jd98

Ugh, I absolutely hate this trade. First move by DD that I've hated. Not that I hate Eovaldi, he's alright, but 6(?) years of Beeks is waaaaay too much to give up for 2+ months of someone that's not needed all that much. I'm not given up on Beeks after 6 innings. Be prepared to see him do very well in Tampa for many years. Wright or ERod should be healthy by the playoffs, and even if not, I'm not sure Eovaldi is even an improvement over Johnson/Velazquez. The cliff was just a hazy mirage, now it's full speed ahead to the cliff. Exactly the kind of deadline deal that I was hoping didn't happen. Or I could have just repeated this

That's a good summary. I saw him in Greenville in 2013. Agree with everything you said.

No, nothing like that, not that early. Basically early in 2013 before he started getting some hype, so I guess that was the beginning of his breakout rather than before. Bad wording on my part. Just meant before he was a top prospect. SoxProspects didn't even have him top 20 for June 2013. It wasn't meant to be some claim to my great prospecting skills, lol, it's just cool when you follow someone from early in their minor league career and they turn into a star. And he seems to be a great guy too. Probably already my second favorite player ever, behind Pedro.

Me too, because the previous mention was Nookie. Not making fun of bosoxmal in any way, but funny typos are funny. I only wish the Nookie and Moolie were switched so we could then say that Nookie has 76 Rubs On topic, Mookie is ridiculous. I had an eye on him even before he broke out in the minors. Thought he'd be really good, maybe near the top of the league in doubles and BA. Didn't expect so much power. And I like that this forum has so many older folks. It's nice to have that perspective, especially when most online forums are overwhelmingly teens/20's (I'm mid 40s).

So worst case, after 4 or more playoff years, the cliff actually happens. Sox have to do a rebuild and will suck for a few years. Might even be a 5 year plan. I thought you liked that because you're always praising Ben for doing it. Should be a win-win for you.

If you win the tiebreaker, there is no elimination game, so why would you not try your best (ie start Sale) to win that one. I'm not seeing any difference between this scenario and game 6 of the LCS (or game 4 of LDS). If by magic, you had everyone available with no rest issues for game 6, wouldn't you start the best guy in game 6 (ignoring factors like matchups/ballpark/etc that may sway decision)

We've got the best record in baseball. I'm fine to roll with what we've got. I usually hate deadline deals. You often trade away a decent prospect who could help the team for 5-6 years for somebody who may increase your WS chances from 18% to 19%. Everybody's saying a bullpen arm. What's wrong with the bullpen? Looks pretty good to me. Kelly's currently in a funk, but he was great before that. Several good RP's in Pawtucket. Hell, I say we could trade away a BP arm or two (other than Kimbrel) and be fine. Not that I'm suggesting that. Edit: I should add that since the second wildcard was added, winning the division is very important. With the Yankees neck and neck, if an addition helps to win the division, that would be significant. So this year, I'd probably be ok with deadline deals, but I'm still fine with sticking with who we got.

This. It's not dWAR. It's Defensive Runs Above Average. "...roughly 9-10 runs of DEF is equal to about one win of value"

but the traditional offensive stats including fielding% and SB numbers is still good enough 99.5% (I made this number up) of the time to discern what would be a 2 WAR difference between players. And my other points are still valid. but it's so appropriate:D. Sorry, I had only seen it mentioned once, and I think it was in a different thread.

WAR isn't a stat, as evidenced by the fact it differs depending on what website you're using. Maybe bWAR is a stat, and fWAR is another stat, and WARP, and eWAR (if ESPN has a WAR), and whoever else wants to create their own WAR, but I don't consider those as stats either. You could also tell that Player C is inferior just by glancing at the traditional stats, and you'd get a lot more information in doing so. If you just look at Player C's WAR and see it's 3, what do you specifically learn about his abilities from that? Pretty much nothing. Actually, you can't even assume Player C is inferior from looking only at WAR. Since it's cumulative, he could be a slightly better player than A and B, but was injured for half the season. Something you would see by looking at his stat line. So yeah, War, huh, good god/ What is it good for/ Absolutely nothing, listen to me

This looks better than what I posted. Basically the same links to the streams without the horribly pop-uppy site to provide the links. And I was still waiting for the links to be active on my site, but it's already working thru reddit

If you don't mind the pirate sites, I like http://myfeed2all.eu/type/baseball.html. I wouldn't try it without an ad-blocker and you'll still get some popups when clicking the links, but I've been amazed how good it's been this year. The different links will vary in quality. So far, I've used Link 4 (which may not always be link 4), which has been the MLB.tv stream of the NESN broadcast and it's been HD quality with no glitches. It may take a few minutes after the game starts for all the links to show up.

