nrockway

ya know, somehow I've managed to go through 30 years of life without ever dating a child. One would think a millionaire (hundred millionaire) athlete has a larger incentive than I to make sure a child bride is not going to ruin his career and life, a person who has a team of people working for him to keep him from screwing up his dynasty-forming wages by possibly doing a background check on someone whose background might be questionable (such as by being a child). I don't buy this argument at all. none of us would make this "mistake", an athlete with 182 million more incentives than me isn't going to throw his life away over a clerical issue. is it really hard to believe that a baseball player might just be a regular ol pedophile and that he thought he could get away with it? I guess we'll let justice take its course, and I bet he'll use the same excuse you just outlined, but it doesn't look good for him and I also think it's frankly weird that you're using your teenage niece as an example of why men are just being tricked by children.

hard not to be optimistic about a bullpen anchored by the unknown lefty and the phantom napper "No one will know their names, and, alas, we will have to die" - Giacomo Puccini

I think he has a case but feels to me on the cusp like Cone, Tiant, Schilling (not on the cusp, should clearly be in, but unpopular), Kevin Brown, Saberhagen. I think if Mark pitched 3 or 4 more years, his case would look a lot stronger.

How the Southpaw stole Christmas...I refuse to believe they're this obtuse and are just trolling the fanbase at this point.

the point is that I wouldn't pay 32 million dollars to a 30something journeyman pitcher on a rebuilding team and expect anything good to happen. Would much rather see young guys and bounceback candidates. royals spent $77mil on two good but not great 30something starting pitchers, I'd rather see what the 20somethings can do on arbitration/pre-arbitration deals or slightly richer guys like Fedde or Yariel Rodriguez. spending actual money on those pitchers would've been as pointless as signing Benintendi over Bellinger, at least with Bellinger we could've gotten back one more prospect last trade deadline. it really would not surprise me if Fedde has a better year than Wacha at half the price.

realistically, I don't know how anyone on this forum could say with any certainty if he was actually good at this job or not. is minor league records the only indicator? he wasn't signing the players. do you give him credit for Montgomery or Schultz becoming great prospects? or for Cespedes or Kath falling down in the system? the GM job is more visible, we can see what moves he's making and who he's hiring, and I'm not sure what he would've done differently to look better to fans. he seems to be doing a fine job thus far, what would David Stearns have done differently? still, the first big test IMO is what he's able to get from Cease; nonetheless, the organizational structure already seems better than it has in years. it genuinely wouldn't surprise me if the Sox compete in the central, the team actually looks better than last season, the wildcard being the pitching staff. still, I prefer to see Fedde and Soroka than I do Flaherty or Wacha.

I don't follow the NFL so I don't really know the rules, but that sounds pretty nice. Especially considering the roster sizes are comparable to MLB compared to NBA.

Realistically, there should similar rules as the NBA which forces owners to spend within a certain window, a salary floor and a salary cap. It matters less if your owner is Jerry Reinsdorf or if he’s Steve Cohen, they literally aren’t given the option aside from going into the luxury tax to retain players (rather than acquiring them via trade or free agency). Reinsdorf is “cheap” by nba owner standards by refusing to go into the luxury tax during the Derrick Rose years, arguably more recently by refusing to keep Lauri Markannen, but the disparity between the lowest payroll and the highest payroll in the NBA is $85mil compared to $280mil for the MLB last season…and that lowest payroll team, the Spurs, have been proven to spend but are rebuilding while the highest spending team, the Suns, are a relatively small market compared to Los Angeles, New York or Chicago. the financial parity in that league is so much better, I frankly don’t see why any MLB fan would want it any other way. Why should we put our hopes in some virtuous billionaire to spend money out of the kindness of his heart without having to be coerced into doing it by league regulations?

