moonslav59

Gotta wonder if last night's loss took the last wind from our sails. Maybe not, this team has shown a lot of grit, and our rotation has actually seen some improvement over the last few starts. Now, we just need the pen to just approach mediocrity.

Agreed. He has had a much longer stretch of hitting well, than not, and pitchers have adjusted to him, and still can't figure him out. .586 first 203 PAs .810 last 242 PAs, including .845 last 202 PAs

I liked that idea, too. I think he has even hit pretty well, after the deadline.

I wondered about why DHam was at SS and Sogard at 2B, but figured they knew who was better on D. DHam is pretty bad, but Rafaela is no great SS, too.

I can certainly understand the reasoning behind trading the upside potential a Chris Sale had for a more durable but less upside pitcher like Gio, especially when you see how badly we've done with injury-prone pitchers over the years (Richards, Wacha, Hill, Kluber, Paxton...) It didn't work. We got it wrong. That does not change the fact that there was a reason for trying it. (The other reason was to try and fix our worst position in 5 years: 2B.) Anyway you look at it, we did not address the need to vastly improve our rotation. We basically swapped out Sale, Kluber and Paxton for Gio. I can understand not wanting to trade top prospects for pitching buy spending less AAV on Gio ($18.5M) + $17M for Sale to play in ATL vs last year's $27M for Sale, $10M for Kluber and $4M for Paxton was not what I had hoped for. Spending less to try and fix a rotation that was severely flawed last year is asking for failure.

Agreed. We had the money to try and mitigate the Gio signing: whether you call it the "money saved" on Sale or not, we did not spend it (all). The "swap" of Gio for Sale was an overall cost increase, both in AAV and actual cost, but when you consider we lost the Paxton and Kluber's money, we barely kept rotation costs the same from '23 to '24. It was just one way we neglected the rotation. There were others, including not signing enough experienced pitchers to minor league deals.

Agreed. I called this a "sham," and i still think the term fits. That being said, our bench and young talent was deeper and better than many of us expected, and the planned kinda worked, except for the pitching. After trying a few middle infielders, and then settling on Rafaela and a second stint from DHam and later additions like Romy and Sogard, we actually have seen better IF play over the last 6 weeks than we did in the first 3 months. Certainly, not great, especially on D, but much better. We've seen the OF go from one of baseball's worst, just a couple years ago to one of the best. We stumbled at 1B with dalbec and Cooper, but D Smith and Romy did stabilize that position wrecked by injury. The catching position was one area some felt we needed to make a signing. It turned out, we did not, and now the jansen addition is looking great. Some started to question the devers extension, after just one month into it. Not much of that, anymore. Despite missing both starting MI'ers and our star 1Bman, as well as O'Neill for some extended time, our everyday players and player depth has been our strength- bad defense notwithstanding. We botched the pitching staff, badly- both in terms of quality and quantity. Doing this for 5 straight years is inexcusable and unforgivable.

That's what got me, the most. Had we spent the "money saved," either on a $10M pitcher or by upgrading from Gio to Lugo or Imanaga, then this whole situation would not have been so bad.

To me, the worst part of the winter was the budget being cut by about $10M from 2023, while coming in about $10 to 15M under the tax line. (Of course, in hindsight, the Sale trade and Gio signings were the biggest disasters.) We could have gone over the line, but chose not to even go a couple million under it.

I can't see that happening. Even 4 IP, 50 pitches or 3 ERs wont happen.

We've seen a few of our pitchers doing very well, of late. Most are still long shots or far away, but the number of promising or semi-promising pitchers seems to be growing.

Asking "ham and egger" pen arms to get 4 outs an inning is too much. The D has let this team down, way too much, this season. The pen has really sucked, too, but 4 outs is too much.

Fans are still pissed they have done too little for over a decade, now. Yes, Soto was a hug get, as was Cole a few years back. They used to add 2-4 big names, some years.

Me, too. Anybody with half a brain knows that word is off limits, now, and it has been for years.

No doubt. 100%. One can argue we didn't even spend the Sale savings on Gio, since we actually cut payroll. Some expected us to spend up to or near the tax line, last winter, and not doing so had a clear impact of our roste5r and roster depth, especially pitching.

The MFY fanbase has not been happy for a long time. They do not think their owner is doing enough with the budget to get them over the hump.

