S5Dewey

There's a red herring if I ever saw one! Honestly now dear reader, how often do you disagree with the official scorer in regards to hit/error? Most of us who have watched any quantity of baseball know 9 times out of 10 when a player muffs a play whether the official scorer is going to rule it a hit or an error. There's certainly more room for discussion regarding clutch/non-clutch than there is for hit/error.

Uhhh... errors are a good indication of a player who's making a lot of mistakes and in the process giving away a lot of outs. I know I keep railing about this but I guess I have to: Giving a team an extra 1/3 of an inning is HUGE.

Yes, but Hanley had what turned out to be a very good excuse. He had a shoulder injury. He came back in 2016 to play a better than serviceable first base and hit almost .290 with an OPS of over .850. Sandoval has already come back from his injury and is now replicating the season Hanley had when Hanley was injured. Whether Sandeoval improves has yet to be seen but I'd be amazed to see him become the 2016 version of Hanley Rameriez. IMO the bar has now been set at "serviceable' and in spite of the rhetoric and the weight loss Sandoval isn't even reaching that bar.

Yep. Like many of us, I have the iconic picture of 'Tek, AFraud and the "leather sandwich" over my desk at home. BTW, I hear that's the only picture 'Tek refuses to autograph. He's apparently not proud of how he handled that situation - while most Sox fans love it!!

Are you saying that Kelly is no Ryan Dempster?

I admire your mature attitude. I even wish I could agree with it! However, I think it's time the Sox made the statement that they're not going to take this s*** from the Orioles or their douche-bag manager. Were it up to me I'd start Joe (100+mph) Kelly today and I'd let him pitch until he buries one in Machado's ribs. Then after Kelly gets ejected from the game I'd come back with my real starter.

Ugh. I didn't realize it was that bad. Sandoval is being saved from release for two reasons. 1) For the amount of money they're paying him they'd like to see him succeed, and 2) there's no one to take his place. As much as I like Hernandez (Plan the FO seems unwilling to give him 3B and let him prove he can't play it with no Plan C in sight. IMO #2 is a better reason than #1, but how long will they be willing to carry a guy who's making multiple errors and hitting around the Mendoza line hoping that both facets of his game will improve? Is there anyone else on this team who could get away with that??

Agree completely. It was one of the cheapest shots I've ever seen Machado barely touched the bag (if he touched it at all) with his lead foot. He may not have "intended" to hurt Pedey but it was typical Machado - doing what he wants to do and then getting a pass on it because he's a talented player. And then that ********** Showalter tries to protect him by saying " I haven't looked at (the replay) but I know how those things seem to play out now the next day." Personally I hope the Sox stick one in Machado's ear today - metaphorically speaking, of course.

You know you're dealing with something (else) here that's not statistically provable, don't you?

Anyone who watched the post-game show last night knows what Pedroia thinks about the rule regarding overrunning the base at 2nd. "I don't need any f***ing rule to tell me.....". LOL

Hoooo.... boy! Four errors in 15 games may not solidify a person's being replaced, but it certainly is a start in the process.

..but that would be such a small sample size as to be insignificant.

I hope you're not asking if some players can recognize that the team is in trouble at the moment and elevate their game to get them out of it. That would be referred to as being clutch and you can count on one hand the number of people here who think that can happen. The best we can hope for is a convergence of their randomness so this team can start scoring a few runs.

If that were true then it would be like OPS and they wouldn't have to have "trained observers" watching every game. They'd be able to just take the box scores and build their WAR from there. However, WAR also uses some immeasurable things. Range factor comes to mind immediately.

OK. I'll go with the IRS thing then. See? I'm not that hard to get along with! LOL

So did Andrews drop the ball on this when he recommended non-surgery two years ago? It'll be interesting to see what Buch has when he comes back.

Look, I don't want to sound snarky about this but WAR is a lot like the federal budget. It's so big and so convoluted that it's virtually impossible for laypeople to understand and if one can't understand it they can't find specifically what's wrong with it. Therefore we just have to assume that it's right. My bigger and global problem with WAR is that regardless of how much lip service people want to give to the fact that it's not the be-all, end-all they treat it like it is when they're in a debate. For some reason saying that Player A's WAR is better than Player B's War makes Player A a better player - and that is the defining moment in the discussion. I'll have a lot more faith in WAR when B-R (or someone else) qualifies WAR values by saying that the Margin of Error is 'x.xx" rather than saying "Welllll..... it might not be perfect... but it's close!" In my mind when someone assigns a numerical value to something without specifying a margin of error they're saying that the numerical value is what it is - and not somewhere close to it.

As Oldtimer pointed out in another thread, Sandoval has now made 3 errors in 12 games. If he continues to make errors at that rate - or anywhere near it - that .800 OPS still isn't going to cut it with me. Or probably any other team.

Well... one thing I'm sure of is that if a team doesn't score they won't win. Whether that's attributable to poor hitting or outstanding pitching is an age-old debate. It's had to blame the loss on Porcillo when his pitching line is 7 ip, 6 hits, 3 runs, 0 ER, etc... IMO we have to chalk this one up to "It's just one of those things....".

Even B-R admits that it's not an exact science. It's simply a matter of how inaccurate we allow it to be and still believe it.

I think we're getting what we expected with this team - a bunch of good hitters without David Ortiz in the lineup. The theory was that we'd make up for losing Ortiz with better pitching and better defense. Last night two things happened: The defense let us (and Porcillo) down and the Jays pitching staff came up big. The Sox are still .600 and one game out of 1st in spite of having been decimated by injuries, sickness, and bereavement & paternity leaves. Last night was only one game. It's early to panic yet. Let's wait until July to do that.

Actually... IMO this forum covers most topics fairly well. You just have to understand that there's a certain paranoia about having "too many threads" so a variety of things get posted in a single thread. For example, anything about Benintendi gets covered in the Benintendi thread rather than multiple threads about his hitting, his defense, his attitude, his upbringing, or the length of his hair. What topics would you like to see that aren't covered here?

That's a terrible analogy. I agree that the automobile is a better mode of transportation that the horse-drawn carriage, but not because of the number of moving parts. Both the horse-drawn carriage and the automobile get us where we want to go. The advent of the internal combustion engine just made travel quicker and easier even though the automobile had more moving parts. It's a trade-off. While I do own vehicles with power windows & doors, a GPS system, an EGR system and fuel injection I long for the days when I could rebuild a carburetor or change a fuel pump beside the road (I've done both). Now when my car stops running I have to call the garage and open my wallet. Does that make the current version of the car "better"? WAR is a lot like that GPS I spoke of, only with one exception. When my GPS fails to operate correctly it's immediately obvious but when WAR isn't operating properly some people tend to say, "Gee, it says that so it must be right". If we applied that to the GPS some people would occasionally end up in Albuquerque firmly believing they were in Boston (or wherever they wanted to go).

There seems to be an assumption that the more complicated something is the better the chance that it has to be right. I simply don't buy into that. IMHO the more variables one puts into an equation the more variability there is in the result.

::Giving my head a good hard shake:: Let me get this straight. BR calculates a Worth Above Replacement value for a player and then makes an adjustment using some other formula based on runs. Then they express it as WAR. So if I have three apples and take away two baby carriages what do I have left?