Duran Is The Man

Like one fan said I can stand the Red Sox not being good, but I can’t stand the Red Sox not trying to get better. They have said the end goal is playing baseball in October, but haven’t done so for three years now.

01: 2nd
02: 2nd
03: 6th
04: 2nd
05: 2nd
06: 2nd
07: 2nd
08: 4th
09: 4th
10: 2nd
11: 3rd
12: 3rd
13: 4th
14: 4th
15: 3rd
16: 3rd
17: 3rd
18: 1st
19: 1st
20: 3rd
21: 3rd
How can you give ownership cover and say "well other teams raised their payrolls a lot." This didn't happen magically. Henry and Co pulled money out of payroll and applied it elsewhere. The Sox still charge at the top of the market for tickets. They still own their own network and have a ton of real estate in the area. If they aren't putting $$$ back into payroll, it's by choice! 10th isn't good enough. We don't treat this team like a midmarket! We aren't charged like a midmarket! If they continue to artificially deflate payroll, they will see more and more fans walk away. They say the end goal is October baseball and winning the division. It can't be if they aren't going to legitimately invest in the MLB team. The only reason they won 4 WS was because they combined a high payroll with some home grown talent. They need to do both going forward. 

The Yankees ditched Dillon Lawson, and we signed him, and look what happened!
More awesome thinking from the Red Sox brain trust. 

Are you saying a farm system that is very heavily left handed hitting and utterly bereft of any pitching is a good thing???

I think there's a new field in baseball metrics - Pollyannalytics.  
With Pollyannalytics, you can make anything look like a positive.

If keeping the major league team mediocre was his objective then he aced it although in hindsight he made the major league team worse with the Sale trade, and his great work at, or near the trade deadline. If his objective was to make the major league team better to make the postseason he flunked his first test, and gets an F. I don’t give him any pass for being a low pick to be the HOBO of the Boston Red Sox whom Sam said anyone would want to be. I don’t give him a pass for having to work under JH, and I don’t give him any pass for his inexperience. ALL of Baseball Ops failed for the third year in a row.

As far as the major league team is concerned, Brez took a thoroughly mediocre team and...
kept it thoroughly mediocre.  

The 12th pick in the 2024 HOBO draft Brez the Prez made the Red Sox worse off around, and during the trade deadline. JH ran DD off, and has replaced him with 2 Nerd Clones, and it has shown in the standings. 🤮

Well, you probably assumed Bloom had a clue what he was doing.
I tried to do the same.  Then the facts sunk in:
-Yoshida was a $110 million DH without a lot of power.
-Bloom had spent a lot of money on 2 DH's, the other being Turner.   
-Bloom had only allocated $10 million to the rotation, and donated it to the retirement fund of Corey Kluber. 

Not good, not good at all for a $20 million DH.
For a $20 million DH you should get Kyle Schwarber. 
Schwarber .852 OPS 137 OPS+ 38 HR 102 RBI
Yoshida  .765 OPS 112 OPS+ 10 HR 56 RBI
Great job, Bloom.  😒
 
 

Every time someone mentions Bauer, there’s the (understandable) response of “would you want to explain to your daughter what this guy did?”
I’ll going to answer that prematurely.  I have a 17yo daughter who’s old enough to understand sexual assault.  She’s also a baseball fanatic, easily as bad as me, and makes some observations I never thought of, like “Christian Vazquez clearly has some form of albanism.”  Diehard Cubs fan who was visibly upset when they traded Christopher Morel.  Her statistical preference is OPS for any player, always eschewing BA and RBI and only discusses HRs as a rate rather than a total.  She also thinks Alex Cora, Carlos Correa, and Alex Bregman should be banned from MLB, but not Jose Altuve as he did not participate in the scandal.
 
On Bauer, she asks me “why is MLB doing him dirty?”  And she mentions players like Julio Urias, Marvell Ozuna, and Aroldis Chapman, who were just as bad and punished minimally in comparison.  She’d probably freak out if she knew about Bret Myers, who once beat up his wife on Lansdowne Street in full view of numerous witnesses and was allowed to pitch again.
Bauer is a PR problem, but not more of one than numerous others.  Yet he doesn’t get a second chance.  

If only he had stuck to more wholesome hobbies, like using his interpreter to place his bets.
Of course, Bauer is actually not being punished by MLB.  He’s just being collectively avoided as a PR problem by the same owners who look at Aroldis Chapman and think “But good left-handed relief pitching…”. (Since his incident with the Reds, which was bad enough that the Dodgers backed out of a trade that had already been publicly announced, Chapman has been acquired by the Yankees, the Cubs, the Yankees (again!), the Royals, the Rangers, and the Pirates, and won two World Series rings.  I’ll also wager sixth team signs him this off-season.)

The Red Sox need to sign Trevor Bauer. Give the guy another chance. Never charged or convicted of anything. Never liable in any civil suit for anything. He can pitch. 

