sk7326

His bat has much more value in CF, but I am not sure at his age you can count on him to do it at a premium level. I think he stays in RF. Bradley's range at CF is a better fit.

I think the pressure is a bit overrated - or the rush to use pressure as to why the inning went to seed. After all, when Rivera blew the 2001 save that inning did not have a single ball hit hard. These are grownups in a job they've been doing for a long time. Also, a lot of the import of the job has been stage managed away. Consider in 1974, Mike Marshall won the Cy Young as a reliever. He was reliever who made 106 appearances and pitched 208 innings. 21 saves yes, but also a 15-12 record! Compare that with the lavishly compensated Jonathan Papelbon who only is giving 60-70 innings or value - and often in very specialized situations. In 2003, Grady I think never understood the whole closer by committee idea - and just seemed to pick guys randomly, which was not at all the intent. When Bill James put that idea out there, it was making the simple observation that you want your best pitchers to be pitching when it matters the most, and a lot of times that is not the 9th inning. This makes sense - a 2 run lead with the bases empty and 3 outs to get is not a difficult situation. You shouldn't be saving a closer for that situation and using lesser pitchers for those highly leveraged at bats in the 7th and 8th. Heck, in 2004 Tito understood this fully - and had no shame in bringing in Foulke in the 7th when things were getting hairy. Papelbon has been a good reliever and occasionally great (though not as consistently since 2008). That said, $14M is a lot for 60 innings of work ... and unless he is a guy you are happy bringing into the non-9th inning of a game, I am not sure how irreplaceable he really is. Saves are a weird made up stat which do not really help with identifying good relievers. But arbitration pays for them and so does free agency, so we are stuck with a lot of 1 inning closers being overpaid for a very very narrow job description.

It is possible that there is extra pressure - but I have not seen a good analysis proving it (and a bunch of ex jocks who got paid to do it aren't great authorities). I look at it very simply - if you don't want to bring a pitcher into the 8th inning of a tie game with the go ahead run on 3rd ... then he's not a guy you trust and not really worth the scratch.

A lot of their relievers last year weren't particularly good to begin with. There are a lot of talk show sort of reasons to anoint closers - but what the job has become ... pitch an inning, without any baserunners on ... is not that bad, and often are not the most important outs of a particular game. I was watching the MLB.TV package for Sox-Royals and got the Royals announcers and they were talking about "getting the game to Holland" in the 9th - as if they would never bring him in the 8th when the Red Sox were building the rally. Yet that is how almost every team thinks - what good is a closer if you refuse to use him when the game is on the line? I argued for Hanrahan over Bailey early in the year - but that is because Bailey was the better pitcher and should not be kept in the "proven closer" glass case. I mean the Phillies are paying $14 million for 50 innings of work - is that an efficient use of money? Only pitch a guy when there is a lead and no duress?

8 HRs allowed in 55 IP ... has been Tazawa's soft spot all season, and Arrencibia is more than capable of closing his eyes and hitting it far.

It IS a volatile position - I agree. But Papelbon clearly when we let him go had stopped justifying his contract demands. Pitching innings with nobody on is not really a skill that should cost a ton of money. Papelbon is a closer because he was anointed in 2006 and amassed enough saves that the market is paying him as such. But he has not been treated like a team's best reliever for a few years - now granted not nearly enough teams use their best relievers when it matters most (the Red Sox are good there relatively). The one inning closer is a relatively unimportant invention - it is helpful that they find SOMEBODY, but they don't need to go nuts identifying who.

Iggy's replacement is a pretty good defensive SS - a modest dropoff for an improved bat. Detroit needed a SS, and they got one who has an everyday starter sort of ceiling - although his hitting matters there too, his struggle is going to be producing enough to stay playable. This year his body of work has been a "yes" there. His July is not acceptable, his August to date is.

Well, two playoff appearances and 179 wins in two playoff misses ... not flags, but 29/30 teams can say that. The Sox run was pretty good - not like Pedroia, Youk etc became bad people suddenly. But - in any case, this year has been a bit of a return to form. Not sure if a title will come from it - just from the perspective that no baseball favorite is ever any sort of iron lock - but has been a terrific season and an unruined summah.

It is a good reason to look year to year with the bullpen. Just pick a guy and let him work the 9th ... it's an inning - just like the others, although the financial incentives have gone insane. I mean this year Uehara - a pitcher with phenomenal command and a good splitter, but no wipeout pitches - has been remarkable this year. But he could turn into a pumpkin next year easily. You could just as easily have Drake Britton get those reps next year (obviously Koji deserves the role until he loses it) - just how the cookie crumbles. Tampa turned an Angels castoff (Rodney) into somebody after turning career underachiever Kyle Farnsworth into the same. We have plenty of live arms - just run them through.

