CentralChamps21

If the Portland TrailBlazers had been smart enough to draft Michael Jordan over Sam Bowie, Jerry Reinsdorf would have only one championship to show for his 78 combined years of team ownership.

So, they don't run the team. Tell them to shut the fuck up and worry about pitching.

I agree. Suggesting that Tony punted game 1 is giving him too much credit by suggesting that he actually knew Lynn was the worse option.

Can managers be traded?

I think Tepera's comments show that the Sox let the Astros get in their heads over the sign stealing scandal. The Astros scored < 3 runs 38 times this season, 17 of them at home. There was sufficient tape to study on ways to get their hitters out.

That seems to be what most people want. Then when our pitchers' ERA all go up 25% next year due to all the outfield balls not being caught, they'll blame Katz. Even better: sign Schwarber to play RF, move Vaughn to 3B and Moncada to 2B. We can lose games 11-10.

I'm not saying that the Madrigal-Kimbrel trade was good. It was awful. I argued that the year after a 60 game season had too many question marks to be trading for a rental. Madrigal could have been traded in the offseason for someone with more control. Or the Sox could have gotten a 2B who can also play OF, and then given Madrigal a shot while being able to shift things around and move on without him if he couldn't make it through a full season. There were other options besides trade him in July 2021 and commit to him for 6 more years.

Sometimes you get beat, but at least give yourself the best chance to win. Lynn is historically bad at Houston. Cease has extreme home/road splits. September should have been spent lining up the rotation to have Giolito and Rodon pitching games 1-2 and Lynn and Cease pitching games 3-4. The Sox may still very well have lost the series, but at least it would have looked like they were making their best effort. Also, Hendriks should have been the first guy in when a pitching change got made with guys on base. You have to keep the lead in the 3rd inning or you don't need a closer in the 9th, and they had Kimbrel even if they did.

He had clearly changed his approach. He'd moved away from his "never swing and miss" approach to sacrificing some of that in order to hit more doubles and even a couple homers. He still had a very low swing and miss rate, but not to the extreme that he had previously. He was finding that sweet spot between contact and power. That said, he has to prove he can do it for a whole season before I'm really going to be upset that he's gone.

On a team that uses data to position their infielders, Bummer would be unhittable.

The question for Madrigal isn't his ability to produce at a high level. The question for Madrigal is his ability to do it for an entire season. A guy on a 4.0 WAR path isn't useful if he's injured more than half the time.

I agree Jose is going nowhere, but I just don't see this team being successful with three similar RH ground ball machines with no real defensive value. If one of the other two doesn't get what we need by himself, maybe he's packaged with Kimbrel, or someone else. Something needs to change.

I don't think Vaughn, Eloy and Jose are all on this team next year. That's what will give.

That $19.67 figure includes a pro-rated portion of his signing bonus that was paid in 2020, and $4M of his 2022 salary that is deferred. I prefer to work with the actual amounts players will be paid in 2022 rather than what list listed on the books for that year.

SP: Keuchel $18.0, Lynn $18.5, Giolito $7.9, Cease $0.9, Kopech $0.7 RP: Kimbrel $16.0, Marshall $2.3, Lopez $2.8, Hendriks $13.0, Bummer $2.5, Ruiz $0.7, Cordero $0.7, Crochet $0.7 C : Grandal $18.25, Collins $0.7 IF: Hernandez $6.0, Abreu $14.0, Anderson $9.5, Moncada $14.0, Mendick $0.7, Sheets $0.6 OF: Goodwin $1.7, Engel $2.2, Jimenez $6.5, Robert $6.0, Vaughn $0.6 Total: $165.45m

Meadows is a platoon guy at this point, but I have hope that Sheets can still progress to where he hits lefties well enough to be an everyday guy. It's too early to make him strictly a platoon guy.

I created this to be a tracker of "what the active (26 man) roster would be if there were a game today." I think it can be a helpful tool to see how things progress in the offseason. It is NOT a projection of what I think the roster will look like on March 31, just a roster you can make of players in the organization on a particular day. For example, Brian Goodwin and Danny Mendick are listed right now but I don't actually think either of them will be on the roster on March 31. Who is NOT included : Free agents, even if they haven't been signed by another team yet (Rodon, Garcia, Tepera) Who IS included: Players with options, up until the point those options are acted upon (Kimbrel, Hernandez) Also included: Arb-eligible players, up until the point where tender decisions are made (Goodwin, Marshall, Engel, Giolito, Lopez) For the last roster spots where there might be debate (Mendick vs Goodwin vs Gonzalez, Ruiz vs Burr) I just listed the player(s) who spent the most time on the roster in 2021 as a place holder until the organization makes a move. That said, this is our current roster: SP: Keuchel, Lynn, Giolito, Cease, Kopech RP: Kimbrel, Marshall, Lopez, Hendriks, Bummer, Ruiz, Cordero, Crochet C : Grandal, Collins IF: Hernandez, Abreu, Anderson, Moncada, Mendick, Sheets OF: Goodwin, Engel, Jimenez, Robert, Vaughn As transactions are made, I will update this.

Soxtalk: Kopech should have been managed differently to better prepare him for success as a starter in 2022. Also Soxtalk: Sox should have been more aggressive in chasing HFA against Houston.

I can't wait until June, when Kimbrel is in the middle of 10 straight scoreless outings, the guy we trade him for is in the middle of a 3-for-20 slump at the plate, and the same people who are now saying the Sox shouldn't even pick up his option complain that the Sox shouldn't have been cheapskates and paid Kimbrel $16 million instead of trading him.

Teams don't devalue players due to a couple bad months the same way fans do. The Sox would get plenty of value in trading either of those guys. Same goes for Kimbrel.

Yeah, anyone who puts those two sentences together in the same paragraph gets a huge "Fuck off" from me.

Is sports talk radio a Gen X/Boomer thing? I'm just asking because I don't know anybody my age who watches/listens to sports talk programming.

He had limited no-trade protection for 2020, but not for now. In a normal year, there would be a substantial market for Kimbrel and the Sox could get a player very similar to Madrigal back for him. In a year with an expiring CBA, it's much harder to guess how much demand there will be.

All those things are related. A high GB%, high AVG, high BB/K rate, and low ISO are all results of a high contact approach. Luis Robert might be the rare talent in the lineup who can cut down on his strikeouts, make more contact, and still hit for power, but not everybody has that level of talent. I think a lot of the problem may stem from pitch recognition. For a team that had stats that reflect a high contact approach, they still chased an awful lot of breaking balls out of the zone, and I think that's also why they made such poor contact on fastballs in the middle of the plate.

I would take Ozzie back over Tony, much in the same way I would take getting kicked in the nuts over getting shot in the chest.