Daryl Boston I'm sure had a large part of it although I'm not so sure Benintendi was ever all that good defensively in left. I'd put some blame on the outfield coach because the schemes out there were ridiculous, nobody was ever in a proper position and only Robert could make up for it by having incredible range. Basically every flyball anywhere in left or right center field consisted of Robert pissing off his teammates by essentially taking balls out of their gloves. I've never seen so much chippiness among outfielders about whose routine flyball it was to catch. I'm sure that creates uncertainty and a lack of confidence and since there's only so much dWAR to go around, all of it went to Robert as there were fewer potential chances for the left and right fielders which magnifies their mistakes. Benintendi's dWAR looked pretty good in Boston playing in a very tiny left field and during his gold glove season in KC, he played with a terrible defensive right fielder and gold glove center fielder who thus probably shaded toward right to compensate for Dozier's garbage defense (to a lesser extent, Isbel and and Olivares) giving Benintendi more chances to make plays. Hopefully the additions of Bourgeois and Sizemore can help the defense out there, but we'll see.

his best years were in Boston and KC, ranging from (complete seasons) 1.7 WAR to 3.9 WAR. I don't think it's absurd to think that a healthy Benintendi could put up ~2.5 WAR. I wouldn't expect Robert to drop 2 WAR from last season though, even if a slight regression is in order (I don't think he'll regress unless he misses games).

Does Baseball Prospectus give any information on how they do their projections? Intuitively, Fedde seems a bit high (though not outrageous, I have high hopes for him), Cease seems low. Vaughn's WAR might be right, but I have a hard time believing his OPS will be lower than last season and still produce higher WAR. Eloy feels a little high and I don't think Moncada's OPS will drop 20 points in a contract year (provided he's healthy). Even Kopech seems low, he was pretty abysmal this year and still produced 0.7 bWAR...maybe if he's a reliever. I don't think players like Kopech, Vaughn, Moncada could get much worse. Benny's WAR is optimistic but not out of the realm of possibility. Fedde seems particularly interesting to me because I wonder how they weigh KBO stats relative to MLB stats if they are using 3 or so years of data to make a projection.

I think he's about the only writer worth reading still left there, maybe Rosenthal. Probably can't go wrong at such a low price.

I canceled my subscription a few months ago. Well, New York Times subscription which offered the Athletic for free. For 12 bucks, it might be worth it, but I felt conned because it marketed itself as "smarter coverage for die-hard fans." I was imagining long form, well-researched articles but it's anything but, it's the same drivel you'll read on ESPN, arguably worse than ESPN Insider. I guess that's the only way for it to turn a profit. The last straw for me was when they fired Fegan and 20 other journalists. Their coverage of other sports might be better, don't really know. Personally I'm wondering if it's worth it to subscribe to Baseball America. $100 a year is not cheap but maybe you get what you pay for.

it isn't a criticism of these players, it's a criticism of the dogmatic belief that a market economy efficiently distributes limited resources. baseball has always been an analogy for society, the Dodgers, Mets, Yankees payrolls relative to every team in the central divisions is something that every 'flyover' midwesterner should feel deeply. it's an analogy for inequality. it's evidence that only the most highly-capitalized companies can succeed in the modern world. have some pride, man. more relevant perhaps, it's clearly bad for the sport.

1 billion dollars on two athletes' salaries. Sickening. 75,000 people are homeless in LA County. Who cares about baseball, this just reflects poorly on society and our so-called values.

Peavy must feel conflicted. On one hand, his name is in the news again for some reason and people will now probably buy his jersey. On the other hand, some midwit journalist is calling his jersey a “bizarre choice”.

Maybe there’s a reason Tampa Bay traded him for cash despite his once upon a time top prospect ranking. Maybe in addition to having a negative career WAR and 5 ERA and even higher FIP, he has no drive to get better. I probably would’ve kept him based on his high strikeout rate, but there’s probably more to the picture. Does he clear waivers?

