CaliSoxFanViaSWside

You know as well as I do that no one of any significance is coming to the Sox. The roster is what it is now.

Late April 2018 TJ surgery not 2019. He missed almost all of 2019 when he had a rehab start and had a capsule sprain. But his 2020 showed he was finally healthy. 11 starts 2.70 ERA and 1.163 WHIP and even better second half in 6 starts with a 1.37 ERA. I always like pitchers, who after injury, have a strong 2nd half. Rodon pitched 4 games 2 starts, 7.2 innings total, 8.22 ERA and 1.565 WHIP. There isn't a world in which Walker gets less than Rodon. According MLBTR Walker was the 23rd ranked FA this year. Guys like Rodon who were non tenders , injured and sucked are probably all lumped together at over 100. He's lucky the Sox gave him $3M.

Yes I was just thinking of editing my post to say he could sign for 2yrs around $15M

Walker is probably left because after last season he thinks he is worth $10M a year but with his peripherals teams are offering $5M. If he gets $5M I'm going to cry that the Sox didn't consider him. He can still bring the fastball at 94/95 , he's 28, he throws strikes and knows how to pitch.

Part of my discussion with SS2k5

Amen. Half the people here, if they were young professional athletes who chose to reveal more about themselves would be thought of as douches too. Does everyone really have to act the same way and hide their inner self to please everyone ?

Discuss anything you want. All I was saying is my opinion doesn't matter. I am also saying choosing to believe things because people say them in Twitter is something I don't like to do. How does anyone know for sure the Sox made a $10M offer to Pederson ? There's so much manipulation going on in that world. Why should I or anyone believe that crap ? Take it all with a grain of salt , discuss the hell out of it, but in the end I use my mind and my knowledge of baseball to come to conclusions before most of the discussions take place. I said Cruz isn't coming here early and I said Folty isn't coming here. But I discussed the hell out of how fun it would be to have Cruz and encouraged others to do so. I wanted that thread to catch up to another thread discussing another player. I'd have to look back early in the Cruz thread to see what I said. Edit: I just looked . On Jan. 21 I encouraged everyone to make the Cruz thread as long as the Burnes thread , which it eventually surpassed. AT the time it was around 30 pages behind it. I've been around here a long time. I just don't go running to Twitterers and insiders begging them for info because if I don't care about anything they say except for its entertainment value. I'm too old to be acting like a giddy school girl.

But but we forced MN. to up their offer to Cruz . Sox win ! ( this is sarcasm)

What I think doesn't matter. Opinions are like assholes, everybody's got one. I'm not in the loop on these things. What does it matter if the Sox have or haven't discussed an offer with him. He isn't coming here.

Yes it is. You're on the clock to win a world series . You got a free agent without many suitors who wants to play on a contender, likes your coaching staff, actually wants to be here, who is open to some kind of oddly structured contract, and the Sox, who tell you all about multiple championships and the money will be spent, look the gift horse in the mouth because JR can't spend more than last year because the poor owners lost so much money .

If it was written in stone by the hand of God for our leaders to lead us to the promised land it would be news. But it's not . Most still expect him to start in the minors for the extra year.

Also Madrigal and a better Robert whose upside is better than anyone on the team. Hopefully Moncada can get back to where he was and we still haven't seen the best of Eloy either. Anderson could get better too even though some expect some regression. But judging by the last 2 years and the Oakland playoff series where he got 9 hits in 3 games he's still got some upside at 27/28 years old.

Assistant Director, Player Development: Kenny Williams Jr.

You know how subjective rankings are. Any evaluator can rank a prospect who never makes it to the majors. Happens all the time. They rank on skills that include hitting and fielding for position players. The older a guy gets and the more he DH's that removes half his skillset that would get him ranked. I'm not sure if Future Sox ever had Yermin in their top 30. I think MLB .com ranked him purely on how well he hit in AAA when Robert was putting up the great numbers there to justify his ranking which had always been high based on skillset. He also had the big signing bonus . Yermin had nothing on his side. Bounced around the low minors, independent ball. When no one believes in you coming from down that far purely based on hitting skills and some ability to catch is actually phenomenal. The younger guy will always get promoted before him. But he persevered. He stayed healthy and just kept knocking the cover off the ball until he got noticed. I don't know how bad his catching is. The little we saw in the spring the last few years didn't look bad but it's too hard to tell with seeing so few innings. He's not a full time catcher but he could easily handle 3rd catcher and DH. I do remember he looked terrible at 3rd base but so did Vaughn and Vaughn didn't look so great at 1st base either. But Vaughn had the big college years, high draft choice, scouts raving about him as one of the best pure hitters in years. Yermin has done more as a hitter at higher levels then Vaughn but Vaughn is an MLB top 30 prospect and Yermin can't even make the Sox top 30. Either one is highly over rated and the other highly under rated or perhaps a little bit of both if all they are is DH's.

