moonslav59

Yup, but we could end up choosing Mayer as "the one" to bring back a pitcher. To me, he makes more sense than Anthony, Campbell or Teel.

They have been trying to walk a fine line, by spending as little as possible on rosters they think are as close to be competitive for a WC slot as they can get. Of course, it hasn't been a total budget slash, except for maybe 2020, and even then they spent a little on Perez, Pillar and a few others. The swing and misses on Story, Yoshida and Gio really gut-punched us.

I did not like the Gio signing, and his big plus was supposed to be durability and dependability on taking the ball every 5 days and going 5+ innings, almost every 5 days. The injury was totally unpredictable and unexpected, but that is the risk we took, and certainly 99.9% of anyone who knows anything about baseball would have expected Gio to start more games than Sale in 2024. Had we spent the same or less AAV on Lugo ($15M x 3) Imanaga ($13.3M x 4) Wacha ($16M x 2) Manaea ($14M x 2) or even Flaherty ($14M x 1,) you would not be lumping the Sale trade in the same way. The Gio signing was a seperate mistake than backfired, too. Together, the two moves killed our chances. I can see how linking them makes sense, because the "savings" from the Sale trade could be counted towards allowing Brez the budget space to sign a pitcher, but just because Brez swung and missed on Gio, doesn't mean the Sale trade made any less or more sense, at the time, IMO. Ideally, we keep Sale and sign Lugo or Imanaga- two guys I was very high on, back then. (To be fair, I was also high on Monty and Gray.) Brez messed that all up. We can hope Grissom salvages some of what we lost, and Gio gives us something special in 2025, but neither looks all that promising, right now. Brez did make several savy and good moves, over the winter. We have to hope he does more, and most of all, we need to have a better success rate on our biggest winter deals. 2020: Martin Perez D 2021: Richards F, Martin Perez D, Ottavini C+, Kike A '21 and D '22 & overall C+, Cordero/Wink C-, Renfroe A-, Scwarber A 2022: Story D-, Yoshida D+, Kike F, Wacha B+, Hill B-, Strahm A, Paxton F '22 & B- for '22 and C- overall 2023: Jansen A-, Martin A-, Turner A-, Kluber F, Duvall B+ This has been about a 50% success rate, with some of the successes being mixed or near a C+ value. We need to do better. If you look at just the biggest deals (10M+): D- Story D+ Yoshida (The two very biggest suck, so far.) F (so far) Giolito A- Jansen D Kike I + Kike II A- Martin D Barnes extension (The $15-$40M are 40-60) A- Turner F Richards F Kluber (The $10M-14M deals are 33%.) 6 of the top 9 are D or lower. Our top 3 are Ds or Fs.

How can anyone know this, for sure?

Much has been made of the horrific Sale for Grissom trade, and looks nearly impossible for Grissom to be able to even come close to balancing the 2024 value Sale brought to the Braves, but Brez did make some other moves, too: 1 year of Dugo for Fitts, Weissert and Judice. Robertson & Santos for our 2024 HR leader, Tyler O'Neill. I Cambell for Urias (I still think this pitcher will shine for us, someday.) Schreiber for Sandlin (a top 12 prospect) His in season trades for Paxton, Garcia and Sims all back-fired, but the Yorke for Priester deal could pay off. (I'm not sure any of the prospects we gave up in those other trades would have made our 40 man roster or contributed to the Sox in any meaningful way, but we shall see how they do, in coming years.) If you put all Brez's trades together, the overall balance may not look great, but I see 5 trades that look good and 4 that don't, and 3 of those 4 may end up as giving up nothing for nothing.

I hope we get none of those you added. To me, from this list, only Burnes, Cole and Fried jump out at me. Flaherty and Tanner Scott would be okay, along with a solid catcher and LH RP'er, added somehow.

Certainly, we may never spend like 2018-2019, again. We may never get to top 5, again... maybe even top 8-10, but how do we know, and what evidence supports this opinion? Past trends reveal many ups and downs, and several "downs" have lasted 2 seasons, like this current trend. Our budget went up almost 30% from 2020 to 2022, which is the second highest jump in budget spending under JH in any 2 year period. Granted, the context needs to be mentioned: that jump came on the heels of the largest slash to the budget in decades, perhaps since the Ruth sale to the Yanks. You seem to be basing your opinion on a year trend, downwards, plus the massive cut from 2019 to 2020. Those two events are recent and close enough together to lump into one giant downward trend, but there was a significantly large, two year upward trend mixed in, there. I'm not sure if you are just ignoring that or discounting it as a minimal investment to keep the hounds at bay. We did see a little reward for some of that spending in 2021, namely the $14M spent on Kike, but we did spend. We were still #3 in spending in 2021, and a chunk of that was new spending- not just old and bloated contracts. We went from $180M in 2021 to $195M in 2022, but dropped from 3rd to 6th in rankings, according to Steve the Ump. To me, that season was more about other team's jumping spending by huge amounts, than anything bad JH did, since he increased the budget by about 8%, that winter. That winter was also one of the best signings winter we had, since DD, but it did not translate into wins. (Wacha, Strahm, Hill... were better than the Richards and Kluber winters.) Again, I'm not defending JH or projecting big or even bigger spending, going forward. I have no idea where the budget will go, and projecting budget rankings is even more complex, but I am not understanding why you seem to be so sure JH will never spend big, again.

