moonslav59

JBJ's OBP the last 7 games, counting today's... .357 He needs to start getting more hits, but the BBs are helpful.

I doubt we fall that far behind, but if we do, then this season just wasn't ever going to be the one. I'm far from giving up on this season, and I'm not saying you or others have, but we have almost the same team as last year. I think we have a lot of wins coming soon.

I thought you said once you lost velo, you could never get it back.

Well said. Maybe JBJ will break loose soon.

I thought we paid too much for Pearce, but the signing was not justified only by his WS performance. 2014-2018 (250 players with 1500+ PAs in this 5 years sample size) Pearce ranked... 47th in OPS at .818 39th in wRC+ at 123 His .865 OPS vs LHPs those 5 years places him 26th out of all hitters with 550+ PAs vs lefties. (24th in wRC+ at 134) He's had some up and down years in those 5 years, but he's been pretty good for more than just the WS. It's early. I'm hopeful he and JBJ will snap out of their funks...and soon!

Yes, but that is Moreland's domain (when healthy).

I thought he'd get 2 years and maybe $9-10M. He's a short-side platoon player.

It's way too early to call it a mistake, but it doesn't look good, so far. Most of the free agent signings this winter look as bad as the Pearce signing, so far, as well.

I agree, and my point is that Swihart got way more chances than the average prospect hitting under .700 almost every year at whatever level he was at. To choose this case as the one to blame management is, to me, about the worst choice one could make. Most teams have moved away from the tradition of giving the athletic type of prospect more leeway and chances, and for good reason. Athleticism is not always a good criteria to use for a prospect, and probably less so for a catcher. Swihart's first full season was at age 19 at Greenville. He hit .702 in 378 PAs. He improved at A+ ball in 2013 (.794 in 422 PAs), but that was not really eye-opening numbers. His best moment was in 2014, when in AA, he hit .840 in 380 PAs, and this is when all the hype and hope began. I was one of the many Sox fans with high hopes at that time. He had a strong arm, a quick release time and even showed some power with 12 HRs in 347 ABs. That year, at age 22, they called him up to AAA for 71 PAs (.659 OPS). His .810 overall OPS in 2014 remains his brightest season. We all know what happened in 2015. Surely, a catcher with just 18 games in AAA and just over 300 in all of his years in the minors is not usually called up to the bigs, especially as a catcher for a team thought to be a contender at the start of the year. I can see how a .712 OPS that year in 309 PAs looks encouraging, considering the circumstances, but it is not great. What is often forgotten is the fact that we sucked with Swihart as our starting catcher, and I think management had serious doubts about his ability to handle a staff. Here are the CERA numbers for 2015: 4.51 Swihart (35-43 in his starts) 3.47 Leon 4.58 Hanigan (43-41 in starts by Leon + Hanigan) Swihart also hit just .714 in AAA that 2015 season (80 PAs) The 2016 season began with Swihart as our starter, with Vaz maybe not quite over his injury. Swihart was yanked as the starter very early that year, and that's when all this debate started. I feel they knew Vaz was going to be the starter all along. While Swihart had a respectable .720 OPS that year in just 74 PAs, his CERA was a distant last place out of the 5 catchers we used that year: 5.71 Swihart (224 PAs) 4.27 Vaz (1860) 3.90 Leon (2502) 3.72 Holaday (357) 3.55 Hanigan (1130) This was the season Leon hit .845, so there was no way Swihart should have been catching more. BTW, he hit .655 in AAA in 2016 (122 PAs) 2017: .539 at AAA (212) and .575 in Rk league 2018: .613 in BOS (207 PAs) 2019: .581 in 40 PAs I could post the CERA numbers over these last 3 years, but I've already done that over a dozen times. They were not good. In short, Swihart looked very promising was back in 2014 at Portland. He hit okay when called up early to Boston. Other than that, he did absolutely nothing to distinguish himself as a keeper, and yet we kept him on board.

