JoeBrady

Barring an injury, I'd start KC in AAA. Make him force is way in. Get his confidence sky-high.

I'll go with this. Against a tough lefty, at Fenway where LF matters less, they could go with a Masa, Raffy, Romy, Con, Narvaez, Story, Durbin, IKF type lineup. 8 righties, rest some regulars, and have good lefties on the bench one the starter leaves.

Just impo: Go to a mid-week Yankee game and the tickets cost very little on-line. And you can bring in a sandwich and soda. It was an unusual year, but the top-12 FAs listed by MLB-R went to 12 different teams.

But those two are not the same issues. The first is a concern that your team will never finish 1st. The second is a concern about players being overpaid. As a RS fan, the system works. If I were an O's fan or a Rays fan, I'd be annoyed that the EE and TO have double the spending money.

I find Americans in general have a POV and have no interest in challenging it. A couple of other items. Who is their closer? Some of Hoffman's numbers were prtty ugly, and Rogers has very little closing experience. They have only one player with more than 23 HRs and he is 36 (for those that consider HRs a difference-maker). Gimenez has a good glove, but has never played SS fulltime. 26 GS in the past 4 years.

Look at Cincy. 20% when they made the playoffs, and had 85 Py wins instead of 83. If Burns lives up to his reputation, they can win that division.

And having IKF as a super-sub will add a lot.

I'm cool with letting Bregman walk at that price, but the difference between him and Devers brought a smile to my face. I mean, with a guy on 1st, a hard grounder to 3rd should make you happy. Not cause you to clinch your stomach.

Just on the L/R issue, the only platoon I see is Mayer/Romy. So I generated the following analysis. The two disclaimers are that 1) because we have such a young team, we have 8 small sample warnings, and 2) these are not park-adjusted. v Righties v Lefties Duran 0.837 0.620 Anthony 0.903 0.770 Story (25) 0.743 0.734 Abreu 0.827 0.589 Contreras 0.791 0.871 Durbin 0.722 0.717 Narvaez 0.724 0.712 Rafaela 0.701 0.642 Mayer 0.739 Romy 0.872 0.776 0.725 League Average 0.725 0.704 These are all career numbers except for Story, since I wanted to exclude his Rox stats.

It's a pure hypothetical since I think they always intended on making Mayer a FT starter. If we signed Bregman, I think there is no chance we trade for a short-side platoon player. That said, the answer is no. If, for discussion purposes, Gray + IKF = Bregman, then Bregman becomes a $124M/4 guy at age 33. I wouldn't do that.

It might depend on our LH RPs are doing. If Samaniego and Moran bomb out, Sandy might be our default LH RP. In the past three seasons, he's allowed 2 HRs in 262 ABs v lefties.

I'd say that was the crux of the disagreements in here. Some in argued for more offense, several argued in favor of a #2 SP, and a few of argued in favor of two SPs. IMHO, the regular season is won by having 5 good SPs. But I have NP with someone wanting to upgrade the lineup at the expense of the 2nd SP I wanted.

It's an amazing journey. I complained about every strategy long before they adopted it. Among my favorites: Age doesn't matter. The one constant was the age of their acquisitions. Pujols (32), Hamilton (32), Upton (30), Cozart (32), Rendon (30), Soler (33), Wells (32), Hunter (32). The aging decline curves have long been known, but LAA refuses to acknowledge the science. Ks don't count. They have 8 guys in their lineup that will K at least 150 times if they play the full season. Minors don't count. Between Schanuel, Neto, Adell, Moore & Paris had about 212 AAA ABs, collectively, before they got promoted.

But both are high quality players.

Read enough stories, and you'll hear Anthony and Crochet's names being mentioned.

Why is the FG projected 3.3 Suarez "high quality", but the 3.4+ Gray not?

Story at $23.5M AAV is by no means a problem.

Fair enough. Just obtain a RH bat instead of Masa.

It always works out poorly, yet they continue to do so. Moore is the latest. He was on roughly a 200-K pace in AA & AAA. That almost never works. So they promote him, and he has a 230-K pace, almost exactly what you would expect. So they come 4th in HRs and 25th in runs scored. And seemingly don't understand that that was because they struck out more than any team in BB, by a lot.

They picked higher.

Or we play the long game and eat all the salary to get a better prospect. But the key would still be getting the righty equivalent of Masa, with a better glove.

But except for Duran dropping a fly ball and a baserunning gaffe, we'd have swept the Yankees.

Some of these writers don't even follow baseball. The RS and TO tied last year at 4.9 rpg. The Orioles had one of the worst offenses in BB last year. They will improve, but still scored 108 less runs than us last year.

Refsnyder was a bit of an illusion with his BABIP. Good bench player, but who does he realistically start over? And he is 35.

I've mentioned this before. We finished 22nd in OPS at 1st, and 17th at 2nd. Those should be improved. Bregman will hurt, but I think Duran's all-around offense will be similar to Devers' hitting.