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Not even remotely the point…

No matter how many times I watch “Casablanca”, Rick never gets the girl. I’m well past the point of wondering “will he choose Ilsa THIS time?” And so it goes with Dalbec. Demote Casas to accommodate Duvall. Duran has earned a chance to stay and play more than Casas..

Demote Casas until there’s a need again. Casas would play full time, and, whether or not he realizes it, 1b is his for the immediate future, since there isn’t much between him and Kavadas, who isn’t exactly a sure thing himself…

Separating offense from defense - did Manny’s glove kill the Sox? Yoshida will never hit like Manny, but he is in a lineup that can make up for his miscues, too. In the Big Team Picture, does it matter which hitter brings the runs back? (It’s certainly nice when it’s the defensive question mark and provides him job security.). But overall LF is creta the easiest OF spot to hide a bad glove, and probably the second easiest position overall (not counting DH)..,

What about Nick Yorke and his .884 OPS in AA?

But you are applying universal logic and stating it as if it only applied to the Red Sox…

That’s a good argument. I also would have accepted “he’s a baseball junkie.” But the bottom line is - the 2022 Red Sox were 78-84. If the Sox brought back Wacha, Eovaldi, Strahm and Martinez, how is that an improvement? By hoping they all play better this year? Who is it on this board who (correctly) says “hope is not a strategy”? And if Bloom brings the band back together and the Sox go 78-84 again, how many will call it the right move anyway? Especially since not one of them took a one year deal, so 2024 might look a lot like 2022 as well…

Take out the top prospect of 29 other teams and the farm gets worse, too…

My point w wasn’t that pitching doesn’t win. It’s that a lot of teams pursued other formulae. The fact that 1968 was “the year of the pitcher” shows how ubiquitous it was. Flash forward to the 1970’s and what was the calling card of the Big Red Machine? Or in the 1980’s with the Brewers aka Harvey’s Wallbangers. Or the Cardinals of the early 1980’s. They had pitching, but best teams were built around more. Heck, most of those 1980’s teams early in the decade focused on speed and stolen bases. That was the fad - the launch/angle and escape velocity of the day. You didn’t see this mad league-wide rush for starting pitching and 200 IP starters until the late 1970’s, when the success of Earl Weaver finally went mainstream. Some of this is due to expansion. With 6 more teams in the league, finding superior pitching is getting tougher. A lot of it is driven by economics (personal theory, but not unsupported). KC won a title with a mediocre staff of no names. Tampa has made the postseason four (and counting) straight years while getting fewer IP from their starters than the overwhelming majority of the league. Like it or not, the Opener is a brilliant strategy when deployed properly. It’s very possible starting pitching just isn’t as desirable as it used to be. It can never go away completely, but it can be reduced and deployed different. This might be a fad, but every future was once a fad. And if it is the future of the game, most of those who stay in the past will remove themselves from competition soon enough…

The point is there really is no “magic formula” despite what a lot of us think. I mean, you watched baseball in the 1970’s. Pitching wasn’t viewed as the key to success than like it has been recently. Why? We’re teams just run more stupidly? And it took almost 8 decades before someone thought “what about pitching?” MLB is more like the NFL than a lot of people (including me; I’m formulating this as I go) recognize in that it seems like successful trends breed copycats. This was a masked (and possibly inadvertent) theme in “Moneyball.” And right now, the successful trend is to go lighter and cheaper with pitching and focus on short term with lots of turnover. SP is there to eat innings and keep it close. And the game is won and lost in the bullpen…

I did ask your opinion on their thought process, but I don’t think apathy was the case. They do have a manager who cares about his (next?) job, after all…

Story with elbow problems still throws as hard as reigning NL Gold Glover Dansby Swanson (source: StatCast). Not to mention, if his elbow clearly prohibited him from playing SS, why didn’t Colorado - you know, an actual MLB franchise entrusted with making these types of decisions - ever change his position?

And that also has nothing to do with pitching. Tampa is the model owners want - minimal expenses, maximum results. But how often do they sign free agent pitchers to multiyear deals? Baltimore - who is 92-63 in their last 155 games - what was their big off-season pitching splurge? Kyle Gibson!! And his deal? Basically the same one Kluber got. Meanwhile third place Yankees have committed over half a billion dollars to Rodon and Cole and are looking up at multiple Bargain Hunters…

I would imagine so. Wacha originally wanted 2 years $30mill. A lot of teams walked away from that price…

Maybe that’s the new formula for baseball and business success - don’t dump huge gobs of cash on players who only play 20% of the time even when they’re actually healthy. Don’t forget - it wasn’t that long ago teams started viewing pitching as the key to success at all…

Kluber has a higher AAV than Wacha. Safe bet years were a huge factor here…

Do you think willingness to sign a one year deal was a factor? Eovaldi clearly didn’t want one with Boston…

A Ted Williams movie would - like all movies - need struggling and an opposing character. If you just told the story of his life, you’d have a boring history lesson. People engage in a movie when there’s a struggle to watch a character overcome. We liked “Bill Durham” not because we were invested in Nuke LaLoosh, but because we cared if Crash could drag him to the Show kicking and screaming about having to do it Crash’s way. “The Rookie” (the Jim Morris story starring Dennis Quaid) tried to force this controversy on us with the character of Morris’ father, and it flopped in a big way. Shame, because Morris’ story of a 36yo science teacher who suddenly vaulted himself into MLB should have been more fascinating. So what would the Story of Ted Williams move be? What would Ted be trying to accomplish and who would be trying to stop him? Until someone can tell that aspect, I don’t think there odd a good movie to be made…

No idea why they keep rolling that alignment out there. We do have other options…

We lived through Manny Ramirez in LF for nearly a decade. And got two rings with him out there. Yoshida won’t win any hardware, and might end up as a DH. But his glove won’t kill this team…

That’s a better point, but not the one people are making right now…

But my point about why I didn’t mind re-signing (not from that post)!stands - like Eovaldi sand Sale, he’s hurt all the time. That he went uninsured through June 3 this year didn’t change that.

It’s amazing how much everyone hated the 2022 Red Sox but also clearly thinks letting any of them all go was a huge mistake. “We should have kept Wacha! We should have kept Eovaldi! We should have kept Vazquez! And Bogaerts and JD!!” Heck, I’ve even heard that we should have held on to Matt Strahm!! Did everyone sleep though 2022? Because no one seemed to enjoy these guys when we had them. Or were all the problems with that team because of Austin Davis?

Again - I need a like button…

To be fair, they have had over a century to update it…