mvp 78

It would have been better for him to gut the 2020 team and keep Mookie. Trade Xander. Trade JD. Trade Raffy if they really needed to. Mookie was the best of the bunch.

I would not invite him over for Thanksgiving dinner even though they won 4 WS. Really messed up if you think about it.

That dang budget! I bet it's the accountant's fault! We should blame that bean counter for spending all his time posting here under a pseudonym!

If sustainable is .500, sure. They can be consistently mediocre and make lots of money. Good for them?

"Would not." "Didn't feel like it."

To me, putting the emphasis on defense shows that they believe there is a cheap way to fix this team. I don't think there is.

"We can't afford it even though the ticket prices are high, we own the entire neighborhood around the stadium for development, are raking in the dough, own the tv station, etc." It's just frustrating. I can see letting some talent because you can't keep everyone. However, when you have franchise changing players like Mookie, it's just beyond belief that you are unable to let that guy walk out the door. Will they let the next one do the same thing over $$$?

He's had some good runs. His hit tool hasn't been consistent enough though.

Rebuilding the farm is only the part of the answer. You need those prospects to develop into fulltime starters OR flip them. Sox have a good system right now, but it needs to start bearing fruit next season.

The problem is that the mantra of the org has been to build sustainability. Craig Calcaterra had a take that I liked about it a few days ago: "Yesterday Cubs general manager Jed Hoyer spoke to the press about the just-concluded season and the winter ahead. In the course of his comments he said something you hear from most baseball executives these days: ". . . The goal is to build something that's sustainable." "Sustainable" in this context is almost always a euphemism for "we want to turn a nice profit with a roster that is not too expensive, but we don’t want to be so bad that we catch a lot of hell for it.” The word, often paired with the concept of “financial flexibility,” is almost always deployed as a means of dodging a direct question about payroll and its use strongly implies that the team doesn’t want to shoot for 100 wins or anything approaching dominance, because doing such a thing would be inefficient. Sometimes it’s not just implied. Here was Mariners GM Jerry Dipoto, infamously stating that goal in explicit terms a little under a year ago: "If you go back and you look in a decade, those teams that win 54% of the time always wind up in the postseason. And they, more often than not, wind up in the World Series. So there's your bigger picture process. Nobody wants to hear the goal this year is, 'We're going to win 54% of the time.' Because sometimes 54% is -- one year, you're going to win 60%, another year you're going to win 50%. It's whatever it is. But over time, that type of mindset gets you there ... If what you're doing is focusing year-to-year on, 'what do we have to do to win the World Series this year?' You might be one of the teams that's laying in the mud and can't get up for another decade." He added, "We're actually doing the fanbase a favor in asking for their patience to win the World Series while we continue to build a sustainably good roster." First off: do you think any fan actually thinks they’re being “done a favor” by being told by the team’s GM that he does not plan to go all-out in an effort to win? I sure as hell don’t. The Mariners have existed for pushing 50 years now and are the only team in baseball which has never been to the World Series. I feel like they’ve exercised plenty of patience by now, don’t you? While most other executives are not stupid enough to explicitly say “we’re shooting for 87 wins and asking for more is unreasonable,” most of them basically behave that way. They do so by deploying that word Dipoto deployed last year and Hoyer did yesterday: “sustainable.” The idea of sustainability, when a GM says it, is an exercise in expectation-reduction. It’s a means of conditioning fans not to expect anything more than just Wild Card contention. If they make it, great, we fulfilled expectations! If they fall short, hey, at least they continued to be financially prudent. These efforts at fan conditioning have been greatly aided by 20+ years of “Moneyball’s” influence which has convinced a great many in and around the game to equate wanting to aggressively improve a baseball team with stupidity or recklessness... Whatever the current breed of baseball executive, their media surrogates, and a small core of sabermetrically or ownership-oriented fans want to believe, most fans just want to watch a winner. It doesn't even have to be every year. They just want the GM and everyone who works for him to f***ing try harder, to stop hiding behind quant-speak, and to make protecting the billionaire owner’s checkbook less of a priority. This is especially true for the Chicago Cubs who almost literally print money. Most of us have to approach life in a sustainable manner because if we don’t we’re gonna go broke and be in deep s***. No professional sports team is in that boat and even if some claim otherwise, the Chicago Cubs sure as hell aren’t. So spare me, Jed Hoyer, about your and your ownership group's desire to turn a consistent, predictable profit. That’s not why anyone roots for the Cubs."

Even if John Henry came out and said "I don't care about the luxury tax, we're planning on the playoffs this year," I wouldn't get excited. Ever since the Mookie trade, they haven't shown me anything. Maybe since the Eovaldi/Sale extensions that were even perceived as a swing and a miss at the time.

After the past few offseasons, I'm not sure it matters what they tell the media. It only matters what they actually do prior to April. I'm not going to let the quotes inspire or deflate me.

The reasons they dumped previous players aren't necessarily the same reasons they'd dump a player now. The organization is in a different space than it used to be in respect to luxury tax, farm development and other issues.

Meidroth just has limited trade value IMO. Montgomery has no professional appearances so I don't know how good he is and can't speculate on where his trade value lies.

I'd trade Devers, but it's a very big contract that many teams would not be able to take on.

I would consider trading anyone for the right trade. The hardest pieces to deal would be Anthony and Houck, but everyone else would be available IMO.

Easy enough to do when you have cheap, younger, better players coming along in the pipeline.

There's also friction because Masa wants to continue to play LF and the Sox don't want him anywhere near there.

The Sox had shopped Betts to the Padres earlier that offseason. There was a deal in the works in a prior season for Betts, but it was squashed for some reason. Price definitely pushed the return down. Jeter Downs failing as a prospect definitely hurt the outlook of that trade as he was supposed to be the big prize of that deal. Verdugo and Wong worked out for what they were, but Downs was potentially going to be a franchise type SS. If he became a starting SS, I think the Mookie deal looks a lot more favorable even if the Sox don't get a pitcher. Separately because a three way trade was dropped: Graterol/Raley/draft pick for Maeda/Camargo/cash

If the 2024 Sox had Mitch Keller, do they make the Post Season? A lot of people wanted him last offseason.

Keller had an index leverage of 0.30 for the Sox Chase Anderson had an index leverage of 0.27 for the Sox. The only pitchers lower were Wingeter, Reyes and Dom Smith. Their innings were virtually meaningless.

Next year, it would be Whitlock, Fitts or someone else. It was on Breslow for not finding a better bulk innings guy. However, it's not like Anderson was coming in and pitching in games that weren't generally out of hand already. For the most part, he was a mop up guy.

Actually, the Red Sox won the Betts trade.

Bello to the pen. He can't pitch 5 innings anyway.