S5Dewey

I agree with you .... almost .. in what you say about speed and defense. However, I'm an "up the middle" guy. I believe in speed and defense up the middle, and anything you get offensively above ~.700 OPS is a plus. At the same time I believe that power comes from the corners and I expect my corner positions to have an OPS >.800 and anything you get defensively above average defense is a plus. The more "plus" players a team has, the better their chances of winning. Sure, durability is good, but sometimes it's easy to confuse one long stint on the DL with being "brittle". In the case at hand, yeah, he lost one season to an injury when he didn't report it, but other than that his injury history has been fairly ordinary. Everyone goes down with an injury occasionally. Even Pedey. :-) I see JBJ doing exactly what you said.. getting his swing more compact in the off season. He did that for a while this year but then reverted to his old habits and his swing got longer. IMO he's a short swing from being a perennial AS. You'd think I'd have learned by now, but every year I'm impressed by the pitching in the playoffs and what a huge difference it makes. The old adage of "Good pitching beats good hitting" always rings true in the playoffs. I can't say I'm disappointed by Price's performance in the playoffs - it's exactly what it's been in the past so I was somewhat expecting it - but I will say that it's disheartening that the Red Sox have that much money tied up in a pitcher who can't get it done in October. Now it seems that we need two high priced pitchers, one who can get us TO October and a second one who can get us THROUGH October. :-(

Meh. My contention all along is that the Boston Red Sox would be a better team with an infield of Bogaerts and Iglesias on the left side of it than with Bogaerts and 'God only knows who' there, and more money to spend on pitching. The proof here is in the pudding. Regardless of all the "articles you can find" Jose Iglesias is the starting SS for a very good MLB team. Just like the Detroit Tigers, I don't care about 'articles'. I care about ability and production...and the Red Sox and what would make them a better team. And I don't know how to break this to you but this trade already has been talked about for years. Three of 'em to be exact. And probably will be into the future.

I can live with that.

I'll tell ya what.. I'm betting that there are a bunch of TV executives who are saying "Go Cubs!". Without the Cubbies a WS of Cleveland vs. Los Angeles could be a ratings disaster.

I tend to agree with this. However, without having the expertise to do the research I believe the number of plays he makes that a (let's say) 'replacement SS' wouldn't make outweighs the errors he makes on routine balls.

I'm not right very often, so when I am I want to make the best of it!!

Jake Peavey may be the most overrated late-season addition to the Red Sox staff ever. Moon has made a believer out of me in that the FO decided he was trade bait because Bogaerts was waiting in the wings. IMO that was mistake #1. Mistake #2 was not getting enough for him when they traded him away. He was the runner-up ROY SS, batting ~.300 with (I believe) 3 years of control left, and what they got for him was an aging pitcher on the brink of the end of his career. Ugh.

He lost one full season (2014) with the microfractures in his shins. At the time it was said that had he reported his discomfort earlier his stint on the DL probably would have been shorter but instead he tried to play through it. Bad idea. The attitude issue came from a national televised game when Iggy was 'called out' in the dugout by the catcher for not trying hard enough to get to a ball that was hit up the middle. Iggy took exception to it and a pushy-pushy ensued. Frankly, these are the things that happen frequently on teams - they just don't happen in the dugout. IMO both Iggy and the catcher were wrong in this instance. The catcher for confronting Iggy in the dugout - it should have been kept in the clubhouse - and Iggy for it becoming physical - what little physical there was of it. My take on it FWIW is that there was some bad blood between them before that happened and it just came to a head then. But what to I know?

Great. Thanks!

DD likes defense, which is one reason why I like DD. He also tried to trade for JBJ while in Detroit, which I why I'd be surprised to see JBJ on the trade block in the off season. Which pleases me greatly.

Here's what he's been since being traded to the Tigers: Iglesias was named as a reserve for the American League at the 2015 All-Star Game.[17] On September 5, it was announced that Iglesias suffered a non-displaced small fracture in his right middle finger at the PIP joint after being hit on the hand by a pitch, and the team announced he would be out for at least two weeks.[18] With the Tigers later falling out of the AL Central race, the team elected to not activate him from the DL for the remainder of the season. During the 2015 season, Iglesias posted a .300 batting average in 416 at-bats, with 17 doubles, two home runs and 23 RBIs. Iglesias made one trip to the disabled list in 2016, after suffering a left hamstring strain in August but still reached career highs with 137 games, 467 at-bats and 26 doubles. If you don't like Iglesias' attitude you must HATE Josh Donaldson's attitude. Iggy had one dust-up with a player in Detroit while Donaldson pretty much got run out of California after having a confrontation with the FO, then had the same kind of confrontation in Toronto. On January 15, 2016, the Tigers avoided arbitration with Iglesias, agreeing on a one-year, $2.1 million contract. Thanks, Wikipedia!

