Jake

Adding a piece to a team at the exact time the piece is needed is very valuable. You could argue that whatever production you get from Eloy this year is "wasted" in the sense you miss the playoffs (although this is overly simplistic). The gap between Q and the guys he was replacing on their staff was large and at a time they really needed it. Certainly more justifiable than the Aroldis Chapman deal.

If you could have Taj or RoLo at the same price (probably not realistic), who are you going with?

lol somehow putting "6 HR" twice feels appropriate

Why can't someone sign while they're still in high school? Is his season still going too?

He's a natural RH batter

Makes some sense to be non-committal about the timing. If he really flops, you send him down once Welington is healthy and act like you always knew he probably needed more time in AAA.

I think this is from the foot soldiers.

Hope folks will summarize Hahn's comments

I guess my problem with THT is that the measurables are not great. Fantastic length for his height, but his height is very short. His measurables for athleticism were not good and while his bench press (the only way they're measuring strength) was above average, it wasn't great. Maybe it undersells his actual strength, but now we're talking about something that isn't measurable. Hard for me to conclude THT is a premium athlete or even average for the NBA. It wouldn't shock me if THT ends up outside shooting better than he did in NCAA last year, but he was not efficient inside the arc and he shot free throws badly. This stuff did not improve in the conference season. But overall, I don't think it's crazy to say his play in college is not exactly an asset for him. I didn't get to see him *that* much, but I'll buy that he was a really strong defender. But I worry that his size becomes much more problematic in the NBA. Who does he guard on the Bulls? LaVine? Might get burned but maybe he could use his strength. Probably wouldn't capitalize on the strength mismatch on the other end given his poor inside scoring. Anyway, I also felt that Ayo is not yet a good NBA prospect and thought he'd regret it if he declared. He has a height, but perhaps not length, advantage over THT but is of course smaller. I'm not sure how Ayo would look on the athleticism drills, which is part of the reason I thought it was a bad risk to go the combine (which he didn't do). He was mostly a below the rim player, at least offensively, although he did show some flashes of really athletic defensive plays that would surprise me. Whether Ayo is a strong passer or not isn't clear. He gets some assists, makes some impressive passes. He's the first Illini PG to sometimes hit the roll man on the pick and roll in quite a while, but that's a low bar. I definitely don't think I'd count passing among his negatives, that's for sure. Sharing the court with 2 other PGs complicates things. What Ayo would be able to sell, though, is his overall production, at least offensively. Especially since he started disappearing at times late in the season, he'll still benefit from another year in college. Of course, it'll be somewhat hard to evaluate because the Illini had an extremely difficult schedule last season and chances are it won't be quite so bad this year. In terms of college production, when you look at the box plus-minus oriented statistics, THT and Ayo are kind of mirror images of each other. THT not much on offense, but added a lot on D. Ayo not much on D, but added a lot offensively. I worry that THT's D won't translate due to his athleticism. Others would rightly be worried that Ayo's offense wouldn't translate (besides outside shooting) due to his athleticism/size. I wouldn't want the Bulls drafting either one of them, although in a 2nd round situation maybe you just don't care since those guys are so often fatally flawed.

So to pull a name out of thin air, what would distinguish him from an Ayo Dosunmu (who was almost always lower ranked on draft boards before announcing his return to UIUC)? Or do you think a guy like Ayo would have had helium in this draft as well?

What do people see in him? Crazy wingspan, but also shorter than expected, athletic numbers were bad at the combine, and he didn't play very well at ISU after a hot start.

Baseball Savant, which is created by the same guy who made the old MLB Farm website that was the previous source for minor league spray charts.

FWIW, I think Jose is extremely popular among Sox fans in general

Showing hits only: Including outs:

I've gotta say, their prospect rankings are very divergent from the rest of the industry: 1. Zion 2. Culver 3. RJ Barrett 4. Ja Morant 5. Brandon Clarke 6. Jontay Porter 7. Jaxson Hayes 8. Talen Horton-Tucker (!!!) 9. Coby White 10. De'Andre Hunter and I won't bother copying over the rest. On one hand, props I guess for not just basing your rankings on what everyone else is doing. On the other hand, these are a little wacky.

Well he didn't show up hurt as I saw him play in a spring training game.

I absolutely hate the idea of trading LaVine for Lonzo Ball. I really do not want to be a fan of a team whose point guard can't play at the end of close games because he can't beat DeAndre Jordan in a free throw shootout. If dumping LaVine's salary is so valuable, then you will be able to do that any time you need. Otherwise you're giving up the more talented and higher upside player and not getting much back.

A note about Collins defensively: Baseball Prospectus does advanced catcher statistics for the minor leagues, so we have something to work with for Collins. In AA last year, he was rated at -14.5 fielding runs (driven mostly by abysmal framing), was ranked 138 out of 140 AA catchers. This year, he's at -2.0 fielding runs and is ranked 98 out of 118 AAA catchers. He ranks pretty high in terms of innings caught so on a per-inning basis his numbers look better than the ranking implies. The sample size isn't particularly large this year, but he seems to have gone from outlier bad last year to just kind of not so good this year.

Now I'm feeling like people underrate his potential to break out offensively. I wouldn't bank on it, but I still see Collins as someone whose upside is a pretty valuable player.

Decent chance Stephens ends up getting moved off Cleveland's 40 before long as well, so we may see this turn into an Ian Clarkin type of situation

I do think folks are underrating the possibility that Collins is indeed being called up to be McCann's backup for a short time. Seby Zavala looked so bad last time that it's quite plausible the Sox felt their hands were tied and had no choice but to call up Collins.

I do wish we hadn't called him up in the midst of his annual mid-year slump

I'm worried about his strikeouts but let's be frank, Zavala looked so bad when he came up that this is really your only option even if you think it's going to be temporary. Assuming Beef's injury isn't too severe, Collins may have an outside chance at playing Alonso off the roster.

I see it as pretty straightforward: Giolito, Lopez, Kopech, Cease in no particular order and then someone from outside the organization.

He really hadn't been doing very well in AA so it stands to reason they might have just been trying to give him an easy, extended prep by making him the starter rather than planning to have him pitch more than an inning or two. But you have to feel bad for him, this is just a mess. Not a lot of guys have recovered from this kind of thing so I hope he gets some help and figures this out.