moonslav59

Woo won 6-2 as Pannone had a nice start (5IP, 6H, 2ER, 0BB, 5K) and Politi looked good in relief, again. Duran went 1-4, Fitzy 1-3 w a 3B and Wong went 2-4 w a 2B. POR got swept. Santos let up 4 ER in 5.1 IP. Koss (w 3B) and Sogard went 2-3. Walter looked good, again (7.0 IP, 4H, 1ER, 0BB, 11K)- keeping his K:BB rate off-the-charts! Kos went 2-3 in this one, too. Greenville lost, again. Yorke, Binelas and Rafaela with 2 hits, each. Jimenez went 1-4 w a 2B. Salem lost, again. Jordan continued his hot streak, going 3-5 w a 2B. Hickey went 2-4 w an HR.

JBJ now has a higher OPS (.576) than Verdugo (.571). Also, Kike, Arroyo & Dalbec.

How about Johny Gomes catching the granny?

As Bruce would say, "You can't start a fire without a spark."

Maybe benching JBJ lit a fire under him.

Let's get to the closer, first,

I was not one of the guys saying we gave up nothing. I like Moncada, Kopech & Margot. I was just saying several posters have said things like, "None of these guys would be playing for us, now."

From what I've been hearing, none of the guys DD traded were any good anyway. That's the scuttlebutt, I hear, here.

They haven't been in that mode, yet. The closest they came was trading A Ramirez for 2 months of Schwarber.

Nobody should count on anyone, but the theory is build it up with as many good players as you can to increase the odds you produce guys like Betts, Bogey & Devers plus some role decent players every half decade. Or, you use them to trade for players you hope lead you to a ring- like pre-2018. Adding Binelas and Hamilton may or may not end up being meaningful, but the more guys we add like them, the b etter our odds. To me, that what it's all about, in terms of trying to build your farm beyond drafting and IFAs. It seems like Sox brass did not want Renfroe back- my guess is over his defense, and maybe a little over thinking he peaked on offense. The financial cost of JBJ is what really shook me, because, even though we went over the tax line, there appears to be some pretty set limits on spending. The Beni trade barely saved us enough to sign Renfroe and keep him for a year, and only Winckowski has any hope of helping, unless you think Cordero will come to life. I think Bloom was told to build the farm up as quickly as possible and as well as possible without making the fanbase believe we are planning on any downtime beyond the 2020 season. Never give the impression this is a complete rebuild. Make it as slow and painless as possible. I'm not sure how well Bloom has done in that area, so far. The 2021 season brought Sox Nation to life, rather unexpectedly for some of us, but it might have hurt his plans on doing a deeper rebuild without scaring fans away.

Better yet, instead of JBJ (I do like what I see in Binelas & Hamilton, but I know you don't really want to hear about that, until they prove themselves..)

Me, neither, but I don't like JBJ in the line-up, even if we were facing a righty.

Oh. I thought someone said it was in the 90's, or was that the day before?

Was Strahm penciled in at 6 or 7?

I'm not saying buy cheap, but we may have to go cheap at Catcher or one OF slot, or count on someone in the system to fill a slot. Not all our slots are all stars needed a replacement in kind. Bogey, JD and maybe Wacha/Hill. With $100-110M, we should be able to spend big- maybe just Story like big- on 3 or maybe even 4 positions. $25M SP $20M 2B $18M DH $17M OF That's not going cheap, and it still leaves $20-30M for the other 4-5 slots that aren't doing all that great, now. Maybe we dare trade a prospect or two to fill one big slot, and that would add $4-5M to each of the other 3 slots, like trade for SP and spend: $25M 2B $25M OF $20M DH $15M Closer There are a lot of encouraging ways to look at how to spend the money, but who knows what Bloom will do. Maybe he spends the $100M on 10 guys between $8-20M, and we look like we decline at 2B, SP and DH, but we could improve at C, CF, RF, SP3, SP4, RP2 andRP4.

Of course, we could end up worse. I'm hopeful the Price money added into the pool helps us get better. I also think we can improve at 3-4 slots without spending much. We could also fail by bringing Bogey, JD and Wacha back at team friendly rates. Nothing is guaranteed.

