mvp 78

I'm not going to cry that Frazier went somewhere else. If the Sox signed him instead of JD, it would have been very underwhelming.

Reynolds is definitely not the best player, but he only got $2M last year on a 1 year deal. He's projected to have a .793 OPS. He can play every day if need be. Duda who is only 2 years younger is projected to have an .828 OPS. He was projected to sign a 1 year $6M deal. He is a platoon guy. Career .658 OPS against LHP.

No no no. Reynolds has great power and has played in the AL East before. He'd be cheap and on a 1 year deal. Duda is fine, but nothing special. Frazier is a slightly worse Duda. Moose is a better player than the other guys, but I worry he's going to hold out for a longer term deal.

I'd certainly rather they just sign JD and wrap it up.

Reynolds > Duda > Frazier > Moustakas If they can get Moose for only 2 years tho... Then I'd just grab Moose and trade Hanley by eating 90% of his current deal.

Hope springs eternal except in NE Canada.

Crazy.

They do it because of the sponsorship deal with Pepsi/Frito Lay. Players aren't allowed to use other brand seeds. Same deal with the gum.

https://www.baseballamerica.com/columnists/tank-tax-push-teams-try-harder/#Q0lv8QrEjvdTsvQM.97 The ‘Tank Tax’ Could Push Teams To Try Harder When the 2018 season begins, roughly one-third of major league teams will be in the early or middle stages of rebuilds. Baseball is a copycat league. And when we're coming off a stretch where the previous three World Series champions won after complete teardowns that led to woeful big league play, it's understandable other teams have tried to replicate that formula. The current system's relatively fixed draft slots provide a benefit for the worst big leagues teams. Before the new Collective Bargaining Agreement, the difference between picking first and third, fourth or fifth was relatively modest. Every now and then a Bryce Harper or Stephen Strasburg came along and made it extremely valuable to pick No. 1 overall but in other years, where there was no clear-cut No. 1 pick, the ability of each team to spend whatever they wanted in the draft meant top talents often waited to hear their names called-three of the top 10 bonuses in the 2010 draft came on players picked 28th or later. Nowadays, teams know their draft spending is fixed by their spot in the draft. Front offices and owners have learned that selling hope and the future (and saving tons on payroll) is a better promotional appeal than trying to entice a fan base by adding a couple of mid-level free agents to a downtrodden team. It's hard to find anyone in baseball who believes the current system is ideal for the health of the game, but general managers don't win contract extensions by making decisions that help the game overall. If you want to fix the system, you have to change the incentives so that it is preferable to win 75 or 80 games than 65. Baseball could adopt a lottery for the draft, where the team with the worst record would no longer be guaranteed the top pick. Depending on how the ping pong ball bounces, a team with the 10th worst record could end up picking No. 1, although the lottery is weighted so that the worst teams have the best chances of picking at the top of the draft. That's the approach the NBA has taken for decades. And if you've followed the NBA at all, you might notice that it has done very little to keep teams from punting multiple seasons (or in the 76ers case, close to half a decade). It's not that unusual to see an NBA team win less than 20 percent of its games. A lottery doesn't do much to prevent teams from tanking. Another option proposed is to adopt a salary floor, something the Major League Baseball Players Association has opposed in the past. The idea is that by ensuring teams spend a minimum amount at the big league level, more veteran players will receive contracts and no team will be able to cut payroll to the bare minimum. But a salary floor doesn't add any incentive to win. The same current structure would exist where rebuilding teams would have every reason to try to race to the bottom of the standings and the top of the draft. The only difference it would likely make is to make it much more likely that tanking teams would take on awful contracts (to reach the salary floor) while getting paid in prospects for taking the unproductive player. Imagine Jacoby Ellsbury heading to Miami with multiple quality prospects in exchange for a low level fringe prospect. The Yankees would get some breathing room under the luxury tax while the Marlins would edge just over the salary floor. If the goal is to eliminate the incentives that