moonslav59

A big part of the success of this team came from our "secondary players." I guess when your team lacks a top starpower batter, you kind of have to rely on a team effort, but I feel like it went beyond even that. All year, I pointed out how our 5-9 batters outperformed all other teams in OPS by slots, but what makes that more remarkable is that we did it with so many back-ups. Remember, Narvaez was Wong's back-up, and he won the FT job. Campbell started the season as our 2Bman, and we morphed into DHam, Mayer, Romy and a few others. Mayer also covered for Bregman, when he went down. Eaton played some there, after Mayer went down. Casas went down in early May and we cycled through Toro & Romy before adding Lowe. Romy and Ref hit vs RHPs more than planned. Now, Yoshida has formly won back his DH position after missing about 4 months. A lot of moving parts over the season. 4 different catchers is not out of the norm, but our back-up has 2/3 of the innings. 6 different 1Bmen with 5 over 94 innings. 2B was once again a merry-g-round with 6 guys over 56 innings and 4 over 165, including our GG CF'er playing 2B too often. 7 players at 3B, with 4 over 60 innings. Amazingly, the SS position was the most one-sided with Story gtiing 1365 of the 1430 innings at SS. (DHam had 60 and nobody else more than 3.) The OF saw a lot of shuffling and Rafaela used at 2B, a lot, but we did see 3 guys with 800+ innings in the OF (1337 Duran, 1149 Rafaela & 829 Abreu, who was hurt.) Anthony had 442 and DH'd some. Ref has 256 and was hurt for a while. Eaton had 134, KC 69 and Masa 32. The PASSWORD had 25 and Sogard 17. Hats off to a pretty decent defense that improved greatly as the year went on. Despite 21 errors at SS, it was nice to see Story make so many great plays there. The Sox are T for 9th in team DRS but are just 2 away from 7th. They are also 9th in team OAA, so I think it's pretty safe to say, we willed ourselves into a top 10 defense, after being horrible for several years beforehand. Traditionalists will point to the .980 last place Flg % and neglect the value of making plays nobody else makes (or very few do,) but so be it. .985 is 20th and .987 is 10th, so just .002 separates a top 10 from bottom 10 team. Good job by Brez fixing the defense, which I'm sure helped our pitchers look better.

Agreed, and it doesn't bother me that Brez was out 11th pick: he's pretty damn good, too!

They sure talk a lot with their shoes in their mouths. Was it Omerta to promise a big addition after the Devers trade, or was that guy Yoshida?

The platooning was a big part, but there are other reasons we only have 3 batters who qualify in PAs for batting awards. An interesting aspect of that is of those three, none are hitting over .776. Cora had to deal with... His GM trading away his best batter (Devers) in early June. His top replacement batter for Devers (Anthony) went down in late August (after the deadline.) His .820 career BA 1Bman going down for the season in early May. His back-up 1Bman (Toro) stating off with a hot week or 10 days, then imploding. His 2nd or 3rd best batter (Bregman) missing several key weeks in misd summer. His back-up 3Bman (Mayer) finally appeared to fix the 2B problem, once Bregman returned, then he got hurt for the rest of the season. His 5 deep OF turned into having to use Eaton, because Anthony and another OF (Abreu) missed most of September. His hottest late season batter (Yoshida) missed the first 4 months of the season. Some minor injuries kept Narvaez and Refsnyder out for some periods of time. The pitching injuries have been well documented, but cobbling to gether many working line-ups through all of the above was a pretty amazing feat by a manager. Somehow we won, despite this... .659 Toro in 294 PAs (10th on team) .664 Campbell in 262 (11th) .580 DHam in 186 (14th) .498 Wong in 181 .580 Casas in 112 .657 Sogard in 97 Sabol & Sanchez went 2 for 20

Then he tell us why. Expose the genius! (Maybe he wants to keep it a secret from other teams?)

Trout has had 1072 PAs Late & Close (.850 OPS) and 1223 in High Leverage situations (.951 OPS). Okay, he has 15 playoff PAs (.600.) and maybe had a few meaningful ABs late in some seasons where they were still in it. My guess is, he had 2 or more hits when it counted. He repeated it. It's just not his or anyone's skill.

"Right now" could mean recently: Last 28 days: OPS Against .468 Whitlock (.211 BA Against) .494 Chapman (.194 BA) .506 Weissert (.182 BA) How about some props to Greg? Last 14 Days: .170 Slaten (.059) Props to Justin, too! .458 Whitlock (.208) .458 Weissert (.176) .554 Chapman (.229) Last 7 Days .222 Whitlock (.111) .250 Weissert (.125) .382 Chapman (.100) .393 Slaten (.143) .393 Murphy (.143) These 5 guys have allowed 5 hits in 41 ABs- a .122 BA (3BB and 13Ks)

Players in MLB long enough will get clutch hits often. It is repeated. It's just not a skillset.

Yes, but their excuse did not answer why he could have kept sharp batting all year in AAA. The "rehab limit" was not involved in this case.

LOL! In all fairness, they did count on Anthony remaining healthy- and Abreu, too. For all the talk of an inconsistent offense that bunches all their hits into a handful of games to warp the view of how good their offense is, well... The last few game have seen most of our games fall in the 9-12 hits range. Last 12 games: team hits 10, 12, 8, 10, 7, 12, 10, 10, 9, 12, 4, 10 11 of the 12 games fell between 7 and 12 hits. 10 between 8 and 12 and 9 between 9 and 12. We haven't had more than 12 hits since doing it back to back to start Sept (14 & 18 hits on Sep 1 & 2.) We had 2 hits on 9/12, but we've had between 7 and 12 in 17 of the last 19 games.

