5GoldGlovesOF,75

Breslow and Bailey are here to teach pitchers, fix the pitching staff, and change the system. B&B... Bread and Breakfast... or with disrespect to recent comments: No-Bread and Makefast. N&M. With their expertise -- and we'd better accept that this could represent this offseason's big change -- who are the big leaguers they can help improve in 2024? They paid big bucks to show they could turn Giolito around. And certainly, the younger guys like Whitlock, Houck and Crawford would be candidates for some prime tinkering. It's not hard to see all of them become different pitchers after buying into new throwing programs brought on by fresh, new voices with track records of success. Whitlock and Houck are more than a year out from structural procedures, presumably healthy and physically ready to let it fly. Pivetta is another who could benefit. He already showed he is willing to apply lessons learned from Chris Martin, who learned from Ohtani. Which leaves us with Bello. The pupil of Pedro took steps forward last season, but his stuff still seems like it could dominant even more -- at least on a consistent basis. Brez and Bailes are the new mound gurus. N&M. Please stand up, please stand up.

Can the Red Sox just raise ticket prices again?

... he may have believed that then, but the guy is certainly being honest with us today

"But I think the reality is..." But = (dictionary definition): "contrasting what has already been mentioned" I think ~ I've realized the reality is ~ this is not what I agreed to, when accepting this job Quote from Brez' introductory presser, Nov. 2, 2023: “I don’t see financial resources as a limiting factor.”

Basically, we need you to sign an extension to buy tickets and NESN for the next decade and show patience while we draft and develop players who will become big leaguers we can pay MLB minimum to form a decent team. After about 10 years, we could be pretty good for many seasons after that. If you die by then, hopefully you'll kids will take your recliner.

A lot of us? Isn't that most posters? Is someone not old enough to keep looking over his shoulder for a guy in a hoodie holding a scythe? Or is that a new CBO who answers a question about competing with a sentence that begins: "But I think the reality is..."

They sure proved him wrong, because 75% of the seasons of the post-Dombro Red Sox have been good enough to finish as the fifth-best team in the AL East. The only thing Dombrowski did in Philadelphia is turn around a losing club, get them into the World Series the next year, and keep fandom excited with plenty of star players collected on sustained contenders.

He has kind of become the Howard Hughes of MLB.

I don't really care whether the Sox sign Snell or Montgomery, though I've suggested acquiring the latter since last July. But Boston needs more good pitchers now -- not when the team is good again, which is really hard to be without quality starters... (he said, ad nauseum). And there's no such thing as "wasting" a good pitcher's prime if the club isn't a strong contender in any specific year. A good pitcher makes a bad team better in so many ways, not the least of which is to change the culture of upgrading a low-end roster. Lights-out pitchers limit the times a bad D handles the ball, and reduces the amount of runs a bad O needs to win games. That alone improves a ballclub, not to mention the rest provided to the bullpen, which will then be better positioned to help win future games. A good pitcher can even make teammates better, like when Ohtani taught Chris Martin the best way to throw a splitter (Martin is already paying it forward in Boston).

I'd keep Rafaela because elite defenders are rare, especially in Boston these days. If your pitching sucks and you won't upgrade personnel, the best way to help improve it is with good defense.

We all know there's a lot of luck in the development of prospects a GM/CBO drafts, and those kept vs. those traded -- mainly because there are entire departments of employees involved in scouting, analyzing, discussing and arguing who comes and goes. It's also hard to call Dombrowski or Bloom good or bad at drafting, compared to say, Epstein, who had more free reign to give out big bucks to sign top picks. Overall, the draft is just part of their job, and the way most teams operate -- grabbing the consensus BEST player left on the board when it's their turn -- it's hard to be really good or bad at it. But one thing that separates the big wigs is being decisive enough to actually use some of that prospect capital to acquire talent evaluated outside the organization. It was a speciality of Dombro's, a weakness of Bloom's, and a trait that might make or break Breslow... and our summahs!

I've posted before how I was horrified when Dombro dealt the system's #1 pitching prospect -- but of course he never made it, and Pomeranz was a key guy for the '17 division champs. A few points: Espinoza was the first "next Pedro" but those Sox were fighting for first place and going for it. So that trade was more reasonable for a contender than a club that say, finished dead fifth in 75% of the last four seasons, swapping their best all-around positional everyday prospect; that Dombro deal, in retrospect, was also a prime example of how overrated the narrative was that he razed the farm... or how astute he was in knowing which guys to keep and which to sell high.

Keep wishing, fanboy, and let the pros handle the pros. You just lube up with enough $12 beers so you can squeeze into your $150 grandstand seat behind the pole, but finish your $7 Fenway frank before the 7th inning stretch and we'll let you sing-along for free with Neil Diamond.