Indeed, it was far from "almost everyone," and not a single person called Brez a "genius" for this trade. Some liked the idea of making a strong move to improve our 2B situation, which has been one of the worst positions in MLB for over 5 years. Some felt was some value in trading a high injury risk pitcher and using some of the savings to sign a pitcher known for durability. I recall many feeling skeptical about the deal on many fronts. Several posters were against the trade from day one, while others seemed to focus their distaste for the money aspect of the deal, only. Now, it seems like many are sounding like we did or should have known, at the time, this trade was awful or made "no sense." Hardly anyone said it "made no sense," back then. Had Sale gotten hurt, again, we'd have heard nothing. Had Grissom won the 2B job and done well, we'd have heard less, even if Sale was doing well. Had Gio stayed healthy and pitched well, it would not be so bad. However, every aspect of this trade and the loss of Gio for the season turned out to be the perfect cluster storm of failure.

There are a few teams that have really good farm systems OR a nice core of recently graduated young players who have proven they belong in the bigs. The Sox are maybe one of just a handful of teams that has both, despite the lack of a solid young core of pitchers to build around. To me, it is so obvious what our next step should be, and the when to do it the only debatable point. We need to build up the pitching staff. Perhaps we have already begun building the farm staff, but we cannot wait to see if we've done a good job. Even if we have done a good job, the wait would be 3-6 years from now, anyway. There are two major ways to significantly build up a ML pitching staff, with waiver wire, minor league deals and Rule 5 as long shot methods. 1. Free Agency: We will likely have to just bite the bullet and spend more, and not just on the rotation. Just replacing Pivetta, Jansen & martin in kind, will not be nearly enough. We spent about $6-12M a year on the rotation from 2020-2023, and the $19M spent on Gio was offset by paying for Sale to play with ATL, so the "big spending" of 2024 was a mirage. We've beaten JH to death, several times over this, and deservedly so, but it will be very hard to have a better staff, next year without spending more and spending correctly. The "correctly" aspect is often quesswork, and we've done pretty poorly in this area, but this is Brez's second winter coming up, and he should have a chance to redeem himself. 2. Trades: Here ie where I am adamant about the need to make a big splash. We have a few very strong positions with a bottleneck of talent- young and inexpensive talent that many teams would die for. Some teams are very good at developing young pitchers, but lack solid everyday players, at low costs. We need to find those teams a strike a deal or two. We also have some useful midtier depth players, who may be weak in one area of their game (many of defense.) We could find some teams to trade us some useful pitching depth, in exchange for these limited role players. Noting fancy, but something to give us mid season depth, when we know we will need it, eventually. We also need to stop counting on players returning from the IL to give us a boost. It seems like every season, we fall into the same trap. We skimp on deadline deals, because we have hopes in guys like Hendriks, Martin and Casas returning and returning to glory. It never seems to happen. That being said, I do think we have a few pitchers that can fill some meaningful roles on the 2025 pitching staff, but not the ones they needed to fill, this year. If we can count on Houck to step up his IP and be a solid 2-3 SP'er, not our #1, we should be okay. We should count on Bello as a 4-5, not a 2-3. We should count on Crawford as a 5-6, not a 3-4. We should not count on Gio for much, but certainly not as our #1. Being our #2 is asking for trouble, too. We need an ace. To me, we need an ace and a solid #3, as well as 2-3 minor league SP'er depth signings like Criswell was, last winter. I know that is wishful thinking, but we could trade for one major pitcher and sign another, then make some mid-tier trades for added depth, ending up with this: SP1 ____ SP2 Houck SP3 ____ SP4 Gio SP5 Bello SP6 Crawford SP7 Criswell SP8 _____ SP9 _____ SP10 _____ (Priester, Fitts, Dobbins, Mata, Murphy) Closer _____ RP2 Hendriks RP3 _____ RP4 Slaten RP5 Whitlock RP6 Winckowski RP7 Kelly RP8 Booser, Bernardino, Fulmer, Weissert, I Campbell, Mills, Horn That's 4 major additions to the staff, while losing 3 (Pivetta, Jansen & Martin.) I can't see us doing much better without at least 4 major pitching additions.

Fitts pitched a good game (5IP, 5H, 1ER, 1BB, 5K) Grissom 1-3 w BB Meidroth 2 BBs Casas 0-3 w BB POR was down and scored 2 in the 8th, 2 in the 9th and Campbell hit a 2 run homer in the 10th to win 6-4. Hickey & Jh Garcia went 2-4, Dobbins pitched 2 hit shutout ball through 6 IP (1BB & 3K.) GRE won 4-0 behind Monegro's 5 IP, 2H, 0ER, 2BB, 7K. The pen only allowed 1 hit in 4 IP. Team 3H, 3BB, 15Ks! Romero went 2-3 w 2BB (OPS up to .870.) SAL lost 4-3. Arias went 2-4 w BB and 2B. Zanetello 2B'd, too. Yuten 2-4.

We could sign Rich Hill.

You just can't lose games like this in a playoff run. This sucks.

The DP would have made 3 outs.

What? He should have put himself at SS?

My kingdom for a short stop!

It can't get any more sick than this!