entice a team to be terrible at the big league level for a number of years, you have to create incentives for not being awful, or disincentives that punish teams for being putrid. So that's why I propose the tank tax. It's relatively simple. The same draft system continues to exist. The worst team picks first, the second worst picks second, etc., with one caveat: any team that fails to win 70 games in back-to-back seasons faces a 10-spot draft penalty. Have one awful season (like the Giants and Tigers 64-win teams in 2017) and your club reaps the benefits of having the top picks in the draft and the larger draft bonus pool that comes with it. But if a team wins 60-something games two years in a row, they pay the penalty. Instead of drafting first again, that team would draft 11th. And the penalty escalates. Win less than 70 games three seasons in a row and it's a 15-spot draft penalty. Four straight seasons with less than 70 victories and the team pays a 20-spot draft penalty. Twenty spots would the be maximum penalty, so a fanbase unfortunate enough to suffer through five straight seasons of 93 or more losses would see their team face another 20-spot penalty. But much like the luxury tax, the penalty resets anytime a team wins 70 or more games. What this would do is still allow rebuilding teams to garner better draft picks than successful teams, but much like relegation in soccer, it would also give them reasons to care about winning at the big league level. Look at the currently rebuilding team like the Reds or the Tigers. Under the current system, neither team has much incentive to spend in 2018 to improve the big league club unless they see a clear path to 85 wins or more (and a potential playoff spot). If the roster doesn't look ready to do that, it makes more sense to save money on payroll, try out a series of young, less-proven players and reap the benefits of another top draft pick next year. But with the tank tax in place, both teams would have reason to add a free agent or two to try to ensure that they get to 70 wins. The same incentives would apply during the season. A team facing the potential penalty would have every reason to try to win in September, as a three-game winning streak could be the difference between picking fourth or 14th. Instead of rewarding failure, the system would reward (admittedly, very modest) success. The 70-win threshold is a suggestion. Maybe it's too lax (75 wins would create a much stronger incentive for competitiveness, but would also be a much more difficult bar to clear). Maybe it’s a little too strict. The same is true about the 10-spot penalty. All of this is negotiable. But whatever the exact details, the core idea remains the same. By creating incentives for winning, more teams will try--to the benefits of fans and baseball as a whole. More teams will also spend in the offseason to genuinely try to improve, which helps veteran players potentially. And it will add another reason to care when a fourth-place team faces a fifth-place team in an otherwise sleepy September series. So how much effect would it have had? Of the 240 team seasons from 2010-2017, 44 times (18 percent) a team has won less than 70 games. Without the rule, there have been 10 teams this decade would have triggered the penalty. The Reds (2015-2017), Twins (2011-2013) and Astros (2011-2013) are the only teams that won less than 70 games three years in a row and would have faced the larger two-time offender penalty. The Orioles, Braves, Athletics, Mariners, Marlins, Rockies and Cubs would have triggered the tank tax once. If the rule was in place, it likely would have given several of those teams the incentive to win more. The Orioles, Reds, Rockies, Marlins and A's all finished with 68 or 69 wins in one of their “tank tax” triggering seasons. Teams would still rebuild with a tank tax in place, and some would be ensnared by the penalties. But if you want to creative incentives for teams in the baseball to try harder, it’s a pretty simple tweak that could spur teams to win more now while still focusing on the future. I don't really know if I agree with this idea, but an NBA style draft wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. At least anti-tanking measures would seem to make September baseball more competitive, but I'm not sure that's really been an issue recently.

@PeteAbe Eduardo Rodriguez throwing. The lefty is out to 90 feet and looks confident following knee surgery. Hachi Machi!

@PeteAbe #RedSox at Fenway South today include Porcello, Bradley, Barnes, Devers, Leon, Swihart, Price, Workman, Wright, Rodriguez, Scott, Travis, Wright, Thornburg, and Lin.

