drewski6

We are going to have to win like 20 in a row for renting to be a good option.

My bad, its a sirloin. The seven pepper steak sirloin salad from longhorns.

And if they say no, i get to eat the steak salad

Okay. What about Aiva Arquette for two pitchers in their late 30s. Id even throw in a Peppercorn crusted sliced strip steak over a garden salad from Longhorns.

Gray + Chapman?

But its a pattern with breslow, not an isolated incident. Watch any interview with breslow and he will bring up how he is the final decider multiple times. Only exception is when he axed cora , for that he said "we" and he got corrected.

IF you are saying that you are on the fence about selling, but would jump on this because too good to pass up - agreed. Just want to amke sure i am understanding you correctly.

Do you think we can get sebastian walcott from rangers for sonny gray??

Fangraphs gives us a 20% chance to make the playoffs. I still lean sell

If you think Bres didnt treat Devers with respect, wait until you hear about how he treated Story and Whitlock

well this has me rethinking my initial reply to NOtins question in whihc i responded "i assume not"

True, but also true ^

sounds like more of the same

I assume not.

My case on Anthony is that you should not have expected him to be a superstar, not that you shouldnt have expected him to fill a role.

But story has gotten significantly hurt in like 4 of his last 5 seasons and Anthony has gotten hurt in 100% of his MLB seasons, so I dont think its particularly smart on Breslow to assume he would have gotten a full season of the noted projecteions. Regarding Narv, I mean what is he going to finish within 1-2 WAR of where we thought? Hes kind of doing his job, and we shouldnt look for production from Catcher anyways. I hear you on the player by player vs their expected production levels. The death by 6-9 disappointments to varying degrees. But again, I think that a big failure and what makes this level of stinking possible is the complete lack of star power on the offensive side. We should not have expected really anybody on this team to be a superstar hitter. Contreras is getting up there in years. Abreu has historically struggled vs lefties. Anthony is super young and got hurt last year. Maybe Duran - but hes been erratic over his tenure here as a whole. And I know fans tend to dislike stars. They dont like the paycheck. They dont like how they get so much credit. Fans tend to like the scrappy and overlooked role players....BUt I do think that the people who are like "no big contracts"....."Be super efficient" ....."Look at this team from a position by position breakdown as opposed to from a perspective of who is/are our elite hitter(s)".....Pitching and defense wins (with timely or just a little hitting)....max efficiency (so dont even consider a DH , we cant waste Masas pay) These kind of things that we consider to hear from the budget hawk sox fans, Im jsut saying that there is another side to that. There is a downside. And I believe we are seeing it.

No, I'm sure it has worked, I am just saying that this year is not a string bad luck. It was a bad vision and bad execution by the CBO. Although, you could argue to be this far below expectation it would require all 3: bad luck, bad vision, bad CBO execution. If you are expected to have the 10th worst offense in baseball, and you wind up bottom five - I dont think we get to excuse it with bad luck, even though I acknowledge that there was some bad luck. Kind of like if you drive recklessly and injure someone, sure there is some bad luck in that, but you dont exactly get to use it as an excuse.

You will not ask questions about why we fired Cora, you will shut your mouth and do what we pay you to do.

And you are wrong. Cuz we have good SP, good closer and a modicum of hitting and we stink. You got the team you wanted. Only a little hitting but a ton of pitching. This is the team of Joe Bradys dreams. And thats why you were still saying its early until like a week ago.

But there is a ton more year to year randomness with pitching and you can improve pitching as the year goes by and you can scrap together a pitching staff. Also, you need to be rock solid in both pitching (starting) and pitching (relief) AND defense to have a good run differential that is driven by run prevention. Frankly, its just easier and more consistent to improve your run differential by increasing your offense vs having to have lights out SP, RP, AND defense.

Narvaez was bad in the second half of the year last year, and his extremely impressive breakout came in a season like age 26/27 that feels fluky especially because and was even more fluky by feel because he didnt end the year hot. Story had missed 4 of the last 5 years entering this one. Anthony was age 21. These are not guys who you count on to be your primary offensive providers, or if you do, its not really fair to be like so unforeseen who coulda known when your offense stinks. And its not a surprise. We were ranked a near bottom 10 offense going into this season and even Breslow said "we are going to win with pitching and defense!" And we arent winning with pitching and defense.

What Breslow said to Whitlock and Story after Cora was fired should get any "leader" fired.

Its clearly both of them. Devers is stubborn and entitled, Breslow has never met a situation he cant make worse.

pitching helps but hitting is crucial.

In 2013 our co-aces, lackey and lester were both good , not great and in 2018 sale was great, but behind him the staff was very meh. porcello was our #3.