Good discussion in here.
I am equally nervous about player dev. That's not to say Collins is written off to me, just that I've significantly lowered Collins down in my head.
And that's a big shift. We've blamed for years the lack of farm output on drafting long-tail players like Mitchell/Hawkins/Walker that had poor hit grades and never improved.
Well this was our draft of polished college hitters. Collins/Call/Fisher. All good OBP. Good college production.
They've all stumbled at the first big challenge (I recognize it's sort of unfair for Call).
I keep saying it, but I was reading the longenhagen bio of Jimenez, which talked about all the mechanical updates Jimenez made in the past two years to go from raw to possible 70 hit grade.
I just don't know the last time I've ever read that about a sox player. And I don't know if Jimenez did it himself.
If I recall, for years the sox philosophy was let them carry what got them there for as long as they could and then fix it when it's broken. Sure seems like that's the same. Still same guy at top (Bell).
We've heard of all of the changes, but all of them were a bunch of essentially first year guys. Why would we take that risk before the rebuild? We couldn't hire some player dev guys out of Arizona that turned AJ Pollock and Peralta into above average offensive players?
It just seems like for hitters we are relying on them to figure it out on their own. And I hope they can do it.