That's just cruel to bring that up where I can read it. :D

I said... However, my understanding is that one of his 'demands' was that he be guaranteed being a regular starter at least at the beginning of the season And then Mal said... the way I heard it is that he wanted to considered a member of the starting rotation until, or unless, he showed he couldn't handle it. I think we're saying the same thing. Now, will someone please tell me how to do the multi-quote thing??!! Thanks.

Agree completely, Slash. Now I wish I'd saved my recent post in the Realistic thread and posted it here instead.

I think that's where I was going with my post. The pressure is now all on the Cubs to win the next game - the simply CANNOT allow themselves to get into the position where they need to sweep three games from the Dodgers with the Dodger's pitching staff being what it is. IMO the Jays have a better chance of coming back from 3-1 than do the Cubs.

Just an observation here.... One of the things that amazes me is how quickly the complexion of a series can change depending on one win. Going into Tuesday night's game the Cubs and Dodgers where tied at one game apiece. The loser of that game (the Cubs) now has to win three of four while the winner (the Dodgers) only have to gain a split over four games. Somehow a split seems to be a lot more do-able than winning three of four, and that mindset revolves around that one win.

The Cubbies now need to win three out of four against the Dodgers. That's a big order. Not impossible, but the odds-makers would be against it.

I don't disagree with you at all. In fact I wanted him signed too. However, my understanding is that one of his 'demands' was that he be guaranteed being a regular starter at least at the beginning of the season and that was something the Sox weren't willing to guarantee. And I can understand that. In my world nobody is guaranteed a starting position (unless they're a proven commodity like Pedey). Imagine the hoop-la if Sandoval had been guaranteed being a starter! I hated to see him go but both parties had their needs and their needs didn't match up.

Why don't we ever get guys like that?

This raises an interesting question... Is that "formula" for comparing WAR with a player's worth skewed, or is there a glitch in the calculation of WAR that makes a player's WAR higher than his actual worth? Maybe it's impossible to compare the two.

I never saw or heard that Lackey himself said anything about not finishing the contract. Anything I heard about it came from his agent and when read it I rolled my eyes and realized it only was a bargaining position. After that it took on a life of it's own and before we knew it Lackey was traded. It appears that it's OK for Lucchino to make an insulting offer to a player but when a player insults Larry the player gets traded. I'm glad Larry's gone. I was glad he was leaving the moment I heard about it.

I agree with that whole thing. The FO set themselves up for failure in the Lester negotiations and then refused to backtrack when they found out that they actually WOULD fail. The Lackey thing wasn't a whole lot different. The FO was pissed at his agent for implying that Lackey might retire rather than play for the league minimum so they traded him. Larry Lucchino has always impressed me as being a stubborn son-of-a-bitch.

Well..yes, but the flip side of that coin is that we went from last to first on DD's watch, too. I've always had reservations about Price that I don't need to go into again (not now anyway LOL). Let's just say that we got what we should have expected based on prior performance. As far as Kimbrel goes, he didn't show up as advertised and I don't see that as being DD's fault. As with everything, you take the knowledge you have in front of you and make decisions based on that knowledge. It was "unfortunate" - for lack of a better word - that both of those guys went into the crapper late in the season. With one of them it was predictable, (oops!) but with the other one it wasn't.

I have a tough time going into a season thinking that we'll plug gaps in July. IMO the trade deadline is the time for teams who know they have a shot at it to beef up their team. A team that waits until the deadline may find themselves out of the running by then, where if they'd filled their known gaps before the season started they could be in the thick of it - and then improve the team MORE at the deadline.

I'm not surprised that Hazen left. He was a GM with no GM responsibilities. What surprises me now and did at the time is that DD was given the GM job without the title. IMO that just confuses things. And I don't think it matters much who then next pseudo-GM is. DD is still going to be calling the shots. This works well short-term but in the longer view it may cost us some good baseball people who aren't interested in being a GM in name only and therefore move to another club where they can be a real GM.