I'm glad he's healthy, seemingly cancer-free, and looking much better. He's a baseball legend and I don't think he's even anyone for Sox fans to scapegoat. As far as I can tell, pretty much every Sox player spoke fondly of him besides flash-in-the pan egotists like Yermin Mercedes. He probably shouldn't have been re-hired as manager, but I don't see any issue with him offering his perspectives as an "advisor". The front office and coaching personnel should be intelligent enough to make decisions for themselves and either ignore or integrate others' opinions into their decision-making. This seems very much the same role that John Paxson plays with the Bulls who clearly has no impact on player evaluation (maybe he should). I also think it's completely pointless and irrelevant to baseball to criticize him for a barely over the legal limit DUI, though he should probably have his driver's license taken away, when half of this country is addicted to drugs and I'm sure "good" people we know have made a mistake and gotten a DUI. There's good evidence to suggest there's a relationship between DUI arrests and access to public transportation (and Mormonism), it's not exactly a surprise that Arizona and Florida have much higher rates of DUI arrests than New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania or especially Washington DC, places that actually give you the opportunity to take the train or bus or somewhere. Point being, this seems like a whole lotta nothing. here's an interesting article pertaining to White Sox baseball I read today: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/how-not-to-build-for-depth/

He hasn't been any good since 2019. Tried to blame his lousy performance last season on Willson Contreras, then performed even worse with Baltimore and I guess he's not really in a position to complain about Adley Rutschman. Maybe he turns it around, I wouldn't hope that he performs poorly, but I wouldn't hold my breath expecting a bounce back season.

Wish him luck. If he could hit for even .250, he's probably a starting major league center fielder somewhere. Sneaky power, surprisingly good defender.

A little more than I would have expected but I think at worst he's a good defensive outfielder who will get on base. have to think multiple interested teams drove up his value. the AAV seems fine but 5 years would've been a bit more team friendly. but maybe his game translates real well and he has 20 homer potential.

It's true but sports would be a lot better off of it wasn't tied to market forces. Sport is a public good. A cultural product that gives people a sense of pride in their city, state or country and brings people from diverse backgrounds together in favor of a common interest. It's kind of like nationalism but much less chauvinistic, I enjoy conversing with any passionate sports fan even if they root for the Cubs, the Twins, the Pistons, the Lakers, their own national teams. Everyone everywhere likes sports, it's a common language. Even if you have radically different political views or economic interests, or live in different countries with governments who desire to wipe the other one off the face of the Earth, sport is an analogy for the fact that we're all just human beings and basically want the same things out of life. The fact that everyone in the world loves sports of course makes it a profitable enterprise, so a handful of powerful people can reap all the benefits. A baseball player is not inherently more valuable to society than a teacher or nurse is, but his skillset is unique enough and sport produces enough revenue that they can make absurd amounts of money; and it's probably "fair" in that sense that Ohtani is going to become a billionaire because he's probably entitled to a fair share of the revenue considering his individual impact on the industry, else an owner will take the revenue he creates for himself or to give his shareholders a dividend. It's a fatal flaw of the market economy, for all its historical benefits, that the super wealthy will reap all the rewards of baseball and the poor family will have to stay home and watch the game on TV while business people will take the best seats, using this 'amenity' to wine and dine their corporate clients and not even watch the game. There's a good book about cricket I like called "Beyond a Boundary" by Trinidadian historian CLR James, discussing the importance of the sport to him and his local community, and how people in India and the Caribbean could fall in love with a sport created by their colonizer, Britain. The sport parallels struggles for independence, race and class politics, but also a universal love for the game regardless of background or one's relation to colonialism. You might draw similar parallels with baseball, an American creation, and the fandom it's found in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Japan and Korea.

I think there's room to be optimistic that the new front office might actually be able to build a savvy player development staff and give them useful tasks to perform. At least Bannister did it successfully in San Francisco. I don't know how much he's actually doing with the Sox on a day to day basis, but I have to hope that Getz is letting him build a similar system here.

Sox also took Jace Fry out of OSU in the third round in 2014, right below Michael Conforto, Of course, OSU produces a lot of good players like Adley Rutschman, Steven Kwan and Drew Rasmussen so maybe it's just a coincidence.

That's an interesting point. I wonder if there's a Sox/Oregon State connection like there was a Bulls/Iowa State connection. Sox did select an an Oregon State guy in the 17th round of this past draft, Mikey Kane, who played 7 games in rookie league and posted a .839 OPS, 9 singles and 4 walks.