If Henry is set for life -- what billionaires aren't -- he can presumably do whatever he wants.
So if he owns a sports team and wants to win, he can spend all he wants signing talent -- and paying luxury taxes -- and it won't make a difference in his future.
Or he could chose to stop paying market value for top talent, and instead spend just enough on bodies to fill jerseys so his team can still play games and sell tickets. He'll still make a profit, but why does that even matter to him at his age?
Maybe he's just a competitive business guy, and gets off more on making money than winning trophies -- because at Fenway Park, Boston, those aren't mutually connected.
If not -- if you don't need the profits or aren't going to try to build a winner -- why even own a pro sports team?

The thing about this plan is that we are not paying a penny more for it, or Trading any top prospect or young everyday payer, except Rafaela. We could even keep Rafaela as depth, and it changes nothing, except we get one less pitcher via his non trade.
I'm not asking anything for Yoshida, and would even give some money, just to allow another slot for a kid or Casas to DH and improve our D. If we wanted, we could DH Refsnyder and Abreu as a platoon and "rest" Devers and Casas at DH, often, instead of giving them full days off.
No money or players are given up to get the line-up I suggested.
All the winter budget could be directed towards pitching. If we were able to get a pitcher (maybe a highly-priced one) for Yoshida, great, but we dont have to. If we decide to tarde Abreu or Rafaela for a pitcher, it would barely make a dent in our line-up of depth, because they'd be replaced by Anthony, or maybe even Campbell.
It's not rocket science. It costs JH nothing.
Yes, you are right to say "it will never happen."

Change of scenery for an MVP, still only 25, playing for Cora, pairing with Raffy on a left-right heart-of-the-order, taking opposing pitchers' focus away from younger but talented teammates...
Could anyone imagine such a scenario propelling a club closer to the postseason? A pair who could form a Manny-Papi challenge to Judge-Soto? Two guys in the same line-up who both destroy Yankee pitching?
How can Brez not go for this? oh, yeah, because of an owner no longer invested...

And the guys you trade for might not ever be as good as they were before you traded for them. 
And the guys you sign in free agency might not ever be as good as they were before either. 
I like taking risks, and right now my preferred path would be to keep guys like Campbell and Anthony and go out and sign guys like Corbin Burnes and maybe trade for an elite closer. 

I agree. As much as I like Abreu, we could not get Crochet for 2 of him.
I like the idea of trading Yoshi, but not for a 1Bman. Trade Yoshi, move Casas to DH, Devers to 1B and go with Mayer or Campbell at 3B and 2B. This would be a powerful line-up with a greatly improved D.
C: Wong & Teel
1B: Devers
2B: Mayer/Campbell (DHam/Grissom)
SS: Story (Mayer/Romy)
3B: Campbell/Mayer (Romy/Meidroth)
LF: Duran/Ref
CF: Anthony/Duran
RF: Abreu/Anthony (Rafaela traded)
DH: Casas
1. L Duran 
2. R Campbell
3. L Anthony
4. L Devers
5. L Casas
6. R Story
7. L Abreu/R Refsnyder platoon
8. L Mayer
9. R Wong/ L Teel
Utility: L DHam/ R Grissom
WOW! We can have this line-up with no outside additions!
 

Romy -- cut from the worst team in history -- gets an A for coming through in more ways than expected.
Sogard gets a B because he made the majors when he wasn't supposed to, and once he got there, looked like he belonged.
Maybe I expect more out of the best students, but I only give a C to both Casas and Devers. Yes, they aced a lot of pop quizzes, but their end-of-the-semester projects were incomplete (no bibliographies!) and each had excused absences during the big week of state tests. Our class was really counting on them to raise our scores...
And Grissom gets an F because the decision to transfer to Fenway High this year was a complete failure.

You make your own luck. Here's how suspicious I've groan: even though moves the past half decade are on Bloom's Watch or Breslow's Watch, I just cannot overlook they may be forced to listen to the bad advice of the same Henry lifers and flunkies from an overstaffed front office...
Brez on WEEI, 9/26/24: "we’re looking at monitoring workload and understanding whether or not we’re asking more of guys than they are equipped to handle and if that means we need to change offseason conditioning or in-season workloads …"
5Gs replies, same day: "Here's a change: stop conditioning fans to root for pasta you're throwing against the wall to see what sticks. Hint - it's not undercooked, it's boiled down to mush. And stop pretending to rely on broken-down leftovers like Paxton and Hill -- two old loads pushing 80 years old!"
 

ugh, those are worse than the ugly yellow ones!

I'm surprised the yellow jerseys are as popular as they seem to be.  I fail to see any visual appeal whatsoever.  They'd look better on a Swedish national team.
But there's not much use complaining about it.  There are bigger issues in the world.
 

I like a lot of the city connect jerseys.  But I hate those jaundiced abominations.  
 
Except that they do seem to lead to wins…

Yeah, funny how they keep going with makeshift solutions at SS, but they really really needed that 2B, even if he was just a prospect. 

They did something they didn't need to do, probably motivated by the tight budget, and they got burnt to a crisp for it, deservedly so.    
 

And they proved that they're just flat out stupid or incredibly cheap by doing nothing when Giolito went down.
Credit to Houck, Crawford and Bello for making nearly all their starts and pitching as well as you could expect given their talent levels.  They kept it from being even more of a debacle than it could have been.