Yoshida had options. He could have been assigned to AAA all season long.

He hold a pretty firm grip on the 4 slot in the AL. Once again, the AL East has risen to dominance, so our record is legit. We are tied with the Padres for the 8th best record in MLB. That's very close to top 25%. If you value run differential: 173 MIL 158 NYY 138 CHC 135 LAD 134 PHI 110 BOS That's top 20%. (Cue big blowout wins don't count.) Finally, we got some results for a team on the rise for 2-3 years. Keep it going! One game at a time!

Updated Sox OPS after tonight's big win: .859 Anthony .845 Refsnyder .826 Romy .822 Bregman .794 Abreu .788 Lowe .734 Eaton (All these top 6 batters missed a lot of time- not all by injuries.) .775 Duran .746 Story .728 Narvaez .704 Rafaela .698 Yoshida (These 5 have been so very important, all year, or down the stretch, like Masa. The first 4 have stayed relatively healthy and have over 1/3 of the team's PAs in 2025!) I wrote earlier how Cora worked magic with a pitching staff that should not have done this well, but he also deserves credit for cobbling together a pretty decent offense, despite his boss trading away his #1 bat, his next #1 bat has missed the last month of the season, and his next two best hitters- Bregman and Abreu missed a lot of time, too.

I'm glad to hear you say this, Fred. He had shown some pretty serious improvement from 2023-2024, but some of the numbers he had to improve on were historically awful. It's understandable to have serious doubts, I had them, too. It was the totality and finality of your criticism that seemed over the top and needless. The guy cut way down on his K's from day one of the season. His BB% was and still is horrific, but it no longer is legendary. He nearly doubled the 2024 rate (2.6 to 4.7.) He's still streaky as all hell. Swings at too many balls that are not even close, but he seems to do just well enough to force pitchers to throw some strikes. I was impressed by all his hits to RF, this year, especially over the last week of the year. He also got some big hits, and like last year, more than his fair share of RBIs for so few hits. While 138 RBIs in 2 seasons is not great, for a .245 batter with not a ton of power, it's decent. He's robbed so many hits, this year, including multiple homers, the guy has been a clear plus. He's got about a 3.5 FWAR, this year and about a 7.5 bWAR in 2024-2025 combined. Think what you want about WAR and what is it good for, but they guy is a plus. I hope he improves, too. Maybe he won't, but if he keeps repeating 2025, I'm fine with it.

The fact that our pitching ranks so highly, when we went into the season with a much maligned pen, had our IP leader (Crawford) from 2024 miss the whole season, our '24 ace (Houck) implode and then miss the rest of the season, and then watch #6 Sandoval, #7 Dobbins, #7 Fitts and others miss all or most of the season, but still end up with a decent ranking has to partially Cora's doing. Hell, Slaten missed a bunch of time, and there was talk Hendriks might win the closing job, if age caught up to Chapman. Brez traded away Priester and Newcomb, and still Cora managed to squeeze every last ounce of success out of the whole staff. Give the guy the props he deserves. Hate him for the whole trashcan fiasco. I guess none of us have ever done anything bad in our lives. Hate him for a few moves that didn't work out, too well. Hate him for handling the Devers situation like an enabler, but give the guy some serious credit for pulling this off.

It would be nice to end the season with 90 wins, but we will give some players a rest. I like the way our pitching lines up for a 3 game series. Our three top SP'ers and 2-3 pen arms might pitch 22-24 of the 27 IP that might be needed in the 3 game series. Maybe they pitch 25-27 of them. Then, there is a day off before the next round, and if we win the first 2 games, our 3rd SP'er can start game 1 and our 1-2 SP'ers can pitch game 3 & 4. We may only need our #4 SP'er once before the ALCS.

One of the most repeated criticisms of Cora was pen choices, and yet our pen carried us for much of the season. Many of us, including myself, were highly critical of Brez for signing "just" Chapman & Wilson. What Cora did with this pen was sheer genius. Sorry, but end of debate on this one. Somehow, our pen has the 2nd best fWAR and ERA- in MLB. The rotation gets a lot of credit, but they rank 14th in fWAR and 8th in ERA-.

It looked like a no brainer to many of us, but Brez saw the light that Bloom was shading.

Also, Narvaez, Chapman and Matz.

It's like some were just too locked into a gloom closet that they refused to believe a big enough improvement had been made. In some ways, I think the 2024 was actually better that their re cord indicated. The Devers injury was crippling, but then again, we dumped him, this year, so that kinda evens that up from 2024. The other big plus was the 2024 Gio signing, which made Brez and the team look worse than it was, too. We didn't see that coming for '25. He pretty much just made up for the loss of Houck. Wilson and Matz helped, as did some no name pen arms that held their ground, well. Romy & Ref were huge! Raflopperela was too.

Sorry, but that seems silly, to me. We get lucky, tonight, and that saves a guy's job.

We've both been strong Cora and Brez supporters, Max. Thanks for holding firm to your convictions.

Cause the magic # was one!

Brez should be fired for signing the old, washed up Chappy, and trading the catcher of the future for Crochet!

What a season!