That's a great comparison. Nordhagen was a rookie at 27 and for the next 6 years put up pretty good numbers for the Sox. He didn't take many walks but his BA was .290 , 110 OPS+ and .761 SLG for his Sox time and had good pop. He was a DH/C . He even pitched 2 innings in 1979.

Well I like this Hawks team. Very competitive so far. Lankinen looks amazing so far. The PP is clicking. Despite the lack of talent I'd say they actually have better play makers but not finishers. To me that's the main reason the PP have been looking good. They've had very pretty passing plays on the PP resulting in goals and better play around the net.

The thread was a nice premise but getting anyone to try to stick to your rules was an exercise in futility. People have their own agendas and ideas on who they would have kept in the previous year because if you are the GM then they figure they were the GM in previous years with the benefit of hindsight and doing things like keeping McCann over Grandal when that is a silly idea. Sox needed OBP and a strong LH bat and stability . It's why Grandal was signed. McCaan provided none of those things and certainly not stability unless your imagination magically makes him forego Free Agency when it will be the one time in his career to enter the market with good seasons behind him. They also got to see McCann have better results catching our ace and Giolito somehow becoming a worse pitcher without McCann is terrifying to them. All with Grandal on the roster to provide him rest and ideal situations to perform. The hindsight in that thinking is 20/20. No one knows how McCann would have played as the No.1 catcher without Grandal around. I was McCanns biggest supporter on the board when they got him and when after his 1st year performance people still hated him citing his numbers dropping in the 2nd half even though he put up career numbers offensively . That hating was just more agendas of people who had said he sucked when we got him trying to justify continuing the he sucks message. His hitting in 2020 solidified that the changes he made were real and now all of a sudden McCann was as good as if not better than Grandal to the people who were having problems with Grandal. Even the Sox, who started off with 3 catchers ,abandoned that idea which meant McCann would now get less AB's because of the full commitment to EE at DH. Renteria had to go so I will agree with you on that but not for the reason you said. I had long arguments with lots of people saying the same thing you did. Renteria panicked and he panicked the team. I'm sorry but it's just not true. The Sox were just not as good as many thought they were. I assume that you mean by he panicked because he took out Dunning in the 1st inning. The Sox had a 3-0 lead after 3 innings with a pretty well rested BP. The Sox lost because they had no 3rd starter, the BP had to absorb the Crochet injury and then they sucked and the Sox hitters blew a lot scoring opportunities . That loss was squarely on the players and an unfortunate injury. I don't see how anyone can say they lost the game in the 1st inning unless they also make up an imagery scenario where these highly paid professionals panicked and mass hysteria ensued amongst the hitters and pitchers as if a gunman was spraying them all with bullets and they were frozen with fear.

I Know you'd trade Madrigal in a heartbeat but it isn't ridiculous to say if Madrigal and Crochet both stay with the Sox Madrigal likely means more to the Sox than Crochet in the next 2 years. If the Sox could have moved Crochet to help the team but insisted on Madrigal as a centerpiece instead I think they made a mistake.

I don't care about that at all.

Isn't Callaway the guy who didn't like Bauer ?

If the PECOTA stuff is to be believed those numbers don't exactly look like playoff numbers so Fuck Pecota.

Surprising they give Keuchel such a bad FIP . He has had only 2 seasons his whole career with an FIP worse than 4.41 and one was his rookie year and the other was the short season with Atlanta. They must be highly conservative giving 2 semi older pitchers like Keuchel and Lynn so much regression coming off very good seasons.

They have Madrigal with a higher OPS than Robert which is pretty hard to believe. However it did happen last year as I pointed out a while ago. But over a long season theres no way that happens. Robert would have to hit like he did when he slumped last year for multiple months. I think there's a good chance he moves forward in a highly positive way this year. It would help tremendously.

Vaughn will be 23 in April . You hold him down for a year and he's 24 next year. It's time to start seeing what we have. He was supposed to be one of the best college bats in a long time. You can't keep delaying him because of Covid and not getting Minor League AB's. The Sox trust what they saw of him in Schaumburg enough that its reasonable to assume he's going to get a lot of AB's this year. You have superstars in the league putting up great number by 22 yrs old and younger in some cases. He needs to face MLB pitching now . And I say this as a guy who has always cautioned against expecting too much too soon for Vaughn.

I think your thinking on this is correct . I don't think there will be a pitcher in all of baseball to pitch 200 innings in 2021. However I am thinking that 162 games being played is a long shot at this point in time. In the unlikely event all 162 are played I'm still not betting on anyone reaching 200 innings.