moonslav59

I'm glad we were able to trade him without having to pay a penny. Remember, his buy out was $500K, so his "real cost" was about $13M.

Your points are very well taken. I too wish we had more than just 3 good prospects to pin our hopes on. We might be lucky, if two of them give us plus production down the road. One thing going for us is that we don't need great production to replace Pablo at 3B with Devers or Moreland at 1B with Travis. Replacing HanRam and Pomeranz will be tougher. I'm not sure we can even hope Groome will be ready AND as good as Pom year one (2019). We may need a healthy other 5 starters or someone to come out of nowhere to take his place (Elias, Owens, Johnson, Barnes?). I think the salary space we lose by our departing players will be almost totally eaten up by arb raises and extensions.

Good to see some of our bats beginning to "awaken", but too bad Wright had a meltdown. Taylor's performance was promising.

Exactly. Like it or not, GMs are graded in hindsight, like they were supposed to know a player was going to get hurt or suddenly and sharply decline. There are cases where warning signs were abundant, and a GM took a gamble anyway, maybe because it was his best or only option available at the time. On Buch, I was one of his biggest defenders over the years, but I agreed that it was time to cut our losses and move on from all of the uncertainty that came with his health status. I will say that if he was only making $2-3M, I'd have wanted to keep him. The money saved should help us immensely this summer.

We've already discussed potential for our bullpen. I'm little concerned with our lefties but we have now several flame throwers in the pen. No need to be concerned about having a top lefty. Thornburg is better vs LHBs than just about any lefty in MLB. Leon, Moreland, Pedy, Xander, Pablo, Beni, Bradley Jr, Betts and Hanley is good enough offensively to score many runs, even though we maybe short on power. This is how you build a championship team. We lose Young and Moreland for 2018 season. We're light on OF replacements within our system, but my guess is replace these two with Travis and one from Swihart, Hernandez or Devers. We lose Kimbrel, Pom, Joe Kelly, Robbie Ross for 2019 season. We'll probably have to sign a couple FAs and hope our younger pitchers step up. Maybe Groome can be a significant piece. We have a three year window to chase the world series and reload the farm system. Sale, Porcello, Xander, Hanley and Pablo comes off the books after 2019. Hanley and Pablo will yield $40M in savings. By replacing Hanley & Pablo (Moreland & Young) with Travis, Devers, Swihart & Hernandez, we might have enough money to pay all the big arb raises AND keep Sale and maybe one from Bogey and Porcello. Maybe sign someone else, if they want too much. I think it's a solid 4 year window...maybe 5. We all know what type of talent it takes to win it all. There's always some luck involved. How often does a Betts seemingly come out of nowhere? I'm just thankful we have a competitive team at least for next three years. We may need another Betts by year 4 or 5.

Moon has a very good point about building the starting rotation from the top and not the bottom. Acquisition of Sale has accomplished that task. There's no doubt that in Sale, Porcello and Price, we have three formidable starting pitchers at least on paper. Sox will have the luxury of selecting the 'best' fourth starter from Pomeranz, E Rod and Wright come playoff time. That's exactly it. While we "only" added one starter, Sale made Porcello & Price our 2-3 starters. ERod is now our 4th starter. Pom and Wright are our 5-6 not our 4-5. Trading for a 3/4 like Pom is better than trying to upgrade your 4/5 starter. Here's the luck we've had going that route: Masterson Peavy Dempster Mortenson Aaron Cook Franklin Morales Erik Bedard Brad Penny John Smoltz Paul Byrd Bartolo Colon Julian Tavarez Matt Clement (not really a 4/5 type) Jason Johnson Wade Miller Bruce Chen

LOL! I read the book, too. It was better than the movie as is usually the case. It's hard to argue against the importance of having a great closer, especially since our three rings all came with stellar closer closer performances throughout each season and playoff cycle. I love having a lights out closer, and I really do think Kimbrel was one of the best one could ever expect to get. I'm hopeful he gives us another 2 years of great closer production. My beef with the trade was about paying FA money and giving up top prospects. I was OK with one or the other but not both.

That was a big part of "Moneyball" as the A's continually created closers from their system, and then they traded them over and over again. They realized they could use the over-valuing of closers to their benefit. Foulke was a big part of our ring as was Papelbon and Uehara, but paying big money and giving up prospects was overkill.

maybe not 100% "win now" as we still have Groome, Devers, Travis and Swihart, but I agree we went a little to far. Maybe you think a lot too far, but I don't think we are far apart.

