Hahaha. If that happened I'm not sure OCab would still be alive.
I heard something about Foulke's wife.
In any case, I'm pretty sure there is nothing confirmed.
That's a bit of an oversimplification, particularly because a lot of the spending occurred after the 2018 WS.
Personally I think if you want to really attack or defend the spending you pretty much have to do it on a contract-by-contract basis.
I think Henry did sign off on all this team's crazy spending sprees, and there have been a few of them. Pre-2007, pre-2011, pre-2015, pre-2019. That's actually every four years.
There is a financial incentive even if there are no fans at the games. They want people to watch the games on NESN, which had big drops in viewership in both 2019 and 2020.
Yes, those comp picks were irresistible to Theo. That same year he got Ellsbury and Lowrie for Cabrera, Buchholz for Pedro, Hansen and Bowden for Lowe. St. Louis got Colby Rasmus for Renteria.
The Renteria case was strange, though, and so was the whole parade of shortstops in that period. We went from Nomar to OCab to Renteria to Gonzalez to Lugo.
I'm not drawing any conclusions on the mentally incapable part. But it's rather unusual to sign a guy to a big 4 year contract and then trade him after one season.
I guess you can add Kershaw to the list now.
And it's worth noting, Kershaw almost didn't get the chance for redemption this year. If the Dodgers didn't come back from 3-1 against the Braves, Kershaw would have been wearing some of it again.
One thing about both Price and Kershaw is this: they got a lot of chances to turn things around!
Copied from another thread here:
@SmittyOnMLB
Boston Red Sox’s Chris Sale projected for 2.97 ERA, 17 starts, 94 innings in 2021 in return from Tommy John surgery, per Bill James Handbook
Sure, why not?
I happen to agree that there are a lot of psychological factors at work in pro athletes, and the proliferation of sports psychologists tends to confirm it.
But the impact of these factors on actual performance is probably very erratic and virtually impossible to quantify. You have to avoid assumptions and generalizations. And the average sports fan loves assumptions and generalizations.
I'm calling shenanigans on Jax's post about Gray. I don't think he said anything about wilting. He said they wanted him to throw too many sliders or something like that.
That said, Gray's home/road splits in 2018 were rather bizarre.