I'm assuming you're just using b-ref's projected salary since it has the same number. The first problem is they are including JD and you are assuming he leaves, so subtract $19M. The other problem is they are counting 27 arb players at an avg of about $2.75M each. There will not be 27 arb players on the 40-man. Some will be replaced with pre-arb guys (at b-ref projected $750k), and some will be replaced with post-arb players which will add an unknown amount but remove an avg of $2.75M for the guys they replace. Removing these arb players to match the makeup of the current 40-man (18 pre-arb, 13 arb, 9 post arb (best I can tell, may be slightly off)), removes about $32.5M. That brings the starting payroll down to around $81.5M, while needing to add in 7 post-arb guys. Doesn't seem so bad.

Could they veto contracts that are obviously just trying to drastically lower AAV to avoid the luxury tax? I guess it would be hard to get the big free agents to do something as extreme as my example because they want to assure something decent long term in case of major injury. You could still do it on a smaller scale. Yankees could've added 2 1M opt out yrs to CC, and he goes from 10M AAV to 3.3. Do that for some other contracts and you can afford another big one. Not much risk to it. A player would have to have career ending type injury, then you're still just paying 1M/yr for X yrs. Savings from staying under luxury limit would outweigh that. Edit: You'd also be stuck with the AAV during the opt-out years, so there is more potential risk.

I haven't posted in a really long time, but I've got a question that someone here can probably answer. Is there something preventing a ridiculous front loaded contract with an opt out. Something like signing JD to a 15 yr contract, first 4 years at 30M, last 11 years at 1M, with an opt out after 4 years. That would essentially be 4/120 since he's guaranteed to opt out, but only counts as 8.7M toward luxury tax. Is this a real loophole to avoid luxury tax, or is there something preventing it?

Was that in response to Henry saying "Thanks for wasting hundreds of millions of dollars of my money"

You have to give Henry credit too, for being willing to spend more than ever. Talent wise, the team just needed pitching upgrades, but financially Ben left the team with a whole lot of wasted money. If there was still the constraint of being under the luxury tax, then it wouldn't have been so easy to turn the team into a contender. Without Henry upping the payroll, Price couldn't be here without somehow getting rid of one of Ben's major mistakes.

but he didn't make that statement. I guess you thought he was implying it, but I didn't see that either, which is why I didn't know why you were arguing with that post. He was just talking about building a team to suit the home park, and said Fenway is often mistakenly thought of as a HR park, when it is really a doubles and not a HR park (which is all true). Maybe he was implying it was preferable to acquire doubles hitters rather than HR hitters (but often they are one and the same). He wasn't saying it's impossible to build a successful HR team. Obviously that wouldn't be true, as you pointed out. I just think you read way too much into that post.

This is what jung originally said.. Your own link shows Fenway as ranking 26th in HR, so what jung said about Fenway not being a HR park is 100% accurate. Why are you trying to argue that point by making it only about RHH? Even for RHH, it's only 13th, which isn't all that good, it's just above average. Looks like you arguing with jung for the sake of arguing on this one.

That was unintentionally amusing

I'll agree with that. They all had their risks, but they shouldn't have all been that bad. I expected Porcello to be decent, but wouldn't have been surprised if he was below average, but nobody expected him to be that bad. I expected Panda to continue his downward trend, maybe not as much as he did, but it's not a huge shock to me. The warning signs were there. For Hanley, it depends. Sucky defense was no surprise, but sucky offense was. If his shoulder injury lingered all year, then that explains it, and injury history was his biggest risk. If he was fully healthy and hit that poor, that's unexpected. I liked the Hanley signing, when I thought he was being signed to play 3B. Signing both Hanley and Panda for those contracts was a horrible move, especially considering... We'll never agree on if the rotation should have been mediocre enough to contend, but I just didn't see it. Which of these rotations going in to last season would you expect to be better? A: Lester, Lackey, Buchholz, Peavy, Doubront B: Porcello, Miley, Buchholz, Kelly, Masterson To me, it's clearly A by a good margin. Lester>>>Porcello, Lackey>Miley, Buchholz=Buchholz, Peavy/Kelly could go either way, Doubrount>Masterson imo (Masterson looked done, I wasn't expecting any kind of bounceback). Well, the A rotation was below average the prior year, so I didn't see B even sniffing average. Looked like a bottom 3 rotation, which is what they were, and is not good enough to contend unless the offense is awesome. (Hanley increased that possibility, Sandoval not so much (except in October apparently (I like parentheses)))

Betances/Miller/Chapman. That's just ridiculous.

You can blame Ben for acquiring players that were way more likely to underperform. Price and Kimbrel have given no reason to expect nothing but great performance. They may slip a bit, but everyone will be shocked if they are bad. Ben's major acquisitions last year were riddled with question marks. I'm not surprised by Panda's performance, or Masterson's. I'm not surprised that Porcello underperformed, but am surprised by how much he did. Not surprising that Hanley hit well until getting hurt, or that his defense at a position he never played was terrible. Miley was as expected. The pitching staff was nowhere close to being good on paper, and looked unlikely to even be mediocre enough to contend for a playoff spot.

Frazee deserves some leeway since he just won a World Series. One bad move is no big deal. Ruth is fat lazy bum with attitude problems anyway.

Signing Stephen Drew midseason was the beginning of Ben's downfall.