Jake

It's getting really difficult to justify keeping him down there.

What in the world would Aaron Bummer have to do to get his spot back on the MLB club?

Hard for me to understand what has changed recently with Moncada to make you question him, especially with regard to concerns about his ability to make contact:

When I see Madrigal swing I marvel at how all that load and weight shift tends to be wasted on a ball pounded into the ground. I haven't watched him play enough to say for sure but it seems like he might get something out of a little more loft.

Avi was not an average MLB player prior to his breakout last year. He was a slightly below average hitter who was playing defense badly. There would be no harm having Fulmer be a 5.50 ERA pitcher in AAA at this point, but they can do what they want to do with him.

"Very few" players have the language he's requesting in this year's draft, say the Bears. Well the player is the best LB in the draft per the Bears so I would sure as hell consider giving him the elite contract treatment.

I would think that sounds like the type of player who out-performs his speed on the basepaths.

We really don't have much left-handed starting pitching in our system, so from that perspective this makes sense too. It looks like Medeiros has the raw stuff to be an effective starter, whichever portion of the rotation that is. If hearing a new voice/growing up/continued development gets him to hone the command, you got something very nice here.

That's the first time that pitch-tipping came to mind for me there. It's a very hittable hung curveball but you almost never see a guy go up and swing at that on 0-0 unless the pitcher has been throwing that pitch to start guys off throughout the game.

Well they've hit the changeup pretty well, but the same could be said for his fastball. He's thrown 9 breaking balls, 8 of which were called balls. That's probably not helping him much.

Why is Madrigal getting caught stealing? Are they pickoffs?

Sure, but that's why I brought up Colon as a comparison because other than a brief time early in his career he wasn't a big strikeout guy but was able to be successful throwing 80%+ fastballs. Lopez might also find a little more success with his fastball if he could get himself ahead in the count a little more often, which is hard to do when he can hardly throw an offspeed pitch for a strike (not that he's pounding the zone with his fastball either).

Reynaldo really has a lot of young Bartolo Colon to him. I wonder if he'd be better off trying to emulate that approach and simplifying things, just throwing the fastball and one chosen offspeed with a third pitch just once in a blue moon.

I'd agree that Reynaldo looks like he's due for a little bonus rest if the Sox can buy some for him. His velocity varies so much within and between games that I don't know whether I should think it's because he's tired, consciously backing off, or what.

So what's the deal with Vieira? Started the season struggling terribly with walks, but in the past 2 months-ish has really cut back on the walks. In spite of not many walks, they've still been scoring on him. So how does he look? What are they hitting?

Of course FG ranks him T100 as a 1B, which is fair IMO

I am not a fan of ranking Collins outside the T100.

I think part of it is we assumed he'd either be an All-Star or a Courtney Hawkins redux and somehow he's looking like a solid MLB regular, the part of distribution of outcomes nobody was really betting on.

https://2080baseball.com/spotlight/kodi-medeiros/ Report from a couple weeks ago had him 90-92 in that particular outing.

The MLB Pipeline writeup specifically mentions Medeiros having lost velocity from the time he was drafted and later got it back. Wouldn't be surprising that people have different notes on velocity if it has bounced around so much.

Longenhangen's velo report is lower than what Baseball America and MLB Pipeline report. Also a tip for looking at his stats: Make sure to account for the very high number of hit batsmen; his walk numbers appear just about decent until you account for that.

They've got some Beckham kid hitting pretty well in Tacoma...?

I played with a couple guys whose arm in the outfield played much better than a radar gun would have made you think. As you mention, accuracy was a big part of it since being off target by a little bit will cost all the time saved by throwing harder and usually more than that. The other thing about those guys in my experience is they threw very straight balls with pure backspin. I'm not a physicist, but it sure seemed to me that these throws played better than their nominal top velocity because they didn't have to travel as far (because they didn't have to hook/slice on the way to the target) and didn't decelerate as much in the air. Those things also make the accuracy part easier to accomplish.