Or, Cordero for Fitzy.

We finally face a lefty. It's going to be mid 60's, tonight, so not as warm as last night, but maybe we can keep the bats hot.

At age 32, Charlie Morton has an ERA+ of 86, CAREER. His WHIP was 1.44. FIP was 4.10. When he joined Houston, they helped him focus on his best pitches and changed his approach. From age 33-37 (5 season w HOU, TBR & ATL), he went... 61-24 3.34 128 ERA+ 1.130 WHIP 3.25 FIP You can choose to see him as a career 101 ERA+ pitcher, or you can look past your own nose and see he became a much better pitcher for a sample size worthy of clear proof. Now, one can easily argue Pivetta is no Morton, and his sample size is not yet large enough to prove anything, but he's over 207 IP with the Sox, and certaainly one can imagine he is not the same guy he was with Philly: 78 ERA+ w PHI 106 w BOS 1.433 WHIP w PHI 1.271 w BOS 4.64 FIP w PHI 4.13 w BOS All very good numbers for a #5, and also b etter than many teams' #3's and 4's.

Too many posters assume a player is doomed to repeat his past. Nobody gets better or worse. It's obvious they don't know jack. Like Papi never got better than the Minnesota Papi.

Who said we'd only sign worse players? Also, it is possible to spend the money on the 6 big gaps that will be open on 8-9 players and technically take a step down at all 6 "open slots" but still be just as good, because you are deeper and improved another 2-3 slost by a combined amount bigger than what we lost at the 6 slots. We could lose Bogey & Kike and add Judge and play Arroyo at 2B. Is that a net loss? Yes, we got worse at 2B, but way better in RF. (I'm not saying Bloom will splurge on Judge, bujt can we wait to see what he does with $100+M to spend?[ We've only seen Bloom spend big on one player: Story, and he's been playing about 6-7 weeks. Can we really learn that much about Bloom based on one big signing? You make a good point about man of us seemingly blindly trusting Bloom will do fine signing stars. We really cannot know about this area of his "game," but it seems like many are assuming he will fail, and/or that Bogey cannot be replaced, in kind. We need a SP'er, Catcher, 2Bman, closer and 2 OF'ers & DH. We will probably use Houck or Whitlock as a closer or SP'er, so maybe we have 6-7 major slots to fill and close to $100-110M to spend. Maybe we spend $10M on some depth and have $90-100M leftover to fill those 6-7 major slots. Replace: Wacha/Hill Vazquez Strahm Bogey Kike JBJ JD I know it's hard to find a good catcher, but improving on Vaz might be easier and cheaper than we think. Improving on the 2022 Kike and JBJ, could be done with $5M each. We could have $20M to spend on SP, 2B, OF and DH, assuming we use Whitlock or Houck as a closer. Why imply we will fail?

This is the template. I put ___gaps___ where I think we add someone not in the system, or bring one of our current players back: (Some players may be slotted differently; this is just a rough quideline.) SP1 ________ SP2 Whitlock SP3 Sale SP4 Paxton SP5 Pivetta SP6 Bello/Seabold/Winckowski, (Mata, Walter, Murphy, Ward) Closer _______ RP2 Houck RP3 _______ RP4 Taylor RP5 Barnes RP6 Diekman RP7 _______ RP8 Crawford/German/Politi/Feltman/Kelly/Ort/Wallace C1 ________ C2 Wong, R Hernandez, Cottam 1B Casas (Binelas) 2B ______, Arroyo/Downs/Hamilton (Yorke) 3B Devers SS Story, Arauz (Lugo) LF Verdugo, Duran CF ______, (Rafaela) RF ______, (Jimenez) DH ______, Dalbec, Koss, (McDonough) (Player in parenthesis are likely not ML ready by 2023.)

No, you went beyond that. You started getting critical of him, recently.

Which is now nearly 2 full years and not just a few starts strung together.

I have no issues with jacko. I will say, it's fine to change your opinion as more evidence is gathered, but he does seem to flip and flop on Bloom quite a bit. When we are doing well, he loves and praises him, maybe even secretly dreams of him as the next Yankee GM, but he can suddenly turn on him in the blink of an eye.