S5Dewey

IMO - and this is all it is.. My Opinion with nothing to back it up - I don't think Sandoval will be with the team as soon as they can get rid of him for any reasonable exchange. I think they're tired of looking at his face and knowing how big their mistake was. It's like getting a divorce. It would have been cheaper to keep her, but at least you don't have to look at her every day. Sorry Kimmy.. no misogyny intended. I'm just being practical. :-)

The off season is like that... feast or famine.

And we'll never know because one can be any weight they want to be in the programs. I can remember when David Ortiz was at his heaviest and was listed in the probram as being 235. Hell, ONE LEG weighed 235!! LOL

I get your point and I agree. Sometimes there are things that just stick out and it's hard to give someone any benefit of doubt in a situation like that.

Point by point; Hanley and Remierez = Meh. Small sample size. IMO MH will be better than that and Hanley will be A LOT better than that. Elias = 3 runs in 10 innings in that competition isn't impressive, but 9 K's in 10 innings is impressive. Abad = Just after I'd trashed the guy I see good numbers. Go figure!! LOL Vaz = Disappointing. I'm still hoping for better. Castillo = Raises the point of what do we do if he turns out to be as advertised? We can only put 3 guys in that outfield! Do we hope he succeeds, or do we hope he fails? (Theoretically speaking, of course. We NEVER hope anyone fails. Ugh.)

I don't have too much angst about our 3-7 'pen. Those positions are a crap shoot on any team. I agree that given their history 2-3 of these guys will step up. Besides, given the quality of our top 3 pitchers there may not be a lot of work for #'s 3-7 anyway so I think this problem will sort itself out. It may take a little more time (and a few more losses) than we'd like, but IMO it will happen. If that's what we're worrying about then things are looking good!

Hmmm... " Type 'A' " much?

That's fair. It seems like he would be marketable to some team with a surplus of RH mediocre relief pitchers (which would be most teams) who's looking for a lefty with a nice ERA against LH hitters.

Yep. I don't expect everyone else to look at things the same way I do. My gripe is with someone who forms opinions about someone's work ethic or mental makeup without knowing that player personally. The only sources we have about those aspects of a player are the media and the media are notorious troublemakers, often trying to stir the pot to create controversy. Whether it's JBJ or anyone else in any aspect of life, society being what it is today many people are willing to believe anything negative that's said about anyone. They are allowed to have that opinion and I have the right to refute it. Will I change their minds? Probably not, because when a person doesn't use logic to come to a conclusion they can't be persuaded to change their minds by using logic. But that doesn't mean I won't try.

Getting back to Abad for a moment, I don't understand why this guy has a roster spot. I keep thinking that there must be some metric that keeps him there showing value that I don't see. I know perceptions are notoriously unreliable but it seems like every time he comes into a game he fails to help the situation. And "failing to help" is his best case scenario! He had one good year in 2014 and other than that his numbers have been pretty much pedestrian but it seems like he flunks the eye test every time he takes the mound. Are there some metrics that I'm not aware of that indicate the number of inherited runs allowed and/or the number of "his" runners who have later scored?

Thanks. I find it unfair of posters to denigrate a player based on their own observations or what one coach may have said in a moment of frustration. In the case of JBJ, the longer the slump went on and the more things he tried the more of a target he became when things weren't working. Hence some people wanted to brand him as being "stubborn" or "uncoachable". I usually don't get involved in these pissing contests but since nobody else wanted to set the record straight and I've always been a big JBJ advocate I took it upon myself to do it. Now, re: Prolonged slumps. IMO the answer comes from our definition of "prolonged". It's unrealistic to think that any player won't go through slumps. Even The Great Dustin Pedroia (no disrespect intended) goes through slumps so it's not realistic to think that JBJ won't too. So the answer to your question comes down to our own definition of "prolonged" - which is something I'd hate to attach a number to. Like Justice Stewart said about pornography, "I can't define it but I know it when I see it". It's the eyeball test, ya know! . JBJ is human and therefore subject to the influences that humans are subject to, which contribute to days of no hits. It's also possible that pitchers may find a way to create a hole in his swing much like they did before, but because he is a hard worker and coachable I believe he'll work his way through it and it won't be as extended - or as obvious! - as the previous one. I think he's OK now. Probably even All-Star "OK" again.

Sorry. There was an implication in the prior post that JBJ had been stubborn and continued to use the toe-tap for "two years" in spite of being told to change it. Bradley began to use the toe-tap on the advice of his hitting coaches so isn't safe to assume that he'd have stopped using it if they told him to stop? This link http://www.bostonherald.com/sports/red_sox_mlb/clubhouse_insider/2015/08/once_considered_uncoachable_jackie_bradley_jr_applies establishes that JBJ initially called the FO asking to do the extra work to get out of his slump. Once he was getting the work he cooperated with Rodriguez in getting the necessary changes made. According to Rodriquez, regardless of what the scribes may have said there was no stubbornness, no uncoachability involved on Bradley's part. My second point was that the timing of JBJ's coming out of the slump wasn't random at all. It had a cause. It was the result of Rodriguez working with him to get his stride right.