Beckett, the ALCS MVP of our last title, that bastion of negativity. I'd like to think he is a guy who simply no longer can pitch - diminished fastball without the command to become something else. I always saw his answers as a guy who recognized the loss of stuff but wasn't going to cry because a bunch of reporters wanted him to. It showed in the results in any case. The Dodgers this season have been interesting - first half of the year something like 3rd in the NL in OBP and last in runs ... that imbalance was not going to last. I suspect the presence or absence of a #5 starter was not changing that much one way or the other.

Valentine as a scapegoat has some truth, once again a comic level of injury derailed the team as much as anything. But when one considers how inept he was at managing his own coaching staff (I don't care if his players liked him) - that was a serious problem, and a poor reflection on him. (nobody in a real job would be allowed that garbage either) The negativity was largely self-inflicted. Instead of a 90-72 team which lost a playoff bid on the shoulders of a team which had a month of poor pitching and started to run out of players generally - the management team listened to much to the soap operas fabricated by WEEI or Dan Shaughnessy and the like and were very reactionary. But it is seductive - nobody wants to say there was a lot of bad luck. 2012 the bad luck compounded, and then the trade + the injuries left them fielding a legitimately bad team. This year, a bunch of the unlucky has sort of shifted back to "about how it should be" and suddenly, a contender.

Valentine as a scapegoat has some truth, once again a comic level of injury derailed the team as much as anything. But when one considers how inept he was at managing his own coaching staff (I don't care if his players liked him) - that was a serious problem, and a poor reflection on him. (nobody in a real job would be allowed that garbage either) The negativity was largely self-inflicted. Instead of a 90-72 team which lost a playoff bid on the shoulders of a team which had a month of poor pitching and started to run out of players generally - the management team listened to much to the soap operas fabricated by WEEI or Dan Shaughnessy and the like and were very reactionary. But it is seductive - nobody wants to say there was a lot of bad luck. 2012 the bad luck compounded, and then the trade + the injuries left them fielding a legitimately bad team. This year, a bunch of the unlucky has sort of shifted back to "about how it should be" and suddenly, a contender.

If there has been one thing Cherington has done wrong - it has been the fetish for trading for "proven closers" - often overpaying. Bailey and Hanrahan need to be object lessons here. You are better off just throwing live arm after live arm at the situation until one sticks. Tampa shows the way here - sift through other team's garbage (or your own) and there is plenty to be had.

I say no - but Carp with a right handed caddy is not at all bad as a fallback position. And yes, if Napoli did not have a competition for his services, he'd make a fine righty partner.

Well Braun won't be doing that anymore probably - but those stats are an expectation for a LF ... Stanton is batting .238, but he is getting on base almost as often as Ellsbury, so it's not at all bad. The SB numbers are more interesting than crucial - we know the industry values stolen bases, but 1985 ain't comin back. Speedsters between 30 and 36 have had some good numbers, but speedsters without pop who can't play CF anymore - the stolen bases are just not enough to offset the other stuff. Basically you are talking Ichiro - who has not been an effective corner outfielder for 3 years. I love Ellsbury - and the lack of homeruns does not bother me - he is clearly not a slap hitter. He is hitting the ball hard, just not as many going over the fence. But I am not sentimental about what he represents as an investment. The Crawford comp is instructive. Crawford had a pseudo-MVP season entering his free agent year - a great athlete but also a guy who was not playing CF. His rough season in 2011 indeed was made even rougher because he was playing an "offensive" position. That he was a good defender in LF (and he slipped there too in 2011) hardly mattered when his bat when in the tank so hard. The Red Sox if anything overvalued the defensive component of Crawford's WAR-case. This is the basic principle of WAR/VORP/whatever. The fact is the Red Sox could snap their fingers pull Daniel Nava and Mike Carp from obscurity into ok production at LF. So if Ellsbury can't produce like Daniel Nava as a left fielder - then a team is wasting its money, since that sort of production is not hard to find. Can a team like Pittsburgh - for instance - who is getting NOTHING out of their RF, justify Ellsbury as a RF with McCutchen manning CF? Sure - but that is a very specific case. I love Ellsbury - I am trying not to be sentimental about his production as a 30 year old outfielder.