I can't trade Miguel Bleis this year. When your team is an annual cellar dweller, you don't give away the one guy in the entire system that some scouts or media say has five-tool potential. Have to give a franchise-altering impact player a chance to develop, especially after missing almost a whole season with injury. And until Bleis shows he's back on track, no other club is going to be willing to swap anyone with top of the rotation promise for him -- and that's the only return that can justify a deal.

Please, come to Boston for the Springtime You can pitch cold wet nights and wreck your arm ... sang the #1 fan of SamBrezBaileee

The Sox are reportedly interested and plan to go all in on an offer that includes 100 months of incentives, with an opt-out after 95, when Roki has a good chance to live to 30.

Fan cynicism evolved because of Sam Kennedy's constant ******** that the Red Sox are in it to win world championships. Rational fans have only seen lateral moves so far that make them longshots to even get them out of the basement. Breslow's looking to add young pitchers who'll be part of the core moving forward. One or two of those would at least give a glimmer of hope for improvement in the future. Forget about a bridge year. Fans would be happy just to find some shallow waters jutted with stepping stones that aren't too slippery...

Come on. The disappointment isn't that any of the starting pitchers who signed so far are great, it's just that all are better than the one guy Boston inked. At least they were last year. And as usual since the Bloom Era began, the only ballplayers the Sox have added this offseason are question marks and hopefuls: can Giolito reclaim past glory? can O'Neill stay on the field? can Grissom play D good enough to keep his bat in the line-up? If everything goes right, they will replace Sale, Verdugo, and one of the lost bats of Turner or Duvall -- from a fifth-place team... The big disappointment right now, more than any Bloom offseason (Betts and Bogaerts were just depressing), is that despite a change at the top of the front office, and a promise by one of the owners, the Red Sox have not made any major moves to improve. There are still gaping holes in the rotation that even casual fans can see -- but will as many of them still pay to keep watching?

"If everything goes right" is an overused cliche that became a mantra for the Bloom Era Red Sox. So far, nothing has changed. But I just can't digest the Giolito contract, which seems disrespectful to fans of a team devoted to a true rebuild. Are we recruiting core players for a better future, or just trying to survive the present. Do we root for him to return to a Cy Young candidate and catapult us into fourth place... only to see him opt out and sign elsewhere for big bucks a year from now? Better yet: if everything goes right for a fourth-place finish, Bello wins the Cy, Pivetta is Bulk Guy on the All-Star team, and Giolito doesn't suck. Instead, he eats innings to give the bullpen a break... but mediocre enough not to opt out. Then we can bring all three back in '26 to shoot for third.

They will be twice as good as the 2020 Red Sox! I'll bet my 1988 Surf Book that Boston will at least double the win total of the '20 losers.

My first idol was Mike Andrews, a second baseman with some pop in the late-60s. A better hitter than fielder, he actually got MVP votes in two years and made an All-Star team when the Sox were good. Later on, Andrews was famously fired in a World Series for making an error... out of baseball at age 29, but made life better for others as chairman of the Jimmy Fund for over 30 years.

Might not see a lot of kids wearing Eovaldi jerseys, but you can be sure Nate's a star alright with teammates of his three postseason clubs: '18, '21 Sox, '23 Rangers. But kids are relevant in today's discussion, because growing up rooting for favorite players is a big part of baseball fandom, including shirts, posters, cards, autographs, etc. Fans get attached to stars, and some semblance of roster continuity is important, even in the era of free agency. It's obviously not the same as last century, when families were on first-name basis with the same starting line-ups being described on their radios for a decade or more on some clubs (ex: Brooklyn NL mid-1940-50s, Detroit AL 1960s). For the most part, we all want to cheer for teams of players who at least seem like they care about winning as much as we do. And fans definitely care about good groups that fall short or don't even reach the last game of any season. The human element makes us empathetic to our heroes, and in some cases, root even harder for them the next time... ... if only the owners pay them what they're worth to keep wearing our laundry.

I didn't make up that nickname or have an epiphany. "Moneyball" the movie was the historical document that told us all we needed to know about John Henry. What was alarming and now disheartening to some of us was that Henry had already won so many rings from spending big -- in money and prospect capital -- and presumably made so much profit (based on the value of the franchise), and then decided to regress character to his Brad Pitt scene... back when the old curse was still hovering through the fog and filthy air.

Depends how you define "widely." If you mean analytics departments and fans who embrace modern metrics, maybe. If you mean baseball strategists from the first one hundred or so years of professional baseball, maybe not quite as wide. Since every batter is unique -- with various individual skills -- variables like On Base Percentage, working the count, hitting behind the runner and making consistent contact all make the label "best" subjective in many ways. The only guaranteed fact is that the first three hitters in the batting order will get at bats in the first inning.

Only after Curly replaced Shemp. It was like Mirabelli driving the cruiser and delivering Stephen Drew.