Jake

Always some BS like that for Grant

There was and is a ton of risk in Crochet's profile. The idea of trading him was a good one IMO. Of course, when the upside is as high as it clearly is for Crochet, you need to do well in the trade too. So far, I like how it looks. Teel looks like a long-term starter at catcher and is a player who is really easy to root for on top of it. Meidroth is having a solid season in the big leagues and looks like one of those guys who will be around for the long term as well — still some chance he becomes a high-end bench player, I think. As others have stated, Braden Montgomery is probably the highest upside player in the organization not named Luis Robert and he's putting up some numbers at AA that tell you he might not be that far away. Wikelman Gonzalez I am frankly not impressed with but getting something out of him would be a nice cherry on top. Sox only had Crochet under contract for two seasons. So to break even, you need them over 6 to 7 years to combine for what are looking like 2 excellent seasons of Crochet. Of course, Sox would have had little use for a Cy Young caliber starter this year. And extending a pitcher with so little track record of success and so much track record of injury would have been a strange way to finally start spending big money on the team when it's not particularly close to competing. I think an investment of that kind only really makes sense for a position player with where the Sox are right now.

Leasure gave up two very soft and lucky hits. He's fine

Estevez is beatable if you have the courage

Wilson walks a tight rope but it's funny to see when he gets guys so sweeper-oriented that they can't do anything to non-rising 94 in the zone

Bobby Witt clown show

Royals 6 for 6 on balls hit 85 or less in the last two innings

To be fair to Hagen, I think there's a lot more to like with him than those two guys. Has shown far more aptitude at missing bats than either of them. Ring showed up with control issues out of the box in a relief role and stopped striking people out once he reached AA. Poreda is a guy I don't think would have been much-liked in today's game because (I suspect) he was a guy with high fastball velo but not able to make people miss it. Smith has serious problems throwing strikes but the foundation of the slider + fastball is extremely strong too. If he can stay healthy he has very good odds to at least be a useful relief pitcher. Here's hoping he can straighten out over the offseason...sometimes I think you have to just get a heavy dose of guys not swinging at your stuff when it's out of the zone before you really find the desire to fix yourself. FWIW, the Carson Fulmer comparison is more interesting to me. Of course I'd say Carson simultaneously had worse stuff but a better college track record. I don't know if Carson ever could have made it even if he was coached up perfectly — baseball is hard — but I always felt like they really hurt him by promoting him out of AA. Carson showed serious command problems that weren't being appropriately punished by AA hitters much like we're seeing from Hagen Smith right now. But then Carson had 3 good starts in a row in July and they promoted him to the majors where he immediately gets lit up out of the bullpen. Then he spends years languishing in AAA where he never figures out how to stop walking people. Sox don't seem like they're keen on making that same kind of mistake with Smith, who I think has to start next year in AA unless his AFL and spring training production is stupendous. I'll note that the thing I'm glad they didn't do with Hagen Smith, they did do with Noah Schultz. Hard to understand exactly what they were doing, given that Schultz walked 5 in his last AA outing (which, to be fair, was scoreless and he allowed just one hit). I'm a little more open-minded with how Schultz is being handled simply because command issues are not something we've seen before with him and I'm allowing for the possibility that there's more than meets the eye with him.

I would love to see some clarity from Getz on what he thinks the timeline is but I don't really expect it — and I probably wouldn't want to give that clarity if I was in his position either. I found his comment about potentially adding via free agency in the offseason to be kind of interesting. I'm never going to be too mad if the organization wants to spend money to add some more wins to the win column, but it's honestly not clear to me what to spend money on. You're already overstocked on young infielders — 5 for 4 positions. You have 2 young catchers for 1 spot. In the outfield, you have Tauchman presumably returning to man RF. LouBob presumably returning for CF. And Benintendi is owed $32M over the next 2 seasons and probably isn't playing badly enough for it to make sense to cut bait and eat that money. So there's your 3 outfield spots spoken for and the excess at the other positions (plus Benintendi/Tauchman both moving pretty slow) means you probably don't want to sign up a full-time DH. Maybe a starting pitcher? Well, let's look at who we expect to be available internally: Shane Smith, Davis Martin, Yoendrys Gomez, Jonathan Cannon, Sean Burke, Mike Vasil, Drew Thorpe, Noah Schultz, Duncan Davitt (via Houser deal), Ky Bush, plus a few guys who are a bit less likely to make the team early in the year but with some lucky breaks could be ready/available by ~June (e.g., the whole 2025 AA rotation). I'm not saying this long list of names is filled with all-stars, but for a rebuilding team you do want to give yourself some chance to give some pitchers some run to see what they've got. Not to mention potential Rule 5 picks, scrap heap pickups, and so on. Big money free agent starting pitchers are very high risk acquisitions and the risk increases over time; seems like a weird place to invest. Okay, relievers? Maybe. I could produce a long list of guys who maybe will provide bullpen innings and there's maybe 100 players outside the Sox organization who will be available at low or no cost who have the talent to eat up some MLB innings (not to say that all of them will). But you see what that has looked like this year and it's been a pretty bumpy ride. Throwing a little money at trustworthy veteran relievers wouldn't be crazy IMO. Could make the team more watchable and might give you some flippable pieces. Technically, these signings are risky, but the absolute dollar amounts involved are rarely all that big. pre-2027 feels like the soonest plausible offseason for the Sox to start throwing money around, but for all we know there may not even be a MLB season in 2027. FWIW, that also feels like the soonest you could see Getz be fired.

