Jake

If you were doing something like that, why not just sign Dozier to play 3B? He's not a great defender and is too old for us to care about his long-term value.

I didn't see rabbit's tweets as speaking from some kind of insider knowledge of our hopelessness but just someone frustrated with the notion that the Sox are going to be on some kind of equal footing with the Yankees/Dodgers/couple others in the pursuit of these big fish.

It's like the Sox only target catchers whose value is only high if you ignore the influence of framing

I think it's good to have an alternate way to get into the HoF other than the baseball writers' voting. I wouldn't have put Harold in. I also recognize that Harold played in an era in which players were generally evaluated in different ways than they are now: Batting average and RBIs were king. I suspect part of the reason there are some people so ardently in his corner is they feel that if Harold played in a different era, he had the bat talent to change his game in a way to suit the new incentive structure.

I'm sure we've checked on the price. Makes more sense for us to look at him as a free agent two years from now as a final piece for our contending core

Shields was in the midst of a downward trend in his velocity and it woudln't surprise me at all if they withheld information about him dealing with soreness, dead arm, etc. even if it never really developed into a full-blown injury.

The only sad thing is I'm not sure who in our organization you would bring as the "now we're being serious" crew. Abreu? Probably not since he's likely to be gone soon. No other established faces.

I assume the whole thing is meant to be sarcastic

I think Boras knows it's usually not good to drag things out and history suggests that elite free agents tend to get snapped up pretty quick. Winter meetings seem like a good target since it is so convenient to get a bidding war going. On the other hand, a little easier for teams to collude to keep his price down.

Since becoming a full-time MLBer, he's put up WAR numbers of 1.3, 1.5, 0.3, 4.0, and 1.6. These are all in not quite full time roles (a little 500 PAs each year). How much extra money does the 4 WAR season get him over and above what a 1.5-ish player in his prime usually gets? It's hard to know. You could also make an argument for a guy who plays multiple positions being more valuable than the numbers tell you because you can deploy him in a way that he's usually filling in for your weakest link every time he plays. I wouldn't mind having him around, but it's hard to see why the Sox would value him more than a team that's more clearly in contention right now. It also begs the question of where we would plan to play him. We're weaker in the corner OF than we are at 3B (and he seems to be a better outfield defender than infielder), but if a couple things go right we could end up weaker at 3B than the corner outfield. In that sense, he can be pretty useful because you're not locked into a guy that plays a position where he might get pushed out by a prospect over the life of the contract.

You're pretty much going to keep pitching him unless it looks like continuing to do so is actively hurting his development. I don't see any way we end up with enough rotation options this year that we would pull him from the rotation for being merely pretty bad.

The Sox are in a very good position to front-load a contract, but it would be very tricky to do with Harper. I suspect it would require a contract structure that has never been done before. Harper is going to want an opt-out, and perhaps multiple opt-outs, probably starting around year 3 of the deal. If you front-load the deal and he opts out, then all you did was take all the negatives and none of the positives of the front-load. But if you disincentivize the opt-out by somehow making the front-loading contingent on his opting in, then he loses the benefit of the opt-out.

The upshot is by this metric, almost every single White Sox batter was overrated by popular alternatives. I wonder if this might have something to do with strength of schedule.

More important, why did we think it would be beneficial to push him so quickly through the minors? These probably have the same cause, but we could easily have picked him and put him on the typical prospect path and he may well have improved against easier competition.

All else being equal, I'd be more inclined to see what Moncada could do in CF. Of course, that's a hell of an experiment to try at the MLB level and I'm sure he'd be more likely to resist it. That being said, there's no reason to be considering any move at this point.