For Kimmi: http://boston.locals.baseballprospectus.com/2018/02/02/lets-be-optimistic-on-the-offense/ Even so, age gives us an overall positive picture of how the 2018 Red Sox offense could look. Betts, Bogaerts, Devers, Benintendi, and perhaps Bradley could all improve, and I think that’s actually relatively likely to happen just based on how their 2017 seasons went as well. That should be more than enough to offset what little production Boston receives from Pedroia, Moreland, and Ramirez... FanGraphs projects seven of the Red Sox to improve, five of which significantly. Only Pedroia and Mitch Moreland are projected to improve only slightly from their 2017 performances. Rafael Devers is projected to perform just as he did last season, only to play a full season’s worth of games, which would be a large upgrade over what the Red Sox have been getting from third basemen over the past half decade or more. Only Christian Vazquez is projected to put up a worse performance... Looking at all this, it seems safe to assume a good chunk of the Red Sox starting lineup should be expected, for a variety of reasons, to put up better seasons than they did in 2017. In fact, it’s not just a numerical chunk of the lineup, but the very best players in it, like Betts, Bogaerts, Benintendi, and Bradley. Devers is a bit of a wild card given his youth, as are Ramirez and Moreland for their ages, and Pedroia for his age and injury history. It’s not hard to see Ramirez turning things around, Pedroia getting healthy and hitting better if not returning to his late-aught MVP form. Similarly, this could be the end of the line for these guys. Sometimes baseball doesn’t let you down gently. Sometimes it smashes you into the concrete. But the smart guess is that both Ramirez and Pedroia have something approximating league average hitting left in them. Add that to a stronger front of the lineup featuring everyone with a surnamed starting with B, and you’ve got a potentially strong lineup. So, do the Red Sox need J.D. Martinez to improve their offense in 2018? I suspect they don’t. I suspect it will get better simply by running the same team out there again.

Post for all your Spring Training thoughts. Here's a picture of bearded Rick Porcello.

250 games is more than "a little" but yeah.

It's not a crippler, but it wastes a roster spot on a guy who really can only play one position. He has played some corner OF in the past, but I'm not sure the Sox would have him play there at all.

I thought he was out of options. In that case, I replace Elias with Scott.

@RedSox Just a few things in the Truck: 20,400 baseballs 1,100 bats 200 batting gloves 200 batting helmets 320 Batting Practice tops 160 white game jerseys 300 pairs of pants 400 t-shirts 400 pairs of socks 20 cases of bubble gum 60 cases of sunflower seeds

Projections have Hanley at a higher OPS than Frazier or LoMo. Moose and Duda would be lateral moves. JD would be the only move to push the needle. That Moreland move still seems iffy to me.

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/mlb-payroll-might-decrease-for-first-time-in-long-time/ All of the theories about why free agency is slow are probably right. There aren’t enough teams in competitive situations; teams at the top are secure, while teams at the bottom have little reason to spend. The players in this market certainly have flaws. The new CBA has emphasized the benefits of getting under the competitive-balance tax and two massive spenders are doing it simultaneously. Maybe teams have gotten a little bit smarter. Maybe Scott Boras is still going to get owners to bid against themselves at some point. Theories are boundless, but the results are pretty close to being in. The players are about to have stagnant, at best, payroll numbers next year at a time when owners are making greater profits than ever. That’s a pretty bad look for baseball.

I just don't think the situations are familiar at all.

Opening Day Lineup: Betts RF Beni LF Xander SS Devers 3B HRam DH Moreland 1B Hernandez 2B JBJ CF Vazquez C Sale P Bench - Leon, Swihart, Brentz, Marrero SP - Pomeranz, Price, Wright and Porcello RP - Kimbrel, Smith, Kelly, Barnes, Elias, Hembree, Johnson The will probably need to make a move with one or two of Elias/Hembree/Johnson because none of these guys have options and I'd rather have Scott and Workman in the pen. Holt has an option remaining so they can mess around with Brentz and Swihart before deciding if they want to dump one of them and call up Holt again.

@nickcafardo Just in case you’re moving on from the Patriots, David Price,Matt Barnes and Steven Wright were among the players working out at Jet Blue Park today. Sandy Leon also came in. A healthy Price and Wright would be a big first step for this team.

My google search failed me. It'd be easier if Mr Byrne had a twitter account.

No, but the author of the article is from Seattle.

Collusion. Duh! Honestly, there are so many unsigned players right now that could be had for decent contracts that it's weird that neither side has flinched.