I'm not the least bit concerned that we don't have ML-ready players in Pawtucket at this moment because... where would we play them?? It's nice to know they are there, in case of injury, and knowing that Moreland and Young are FAs after this year. (I'm pretty sure Travis has an inside track to Moreland's slot.) (Maybe Hernandez or Devers will oust Pablo, Rutledge and-or Holt out of town.)

I agree that Anderson, Ockimey and Lakins might now be hot topics for us at the moment but it does demonstrate that we have players in the minors who are 3-4 years away to fill spots starting in the early 2100's.... You mean early 2020's, right?

True. I'll try to avoid that sort of talk going forward.

I guess, if a prospect is close to being called up to the big club, then talking about them in that context is ok for this forum, right?

It wasn't that "iffy" to some of us. What a great start for "the fat catcher" and the one that can't hit.

Agreed, and while a half season of pitching great for the Padres can be viewed as a fluke, it can also be a strong sign of what he can do again... this time for us.

Thornburg is better vs LHBs than almost any LOOGY... 531 (LHBS) vs .732 career (RHBs)

Again, they did a lot of it with stacked comp picks, massive international signings and no restrictions on how much we could pay draft picks. You may think those are minor obstacles: I do not.

"Posters" to me includes the site I was on before. My apologies for offending this site. I'm sure none of the same thing happened here.

I've been clear about the rules restricting international FA signings as being the major change in our immediate rebuilding the farm efforts. Look at who we have gotten in recent years this way: Bogey, Moncada, Espi, Margot, Devers and both Basabes. This is going to be almost impossible to replicate. On draft picks, certainly higher is better and the comp pick rules have lessened that impact on teams getting picks due to losing good players to free agency. That was a major factor in our farm building under Theo: Top 15 draft picks: 12 Groome 7 Beni 7 T Ball 16-32 draft picks: 26 Chavis 24 Marrero 31 B Johnson 19 Barnes 26 Swihart 20 Vitek 28 Fuentes 30 Kelly 27 J Place 28 D Bard These are all of our top 32 picks since 2006. It's harder to get comp picks than it was earlier, and the picks are in the sandwich supplemental rounds not like before. It's harder to sign multiple great international players. It's harder to draft outside the top 10 or 15. We've made some great picks after the first round, so it's not impossible, but all I'm saying is that things have changed a lot since the "good ole days" when we could just sign almost any international FAs we wanted, draft better players later in the draft due to signability issues with poorer teams drafting ahead of us, and new budget restraints and penalties.

It's not. I consider my self an optimist, so I'm a bit surprised to be called a "whiner" who is trying to dim other posters' optimism.

Don't tell me what to think, especially if it is something nearly impossible to do. Besides, I never said we "can't ever" build up the farm again. It can be built up much easier after some losing seasons and higher draft picks. My point is, it is going to be very hard to rebuild the farm from now until about 2021 to even close to what it has been due to international signing and budget rule changes and projected loser draft picks. It's not impossible, but it nearly is. Can we build the farm to a point where we are able to stay competitive, even without 3-5 top ML prospects? Maybe- maybe not. Will we have a roster after 2021 that includes very low cost studs like Betts, Bogey, JBJ and ERod? I doubt we approach 4 like these, but maybe 1 or 2 will be all we need, if we can start significantly improving our FA signings. We're likely not going to have the prospects like the package we sent to Chicago for Sale again for the foreseeable future.

You feel "sorry" for anyone who feels losing 3-4 of MLB's top prospects will dampen our future is puzzling to me. I'm not upset about our future. I'm glad we traded some of it for the here and now, especially with Chris Sale. Wishing we still had Espi and Margot, even if they were later used to maybe get us Quintana is not whining. I never said anyone who praises DD is "anti-Ben", but clearly there are many who bashed Ben even though he helped us win a ring and helped built the strong farm that enabled us to get Sale, Thornburg, Kimbrel, Pom and others.

I don't think having more than 1 or 2 lefties in our pen is essential. Once Thornburg returns, we'll have a guy who is better than almost any LOOGY in the league: OPS Against by splits: .531 vs LHBs in 414 PAs .732 vs RHBs in 496 PAs It's obvious by the nearly identical PAs vs righties and lefties, the Brewers used him vs LHBs much more than a normal right-handed RP'er would see.

soxprospects.com had this on Kopech's slider: Slider: 84-87 mph. Plus potential, showed wipeout potential and bat-missing ability. Yes, the 4.6 BB/9 is hideous. His 11.9 K/9 is promising.

Ultimately, who we get mid season will be the guy we traded Buch (and whoever else we end up trading) for.