, but a guy who's gonna be on the bench anyway. So in that sense you're correct, they could easily have let Pablo screw up for a couple weeks then given Shaw the job. So when they decide to make the call now, bench Pablo for Shaw before game 1 when that never happens to veteran players, you really need to think about just how comprehensively Pablo had to **** up just to be in this position. Personally I think there's something to be said for lighting a fire under Pablo's ass now by taking the unprecedented (and therefore highly embarrassing) step of benching him on day one, in the hope that he takes the message, cleans up his act and slims down into playing shape. And of course if he doesn't or can't, then there's nothing to salvage here and playing him would just be enabling him to begin with.

Sorry, Kimmi, no. The point has been made to you in straight sincerity with no jokes at all and you lump those clearly, seriously communicated posts in with lolfat. This is not our bad communication, this is your bad/dishonest parsing and response.

Shaw's good enough at third to make the basic defensive plays, he doesn't seem to exactly have top flight reactions, probably owing to the lack of reps he's gotten at the position over the last few years (hey, anyone gets rusty without reps). I'm curious to see if we get lucky here -- if Shaw can get comfortable at third and keep hitting at something approaching the level he demonstrated last year, we could have a stealth All-Star on our hands. Not very probable, but all the pieces are there, andI think the talent is there too, it's down to Shaw figuring out on the fly how to put them all together. That would make Pablo showing up 40 lbs overweight one of the best things that could have happened to the team this Spring.

And the reason is that Pablo is out of condition, but you keep lumping any reference that suggests Pablo is not in peak physical condition, in with all the "lolfat" posts so that you can conveniently ignore it.

Awful lot of flukes. I think it's a reasonable time to, without pointing fingers, admit that for whatever reason, the big league plan was not good in 14-15. They had the money and resources to accomplish more than they did, that's the final analysis.

I believe that you get chances until you prove you shouldn't get them. Pablo Sandoval has long since used up his grace period, and he doesn't seem to have realized this.

You mean Allen Craig I think, yes?

I think you have to distinguish the two. you cannot put Sandoval and Castillo on the same plane, they're very different situations. Castillo is an unproven player who had a mediocre showing last year and isn't regaining the skills he lost to 2 years of forced inactivity, as quickly as some fans would like. Sandoval on the other hand was once very skilled, has played regularly up to this point, but is in the process of eating himself out of the league. In other words decisions Pablo is making and actions he is taking are eroding his ability to play this game at the level we are paying him to perform at, while Castillo is a victim of border politics he had no control over. That's the difference here between Sandoval and Castillo. And also why I feel Castillo should get an extended opportunity to continue to try and regain his skills and want Pablo shipped out of town on the next dump truck.

Yes it was, Kimmi. Pablo was already on 2 strikes after last year's lethargic performance at the plate and in the field. if you think for one second his showing up 40 pounds heavier than he said he was didn't seriously cheeze off the entire franchise, then you don't realize just how precedent setting it was for Shaw to even get a sniff at third base this Spring, no matter how he hit. If the Franchise as a group wasn't deeply offended by Sandoval's decisions about his personal conditioning in the offseason, all Shaw's brilliant spring would have meant to the franchise was "Oh hey cool, we have a good bench guy, nice to know, maybe we can count on him if the starter goes down for a few weeks." Spring training stats are usually all but completely ignored by a franchise, unless they're anxious for them to mean something. That tells you a lot, and I mean a LOT, aboutt what was going on in the collective minds of the leadership of this team when they opened 3B up this Spring at all. How do I know this? because young bench types have been having brilliant springs for years, and this is the first time a guy with 4 years left, or any years left, on a big contract, was even on the hotseat as a result. And for a guy who'd played less than a full season at 3b combined over the last 5 years to beat out the incumbent in Spring training? This franchise was DESPERATE. Desperate either to make an example out of Sandoval from day 1 and Shaw gave them the perfect excuse, or desperate for something, anything, to get them out of the positional crisis at third base that Pablo's lack of discipline put them in -- it all goes the same place in the end so it doesn't matter. Now that doesn't mean that Shaw didn't beat Pablo sandoval cleanly and fairly when they were both auditioning for the third base job, I don't want to take anything away from what he did this spring. But I don't think you necessarily realize just how unprecedented it was for that to even be a legit competition in the first place. Especially for a guy like shaw where the Franchise is doing a 180 and suddenly deciding hey, this guy's a legit option at 3b when his minor league focus was on a less athletic position at first base. Everything about that set of moves screams of desperation, almost to the point of panic, and it's all because Sandoval showed up unfit to play his position. Make no mistake though, Pablo was on or near his last chance when he reported to spring, he was the worst position player in the majors last year partly due to his weight and conditioning, and his dead weight contributed heavily to the Red sox not being able to lift themselves out of the basement, if you'll pardon the turn of phrase. but even then, one bad year wouldn't be enough to put Sandoval this far into the doghouse unless something else, and probably a lot of things, had been wrong with the picture. veterans just do not lose their job in Spring Training. A crappy April, yeah, it can happen if a guy is on 2 strikes. But NOT in spring training. Spring training is usually just used to allow vets to get their reps in. So there's worms beneath the surface besides the obvious ones we saw. it's very very likely when they weighed him and found him to be even heavier this year than he was in his useless previous season, showing he'd learned little and not made sufficient effort to overcome the problem that had damned him last year, that revelation was enough to rip convention to shreds. Do you know how hard it is to break convention in baseball? It's the most conventional sport in the world. They do things in this game for no other reason than that they did them 60 years ago, and that's enough for nearly everyone. Hell your entire argument about Sandoval is an appeal to convention. You're calling for what would be done in an ordinary situation where a veteran performed poorly last year but was uninjured and able to play. For the Red Sox to throw convention out the window and throw 3B up to such an open competition that a bench 1B won the job in spring, they had to have been utterly steamed, so far beyond furious that there may not be a word for it outside of Lovecraftian horror. just something to think about Kimmi.