Certainly, they have not proven anything, but it's hard to say they are closer to "overhyped" than the others I listed. The 2016 farm is most known for bringing us some very valuable vets via trade. In some ways, one could argue that farm indirectly brought us more production than others: Sale, Kimbrel and Nate (maybe 2 will be HOF'ers.) If we want to count indirect impacts, we can also add the values we got when some prospects left via free agency and the comp picks they brought us: Kopech for Jake (Sale for Kopech and others) K Campbell for Bogey (We also got Anthony for losing ERod , but ERod was not really from "our" farm.)

Getting Soto does not forgive years and years or you and other Yankee fans screaming for Cashman's removal. As I've said for years, I hope you keep him for decades more. BTW, tough loss. I ain't cryin'.

This week's games: 1 ORE v 20 ILL 5 TEX at 25 Vandy 8 LSU at 14 TX A&M 12 ND at 24 Navy 21 MO at 15 ALA 3 Penn St at WI 4 Ohio St v NEB 6 MIA v FL St 11 BYU at UCF 13 IN v Wash

I didn't see the word peanuts mentioned, either.

Nobody says a word, if he sits out 2024.

If you go by BTV value, we can get a pretty damn good pitcher 0ne-for-one, but I agree. We'd need to add to get a real good one. Maybe and Abreu makes some sense. I'm not sure that is enough, but BTV values both pretty highly. 64.9 Mayer (this is about equal to logan Gilbert, FYI) 29.1 Abreu Not many pitchers are worth more than 94.

In some ways, you get what you pay for, and continually signing 1 year pitchers locks a GM into a certain type of signing- usually a gamble. Granted, $5-10M/1 is not chump change, and we should have done better than Richards and kluber at $10M. We actually did better with our $5-7M AAV SP'ers: Wacha, Hill, Paxton and Perez I & II, but non of them were really great signings. The Gio signing was the first 2 year deal over $5M AAV and the first SP'er deal over a $10M AAV since the Nate re-sign back in 2019. Even he was a gamble, but the gamble was not supposed to be health-related. We swung and missed. The biggest swing and miss was the timing on the Sale trade.

Good thing our infuriatingly bad front office did not listen to this board and trade Duran...you know, they guy who had a higher WAR (6.7) than Sale (6.2.). You win some...you lose some. Lately, we've done a lot of losing.

I'm not for trading Mayer for Peanuts, or even a truckload of cashews, but he seems like the most likely guy to trade as the centerpiece for a top SP'er. Anthony seems like the surest bet of all our prospects and has a very high ceiling. Campbell is the lone RHB and a real athlete. Teel is a catcher who seems like he will stick as a catcher- nuff said on him. Casas will not bring back what mayer will. Duran is Duran. He does it all. I'm not against trading anyone for a better return, but if Mayer can bring back a controllable ace, I'm in. If that is "stupid," then I don't wanna be smart.

Sounds about right. I agreed with your point about Houck needing to prove he's an ace, beyond a year. MLB history is full of pitchers who had just one really good or "ace-like" season. I think he can and will do it, but it needs to be done.

I'm curious to know how each of us view the amount of aces in MLB, right now. Here is a list of the top 185 SP'ers with 100+ IP since 2023, in order by fWAR: https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders/major-league?pos=all&lg=all&type=8&month=0&ind=0&startdate=&enddate=&season1=2023&season=2024&stats=sta&qual=100 I'd say the top 12 are, for sure (on this list.) After those 12, I see another 8-10 I would easily call an ace. I'd say the minimum might be 22, and maybe I could go up to around 30.

Me, too, but many pitchers we may consider an "ace" have had some sort of issues over recent years, too. deGrom is certainly an ace, but I'd rather have Houck, so it's kind of subjective. I like to think of the top 30 SP'ers as "aces," but I'm not sure about what sample size to use (1 year, 2 years, 3 years or a mix of all?) and what stat/metric to use (WAR, ERA-, xFIP, OPS Against or a mix of these.) If you created a list of all these sample sizes and all these criteria, some pitchers would be on most of them, but not 30 of them. I guess you could see who is on the most top 30 on these lists, and take the top 30, but a pitcher who did not pitch 3 years ago might get dinged out.

I made the same mistake. Primary position includes players who played some at that base, but it includes all their PAs as if they were all at that base.

We paid Sale a ton of money for just a few starts, too, plus the money to ATL for him to win a Cy Yong with. I'm not sure why talking about them is okay, but Gio is off limits. Of course the money for 2024 in gone, and he's just getting $19M for 2025. We all know this. It doesn't change the fact that he's still getting paid $38M for 1 year, in one context.

I just said this. I get it. I still don't get why you make a big deal over seeing the view that we are paying Gio $38M for one year of pitching. We basically said very similar things about Sale's pay for not playing.

I'm not sure the CBT matters much, unless we get near it, again, but yes the yearly budget matters and by a lot. The winter spending budget is perhaps the most meaningful, and the fact that Gio got paid $19M to do nothing in 2024 does not matter, in that regard. I get that. All of this does not take away from the view that io will essentially be paid $38M to pitch for one full year, assuming he does that in 2025. I never said that was the CBT hit or the 2025 budget hit, or even implied it, so I'm still not sure why you are making such a big deal about that statement.

You never know high highly some teams might value our arms. Would you include Crawford in a trade for Crochet? Mayer, Crawford and Abreu for Crochet and Roberts? Casas, Crawford, DHam and Abreu? (add Fitts over DHam?)

In conjunction with Mayer and Casas, I think he has enough to get the deal done, but yes, mayer's health concerns might be too much for many Gms. I do worry about trading Fitts when his stock may be low.