Here was my approach to what would constitute success for this season: 1. Don't set another losses record 2. Accumulate young players playing well enough at the MLB level that they can reasonably be expected to play on future competitive Sox teams (at least if you stipulate that such a team will appear in the next few years) So far, I feel pretty good to be honest with you. Obviously we knocked out #1, as so many posts like the OP can point out. Besides that, there's a cadre of players 25 or younger with 5+ years until free agency who are playing rather competently: Lenyn Sosa Kyle Teel Chase Meidroth Colson Montgomery Miguel Vargas Edgar Quero in no particular order. Brooks Baldwin has shown a few flashes at the plate. Team just acquired Curtis Mead, who certainly has the raw hitting talent to be an impact player. Quite frankly, it's remarkable how basically every position player prospect to taste the majors this year has succeeded (I don't count Baldwin as a prospect in that sense). Plenty of positive developments among minor league hitters as well, with Braden Montgomery now showing well in AA, Caleb Bonemer emerging as a serious prospect in the low minors, Jeral Perez showing some pop, Javier Mogollon looking good, William Bergolla looking like a future (bench) MLBer, even Sammy Zavala making a late season surge back into relevance. Jacob Gonzalez is hardly a success story but I'd say he took a step forward this year and has a reasonable chance to find a minor role on a big league roster down the line. Among the prospect hitters, Bryan Ramos's season is the main one I count as a serious disappointment. Pitching side is a different story on all levels. Shane Smith is a very nice feather in the cap despite the inconsistencies. Davis Martin has had a somewhat up and down year but looks like a useful player. Cannon qualifies as a disappointment but I think he still has a shot to be an innings eater. I'm not a big Burke fan but he's held his own and might make it as a starter with some reason to believe he could successfully convert to relief pitching. Yoendrys Gomez is an interesting late-season bright spot; I still see him as a reliever long term but his little run as a starter has been legit so far. Grant Taylor isn't on track to be a dominant ace-level starter but he looks the part as a shutdown reliever. Jordan Leasure catches a lot of s%*# but he's looking more and more like a solid setup man to me. After that, the MLB bullpen has been pieced together with older guys who have largely spun their wheels. The minor leagues don't offer a ton of inspiration pitching-wise. Some interesting guys for sure, like Oppor down in the low minors. I'm interested in Riley Gowens as well. A couple other of the dudes having great years in AA I'm not very optimistic about as major league prospects. McDougal has a chance I think. We all know the ways in which the big two lefties have disappointed; that said, it wouldn't really shock me if either or both just suddenly click and push their way to the majors next year. But much worse possibilities are also looking plausible. Wikelman Gonzalez looks like crap to me and it seems the Sox gave up on his potential as a starter quickly, but given the iffy looking stuff I can kind of see why. Jairo Iriarte has completely fallen apart in a way that feels unexamined for a guy who seemed to be on track to potentially join the MLB rotation this year if things went right. Nick Nastrini, who some might remember looked like a potential rotation piece a year ago, is out of the organization and appears to have the yips. There are some Peyton Pallette fans out there but I'm not really one of them. But his progression is a mild positive I suppose. All that is to say I don't think the Sox got much clarity on what the medium-term pitching staff looks like. That said, pitching staffs have a tendency to be built as the plane flies so I don't feel as badly about it. There are some signs to me that the Sox may have some ability to make chicken dinner out of chicken s%*# on the pitching side. I'd rather have a bunch of young hitters looking like legit major leaguers while the pitching staff looks sketchy than the other way around.

