mac9001

Ky looks like a big league pitcher. If he can't cut it in the rotation and finds a way to stay 95+ I can see him having some success out of the pen.

Cannon was at 93.6 MPH Avg on the sinker (max 96.1) and 95.3 MPH on the fastball (max 96.9). 9 Whiffs (21% whiff rate, but only 10% swinging strike rate). But what's really impressive is he had 11 called strikes on the sinker with only a 50% zone swing rate. That's actually really unusual to have such a low zone swing rate and have so many called strikes on a sinker. It obviously was working well for him today. Yesterday Nastrini was at 93.2 MPH Avg on his fastball with a max of 94.7. 19 Whiffs (42% whiff rate, with a 24.3% swinging strike rate).

You can argue the strategy of improving the defense is working. The starting pitching has been decent and Soroka, Flexen and Fedde have looked decent enough where we can probably flip them. The Sox were going to be bad and we knew these guys weren't going to hit. If these guys are still playing in August and we haven't cut or traded have the roster then we have a bigger problem. This (and likely next year) are throw away years, there was no way to fix it, just enjoy watching bad baseball and hopefully when (if) they build a new stadium it's with the intent to sell.

I was surprised how hard Kuhl throws his sinker (avg today was 95.2, max 97). Not sure why someone hasn't put him in the pen to focus on 2 max effort pitches for an inning. It's clear he can't be a starter but everyone keeps throwing him out there.

I think most of us probably accepted the fact the Sox wouldn't score many (or any) runs this year. But the pitching and defense at least have the potential to be respectable. I will say if they pitch and catch this well all season (they won't since if they do many of them will get traded) they will likely over perform their projected consensus low 60 win total.

Hit 98 with the fastball and threw twice as any sliders as fastballs. At one point he threw 6 straight sliders. Most of the pitches in the zone were sliders. Kid needs to figure out how to get a (98mph) fastball over if he's going to have success. It's only 7 fastballs, but his spin rates were 1200-2800. That's actually absurdly inconsistent. A 98 mph fastball with a 2800 spin rate is 70+ grade. There's definitely something special there with some consistency.

Yeah, it's not worth brining him back to save a few million but potentially lose a hundred million of future reputation value. That was some amateur penny pinching s%*# that should be above a respectable organization.

The fact that they haven't been able to leverage financial flexibility into tangible assets doesn't mean it's still not valuable. The purpose on an exercise like this is to quantify value. Having money to spend is very valuable.

Beating 10fWAR isn't exactly a tall order. You might as well use a random number generator on guys like Soroka or Fedde. They very well could be bad, but we spent a lot of money on pitching last year to be bad. Spending nothing and beating 10fWAR would actually be somewhat of an accomplishment.

Honestly it's kind of a garbage write up. The Sox have actually built up some decent minor league pitching depth. If they have a couple more drafts to pad the depth they're likely to at least fill enough of the staff internally to free up a lot of potential money for a impact FA acquisition. The probably won't actually spend the money, but given they have fairly substantial financial flexibility that actually should work out in their favor for future value building.

I keep waiting to see like 10 bullpen guys get cut. I will hand this to Getz, somehow without spending any money or acquiring any real talent the Sox staff might still show how improve over last year. It's almost unfathomable that it's a real possibility.

I think you have to go under at 61 simply because if they're on pace for 70 wins it means someone is performing and we'll trade them at the first opportunity.

Thursday is an off day and all the bullpen arms are gonna be fresh. Might as well make it a bullpen day.

I think people too often try to compare kids like this to establish professionals. Hendricks is essentially a two pitch pitcher that excels at getting weak contact on pitches outside the zone (but still doesn't get a low of swinging strikes). You obviously need great command to execute in that way. But Thorpe throws a wide range of pitches and he predominantly lives in the zone. He's just getting people to swing and miss (at roughly twice the rate Hendricks has). He's also not getting the same level of weak contact. Hendricks is unique in that he can get high contact rates without throwing in the zone. Thorpe is limiting walks by throwing a lot of strikes (getting whiffs and strikeouts), but he's also getting hit a lot harder as a result. He profile is very similar to an elite backend bullpen guy with elite raw stuff who's just putting pitches over the plate (limits walks). How he's doing it is a bit of a mystery, you'd be hard pressed to find a current big leaguer that has a similar metric profile with the grade on his stuff (IE low velocity).

Giolito is a textbook example of why velocity doesn't matter. Between 19-21 he was able to throw change ups over the plate, avoid hard contact and get a decent amount of swing and misses by getting ahead, getting people to miss pitches over the plate (usually with a change) or get them chase fastballs out of the zone. For the last two year's he wasn't able to get the same results on the change up and his fastball started to get lit up. Similarly Cease was able to work off an elite slider in 22. If you have an elite pitch you can throw over the plate, get strikes and not get hammer you'll do just fine with any fastball as long as you have at least average command.