SoxBlanco

This is my favorite post of the entire thread so far.

Exactly. “You can’t make this shit up.”

Did the Sox even make an offer to Conforto after refusing his ask of 4 years? Or did Hahn try to get creative with a short term offer?

More importantly, which teams still might have interest in Conforto?

Absolutely. I would do anything that puts him on the roster for 2022.

How many years is our Conforto asking price?

Maybe nobody wants to commit 4/5 years. He could land a 2/3 year deal with an opt out after year 1. Or maybe even a larger 1 year deal.

James, what is your gut feeling regarding our RF situation? You think we sign Conforto?

Haha, I'm one of the most optimistic people on this board. I defend Hahn to a fault sometimes. I was referring to the "lucked into" part of your post. They absolutely have a championship caliber team. But they didn't luck into it.

This is absolutely insane.

@ChiSox59 The confusion happened with the part I highlighted above. Ray Ray meant that you named Sheets and the guy who is currently our LF (Eloy) as the DH options. He didn't mean that you were claiming Sheets is the LF.

I am very curious to see what kind of deal Conforto gets. It's such a mystery to me because of his poor year last year. Schwarber played only 113 games last year and put up 3.1 WAR (and a 145 wRC+). Conforto is coming off a season where he played 125 games and only put up 0.8 WAR (and a 106 wRC+). Conforto obviously plays better defense, but that is taken into account with the WAR totals. Obviously it was a down year for Conforto compared to his previous seasons, but how will that affect his contract? It'll be really interesting to see how it shakes out.

And Rodon last year.

Agreed. But we might have gone with a 4/$80M and no other teams want to go 4 or 5 years with him coming off a down year.

This is exactly what I've been saying. It's possible that Hahn tried to lock up Conforto the same way that he locked up Grandal early, but that Conforto isn't biting because of Boras. The good news is that we have other options if we don't land Conforto (Castellanos, Schwarber, etc.), so if the market isn't great for those guys, Hahn's plan to not increase the offer at this point might not be such a bad idea. This obviously all depends on whether we are trying to land one of those guys in the first place.

We need the position player floodgates to open. One of the bigger names needs to sign, and then I think we will see a flurry of activity.

This is the number one thing I keep telling myself in order to stay optimistic. The limited market, combined with the fact that we have possibly two guys who I would be satisfied with, gives me hope that the Hahn strategy of not offering an aggressive contract right away might just work out to land one of them.

I honestly think Hahn just figured Harrison can be the everyday starting 2B, and for $4M, that's not terrible. Leury then becomes the super-utility guy (who I think TLR really wants in that role). It will all come down to what we do in RF. If we land Conforto (or another big bat), then I am completely fine with Harrison and Leury. If not, then I will consider the offseason a big, fat failure.

Yes, but the question I asked right after that is what I'm really curious about.

Conforto is my top choice, but if we land Castellanos instead, I would still be very pleased. Where would Castellanos rank defensively compared to Vaughn and Conforto? Better than Vaugh, but worse than Conforto? Would the gap be larger between Vaughn/Castellanos or Castellanos/Conforto?

How many games this year do you think the starting RF will be either Vaughn or Sheets?

When you say “using”, are you referring to 2021 or 2022?

I didn’t take “Just wait…” to mean that a move was imminent. I just figured it meant that we definitely will make a significant move at some point. If we don’t, then I’ll be right there with you criticizing this offseason.

That’s ridiculous. If we are eating $10M, we are getting a great return.

Doesn’t matter. Worst case, they move him and have to eat a little salary. But he won’t pitch for the Sox this year.