JoeC

The issue with the COVID protocol wasn't necessarily that he broke the protocol, but that he lied to the team about it afterwards. If you recall, this happened in 2020, when COVID fears were peaking. He (and Plesac) went out for dinner with friends (at the time a breach of protocol), then lied about it and boarded the team plane, thus putting the entire team and its short-term competitiveness into question. Heck - even Plesac said he broke protocol, and the team went out and got a car service to drive him back to Cleveland so he wouldn't have to risk exposing his teammates on the flight. Remember - positive COVID tests and exposures meant that you were immediately quarantined, and the team had to call up someone from their Taxi squad. With MLB's policies being a very strict "any exposure gets you quarantined" policy, if Clevinger would have been exposed to COVID, that could have put a vast majority of the Cleveland players into isolation, and therefore ineligible to play. Regardless of hindsight and what we may know about COVID now, looking at the potential consequences involved purely in terms of the impact on the baseball team, that was a stupid decision compounded by a breach of trust. His actions could have taken Cleveland out of the race very quickly.

Too soon

Hahn will somehow pull it off.

Slightly smaller, IIRC.

You could say that about the PCL or International League, I feel like. One difference other than the size of the baseballs in NPB vs. MLB I thought was that in NPB they use a 6-man rotation with Mondays as regularly scheduled off days for all teams. So you end up with effectively a 7-day cycle vs. a 5-day cycle in the big leagues. Could be wrong on that though.

I love that Moncada isn’t allowed to do anything besides baseball in the offseason.

Agreed. He should be fired for giving LA a player in return for signing a player they released.

There's a 2022 joke in there that just writes itself, probably.

Was he really that bad? My personal impression is that he wasn't any worse than Sheets / Vaughn, but he just whined about having to play out of position and thus got out of it.

FWIW, if this is the guy I'm thinking of, Paul Goodman is viewed as a guru in the field of injury recovery and prevention, in addition to the "traditional" strength training aspects.

At least for Plesac it was more than just the one incident of being a knucklehead. not sure about Clevinger though

Ah yes - that's the asinine quote I was looking for.

I think the Reinsdorf / Hahn / Sox stuff has turned the entire fanbase into cynics.

Or JR leaked this to him, and now Hahn will say "we were in the market for Judge"

https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2022/11/justin-verlander-triggers-opt-out.html URL says it all.

Plus AJ is basically $5MM ahead right now, so he can be had at a pretty good discount for the next team, thus making him more attractive to teams who are looking for a bargain.

Not disagreeing, but it's a 2-way street. Also keep in mind that Milwaukee isn't known for its ineptitude either. I see that trade as a swapping between peer organizations... or at least way more so than if the Sox went after anyone from Tampa.

If you're playing limbo, that makes it harder.

the return? https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/r/rasmudr01.shtml

Yeah. Hopefully it gets properly allocated to shoring up the bullpen.

Thank you for doing your part in guaranteeing that the Sox never sign a high pedigree arm out of the draft ever again in the future.

I wish I could thumbs down a post.... but I half cynically agree.

...or... adjusted for relative payroll impact, a little less than 1 Leury ($5.5MM on Sox's 2022 payroll is about $7.5M on LA's 2022 payroll)

You think they’re willing to trade for a back-end-bullpen arm with us again?

He needs 2 things to be a starter - a third pitch and to stretch out his arm. not sure if both are attainable.