jung

Don't be ridiculous!

No I am not which makes the short span to the foul pole not very helpful. Most POWER SHOTS head to the POWER ALLIES. Right after you are off the foul pole in our RF it is a very deep RF. The rocket ship baseball has made that a bit less apparent but you STILL really have to hit it to get it out to our RF. You do see the fluke shot to RF if there is a prevailing breeze behind the rocket ship baseball. X's one handed, off balance, all his weight already on his front foot HR that actually carried OVER the visiting bullpen last year comes to mind.

Well OF is 33% of batting order for one thing. If you are going to devote all of 33% of your batting order to LH hitters in Fenway Park you better be making that up elsewhere. Lets see, we have a LH hitting 1st baseman and a LH hitting 3rd baseman. That is a bunch of LH bats for a park with as deep a RF as Fenway's, unless you are suggesting that the Sox are a speed team that can take advantage of all that acreage in RF. Good luck with that.

Which yields doubles or even singles in Fenway if you are not fast enough to leg it out. Watch how many guys have to hustle their rear ends off to even get into second base having bashed a ball into the Monster.

Not heavily marketed by the Sox. David marketed himself and very successfully.

Young players as they come up in the Sox organization are the ONLY players that are a big part of Sox Marketing. The Sox don't market any players no matter how great they might be long term which is in part why 10-11-12 years for Mookie is not that appealing to the Sox. The Sox market: 1.Fenway Park in all its historical glory plus its newfound family friendliness (which did not exist when I was a season ticket holder) 2.Speculation over how potentially great a particular edition of the Sox might be in a given year 3.Their charitable work 4.Their minor league organization 5.NESN 6.Fenway Group's other sports enterprises Thats it. They don't seriously market ANY individual player long term. I am surprised that they have virtually given up on item 2 of my list at least for 2020. But they think they can survive it in the short run and they are probably right.

Least i forget, in spite of the short porch with the high wall in LF, LH hitters in Fenway are hitting into one of the deepest RF's in baseball. Its only a short porch in our RF right at the foul pole. Other than that, its a very deep RF.

You mean the smooth fielding slap hitting 2nd Lin who literally falls asleep right in the middle of plays? Does he have a sleep disorder? That said, I am inclined to agree with you as sorry a Sox situation as that suggests.

Chavis can't hit anything that is not a fat Slider right down Main St or a Change in a hideous location. Other than that he is meat. Should be traded in fact. I have hopes for Dalbec but he is at the moment entirely unproven. Peraza is surely not the second coming of Pedey. Heck he might not even be the second coming of 2018-2019 Pedey. The most fun we will get out of 2020 will be watching the team manage its way through a 162 game season with this crew. Fine for us so devoted to MLB and the Sox to post at a forum. As for the bulk of the people that sit in those seats now, not sure it really matters. Who gets really killed in this....the secondary ticket sellers. This will be another year where they take a bath IMO.

The Sox cared enough to bring in a RH hitting OFer. With Mookie gone for hitters of consequence hitting from the Right side we have JD, Vaz and X....lets see, we have JD, Vaz and X and we have ahhhhhh JD, Vaz and X. Plus most of a teams power comes from OF or DH bats. MLB has not managed to make agility so meaningless in the infield that you can afford to put too many linebackers in the middle infield and Beni is living proof that there are some hitters that simply can't hit many HR's no matter how much Manfred juices the baseball. The last time the Sox featured an all LH OF was 1960. We know what a great team that was! Honestly I don't think the Sox brass cares at least for 2020. They did bring in a RH hitting OFer. He can't hit is weight. But WHO CARES. IMO he is here to keep JD out of the OF. Probably the smartest move they have made so far for 2020.

As for the Sox themselves, they have already proven that they could finish last 3 out of 4 years and not skip a beat as a business.

In fact it punishes teams for it creating an environment where SOME teams will venture into CBT land for SOME period of time. In reality you can feel the ulcers growing in the pit of ownership's stomachs the longer they stay over the tax limit. I will repeat it is not even an issue of whether the owner can afford it or not. Its that hole in the pit of his stomach that has got the words PENALTY and TAX written all over it. It is just impossible for me to envision a businessman that will just take that for very long. Now we can argue about whether or not MLB instituted the CBT to protect the owners from themselves regardless of the dynamics added to the enterprise or if they actually calculated how the dynamic would effect actual standings and actual year over year results. Myself I cannot answer that question. Frankly, if anything MLB administration is worse than franchise ownership, quirkier and more misguided than franchise ownership. So no telling what their thinking was regarding the CBT or if they were even thinking at all beyond protecting ownership from themselves.