That's a vast oversimplification. In doing a little research I learned that his coming out of that streak wasn't at all due to randomness. It was brought on by a change in step. The toe tap wasn't something JBJ took on by himself and it wasn't something he was doing in the minors. He started doing it in an effort to get out of a slump he was in and was one of many things he tried. See #4 of the link. http://m.mlb.com/news/article/179081724/reasons-behind-jackie-bradley-jrs-success/ He got a lot of help from a lot of well-meaning people who, in the end, only served to confuse him. Now he's done what he said he should have been doing in the beginning - doing what got him there. According to this article in the ProJo the thing that helped Bradley the most was correcting his initial stride, keeping himself square to the pitcher with his first stride. http://www.providencejournal.com/article/20150910/SPORTS/150919917 "What changed it all for Bradley was his ability to keep himself square to the pitcher with his first step. His first exposure to the major leagues had seen opposing pitchers attack him relentlessly with fastballs in on the hands, and so he began to cheat on those pitches by taking a first step more toward first base than toward the pitcher. That opened up a hole on the outer half of the plate. Starting with work that began even before spring training, Bradley has maintained a stride directly toward the middle of the field, a stride that allows him to cover the entire plate." "Last year his first move was to open up with the front side," Rodriguez said. "That didn't allow him to get to that pitch middle-out. Now his first move is straight to the pitcher -- square, nice and soft with the front side -- and the ball is dictating where he's going to hit it. Before, right before the ball as pitched, he was already committed to one part because he had opened up with the front side. Now he's getting to the ball the right way."

JBJ should be the poster child for this discussion. JBJ always posted an OPS >.800 (except for one 14 game stint in Pawtucket in 2014) when he was in the minors. Yet when he came to Boston in 2014 he put up an OPS of But then he went on his month-long tear, and something changed there that caused it, too. To attribute that streak to randomness implies that he would have had the same offensive output at the end of the year regardless of when it happened - and there's no way I can buy into that. I watched ever game of it and the guy was on fire. The ball as it was coming in must have looked like it was the size of a beach ball, and he felt he could do anything he wanted to with it. In the entire picture I do believe that there are random variations in a player's performance. Obviously a .300 hitter doesn't have 3 hits in each 10 AB's and a player with 20 HR's doesn't hit but one in every 8 games and the the 8 game cycle starts over. That's random. At the same time there are inexplicable streaks - like the ones JBJ had - that are causal, and the fact that we (or even the player!) don't understand the cause doesn't mean that there is no cause.

Then I'm not sure we have the same definition of "streak". To me the streaks we're discussing are things that happen for no identifiable reason, whether they're hot streaks or cold streaks. OTOH, a prolonged streak of low performance due to an injury has an identifiable reason and (IMO) therefore should not be considered in this discussion.

C'mon. Get real. Are you implying that Papi didn't feel and respond to the pressure in the post-season? That the playoffs were "Ho-hum. Same old same old game" during the playoffs? That he didn't feel the difference between baseball in May and baseball in October? I don't believe that for an instant. There's more pressure in October. Some can handle it, some can't. To continue to use the "small sample size" argument knowing that there can never be a sample size that's "meaningful" is disingenuous. Every sample size means something, especially when it's the only sample size we've got. Right now the only sample size we've got says that Price is a .200 pitcher in the playoffs. I have no idea why that is but Price's numbers in the playoffs are what Price is in the playoffs. I hope he does better in 2017. I really do. But I'm going to have the same misgivings about any playoff starts he has in 2017 that I had in 2016.

This reminds me of something a friend of mine told me about how he and his wife settle disputes. "Anything we agree on we do my way and anything we disagree on we do her way." IOW in spite of any lip service, the outcome is always predetermined.

Yes. Thank you.

That's an interesting perspective. Given that you and I are on opposite sides in this discussion - not that there's anything wrong with that! - I have exactly the opposite thought. I find that nearly everyone here who likes the stats says essentially the same thing at one time or another. "I like and believe in the eye test...... as long as the eye test doesn't conflict with the statistics".

That's all fine, but if we want to be fair about this we have to also have to be willing to take our bad with the good. As I said in a post subsequent to the one you cited, "That also means that we can't call Papi a great Post-Season clutch hitter. He's only a good hitter who happened to run into a few at the right time." Ortiz has only about 300 post-season AB's as opposed to 8600 AB's in his 20-year career. Those 300 are a very small sample size - about 3 1/2% - as compared to his total body of work. If we have the right to call Papi a post-season hero we also must call Price a post-season bust. We can't have it both ways. I believe that Papi is a post-season hero, one who rises to the occasion, but in order for me to believe that I also have to believe that Price is a post-season bust. To believe anything else would be hypocritical.

I don't want to be a dick about this but I don't want that to go unchallenged either. I've got a Master's Degree in Common Sense, the product of living almost 70 years and observing situations and people, and I always get a kick out of people with advanced college degrees who think that everything they learned in their college textbooks explains everything. It doesn't. Back in my working life I worked beside numerous engineers, mechanical, chemical, and biological, and in spite of everything they learned in their textbooks they still had a lot to learn in the real word. Data is a wonderful thing but any data dealing with people has to be taken in the context of the people involved. Edit: I also don't take to condescension very well.

Yep. Crazy, isn't it? That also means that we can't call Papi a great Post-Season clutch hitter. He's only a good hitter who happened to run into a few at the right time.

My tongue-in-cheek comment was directed more toward David Price's WS history. During a discussion we had about that recently there seemed to be a semi-consensus that Price's struggles in the WS don't mean anything because the SS is too small.

To be nit-picky about this, I'd take the under on the next 10, but only because he'd have to be 3 for his next 10 to be closer to .300, but I'd be willing to buy into 2 for his next 10 - which would be equidistant between .100 & .300. . After that, I'll take the over. And I still have to wonder what happened to Alan Craig. I used to say that Good Hitters don't simply forget how to hit - but Craig did! I dunno.

But it doesn't mean anything because it's too small a sample size.