sk7326
-
Posts
7,663 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Boston Red Sox Videos
2026 Boston Red Sox Top Prospects Ranking
Boston Red Sox Free Agent & Trade Rumors, Notes, & Tidbits
Guides & Resources
2025 Boston Red Sox Draft Pick Tracker
News
2026 Boston Red Sox Draft Tracker: Picks & Bonuses
Forums
Blogs
Events
Store
Downloads
Gallery
Everything posted by sk7326
-
He is a solid choice for sure. Very college heavy top of the draft this year - which to me reflects a general lack of star power in this group. Doesn't mean there aren't good players here - but not sure they can plop Benintendi in Portland right away for instance. My guess is he starts in Salem next year at worst - low-A or Instructs are lower level than he saw in the SEC.
-
Oh you are right - the "top prospect" level is Portland. That is, guys who aren't that far away from Boston. But a lot of the Sox prospect muscle right now is at Greenville, and Margot is in Salem. The top 5 ranking for the farm system is not unreasonable, but the prospects are not at Portland ... yet.
-
I think there are teams who are not convinced he can start.
-
Yeah I think Keith Law's reporting had Benitendi as the Sox top target. Overall not a good draft class. I mean there COULD be some stars, but judging from the draft results it was a pretty poor year for high school position players and pitchers, and that is normally where your star upside comes from. Benintendi probably won't come under slot- he is a college sophomore, so he has more leverage than the average college draftee. The way the Sox work especially with the new CBA ... expect them to start piling up some guys they can get below slot ... and then chase down some tough signs later.
-
Portland is not great - the system's power right now seems to be Pawtucket and Greenville ... that said Margot could be in Portland by the end of the year, as could Moncada and (perhaps) Devers
-
Is the actual rotation the worst in the last 10 Y?
sk7326 replied to iortiz's topic in Boston Red Sox Talk
Putting it simply, the Red Sox Brand is take and rake - but if you're only going to have one, you want the rake. -
1. The base coaching is the tiniest part of that job. All bad decisions reflect poorly on him, but he won't get credit for the good decisions. 2. The "right way" is the one which scores runs and the one which prevents them. 3. This is - aside from Davis and Willis - the identical staff to one which helmed the wire to wire best team in 2013. So the idea they became the drooling morons you see is just silly. 4. This is NOT the best coaching staff in Red Sox history - that ship sailed 4-5 years ago. But what you are pointing out is deeply reductive and flawed.
-
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
-
Is the actual rotation the worst in the last 10 Y?
sk7326 replied to iortiz's topic in Boston Red Sox Talk
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
-
Is the actual rotation the worst in the last 10 Y?
sk7326 replied to iortiz's topic in Boston Red Sox Talk
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.