sk7326

He's known as one of the best fielding coaches in the sport - which is his real value-add to a staff. Certainly the work with Bogaerts is showing.

Our slowpokes never got in the way the last decade plus - it might be a part - but it's a small one. There have not been an inordinate number of "Fenway singles" or anything

It's either that or that there is/could be some sort of emphasis on plate coverage at the expense of just going after your pitch when you get it. "Approach" is one of the muddiest of scouting/analytic terms I think since it's squishing together two things which are not necessarily related ... 1. taking pitches and 2. your gameplan to get a pitch you can crush and to crush it ... and yeah #2 seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle

If you want a simple, traditional stat btw to demonstrate the Sox woes - you don't need RISP, you don't need batted ball stats ... A team that plays half its games at Fenway Park is STILL 15th out of 15 AL teams in doubles. It is far and away the most mind numbing of the Red Sox statistical oddities this season.

It's multitasking - and I'd EXPECT Cherington to cycle through back of the bullpen and back of the roster types ... I'm pretty sure the Cole Hamels phone call does not need to be made every day

I don't know if the infusion is necessary. But the focus should be on the offense. I read a lot "our pitching, sniffle sniffle, blah blah" and it is hard to maintain patience. We knew the pitching was going to have to be upgraded. That was a known hole which was supposed to be addressed by the offense and by the defense. NEITHER of those things has happened. Offensively - it SEEMS like the team has (either consciously or unconsciously) traded raking for preventing strikeouts - which is generally a bad idea. Defensively, the combination of slow starts by Pedroia and Sandoval as well as Hanley apparently having issues playing the easiest position on the field. (although I'd love to see the splits - since from my observation defensive metrics can get screwed up by odd shaped fields)

Are you really hyperventilating about the 25th man on the roster??

De Aza can at least legitimately start if something happened. He is a 4th outfielder, but a much better one.

The issue is everybody knows he can hit AAA pitching

By years, you mean 1+, right?

One of the interesting things is to do a comparison with the fangraphs offensive stats for 2013 - when we were the league's best offense That year Sox were: 3rd in walk rate 9th in strikeout rate 3rd in line drive rate 29th in ground ball rate 9th in fly ball rate 1st in "hard contact" 28th in swing percentage in balls outside of the zone 30th in swing percentage overall Compare it to 2015 4th in walk rate 29th in strikeout rate 25th in line drive rate 8th in ground ball rate 18th in fly ball rate 21st in "hard contact" 28th in swing percentage in balls out os the zone 28th in swing percentage overall ==================================== Basically, the nitty gritty sort of stats show that the Red Sox are still very much a take and rake team, they have just forgotten the rake part. In fact, and this points to the claim of not being aggressive enough - it could be their lack of strikeouts is an indicator of the problem.

Personally no. I don't think things are changing that much - Sox are below the league average in both. The Sox overall bizarre batted ball stats provide more of the meaning to me for their offensive struggles. If you put together the walk-strikeout-batted ball story, you have a team that is consistently having solid at-bats and getting pitches to hit ... they are JUST missing them. To me that has to change - and some of it will. It defies reason that a team can continually miss these pitches - without piling up strikeouts. These are hitters with pop, whose approaches have not broken down. The bat speed has not visibly slowed - but somehow solid contact has been elusive.

You can't erase the two bad starts - but if you did, it's clear he has not been the problem. I'm sure I'll never quite "trust" him, but I'm not averting my eyes either.

Yes. We could get into a "clutch" discussion but I will spare the board that. I will just say that every great hitter in those positions is in fact a great hitter. The reverse may not be true absolutely, but I suspect the reverse is true for a majority of cases. But more to the point, RBIs are in general a function of two things: 1. the player's ability to hit - both for contact and power and 2. the quality of the lineup in general. Teams with good lineups pile up RBIs. You look at the relatively scant non-HR RBIs Barry Bonds had in his video-game-number years and you see the difficulty of the RBI. He was often all they had. The thing with RBIs that I was pointing out is that it is every bit as made up as VORP, or OPS or whatever, perhaps more so. It is assigning individual credit for a team accomplishment - even though the share of credit is not in proportion to the actual achievement necessarily. Certain hits can advance base runners to certain bases, but the baserunner still has to be able to run without a piano on his back.

That seems to run counter to what most of the publications that follow these things notes. If anything, they have been harmed by being consistently good and not getting the sort of draft picks from whence your superstars generally come from.

Real baseball people (as I meant to type) - as is virtually the entire industry - care not a whit about pitcher wins or RBIs. RBIs are made up! It's a made up way to split credit as to how a run scores. (note that is does not cover the other ways the runner got around the bases par exemple). Wins are all that matter - but which pitcher receives the wins are totally unimportant. I won't ruin your party and give you the larger picture answer as to where has it gotten this sad sad organization over this sad sad decade plus. This generation of baseball geeks includes probably 28 or 29 of 30 front offices - and most of them probably don't use the publicly reported stuff.

Real baseball say the exact opposite. RBIs (like pitcher wins) are use-less for measuring quality. The most madeup stat of them all.

Yes and no. The pitching has stunk - but it is the offense that is preventing from being "kind of ok", which was the realistic prognosis for this team in the first half of the season. The pitching has stunk more than expected, and some of that is because the defense has been worse than expected.

If you look at fangraphs the Guardians and Red Sox are both walking a lot, and not striking out much at all. The Guardians though are 3rd in Fangraphs Offense, the Red Sox are 24th. The Red Sox BABIP is STILL dead last at .269, although it has improved a little bit. (it's not barely last instead of last with a bullet) Red Sox are 25th in isolated power (to give you an idea, the Guardians are 12th). They have perked up a LITTLE, but are still 21st in "hard contact" and 24th in line drive rate and 17th in fly ball rate. There has been a weird teamwide epidemic of not squaring balls up. The team is 2nd in infield popup rate. What is interesting is the Blue Jays, an offensive juggernaut have some of the similar batted ball stats, but have hit more fly balls (9th vs 17th) and more of those fly balls have been homeruns. The other miscalculation the team made was that moving Ramirez to an easier position defensively would result in a strong defensive backbone to augment the pitching. That has largely not happened, both because Ramirez has been lousy in LF, but because to date Pedroia has not had a great defensive year.

Some of the draft pick discussion can't be had honestly without pointing out that two of the first rounders landed Adrian Gonzalez, Hagadone and Brian Price landed Victor Martinez - draft picks as currency do matter too. The Red Sox draft strategy has been straightforward for a number of years - college pitchers (mostly) and up the middle high schoolers - in other words, ath-a-letes. There have been a couple of prep pitchers, and Clay Buchholz (who was JC and slipped due to him stealing and fencing laptops). So what you get are high probability guys largely - it is a pretty safe strategy for producing guys who can at least be projected as regulars. Given the draft position - not as easy for finding stars (but isn't that always the case).

Some 6-man rotation, maybe give Johnson or Owens a turn.

My guess is the 160 ballpark. If he approaches it and the team stinks, he'll get shut down. If the team is in contention, he might get moved to a "Playoff Lincecum" position in the bullpen.

I think he will be around for good in the next month - have some patience. I think they want to make sure he doesn't inconveniently run into any innings caps. Remember that entering the season nobody actually thought Rodriguez would be in the show this quickly. It does show that kids make jumps all the time.

True. I think the other question the org has to answer is whether it is willing to, say, put a Margot or Devers (despite my heaps of praise in the last post) into a deal to try to keep Cueto from going to a bidding war.

If he is in Portland by next year - I think we all have permission to dream really really big