Geezuz Bloom: "I am Chaim Bloom. I am your new Chief Baseball Officer [whatever the f*** that is]. If you think I look like a robot its because I am a robot." I don't know how much the Sox should toss this guy out in front of the cameras and the mics.

The 2020 team more than even recent editions will be a team featuring a relatively small number of really good players accompanied by sludge. There are more holes in the 2020 team to date than a cheese grater. Not to mention 3 LH hitting OFers. Duh! Seem to have covered that base with their new light hitting OF as a 4th. That's bound to be the thing that just blows up the dresses of the fan base. I am not sure the Sox will make many moves that actually improve the 2020 edition if it takes even from 2021, never mind any year after 2021.

Yup, MLB is still not smart enough to figure out how often they have literally come very close to killing the golden goose and I suspect a next work stoppage of any length at all will take them very close to killing it or will in fact kill it.

And it has done nothing to smooth out the distribution of salaries across ballplayers. I do think the time has come to eliminate the guaranteed contract and come up with something else. If the players think the guaranteed contract has worked out for them across their union membership, they can pass me some of what they are drinking.

There is no worst scenario for the Dodgers regarding this deal. There is only wining it all or not winning it all in 2020. They have been pretty devoted to winning it all year by year for the last ten years. This is just the latest iteration of the Dodgers finally win one of these things agendas.

Not sure there has ever been a good formula for spreading the wealth more evenly. A bit worse with the lux tax. But it has always been a sports entertainment enterprise that rewarded the top players and attempted to screw everybody else. Funny how Free Agency did not change that dynamic much. The time of the guaranteed contract may need to come to an end if there is ever going to be a hope of leveling the playing field. The teams have too much money tied up in dead or non-performing contracts which has effects that tend to roll downhill to everybody. I have not done a study of this but i suspect there is a big gap now in contract term with the very best players able to command long term deals and everybody else lucky to squeeze three years out of ownership.

The "beauty" or hated pervasiveness of the lux tax is on display here. Ask a businessman to spend money to improve his product or his market position and for the most part you will find them all in. Tell a businessman he is paying a penalty to the tune of millions of dollars and you would do just as well to give him a stomach ulcer and let him bleed himself to death. Just the way it is. It really does not matter if he can afford it or not. Bad for his health.

Do you have a reference for that? It sounds more below the threshold than we should be. That said given all the elements that go into the calculation I don't even think the teams know until MLB tells them....another oddity of MLB. Sort of like a rocket ship baseball that became more of a rocket ship three out of the last four years with no forewarning to anybody. Just another of the many surprise packages from MLB.

We should never want to see JD in the OF again. That said I am not sure how much help Holt would be out there as right now we have 3 LH hitting OFers. We need a RHer not named JD to play out there. It should be clear that Moreland needs a platoon mate. He cannot go it alone at 1st base. All of that said, we are really headed for an iceberg in the pitching and so far I have not seen an effort to turn the good ship Red Sox away from it.

I hope to God they are working on that as we speak. That would be the benefit from not being pigeonholed into Gatorade by the Mookie to the Dodgers deal. I really do not want to see Chavis in 2020 in a Red Sox uni. Sell SELL, S-E-L-L

I actually think that what happened to Gatorade was that Verdugo is in some ways a risk though with a heck of an upside and Gatorade is just all risk again with the upside of having a Tripps arm in the pen. I think the Sox got cold feet because that was just too much risk to get in return for sure thing top 3 player in baseball Mookie. So now they have Verdugo and a couple of decent prospects which they actually do need. As for Gatorade, one risky Tripps arm does not solve our pitching issues.

Sure.... lets promote the International League North last place finishers to the big league club. That should work out great.

So what did Cherries ML FA signings have to do with the farm system. IMO Cherries was too protective of his farm and DD simply too willing to rape it. Both had a tendency to fall in love with deals and fall in love with big name players.