sk7326

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

Oh sure - but I do think there is legitimate question as to where the help was going to come from. I am not going to go crazy about one start against a not-special team - BUT Rodriguez did look like "reinforcement".

Indeed - and though it seems far away now, the Devers freight train bears watching.

Oh the sweet smell of hope. Nothing wrong with the spot starts and trying to manage Eduardo's miles - but doesn't take Nostradamus to figure out whether he'll be in the rotation after the break or not. Owens could get a turn maybe too - but he's just not throwing enough strikes on the farm (though it has gotten better).

Probably injury related - but it was not like he was doing anything in the righty side either.

The bat speed thing would make a bit more sense if the strikeouts have gone up with it, but they largely haven't.

I think innings in general - if he has a cap of say 150 innings this season, easier to massage it in AAA ... unless you think the Nation will be happy with him being pulled 85 pitches in regardless of how well he is doing (and given how sensitive the management often is to that sort of thing).

I think - if they are holding him back - it might be more to manage innings caps and whatnot.

I noted this a while back - how much is luck and how much is bad hitting is a curious thing. The team is not driving the ball - that is obvious from most of the batted ball stats. At the same time, the team is still walking a lot and among the hardest teams in the league to strike out. If the players were overmatched, they shouldn't be able to make much contact at all - good, bad or indifferent. So there is definitely an element of randomness here. Nobody would sit here and tell you it's the entire thing (at least not conclusively). But unless the entire lineup has been taught to hit like Ichiro - there is something funny going on in terms of results.

It is good he has found some confidence there - oh the salad days of 2007 - when that pitch looked Pedro-level unhittable in his magical outing

One thing is that the trade market for pitching was going to be tough - there are two big reasons: 1. Revenue sharing - nobody is in the poorhouse anymore (it won't stop owners from whining). Certainly incumbent Cy Young winners won't be on the auction block in December. 2. The Kansas City Royals - because of the 2nd wild card spot - almost every team HAS to at least act like they can make the playoffs during the time they have to sell season tickets and TV ads. Now what I am curious about is whether a team will pony up the extra prospect it will take to get the Reds to rent out Cueto early. I'd be tempted.

Updated Top 25 with the graduations here: http://insider.espn.go.com/blog/keith-law/insider/post?id=3965

Top 20 fWAR pitchers 2012-2015 1. Clayton Kershaw - 1st Round (#7) 2. King Felix - FA 3. Max Scherzer - 1st Round (#11) 4. David Price - 1st Round (#1) 5. Adam Wainwright - 1st Round (#29) 6. Chris Sale - 1st Round (#13) 7. Cole Hamels - 1st Round (#17) 8. Justin Verlander - 1st Round (#2) 9. Zach Grienke - 1st Round (#6) 10. Jordan Zimmermann - 2nd Round 11. Corey Kluber - 4th Round 12. Anibal Sanchez - FA 13. Yu Darvish - FA 14. Gio Gonzalez - Sammich Round 15. Jon Lester - 2nd Round 16. Stephen Strasburg - 1st Round (#1) 17. Cliff Lee - 4th Round 18. Madison Bumgarner - 1st Round (#10) 19. James Shields - 16th Round 20. Johnny Cueto - FA 21. Lance Lynn - Sammich Round 22. Jeff Samardzija - 5th Round (clear signability issue - you might have seen it on TV) 23. Jose Quintana - FA 24. Hiroki Kuroda - FA 25. AJ Burnett - 8th Round 26. Mat Latos - 11th Round Some interesting notes here: 1. You'd think there'd be a monopoly of some sort on this list from teams that "do it better" - but that's largely not the case. The Cards, Dodgers (folks the eye test seems to favour here) and Tigers have some names at the top ... but it is a fairly random distribution. Getting crackerjack pitching is hard. 2. The baseball draft is more of a crapshoot than others (duh!). But it is not at all random. You can quibble some with the Red Sox stuff - particularly on the amateur FA front possibly - but without the top draft picks available, getting that sort of talent into the system is not easy.

They took a calculated risk which didn't work on a guy who has set the franchise back exactly 7 starts. So now move on to something else. 21-24 is not where anyone'd like to be.

Yeah. Pretty much. Lester's Year 1 performance in that deal was bound to be good. So that is not a fair comparison point (they surely did not let him go thinking he'd stink in 2015). The relatively smaller number of star pitchers the Red Sox have produced speaks less to an internal flaw than the reality of a team who has not had many top draft picks in the last decade.

Some externalities there. Burnett was only giving that deal to Pittsburgh. Hammel was awful when he left the friendly confines of Oakland. Volquez went to a good pitching environment, and has been bad when he has not been in one. Masterson was a risk - but a pretty small one. Re-signing Lester - different kettle of fish. Shields has been a beneficiary of extremely good pitching environments his whole career.

Years is more important than money (and position players get more consideration here). The Sox should be big spenders - they charge the most of any team, and you want to see it in the organization. Smart vs $$$ is a false choice.

ERA of 4 is about league median. Obviously a better ERA than that helps, but it's not a disqualifier (the Tigers for one last year qualified with a 4.01 ERA).

I am certainly in favor of switch hitting if possible on principle. But I do wonder if players (and teams) were more sophisticated with when to choose which batting stance. Like if you faced Justin Masterson the decision to bat left handed is easy. But if you have 1999 Pedro Martinez in front of you (not that you have a hell of a lot of chance of hitting him anyway) with that wipeout change up, it might make sense to stay right handed to take that weapon away (or at least a heartfelt attempt). Similarly, maybe it is worth staying lefty on lefty if that is your stronger side and the lefty doesn't actually provide that classic deception or that sweeping breaking pitch.