that was never happening. I knew it at the time. They're a big market media team, you can't be a big market media team and just sit there serenely while the image of your team gets destroyed by consecutive terrible seasons. They were going to be pushed to Do Something. That was a given.

If I was unable to do a job I was contracted and paid to do, I would feel deeply ashamed and work as hard as I could to return some kind of value to my employer. It's not the weight or the work ethic that steams my oysters as far as Pablo goes, so much as the complete shamelessness

Wwwwwwwelp......

who knew Ferrari made minivans?

Actually the Tigers farm system put together an impressive laundry list of developed prospects under Dombrowski. He then turned a lot of them around to build the big league roster in trades -- a legitimate use for a farm system and one that yielded him regular playoff appearances despite really only being upper middle (toronto level) in the baseball budget heirarchy. Dombrowski's problem is that he never seemed to have everything together at the same time in Detroit. If the rotation was good the offense started to struggle, and if he got that fixed, the bullpen started to sag. And at that, the Tigers came within spitting distance of the World Series championship at least 3 times under DD, and only bad luck and clutch plays from other teams kept him from the gold. I'd say it's a good bet that DD knows what he's doing.

Actually the guy who was really bad at this was Theo. Starting pitching was clearly Theo's blind spot. The only ace that the Red Sox drafted that made ace in Theo's tenure, was Lester, and he was drafted by the prior GM. Buchholz was a Theo guy, and he was horrifically inconsistent. There was something nasty and rotten in the Sox drafting and development philosophy throughout the epstein era. The next time you see a homegrown potential top starter is Eddie in just the last couple years, and Cherington traded for him.

i think we have a puncher's chance to make the playoffs this season, and if Price stays healthy, once you're in the short season anything can happen. Nothing's certain of course, never is in baseball, but there's plenty of room to hope for now.

Tell me, Kimmi, what are the future ramifications of a player over the age of 30 that is already so heavy that he needs to work on his conditioning for more than a month after reporting to the team, just to maybe be able to play his position at an adequate level? What are the long term consequences of coddling or enabling that kind of player? Are the consequences of giving sandoval "chances" really any worse than those of letting Shaw beat him out for the job after a very strong Spring, where Shaw clearly showed up able to do the required job from day 1 and Pablo clearly dodn't, and hopefully incentivize Sandoval to put in the work required to win his way back into the lineup? If Sandoval takes this lesson to heart, and works his tail off to get back into condition to actually be a major leaguer, rather than just being one by default strictly because the team's still on the hook for his contract, then my concerns about his character are nullified. If he doesn't, they are verified, and I would not have wanted him playing fulltime again even if he could physically stand the strain of doing so, which his recent back injury on a normal diving play suggests is probably not the case at this time. I will not run a player out onto that ballfield who can not do the job, or stand the strain physically of attempting to do the job, and that's where Pablo is right now. All other considerations aside the risk of additional injury and harm to Sandoval himself is just too great to give him "chances" until he shows sufficient physical improvement.

Exactly. Unfortunately humans, even athletes, aren't statistical plot points on a graph and they don't always conform to the standard laws of probability. Reasons that have nothing to do with statistics can emerge why a player will not regress to the mean, and it can be anything from weight to injury history to personal off-the-field problems to just plain losing interest in the game (it does happen sometimes, even with players that work their way all the way to the majors).

Assumptions based on visible, verifiable facts, such as his general physical condition and on how well he moves in the field. I have no doubt that Pablo will put himself in a better condition than he was on March 1. Whether he'll get himself into actual game shape is a thornier question.

I think they'd be wise to go kinda easy on that prospect depth. A lot of it is in the low minors, we already are a little shy on real big league frontline replacement talent. I mean you do what you need to do to win championships if you can, but there's a limit to how far you want to tax a farm system.

I'm LDS, so no beer for me either.

That's true CP, but don't forget to learn the lessons of guys like Garin Cecchini, who we were convinced was going to take over at third base at some point and maybe even be the next Wade boggs then he literally disappeared completely from one year to the next. it's the nature of prospects to fluctuate in value, sometimes severely. The guy you think you're going to have and the guy you wind up with are two different players a lot of the time.