He moves to LF, his fringy .800 OPS-ness puts him in a cohort with Giancarlo Stanton or Ryan Braun's statistics ... that is a different group than as a CF. His numbers have to be examined in context with being an acceptable CF, and more credit for being a good one. He will be 30 when he enters the market - and with so much of his value in his legs, how much peak vs decline would you be buying over the next 6 years REALLY.

From a lot of the insider accounts - it really does seem like the baseball pros - Cherington and his staff - have had much more empowerment to work without the TV ratings people lording over them, power which did not exist last year. The decisions have been far less reactive, and the deals have been far less desperate. The coaching staff has gotten on the same page, and the manager deserves credit for not being a bozo. The players who have always been good have been good - the guys who have been winners here until the injury plague of 2011-2012. What changed was a lot of bad luck sort of things have improved - Farrell has been able to put a fairly steady lineup on the field all season - and the rotation has suffered without Buchholz but has been pretty stable otherwise (even with his slide late, has been an underrated quality Dempster - and Lester - have provided). The team also got back to the OBP-driven, slow as molasses approach with tough at bat after tough at-bat. Let's put it this way - we're all guessing with regards to "responsibility" for 2012 v 2013. But in 2013, all the moves smell like things the Red Sox Front Office of the mid-late 2000s would have done. 2012 resembled something a WEEI caller would do.

One - welcome ... Two - the bullpen guys - you'll need them all, and you can't count on any of them. Just the nature of the position and when you are collecting performance data 50 innings or so at a time. Uehara looks like the most reliable (and his option will vest, so this discussion is moot). Tazawa is worth bringing back, but if somebody offers him 3 years - that becomes a very tough ask ... bringing ANY reliever back for that kind of commitment with the natural volatility of the position is generally a bad idea.

Homeruns have slumped - that is where things have been tough. Strikeouts are more interesting than an actual issue.

On pace for a 3-4 win sort of season. Like Mark Bellhorn, strikes out so much that the good stuff is easy to miss. Gets on base a lot, plays an excellent shortstop - and a legitimately dangerous bat at the bottom of the order. For a one year flyer - he has been very good. I was settling for average, he has been legitimately good. Iglesias' first 2 months were seductive as all those balls found holes - but there is not really that much of a race as to who offered a better all around package at the position.

Salty is probably closer to your number than $15M. But he is not really much worse than Brian McCann who'd cost years, money, and you are buying the later years of a body with a LOT of miles on him. It is hard to picture him making 110 starts ever again. You are better off finding Salty a useful righthanded caddy and be done with it.

There is no need - and I think the Red Sox might be spooked from a qualifying offer because Drew might take it. He made 9.5 million because that is the going rate for an above average SS, which he has been before. You have to look a bit beyond OPS here - although that is a solid place to start. He got on base at a good clip - which is more important than the slugging part. His BABIP is a little high (.321) but not at the absurd levels Iglesias was enjoying. Ultimately he is going to end this year as a 3-4 win player, and frankly in this economic climate that is a bargain for $9.5 million. Good to excellent defense, excellent approach, good power ... he is going to have suitors this offseason. He has probably had the best SS season since Nomar left and the position became a black hole. Let's put it this way, there are plenty of at-bats for everybody if Drew and Boegarts come back. Middlebrooks might get squeezed, but part of that is on him.

Dempster - innings eater for a team without any - scouting reports said not as good as he showed in Chicago, not as bad as with Texas (lot of HR luck there) ... B- Uehara - great value A+ Victorino - all of his WAR is in defense, contract rich for a potential platoon player down the line, but short hitch, B Napoli - C. Average 1B right now, but could still be better. Drew - A-. Excellent contract, quietly very good year. Gomes - B+. For what he is, a bench bat - has been good. Excellent approach even if I wish he had made contact a little more.

Extending Drew is a good move. That said, this was clearly a 2010 Beltre-sort of marriage here. Drew had to rebuild his good name again and the Red Sox needed a SS. If a team looks at Drew and sees a 3/$35-40 sort of player, I'd have a hard time going there. I do think the market for Drew will be very competitive given how god awful the position is around the majors - there is some very exciting SS on the way, but Drew is an upgrade for a lot of teams.

It was a little more complicated that - Baltimore offered a datapoint from experience, and the 20 year old was outhitting the incumbent. That said, WMB was the safe move here - and we DO have to figure out if he can square up major league pitching consistently and whether he knows what a "ball" is. There is some dual purpose - and if WMB is still the same modest ceiling guy he had shown earlier, they can make the Boegarts move sooner. I think there is a 90-100% chance Boegarts will be on the roster when the postseason starts - just curious how he will get there.