Jake

What is so impressive to me is that he basically missed the entire process of minor league development and is still doing more than holding his own. I see nothing to suggest that he should be playing the outfield for any period of time, but that's okay since that was never a standard he should have been held to. He's probably going to struggle again (in fact I can see that Statcast thinks he's been on a lucky streak) but his ability to take his lumps at this level without falling apart is great. Really the main drawback is it has cost us the ability to see what his ceiling looks like since he missed the chance to dominate minor league competition and show what he looks like when he's fully "on."

FWIW, Statcast seems to indicate that Hendriks is releasing the ball closer to home plate this year than last year (by about 0.2 feet). Maybe the cause of a back issue? Of course you can release closer to home for reasons besides the follow-through.

Worth keeping in mind that the option increases in value every 50 plate appearances starting at 400. Pollock's track record tells us it's a dicey proposition for him to get much over 400, but if he does manage to play nearly every day it's a $15M option.

Yeah I was mainly trying to figure out if we were going to try to do some weird thing where we DH Eloy a bunch just to keep Pollock out of RF.

Does Pollock have the arm to play RF?

Been a while since I strolled down the page on Soxtalk. Looks like The Buster was put out to pasture, eh?

I suppose the other way of looking at this is if you think he can get MLB hitters out right away, you just want to get as much value out of him before the inevitable injury that may leave him unable to regain his pre-injury performance.

I've been on Soxtalk for longer than the time in my life before I joined Soxtalk.

He's pitching somewhere? I can't find any stats on him, was wondering what happened to him.

Seby can't hit, I don't care how well he catches. Yes, 3 homer game notwithstanding. Unless Frank Menecchino just taught him something that he didn't know when he struck out 40% of his PA in Charlotte, Seby's gotta go and shouldn't be playing this much as it is.

Seems like most of the outsiders in particular fail to appreciate the context of Jose getting hit all the time. I'm no fan of the "old ways" where you protect your guys by beaning people — but I also understand that it's frustrating when your guy gets drilled all the time and none of the people doing the drilling perceive much of a cost. So at some point, maybe rather than resort to throwing baseballs at each other it might be useful to at least show the opposition that you might get somebody telling you to F off if you can't safely execute your gameplan.

Still haven't gotten the all-clear from the Sox beat writers.

He's a rock solid MLB starter, hard to complain about this.

I'm still trying to figure out if Kopech and/or Eloy will be in the top 10 or left off entirely. EDIT: On reflection, I don't think they'll be on there at all. Eloy didn't make it last season and there's no way he's raised his stock enough to go into the top 10. Same goes for Kopech.

The Athletic did a similar article a little while back and it was much better.