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Because right now this is a very limited role and theoretically you’re cashing in on Sosa and replacing him with a guy who might offer similar production (eventually) who you will otherwise lose for nothing. Also, you’re ignoring the fact that Sosa has an additional season of development and was just as bad as Mead was before this past season. If 500 PA’s is some sort of death sentence for a young player, it should have been for Sosa as well.

Is this post copied from somewhere else?

Im not a betting man but if I were I would smash the over of 2.6 WAR for Colson Montgomery. I am higher on him than any player in the Sox org and even after last years power tear for the big club I think he’s being criminally slept on. The main concern for Colson is the K-Rate. His K rate in AAA last year was 33% which is a bright red flag but in 284 big league plate appearances he got it down to 29.2%. Certainly not great, in fact it would’ve placed him as having the 8th worst K rate in the league had he qualified. His 8.8% walk rate was around league average and was actually far lower than what he was able to do through most of his time in the minors. What I find particularly promising is that even with that K and BB profile as it is, he’s in the same range as guys like Eugenio Suarez, Riley Greene, Jazz Chisholm, and Byron Buxton who are 120+ RC+ guys. Those four guys share a key set of traits with Colson that allows them to succeed with those low rates. The swing hard and they barrel the ball at elite rates and when they’re squaring up the tend to be very strong pull hitters. That is a recipe for damage. Those guys are 3-5 war players and are established veterans who generally don’t provide the defensive value Colson provides. Assuming that Colson takes a big leap in BB and K rate is a bit optimistic. In fact, I think 27-29% is K rate is probably around where he’ll be most years. I think the walk rate has a much better shot of shooting up to 12% or so as he’s has shown better plate discipline in the minors and teams are going to have to respect the power a bit more. If he settles in with a 12% BB rate and 27% walk rate with how hard he swings and how much he finds the barrel you are looking at a perennial all star with upside for more. One of the things I mentioned about him last year was his off the charts infield fly rate in the minors. I’m not sure if the minor league clubs measured it wrong but that went right back down to where you would hope it would be. He went from twice league average!! in the minors to perfectly average. The next step in his career is the biggest and it has to do with plate recognition and getting ahead in counts. He hit fastballs well overall last year with a SLG of .514. His xSLG was only .390 but his whiff rate was 25.1% which was much better than what we saw elsewhere. When it came to sliders he was essentially Javy Baez. He had a .933 SLG in 33 PAs with a 47% whiff rate and 57% hard hit rate. It’s really hard to find a player as all or nothing on a pitch as him. With two strikes it wasn’t the slider that really burned him it was the change up. He had a 44% whiff rate and 36% put away rate on Change ups without nearly the same amount of changeups as sliders. He had a lot of trouble with curves and sweepers as well. When you look under the hood you see it’s not his chase % that gets him in trouble as he’s about league average. It’s that his chase contact rate is 40.7% compared to a league average of 58%. On pitches in the zone his contact rate is just about league average. What that tells me is he doesn’t have a huge discipline problem or a huge contact problem. It’s that when he chases an off speed pitch he isn’t close. That tells me it’s more of a pitch recognition problem as opposed to being a hole in his swing. For a young guy that came straight out of high school and ascended fast, I don’t think it’s too wild of an assumption to say he can improve in pitch recognition. Even if he chases, he should be in the same zip code and he’ll likely bite a lot less if he sees the ball better. How badly did this hurt him last year? With 2 strikes he was 15/131 (.115) with a .465 OPS and 83ks. When he was ahead in the count he had a 1.083 OPS. You’d expect big splits like this but ideally you get him ahead a bit more often. It goes a bit deeper than that. There is a .260 point OPS difference for Colson from being up 1-0 vs down 0-1. After 0-1 had a 40.6% k rate. After 1-0 his K rate was only 22.8%. Colson fell 0-1 in 145 PAs and got ahead in 105. You’d like to see that number improve. When he made contact on the first pitch (which he did 34 times) in 109 PAs where he swung first pitch he had .559 SLG on a .212 Babip for a guy who’s overall BABIP is .262. You’d like to hope when that sample gets bigger that’ll creep up. I’d have to look deeper into what exactly he was swinging at first pitch. Colson is going to have to establish himself as a guy that’ll cause damage on first pitch strikes. If a pitcher knows that he is going to be aggressive first pitch, they’re going to try and get him to chase. Sometimes they’ll hang one and he’ll get him, sometimes it’ll be far enough that he’ll be able to take it for a ball. What he can’t do is take first pitch strikes. Thats .260 OPS points without getting a shot at it. If his problem was his chase rate I wouldn’t recommend him be that much more aggressive but he’s shown that he has a decent eye. Eventually when pitchers realize that his going to be aggressive first pitch they’re going to give him less to work with. I trust his eye to be able to lay off pitches that are clear misses. Long term I think that’ll get him to more 1-0 counts where we see the best version of Colson. The main thing about Colson that is constant is that he swings incredibly hard and barrels the ball incredibly well and pulls those balls at an incredible rate. That is a recipe for a monster home run hitter. The main hole in his game is that when he chases a pitch you get nothing from him. The fact that he has a decent eye makes optimistic that he can mitigate a lot of that damage with better pitch recognition and by changing the dynamics of his at bats by making himself dangerous on 0-0 counts and forcing pitchers to move further and further out of the zone to avoid leaving him something to hit .

