Jake

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.

I'm not a huge fan of the move but if the Sox don't rule out the possibility of his returning to starting it makes some sense. The general benefit of moving a guy like this to the pen is you don't really make him work through the struggles anymore. The Sox have stated previously that they felt he was unable to turn around a bad start once it went bad. From a developmental perspective, if he too frequently gets out of whack with no ability to correct that same outing, it makes sense to put him in a role where you can painlessly pull him as soon as you see it's one of those days. You can think of it like this: Practicing the right things will make you better, but practicing the wrong things makes you worse. The starting role may have been pushing him into endless repetitions of bad motions, bad thought processes, etc. You can nip that in the bud out of the pen. That said, he still has a starter's repertoire so you might want to keep him on deck for some starts if he's doing well and the opportunity presents itself, sort of like the Chris Volstad role.

I think this is a way to tell Cordell that they're still easing him back into his proper level of play while the Sox are likely more motivated by how badly he played at AAA earlier this year. I do fully expect that if he crushes the ball for a week or two they'll find a spot for him in AAA. Coming into the season he looked like a MLB guy, but he clearly took his demotion at that time about as well as Matt Davidson took his first missed cut with the Sox.

Of course Moncada has a .770 home / .700 away split in MLB, so maybe AAA is informative after all! Not to mention a guy going from an .820 AAA OPS to a .750 OPS (in 2017) or .730 OPS (total) in MLB is hardly evidence of a guy morphing into a new player when advancing a level. At any rate, I don't think it's too controversial to say that Eloy's bat is better prepared at 20 games into his AAA career than Yoan's was. Eloy played a considerably higher number of games at the A and AA levels than Yoan prior to getting to where he is now. Eloy also has succeeded in a different way than Yoan in that he's never struggled to make contact which is a good indicator that he is not likely to go into a death spiral if promoted too aggressively. The question isn't whether Eloy must be promoted today, but whether what we've seen is fairly convincing that he's ready.