bmags

And yet Paxton's strikeout % did not see declines that correspond to these metrics, he still struck out nearly 29% of his batters. In 2016 that was 22%. You can be worried that paxton will not stay healthy, because he probably will not stay healthy. If he was "topping out" at 94 in mid december after recovering I am not worried about that at all.

He was declared a FA today I believe

He’s a mid 90s pitcher. He was low 90s last year. We weren’t at session but I doubt this means what you jump to thinking it does.

Not sure but I remember the Mariners literally drafted a player out of MIT to move them into the scouting dept.

Season start's tonight.

What?

I'm not ignoring it. These things take time. Per your bolded, let's be clear about how this goes. The billionaire owners weren't plucking people out of finance and ivy league business schools and putting them in president and GM roles. Luhnow is probably the closest to a story like that and he was put in charge of scouting. They started getting hired into the analytics and ops positions, were successful at showing these competitive advantages, and then got hired into those roles. Then they hired people who they thought could do the new strategies. Then billionaire owners hired people out of the successful front offices to lead their front offices. So now we have the new breed of former players who are fluent in player development and use of data, and are now being targeted as the group to move into front office and management roles. My contention is this is not going to stop. Is there a president that wasn't a former GM for years? There is going to be a lag. But instead of GMs going to people like Elias and Girsch, you have people like Fuld and Young making their way in, and in a different direction, you have someone like Ng. Is she an u of c analytics hire, or an example of someone whose been around the game for a long time getting a shot.

@Y2Jimmy0's latest tweet helped me find out that they do not have the same rep. I was wondering if Sanchez was a favor of sorts.

This is such silly garbage. First your point is that these new GMs are some sort of unicorns because they are well educated, as if there isn't a plethora of baseball pipelines from top schools like Vandy, Stanford, Duke and Notre Dame, and many across smaller programs like Tulane, ivys, and more. But then its that not all baseball players want to be GMs. It's weird how so many former players are willing to sign on to become coaches, starting out in minor league cities driving a bus, being away from their families for 6 figure salaries after making millions - but they wouldn't be able to find baseball players willing to go to the front office in the same cities they've played, and getting paid more. Thank god we have the finance/consulting pipeline. Two industries that are very well known for handling criticism with class.

I'm very excited for cespedes but I have to say that mlb pipelines international rankings mean less than nothing to me.

So is Vanderbilt. I wonder if they get any players to MLB.

Cool I bet you are wrong. And stanford isn't ivy league.

There wasn't an either/or there. We could have participated in last years class, they for some reason were not successful at getting the top tier talent out of it, though it turned out they found some interesting players that weren't well represented in top 30 lists.

I didn't say they were. These aren't the first smart baseball players in history. The new front office crop are players that retired and learned modern baseball strategies in a variety of different positions and now are the leads for manager and front office roles. And I think that is a good thing instead of teams pulling from consulting and finance industries. And I'd much rather it than agents moving into f.o. roles.

Maybe there is room for nuance in this world. Not on this board though.

I'm sorry does saying "players" indicate idiots?

It may have been a necessary transition, but I'm glad it's now swinging back to the players developing into front office.

just fyi only mods/admins can see this forum in winter months.

I swear to god Soler is going to have a nelson cruz career where teams finally just move him to DH but he keeps hitting 50 bombs a year until he's 40.

Exactly. And there have been quite a few good Cuban players that have not signed with Sox, obviously. But I do think it means something that he stood on the table for Robert, Abreu and we did not for Yasmany Tomas.

Really hope he signs with us so we can try to make some tortured attempt at naming him RC Colas

Continue to think that what people think dombrowski is, vs the things he actually does has a big schizm. DD is 'old school', yet now hires as GM a young, unproven guy who is known for his application of modern analytics into the clubhouse? Also - gotta be pretty weird for Girardi to have this guy suddenly become your boss after being somewhat of just an assistant coach.

I wonder if they have the same rep.

He doesn't really mention anything except its unlikely he signs this year with sox due to commitments, but also all teams are full-up, so it's likely he waits a year.

I'm curious how this stuff happens. Do we think the sox actually finalized the handshake agreement recently, or do we think people knew he was going there but didn't want to be the first to report it.