FWIW, I just don't feel like Burke's recent pitching gives an obvious explanation for this demotion. Maybe it's service time games or load management, IDK. But this is a weird time for a demotion and it's not like there's a surplus of pitching on the squad. As for the "what's their ceiling discussion," I tend to feel like Davis Martin might be the most talented of the young guys who have pitched in this year's rotation. But he's also older and has had significant injury history, so it's harder to make optimistic assumptions about his development. He's also kind of small which people tend to hold against pitchers. I like that Martin is a guy who is really willing to geek out on his pitching which gives him some room to reinvent himself if things don't work. It's a trait many of us liked and saw pay off for the more-talented Lucas Giolito. Burke and Cannon have the big guy thing going for them. Cannon has never been seen as a high-upside guy and I think that's pretty easy to agree with, despite having a good build and flashing some velo at times. I think he has some aptitude for generating glove-side break but he's always walking a bit of a tight rope. Last year he suffered at times for not having a good 4-seamer. This year he has at times shown some good performance from the 4-seam, but everything else has been less consistent and his sinker hasn't been as productive for him. He's another guy who seems extremely detail-oriented and willing to tinker until he finds something that works. Burke is simpler...good body and good fastball shape even though its velo doesn't really hold up over the long term as a starter. The good shape of his 4-seamer compensates for that though. Everything else he throws basically sucks and as we know he doesn't command anything very well either. His curveball has become a bit of a comfort pitch for him but it's hard to get by with a curve-heavy attack nowadays. I concede that a fastball that people tend to whiff at even when poorly-located and not that fast is a pretty good platform to build from. It's also something that might make him more appealing as a bullpen guy, but there's no free lunches; Jordan Leasure has an absolutely fantastic fastball but as a reliever with a two-pitch mix batters too frequently figure out how to line him up when they know what's coming. I'd guess Burke would similarly simplify to two pitches as a reliever. Shane Smith gets to boast of the best production so far of these young players, which is good for him because I think the rest of it is hard to interpret as high-ceiling. Pitching continues to be too complicated to be able to perfectly measure a guy's stuff, but to the extent we can measure it, Shane doesn't really have it. The changeup is the exception but it seems to me that he's had real trouble sustaining it and frequently loses confidence. Shane without the changeup is a much different and less exciting pitcher (ask the Brewers). At the level of measurables, his 4-seamer seems like it should be perfect cannon fodder. It's a bit faster than most righty starters but not enough for that to be a big deal on its own. And it doesn't have a good movement profile. It's basically the average righty 4-seamer in both movement and speed, which is usually a ticket to getting killed. But the actual results are pretty good with it! So that's a reason for optimism and I think it might be explained by his kind of unconventional delivery. His slider shows some signs of being a solid pitch too even if it doesn't have anything remarkable about it. His curveball has been important for grabbing strikes against lefties (like Burke) but is also a pitch he gets hurt on a lot (like Burke). I'm guessing he sticks with it partly because otherwise his whole arsenal would be in the 89-95 range. I'll be curious what Shane looks like after an offseason of rest and time to apply some lessons learned after a first season as an everyday starter whose best pitch is a changeup. But really, none of these guys are very high-ceiling in my view. I'm not really that upset about it. They all have potential to be pretty useful major league starters. You need a lot of those guys in order to survive. The ones with very high ceilings aren't always going to hit them and sometimes those ceilings come crashing down. Every year the Dodgers seem to have 12 MLB-quality starters but sooner or later they're running some bullshit guys out there because they ran out of arms. It comes for every team.

Yeah, that would make some sense even if I think it would actually be an interesting question (in an academic way) whether we think Jacob or one of the two big lefty pitchers will hit the majors first.

Sox: Colson Montgomery, #39 Noah Schultz, #66 Caleb Bonemer, #76 Billy Carlson, #77 Hagen Smith, #79 They rank out the rest of the top 10 as: Braden Montgomery Jaden Fauske Peyton Pallette Tanner McDougal George Wolkow I don't think this is the first list to have Braden's stock dropping...I don't understand that at all, frankly. Here's the Sox blurb: Appreciate the reference to "Gonzalez" who is otherwise un-referenced in the article. Assuming it's Wikelman, but of course he's already pitched in MLB. Probably a copy-paste from preseason but I'm too lazy to check.

Sox bullpen entered tonight 11th best at preventing inherited runners from scoring (but most teams allow a very similar percentage to score so the difference between like 5th best and 5th worst is very small)

Also think if Booser can stay healthy (to be fair, he literally never has which is why he's such a "fresh" arm in his 30s) could bring value in the coming years. He's one of the few actually talented players among the organization's bullpen options

Eisert and Leasure are fine by me. Alexander has been a mighty fine warm body IMO. In general, this game isn't bothering me that much because it's just not that bad of an omen when your young offense scores a bunch of runs and a bunch of old guys blow the lead

This was the warning

Man can you imagine if Chase didn't make that routine error after I pumped up his defense

their turn for soft singles

Thaiss had a bunch of backpicks too, not to mention our pitchers getting some at 2B. Somebody in the dugout is doing their homework on these plays.

Meidroth's error was ultimately pretty consequential lol

So after Alexander, who we got? Or is this Alexander's game now?

This is a tough spot for Venable. How long can you leave Elvis out there? Still need to cover 8 more outs and you don't have a lot of fresh arms.

Elvis was clearly meant to be a starter

Remember when the scouting reports said Meidroth was somewhere between complete butcher and barely adequate for 2B only?