sk7326

If Martinez is not coming - fine. Then the question is what do you do? 1. Sign LoMo - who is young and could be a late bloomer. But it could also be major fluke rule. Would you want to go 5 years with him? 2. Sign a CarGo or Joey Bats (or something similar) - who are old and have bloomed already. But it would be a year - and maybe you strike gold (or at least silver). Statcast data would be helpful here - alas. 3. Ride with this group. This would be frustrating - but the team scored the 6th most in the AL without anybody having an outstanding season. There is reason to see things getting better. All 3 are defensible. My preference would be #2.

College is a little more prevalent and the Seahawks have done nicely. Plus (this is true of the West Coast more generally) - you get to be outside more. Nice thing is being able to watch East Coast games and still have time to g out.

Go figger - the current sox GM and his former assistant have made more or less identical offers.

There are just a lot of tough things or Martinez: 1. The Red Sox are really the only customer who has the need and the money 2. The market has been squeezing guys like Martinez for a couple of years. The industry is not paying a lot of years for unathletic sluggers. 3. The Red Sox have short term options. They could go with LoMo. They could go Building 19 style (yes I'm that old) and look at Bautista/CarGo. They could simply say that "we scored the 6th most runs in the AL without anybody having a particularly good year" and just count on some turnaround from coaching and life happening. I think eventually Martinez joins Boston, but I have no problem with a hard line being taken here.

Leadership is hard to import - it comes from the dudes who have done the work ... of course, this is all based on a strawman here, that the team lacked grit or fundamentals or toughness. That is a highly questionable premise - that the kids were lackadasical or whatever.

Harper would be ummm ... unkind about the racism thing in Boston

Maybe - but the Astros were already there, and the Sox were too to a certain degree. The Yankees real magic was pouncing on sell-offs with Miller and Chapman. The rest is not that amazing. And in both cases you can't blame the Cubs or Guardians for doing it - flags fly forever - but there you go.

The Heyward signing made a ton of sense - he was amazingly young for a FA, they got him cheap relative to expectations ... and was capable of being one of the best OFs in the league if he was just okay offensively (he had been a reliably high on-base guy prior to his StL experience). The signing has not worked since he forgot how to hit. But you are right on the basics - you use the farm to craft the bulk of the team and then FAs are for specific openings. Like Lester. Darvish is a bad contract for the years, but a really good price. It seemed a lot of his problems were pitch selection related - the K-rate was still excellent. It seems like there is still some significant upside there at least short run. But some of the things the Cubs needed to keep their window open have not worked out. (Russell being more average than excellent, Schwarber not even that).

Howard Bryant wrote about this https://www.amazon.com/Shut-Out-Story-Baseball-Boston/dp/0807009792

It is difficult to talk draft without the development part. If you look at evaluating kids (this is true in all sports to some degree) it's evaluating ceiling and probability. The top picks usually are pretty good in both. When you don't pick at the top - you are compromising on ceiling or probability. You can see that with Theo's picks. Usually the probability guys were pitchers - Matt Barnes is a perfect example. He projected to be a big league pitcher - which is a good outcome for late 1st, but you're not getting a star there. Other times he chose ceiling - like a Reymond Fuentes or something. Usually that doesn't work - but the method is sound. The Sox are still doing the sound thing - although Dombrowski is much more inclined to draft upside pitching than Theo and Ben were. Theo and Ben always preferred the lower variability that came with great up the middle athletes. The tl;dr is that it's now on the instructional staff and the kids themselves to find the performance to match the skillz. I don't lament the draft position too much when thinking about position guys - for pitching it seems to matter more. It means you trust scouts more - whether it means trusting a cold weather performer (why Trout fell) or a two sport athlete who just needed to play baseball more (Mookie Betts). Or you look for physical projection with some elite raw tools ... those guys will mostly bust, but it's like venture capital, one of them hitting pays for the busts.

With Brannen - there is a lot of physical projection involved. Hauck is fascinating in that he has a reliever delivery - throws across his body. But he consistently got excellent results in the highest amateur level in the country.