You and Chris Getz can continue to dumpster dive for this.

He could even post the s%*# talk to us as he is driving his comfy Jeep Grand Wagoneer on the south side.

The only point that I was making with Sosa and Vargas is that sometimes young players don’t pan out and excel immediately.

UDFA out of Northeastern. (The massachusetts one.) Michael Gemma College & Amateur Leagues Statistics | Baseball-Reference.com

Sosa was a Latin American signing. We gave up only cash to get him. Vargas kind of makes my point for me. We could have had real prospects with longer control, but instead we got Vargas. Wonderful.

It would be cool

Agree - they are doing a press conference for a non-roster invite.

That is exactly what it is — if he did already break out, there would be no chance to acquire him. But he is still fairly new to the majors without repeated seasons of failure. Meanwhile, sometimes players who initially look mediocre or terrible can break out. Haven’t we sort of seen that a little with Sosa and Vargas?

He also kind of looks like the kid from that Wednesday show

Yeah teams do this to give themselves flexibility during the rest of the offseason.

Plus his name sound positively AI.

And now they get to a few months later, and they spend $175 million to replace him. I don't know what the hang up on another post-hype flop is, but it is positively Getzian.

4 more weeks of this...

I believe he was. It's not the first time the Sox have a fringe guy on a NRI make the team. Jesse Chavez is another guy that comes to mind. He was a NRI, imploded in ST, and the Sox clearly cut him because you couldn't justify having him make the team and he didn't want to go to the minors (supposedly he even contemplated retirement). He signs with Atlanta, and gets his contract purchased before opening day and appears in 46 games for them (and was good).

Pretty much. I would put Brandon Drury in the same boat from last offseason until he got injured right before the season started. I think Pillar had a minor league deal in which he would earn $3 million if he made the team so they cut him and resigned him for $1 million instead. 🤣

Wasn't Kevin Pillar a minor league contract with a NRI, and he was already penciled into the 2024 opening day roster?

Getz will sign him next offseason after he hits 35+ homers in Japan.

Personally... Alexander Canario. Just sayin'.

I don't they are necessarily assured a starting gig, but I do believe teams sign guys to NRI's with handshake agreements they have a higher chance to make the team in order to not disrupt or make any rash decisions regarding the 40-Man roster before heading into ST. It just seems like Kelenic has a great shot at making the team, they obviously really like his potential, and there are glaring holes in the OF. Baldwin is literally his only competition and he is most definitely not a RF. Montgomery is in the wings, but there is literally no reason to hand him the job or rush him to the majors after only 125 AB's in Birmingham.

Don’t blame me. @SoxAce was the first poster to bring him up in this thread. 😉

That's nothing. Let me tell you about Chris Getz's greatest sins and we'll go on a 3-page detour about Cam Booser for Fajardo.

There were trade rumors that the Cubs were looking to improve their offense and 3B was an obvious position to improve. They had Shaw, Jon Berti, and old man Justin Turner and none of them were hitting in the first half. Eugenio Suarez was the supposed target. However, Shaw started hitting better toward the trade deadline and Suarez’s cost was likely deemed too high.