JoeC

He did objectively lead the Sox to having the highest batting average in the league. That emphasis is literally what made him a failure.

Touche. I should have specified directional development.

Plus they didn't develop him. They're relying on his innate talent to sink or swim. This org does a horseshit job at working with players to help them grow.

My point is that if the Sox fail, it should remove any and all doubt in anyone's minds. There will be literally zero excuse at all. Your mind is clearly made up. My mind is 80% made up. 2023 would remove doubt from the other 20%.

Also, to me this is the time to truly hold Hahn’s feet to the fire. This was his first actual leadership hire to lead the team in a supposed contention window. No more equivocation about it being TLR’s fault / JR’s fault for the TLR hire.

I do like his embracing of analytics. About f’ing time we got someone like that.

The more i read about him, the more i like him.…. Which probably just means that the sycophantic media is doing its job well

…so… can we finally put this thread to bed now?

I mean, he DOES come from a winning organization... at least in H2H against the Sox this year.

So they are saying that an elite athlete in his 20’s acted arrogantly? Mark this one down for the history books, folks. Hopefully something like this never happens again.

I interpret that as "I trust colleges to develop players better than our minor league system." If you have a good player development system, you want to get players into that pipeline as soon as you can.

I figured he'd smile once he made this a sticking point to hold up the next CBA negotiations, ignoring the fact that managers aren't part of the union and therefore have nothing to do with the negotiations.

Yeah, the concept of babying someone's pitching arm is a relatively recent phenomenon in Japan. You still see "ace" pitchers at Koshien (annual high school baseball tournament, akin to basketball Final Four) throwing an ungodly number of pitches... and society glorifies these guys.

Not gonna lie - I had a mini heart attack when I misread "TL;DR" as "TLR."

To me, the biggest organizational failure going back to the KW era is in its inability to draft and develop.

Why? Discouraging preemptive unfounded outrage would basically be the end of Soxtalk.

Don't let TLR be the Billy Martin to Jerry....

I mean, it's weird that Ozzie is being interviewed if you assume that they're interviewing him to be the manager. Note that the tweet doesn't say why they're interviewing him ?

Now, assuming this is a true Hahn hire, I'm giving Hahn 2 years. Give him full control and autonomy in decisions, and if he fails, fire him. Nevermind - didn't read beyond the headlines / twitter posts.... Espada ain't coming.

Yeah, I'm not sure when it changed. Back when I was playing competitively (~'06), it was a hybrid. By the time I started diving headfirst into coaching in like 2010, all of the formal education was centered around dynamic warm-ups. What I've been taught is that flexibility is good, but static stretching to increase overall flexibility is not correlated with injury prevention if done right before activity / competition. It's another physical attribute to work on, but pregame ain't the time to do it. ...but again, I'd defer to @ptatc.

I guess my point is that flexibility is just one piece. Strength is also important, and mechanics are also important. Yes, it's easier to prevent a hamstring / groin injury than an ACL tear. However, my point of contention is that joint injuries (ligaments, meniscus, etc.) ARE preventable with the proper protocols. To dismiss them as just being freak / inevitable things (as you seemed to do with Kopech's meniscus tear in your original post) is, at best, only partially accurate. FYI, I've been in athletics my entire life (college hockey, coaching hockey competitively at the youth national level, collegiate levels, etc.)... and what you're saying makes sense... to a point. Yes, I'm aware of the benefits of partner stretching... but that sort of flexibility / stretching has proven to be useless when used as preparation for pre-competition (it's best to warm your muscles up through dynamic stretching and gentle full-range loading). Back to my original point.... non-contact joint injuries are, by and large, preventable, so I don't agree that Kopech's knee injury is an unpreventable aberration, especially once you contextualize it against his own personal injury experiences + his teammates' myriad injuries. I'm of the opinion that Kopech's knee injury is a product of both his injury proneness (probably greatly exacerbated by fitness regimens) as well as the Sox's medical staff's shortcomings.

(bump)

Also, no - people don't criticize non-contact knee injuries... but that doesn't mean that it's not preventable. I've reviewed tons of strength and conditioning protocols (in-season and off-season... though mostly for sports like hockey and soccer), and there's a huge emphasis specifically on knee injury prevention. A lot of the prevention is emphasized around ligament protection (like ACL tears), but things like meniscus protection aren't far removed from those same protocols. Again, this is where I want @ptatcto chime in....

Also, CC Sabathia. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35502136/ Apparently knees are a common injury for pitchers, but correlated with mechanics.

Yeah sure - contact injuries aren't all that preventable, but in this case, Kopech's injury wasn't really a contact injury, was it?