I can see that - but it was a team which had an incredible knack for winning close games, and a lot of those long extra inning odysseys. It was a team which even got up off the mat against the Astros. The team had toughness. Indeed - if you read between the lines of the postmortems of Farrell's ouster - it seemed like the exact opposite. He was not laid back enough - just a lot of professional grinding intensity. What Farrell missed was Francona's ability to crack a dirty joke and tell a kid suffering through a slump. "it's nothing that a line drive falling between two fielders can't fix". The kids - if anything - were way way too hard on themselves.

in the long run - yes. But the year's the best team in the league wins are fairly irregular, far more than any other sport. Really, it's the rotating starting pitchers that does it. There is very rarely a matchup where a team is fielding a better 9 players than another team every single day. It's like goaltendiing in hockey but moreso (since hockey teams can still generate tons of chances).

i think it was something like 4 players or something - i need to find a better link, it was stuff that i remember from reporters covering the team in the 70s ... a black ballplayer came in, then it meant one inevitably was sent down or something. Now I do think that is was not all Yawkey's personal preferences - but a read on the market.

Not their first rounder - they had a bottom 10 record which exempted them.

In chats, Law noted the Red Sox are 24 but trending up ... the problem is that a lot of that trend is built on a very good looking 2017 draft ... but those kids will have to deliver results in pro ball. Right now the laurels are largely based on amateur pedigree and short season.

The last team to integrate is not a perfect indicator (the Yankees were 2nd to last!). But the "open secret" quota on African-American players on the roster was more problematic. He was a racist - and he was also a tremendous boon to cancer research. People are multitudes. One of the great thrills of Pedro and Ortiz were being the first Red Sox since Tiant to really break through the team's historic lilly-whiteness.

Yes, I am sure if Dombrowski knew that the Marlins would be sold and their owner and GM were willing to sell off All-Star players for sacks of potatoes and magic beans, he probably holds these guys a bit longer.

Kinda sorta - if Dombrowski showed up, did his analysis of the farm, identified Benintendi and Devers as the keepers and decided everything else was better sourced by the major league team, at least within the time frame which matters here. Espinoza and Kopech were ultimately dealt because they were pitchers, and come with an inherently much wider range of outcomes than position players. I was not a fan of the Pomeranz trade, but the idea of seeing a toolsy single-A pitcher with a wiry frame and saying "there's a lot of risk there" is pretty defensible. Moncada they looked at him in 2016 and clearly decided he was not the best 3B prospect in the org - so time to use him to get Sale.

Oh I disagree there - I mean the Cubs put a ton of chips on the table in 2016, because they knew they had a great team ... and those players deserved the best possible swing at a title. Even if it didn't work - it was the right thing to do. Life is precious, and you have to pounce on opportunities. This is not a defense of "Bagwell for Andersen" moves which were just a poor use of resources. The Sox built this team the right way - it is hard to have an issue with using blocked minor leaguers and lower level pitchers to try to fill in some gaps. It is on Henry to prioritize finding kids for the next generation (and to open up the checkbook for the stars of today when appropriate).

(those teams all stink at the major league level presently)

Chavis absolutely could impact the team by 2019, and late 2018 is not nuts (though unlikely)

Would we? You are then divining a Sale, Kimbrel, Pomeranz free world ... the international signing thing is a problem too, but more in that it reduces the pool of baseball players more generally. But the Red Sox still got a lot done last year, but of course there was the tragic ending. Espinoza is a fascinating prospect, but he will now end up missing almost 2 full seasons without a great track record of turning the tools into outs.

Yes, although (and this we don't know re: Henry) Ilitch wanted that - Dombrowski was doing his job. And Dombrowski's right hand man got promoted after Dombrowski left, so it's not like Ilitch wanted to destroy the infrastructure there. If Henry wants Dombrowski to keep the farm fresh with some ceiling, it will happen. I would be surprised if Henry gave him the same mandate. My theory (and just my opinion here) is that Dombrowski was brought in here to help the big league club yes, but also to take all of this minor league talent amassed by the org and make sense of it. And - so far - Dombrowski has been right in terms of the kids he has backed and the others he has dealt. It looks like the 2016 and 2017 drafts brought in a lot of kids who could move - there is the raw material there. But there is a lot that has to go right, a bit more than you'd prefer - but probably what you have to live with given draft positions and so forth. Really - it is about the development staff and the kiddos themselves.

It's ultimately age and production (with age thresholds for pitchers and catchers being older). And even that is tempered some - since winning only actually matters at the big league level. AAA is definitely is production - since AAA is essentially a big league taxi squad nowadays. Heck, if you're a team with a AAA PCL affiliate, often you are better off just skipping pitchers past AAA altogether.