Bellhorn04

By far the best value starter signings this past offseason were mid-priced guys-Lugo, Wacha, Imanaga.

Excellent.

May have to do with the device, maybe you need an app if you're on a tablet or whatever. I'm on my desktop right now and I can access any page (have to skip through 5 pages at a time, much like the previous software). I don't think I can do this on my tablet.

I wonder how that Netflix doc is going? I read somewhere in the Sox blogosphere that the Netflix folks hadn't been seen around the team for a while, like 6 weeks. Maybe it was BS. But who knows. Never a dull moment with the Sox, even when they're mediocre to crappy on the field.

Well, there you have it, folks. The 2024 Red Sox win the season series from the White Sox 4-3, outscoring them 35-32. Not especially impressive against the worst team in history. This would be an appropriate time for someone in the Sox media to write something truly brutal and possibly draw a reaction from Henry or Kennedy.

To me Dalbec is one of those guys who demonstrates how tough MLB pitching is. Here's a guy who's been able to consistently mash in AAA (albeit with high K rates), and who did have some early success against MLB pitchers. But they figured him out, apparently. He seems like a good guy, have never heard any words of complaint or frustration or anything. I hope the rest of his baseball life is a good one, whatever or wherever it is.

All lefties! And our guys who have faded in the second half are all righties! There's something going on here, I tell ya...

That's actually a great factoid, and kind of hilarious to boot...

With you on this one. Houck as a "#3 at best" and Crawford as a "depth piece" does imply a whole lotta unrealistic expectations.

Craig finished in the top 20 in MVP voting in both 2012 and 2013. The Lisfranc injury obviously did him in.

Yeah, we really don't know any more. I was shocked when Kennedy announced in January that he expected the 2024 payroll to be lower than the 2023 payroll, when there were still a ton of free agents left on the market. There's stuff going on behind the scenes that none of us know about. But something has definitely changed.

Yeah, I might as well get silly here and say the 2024 team probably would have been better if Bloom was still here. But Breslow has made some moves for young pitching that might pay off bigly. Or not.

Cespedes and Craig are remembered by serious Sox fans for their roles in those trades of Lester and Lackey. Flipping Cespedes for Porcello worked out IMHO mainly because Rick contributed to the 2018 ring. (The CYA was great but his regular seasons overall were spotty.) Getting Kelly in the Lackey deal worked out in the 2018 postseason where Joe pitched very well after much speculation he would be left off the postseason roster.

I'd love to hear Bloom's side of it some time, but I realize that can never happen unless he moves to a new career outside baseball. I mean, you would think that if they were pissed about the 2022 deadline they would have conveyed a message to Bloom about picking a lane this time, and I don't know why he would have defied that. More likely they just left it up to him I guess.

Crochet has some question marks attached to him too because he's not really a proven quantity. The White Sox have been limiting his innings the second half of the season. Since the ASB he has only pitched 24.2 innings, with an ERA of 6.20 and OPSa of .907.

Yeah, I'm not sure where the stories about Skubal being available came from.

Yep, that's what was reported. Part of me wonders if Henry was so livid about Bloom not doing this and recouping that money that he not only fired Bloom for it, but gave a directive to Breslow to get whatever he could for Sale, end of story. Hell, Sale might have gotten 2 Sox CBOs fired, and he's now working on a third! (Note: most of this post is meant as wild ass speculation for entertainment purposes.)

Yes, we're a hair's breadth from garbage time. From having a look at Story and so on.

I could be wrong but I thought the earlier offer for Sale came from Texas. I wasn't one of the people who was mad at Bloom for not doing it. I supported him on that. I've pretty much been a Sale Pollyanna all along.

Outstanding piece here by Dan Secatore at Over the Monster about Devers not speaking to the press for a hour plus after Tuesday's loss to the Mets and some of the fallout. And about a lot more than that. Secatore is really good. https://www.overthemonster.com/2024/9/6/24236818/red-sox-rafael-devers-didnt-speak-but-he-said-everything-christopher-smith-chris-cotillo-masslive

I'm very skeptical they're going to do what it takes to acquire an ace this offseason. Because they're basically in the same position they were last offseason. It's still a .500 team with a promising farm and a ton of question marks. I think they are going to kick the can down the road one more time and treat 2025 as another year of evaluating where they are. If a lot goes right in 2025 they might finally feel motivated to make those big moves.

I did go back and look at the early posts in this thread and re-posted a sample of them. They showed a very mixed reaction to the trade. Old school types like jad, iortiz, cp176 and a700 absolutely hated it! My initial reaction was positive but after a couple of days of thinking about it I amended to say the trade would look very questionable if they did nothing more than sign Giolito. My big problem with their approach to the 2024 rotation is really not that much different from yours, we only differ on the particulars. You have excoriated them for not doing anything to replace Giolito when he went down. I'm excoriating them for trading Sale when we had such a desperate need for starting pitching and clearly had no intention to do much about it.. I think some hindsight is fair in evaluating this trade not because of Sale's shockingly good health and performance, but because of the overall negligence of the rotation that we saw. That negligence basically nullified any sense this trade might have made in isolation IMHO.

I think notin's strategy here is to keep saying Sale is due for an injury until it actually happens.

What, nobody can predict injuries? Interesting.

The best news about the Sale trade right now is that the Red Sox are pretty much making it irrelevant for this year.