Jake

Changed his approach so much that he purged the concept of the walk from his mind

After Beckham, Flowers, and Anderson, I won't be buying the glasses as the fix until I get some more compelling evidence

If Hahn gets to the point that he wants to trade Rodon, then you fire Hahn and let the next guy do it. If he can't get the team to at least think it is competing before Rodon becomes a FA, then we need new management.

That was indeed a weird article because it doesn't really include any new information from anyone about his defense other than Collins saying he has improved his work with the pitchers, whatever that entails. If you're going to puff, at least get somebody to say that he's doing X Y and Z. FWIW, I think we kind of screwed the pooch by having him catch fewer games this year than he did last year. This was because of the time-sharing with Zavala, but it has to have been a negative for Collins who has talked in the past about being affected by the heavy catching load. His offense has trailed off a bit since he's taken a larger share of the catching duties as well, suggesting the need for acclimating him to the workload.

Absurd that Kopech hasn't been in MLB for the past few weeks.

Ryan Sweeney comp still holding up reasonably well for Rutherford

Just sign the kid to a long-term deal and call him up

I'm not as high on Madrigal as some others are just because I haven't yet seen that he has a lot of physical talent. There is some mystery about whether he can play SS, and for some reason the Sox aren't trying it yet, but for now I see a 2B who gets very good reviews with the glove. I worry about what will happen when the better-than-eyeballs analytics get their hands on his defense. Maybe he'll be a great defensive 2B, it'll be important for his value that he is. He clearly isn't super strong, but it's hard to tell where he is on that spectrum. He can make contact with the best of them, but that isn't everything. I worry that you could end up with a guy who bats .300 but with such little power that he's still not actually very valuable. Overall, I see his floor as Chris Getz and I'm not sure who his ceiling is but it doesn't strike me as super high. I wasn't against the Sox drafting him because he's relatively low risk. But I'll also say that I was more enthusiastic about Trea Turner as a draft prospect, who ultimately went later in the round than Madrigal did. Of course, I hope I'm wrong!

lol, Sox really plastering the ball right now

This time he did know it was a strike by the time the catcher caught it, he was just badly fooled by the pitch. Still clearly battling two (or more) different thought processes up there

I've yet to hear a great alternative, but the system is surely bad when it punishes teams for making the right baseball decisions (developing players in MLB the moment it is appropriate).

Normally you wouldn't let Covey make his next start but there might be a riot if we called someone other than Kopech up from AAA to do it.

I thought the Yoan looking K was not a product of him reverting to his previous approach but just misreading the pitch. He usually shows some recognition on the close strike 3 calls that there's a chance he's being rung up but he looked utterly surprised by it in this particular AB.

Unpopular opinion: Moncada can play some D

I'd say his ceiling is slightly worse hitting than this and a better job of keeping the ball in front of him behind the plate. Per Baseball Prospectus, this year he ranks: 102 out of 102 in runs from blocking balls (includes passed balls on pitches that didn't literally require a block) 95 out of 102 in runs from framing 36 out of 102 in runs from throwing 102 out of 102 overall catcher defense (just a fraction worse than Willson Contreras) Last year, he was 106 out of 111. Note that the largest component of catcher defense (in terms of how much influence it has over how many runs get scored) per most current research is pitch framing and both FanGraphs and Baseball Reference do not incorporate any framing metrics into WAR.

I think it is worth saying that executive/management experience has long been a very undervalued skillset in baseball front offices and it's a skillset that is probably rarely present alongside baseball scouting talent, given that those are both specialized skills that don't build on each other. Also I would advise being cautious with comparisons to Atlanta since we know they were brazenly cheating for years.

Right now he has been looking a lot like a player who is caught between two different approaches, something like you might expect if he's working on his approach but hasn't quite gotten it all the way there. Seems to me that he's not taking especially aggressive cuts, especially late in the count, but at the same time isn't getting much out of his cut-down swings. And he has had a number of at-bats where he has some pitches where he is overly aggressive (e.g., chasing outside the zone) while also taking some pitches he needs to try to hit. Looks a lot like he's trying to balance multiple things and isn't through that transition just yet.

Britton is having an issue with the spiked fastballs.

Also, Jose is something really special. Best hitter we've gotten to watch since we were a playoff team.

So he is working on it, it sounds like?

I haven't read the prior back and forth on this, but in a 1-run/tie game run expectancy as stated here is not an appropriate framework for deciding whether to bunt. There are a number of situations in which you don't care about the long-run expected number of runs, but instead the probability of scoring one run. That is, you may consciously want to trade away some of your chance at scoring 2+ runs in exchange for a greater chance at scoring just 1, because it may be all you need. I am certain someone else must have already run these numbers this way and maybe they still don't look kindly on bunting. Either way, it's important to consider the game situation and the extent to which you should be caring more about your chances of scoring a bunch of runs or scoring a small number of runs.

Hate that the Yankees have home crowd in our ballpark. I don't get too wound up about attendance, but I really hate the visiting team getting greeted with raucous applause when they hit a go-ahead bomb in extra innings. As for this, are we really sure that Moncada isn't working on anything? We've seen him doing what looks to me like cut down on his two strike swings to make some contact and we've also heard him tell reporters that he understands he needs to quit leaving so many close 2-strike pitches in the hands of the umpire.

I mean while I recognize that it isn't all that high stakes, it's not a decision I'd want to be charged with making. If Leury hadn't gotten hurt, I'd have given some thought to just demoting Engel.

What I am saying is the choice in the case of those guys wasn't to wait until mid-April the next season to get a bonus year of service time, but instead to wait until about June of the next year because they both had about 45 days of service time with the Nats. In other words, you would be deciding to hold them in the minors for ~4 extra months

If you bring up Eloy, there's really no reason to have both Nicky and Palka on the roster. They're both left-handed LF/1B who would be in line to get most of their ABs at DH. There'd be no rhyme or reason for deciding which one plays on which day at DH.