S5Dewey

Anything is possible but this post sounds like 'guilt by innuendo'. Don't tell a lie, just ask a question. Plant the seed then watch it grow.

Bill James was right...[Analytics] have made baseball about as much fun as doing your taxes.

If our choices are between Rusney @ $13M or JBJ @ $10M and we're in a budget crunch...isn't that a no-brainer?

I believe we've already decided that Who's on first. If we find that Who can't play first we move Bobby Dalbec there.

I've always like Dalbec both as a hitter and defensively. He's a big guy, 6'4", 225 with big shoulders and long arms with an OPS that's always around .800. Lots of leverage there. Defensively I've always believed that anyone who can play 3B can also play 1B - better. They're both corner positions and the ball comes off the bat the same way albiet from the opposite side, and their range is more necessay at 3B than at 1B. Dalbec is 25, hasn't yet reached his prime and will play for the minimum. He's also a known quantity within the organization. Under the current circumstances, what's not to like?

During which time we were rebuilding, just as the Rays have been doing. I'm not completely sold on the way the Rays do business but I do think there has to be some middle ground between the way the two team's FO runs their teams. It involves making a rational judgement of how good your team is and whether or not to trade a player (like ERod or Chavis or even Beni) for prospects knowing that you may finish 3rd next year but the year after you could have that WSC team. At the end of the day the thing that's done in the Sox farm system is that damn, irresponsible business of finishing 1st in their division for three consecutive years. It's ruined our chance to get prospects to replenish the farm!

I never understood Sale's extension, if only for the timing of it. I fully 'get' that Sale might have been able to sign someplace else had we not extended him but his pitching motion scares me. I'm certainly not a doctor but I had reservations about Sale when the trade was made. When someone watches Sale's motion and sees the stress it puts on his entire left upper body the extension seems foolhardy. The shoulder, the elbow, the whole motion fairly screams "Problems down the road!" So why sign a guy to a contract when you can be reasonably certain that this pitcher is going to be a medical liability sooner or later? It appears that Sale was extended for 2018 & 2019 with the idea that we'd worry about the remaining years when we got there. Well, they're here, a year sooner than expected.

Exactly. Which brings us back to the title of this thread and WWTBD. I wouldn't have the kahunas to trade ERod right now even though we might get a good return for him and he might implode next year. If the Rays had ERod they just might move him and given their track record that might not be a bad thing to do.

Just a few days ago we had a short discussion here about Tampa Bay and how they manage to sell high on most of their players. Maybe the most important question now is WWTBD?

Isn't there a rule someplace that one can't call his own post the "Post of the Day"?? :D

If so it would be the triumph of defense over offense.

IMO if someone could guarantee a combined ERA of 4.00 from our top three pitchers JH would forget all about a reset for 2020.

So do you think there's no substance to the rumors when someone leaves? That they're all figments of the press' imaginations?

What about Farrell and his (alleged) affair? What about Francona and his (alleged) prescription drug abuse? Unless these reporters are making things up out of think air someone is leaking them and the first place to look for the source of those leaks is to look for who would benefit from them.

Please see my post above about being trashed on the way out of Boston....

I understand that sports in general and specifically baseball in this case is often a matter of "What Have You Done For Me LATELY" but IMO firing DD for constructing a WSC team in 2018 and having the team fail in 2019 would have been reactionary, especially if JH had set hard spending limits. That's why I'm tempted to believe that there were three things that entered into the firing. The first was the failure of the 2019 season, the second was that DD's history said that he wasn't a guy with the skills to rebuild, and the third is that DD had just plain "worn out his welcome" in Boston. If what we read is true he lacked the interpersonal skills to maintain a relationship with others in the FO. (IOW, he was a prick and JH got tired of him!). However, I'm also aware that nobody escapes from the Red Sox FO without some kind of character assassination, so I take all of that with a grain of salt. Consequently I'm tempted to believe that it was both of the first two reasons I mentioned above, but as Bell said, we'll never know for sure. I do have to wonder though... do other organizations trash people on their way out like the Sox do, and if not wouldn't that have some effect on who might or might not want to come to Boston?

No team should be rooted for when their fans bring cow bells to a game.

We're two-for-two tonight, Kimmie.

And this might have been the most recent time when I didn't look at who the author of this post is, read the first sentence, realize that it's nothing more than another "poor winner" Yankees's post and skip over it... but it wasn't.

When I hear posters say that DD deserved to get fired I want to ask a couple of questions. 1) What do you think the job of a GM is in the off season? 2) Where did DD fail at that? If someone asked me that I'd say that the job of the GM is to build a team that, on paper, should and could contend for a World Series Championship. Where did he fail at that? He didn't. The biggest "crime" he can be accused of is not having his Magic 8 Ball calibrated properly so it would point out over the winter that our pitching staff would implode.

At the end of the day the "tax" is just another cost of doing business. When the salaries + the tax make it a bad business investment JH thinks about making changes - which apparently he's doing.

...and I'm good with that. I'm certainly not crazy about it but it is what it is and there's little that can be done about it. I see two roads to take now. The FO can either try to get one more year out of the position players believing that this group is good enough to win at least the AL East again. This would mean filling a couple of spots on the pitching staff and then hoping the remaining pitchers can come back to their 2018 form. From what I'm hearing JH is saying that's not his first option. The second road is to throw in the towel and essentially telling everyone that we're resetting now. That will probably cause JDM to exercise his option, cause the team to somehow relieve themselves of JBJ and Mookie and suffer through the contracts of Sale and Price. That will happen either prior to the 2020 season or the 2021 season. Whichever road they choose I'll live through it... hopefully!

That's brutal!! I'm the one who's been running around here saying that yes, the farm system is weak but we had a bumper crop of prospects whom we promoted to the parent club which in turn led to the WSC. We hit the 'perfect storm' of prospects and capitalized on it. IMO we'd still be capitalizing on it had our starting pitching not imploded on us. Now that reality has set in I'm ok with the trade-off of having a weaker farm system. I'm just disappointed that the Perfect Storm didn't last another season or two.

Maybe we have different definitions of "prospect". To me a prospect is someone who hasn't yet been assigned to the ML club for any extended period of time and doesn't have an established role. At the time Iggy had over 200 PA's and was on track for 350 PA's that year when he was traded at the end of July. To me he was more like Michael Chavis was this year - a bench-strength member of the team rather than just a prospect. In addition, he had a potential full-time defensive position with the Red Sox @ SS hinging on what they decided to do with Bogaerts. I still don't think trading Iglesias for Peavy was "a good idea" just because the Sox won the WS that year. Winning the WSC doesn't justify everything that was done that season.

I didn't and I still don't, but that's neither here nor there in this discussion. That trade had little to nothing to do with the farm and this discussion is about how trades have affected our farm system.