He was far from inconsistent when compared to the average pitcher in MLB. His injuries and suspensions are what made him unreliable, and some of his poor performances were partially a result of those injuries or rustiness upon returning from those injuries and the suspension. I'll use ERA as my stat of choice, because it's easier to research. Wright started off slowly in the minors, and ended up with about the same ERA as his career MLB number (3.77 to 3.79). His first 5 years were a bit "all over the map:" 5.67 (114 IP as a SP'er) 4.14 (148 as SP'er) 2.48 (87 almost all as RP'er) 4.91 (JUST 7 IP, so I don't count this) 5.02 (75 IP almost all as RP) 6.19 (134 back to mostly a SP'er) Then, we see a lot of consistently good numbers from 2012-2018, except for injury or shortened seasons: 2.54 (142 all as SP'er/ traded to BOS in 2012) 4.26 (135 IP all as SP'er with 13 IP in MLB at 5.40) 3.42 (100 IP all as SP'er in 2014) 4.09 (73 IP with BOS as SP/RP) and 3.81 in AAA (52 IP all as SP) 2015 3.81 (157 IP with BOS aa in 24 starts) 8.25 (JUST 24 IP in 5 starts- injured most of 2017) 2.68 (54 IP mostly in relief in 2018) and 4.86 in just 17 IP at AAA. If you throw out the 24 IP season of 2017, Wright had 6 straight seasons of remarkable consistency and positive production. His worst season was a decent 4.26 season way back in 2013.

It's not that hard to run the bases. It was a freak injury. Yes, inexperience might have been part of the issue, but asking a faster player to PR, desspite less experience, is not an absurd idea.

Maybe not you, but some Swihart supporters think he should have been allowed to play only catcher as well as be handed many more starts than we gave him.

...as well he shouldn't be, except as an emergency 3rd catcher on a 25 man roster that is probably better than most teams can come up with. We did the guy a favor by allowing him a chance to show he might be able to play another position. Nothing in his offensive history justified that opportunity.

Red Sox Select Josh Smith By Jeff Todd | April 26, 2019 at 2:25pm CDT The Red Sox have selected the contract of righty Josh Smith, per a club announcement. He’ll make a start today for the club if the scheduled contest isn’t rained out. Reliever Travis Lakins was optioned down to open active roster space. Smith, 31, saw 127 1/3 innings of big-league action from 2015-17 but failed to make it back up last year. He owns a 5.30 ERA with 7.3 K/9 and 4.4 BB/9 at the game’s highest level. (Note: another hurler by the same name also pitched in the upper minors last year with the Red Sox. He’s now with the Guardians.) Though he has never posted dominating numbers in the upper minors, Smith has struck out better than a batter per nine at the Triple-A level since the start of the 2017 season. He has racked up 23 strikeouts against five walks in 16 2/3 innings in three starts for Pawtucket to open the present season.

There were a lot of us that wanted Iggy at SS and Bogey at 3B. The Middy part of the equation was clearly secondary, especially as he began to show he sucked. I, for one, didn't feel we needed to get anything for Middy to make the above plan worthwhile.

It wasn't about what we could get for Middy. It was about having a great defensive SS and a solid 3Bman.

The argument made by myself and many others was to keep both Iggy and Bogey and trade Middy.

Again, it was never Iggy against Bogey. The idea was to keep both and move Bogey to 3B. One could start an argument about moving him to 2B, but we have no SS to take his place. (Plus, Bogey is pretty close to average on defense in some metric standards.)

Catcher injuries limit a lot of catchers from starting a ton of games, but last year no catcher started more than 123 games as a catcher. That basically means another catcher caught 25% of that team's games (or 39 games). If you split the starts up 60-40 (1 catcher catches 3 specific starters and the other 2 specific starters), the GS totals would be something like 97 to 65. Last year, only 11 catchers started more than 98 games at catcher. Only 8 started over 105 games. Most teams, due to injuries or whatever, already use something close to a 60-40 or 50-50 split anyways. (On an unrelated note, fangraphs ranked the Sox second in catcher defense last year behind AZ. We were also 4th in DRS and 2nd in pitch framing.)

He probably knows them better than we do, and maybe not in a good way.

I must have mentioned Cody over 20 times last winter.

If you look at the top RP'er signings this past winter, most have sucked or are hurt. Less than a handful have done well, so far.

Thanks for that info, Max. Good stuff. Was that loss to Cincy the year Oscar Robertson, another Buck great, led them to the top?

It was, for the most part, when nobody was hurt, Leon with Sale & Price and Vaz with the other 3.

I've been a Bucks fan since I lived in Milwaukee when Lew Alcindor won us a championship. The Celtics were our nemesis, as they were for many teams, but I always respected Havlicek. He was a smart player who always played his heart out. RIP