Balta1701

We never got all the details on that one but it happened in 2019 like 8 days after Renteria was asked by a reporter how he used analytics in his decision making and responded “fuck you”.

And the same guy both has the final say and hired those people.

But if they don’t do that, batters are skilled to the point that the pitcher will have an ERA of 5 and be discarded for someone who will.

You are blaming the nepotism guy to excuse the guy who hired him.

They hire yes men who don’t give them anything they’d disagree with, and then those yes men take the blame just like you’re doing here.

This is only one half of the modern day arms race though. This is a league where most number 8 hitters will hit a get-me-over pitch out of the park, and guys like Moncada will hit .375 unless you strike them out because they hit the ball so hard. Pitchers who don’t do this don’t stay in the league.

So you agree that your blaming of the analytics department doesn’t hold water. Roger.

Because I’m not going to let this hang…it is amazing how people say it was only the pitchers without paying any attention to how terrible of positions he put them in.

They hired the son of his pitching coach in St Louis. Even you can’t get away with telling me that was totally a coincidence. If you are saying their analytical work is bad, you are blaming Tony LaRussa’s handpicked hire to excuse Toby LaRussa’s decisions.

Instead, you’d see a whole bunch of random and weird to the point of creepy comments about how the team needed “energy” from their new arrival, with no one going so far as to call the previous years’ team low energy.

Just a guy hired by TLR as a nepotism hire.

Not only is there none, but even if someone really hates him in private, the Chicago media probably wouldn’t report it.

Is that still Dave Duncan’s son? A guy who clearly has complete qualifications and was not a nepotism hire?

Unfortunately, the contract situation makes it very likely that any return will be a pure nobody. Only a handful of noncompetitive teams will give a roster spot to this guy for the full year. Those teams are likely very close to the early selections on the waiver wire, so they can just take a shot at getting him for nothing. There is also a good chance he's released later this year if he does struggle. Your only real option is to find a pitcher on someone's roster who is also out of options, as the White Sox could certainly bury another pitcher in that bullpen for a while.

Tyler Danish (yes that one) was added to the Red Sox’s 40 man roster in the spot opened up by Sale, and seems likely to have made the team. https://www.overthemonster.com/platform/amp/2022/4/6/23012728/boston-red-sox-news-chris-sale-injury-tyler-danish-2022-spring-training

So Rodon threw 138 innings in 2018, had basically 2 years off, then hit a brick wall when he was pushed to 130 in 2021. Kopech threw 140 innings also in 2018, had 2 full years off followed by one in the bullpen where he was still underused, and you're thinking this tells you that he's ready for a much bigger innings inflation? It seems like you've made the case that Kopech's arm is potentially even less conditioned than Rodon's was last year.

Random thought, I know it’s too late for this now, but would it have made sense to shuffle the rotation a bit to spread around the guys likely to need bullpen help? Something like Gio, Kopech, Keuchel, Cease, VV?

That was after he threw 463 innings in 2009-2010. And the average fastball is significantly harder than what was thrown at that time. Wainwright was throwing 91-91.6 those 2 years. Want to bet Kopech will be higher?

I have not seen this reported, can you provide a link?

“Originally” as in literally 2 days ago when they signed him?

Ironically, We are in the Cueto thread, and he has a pretty regular history of minor and major injuries the last few years.

1. No they did not need to sit Grandal for poor defense as their backups were worse. However, they could absolutely have been smarter if they had been better coached. For an example, lets imagine that Rodon lets several runners on, including a runner on third. Lets also imagine he's out of gas, his fastball isn't where it was 2 innings beforehand. Let's also imagine Correa is up. Given that Grandal sometimes struggles with blocking balls in the dirt, he is unlikely to call for the slider. This sets up a situation where Correa can guess a fastball is coming, and that fastball will be hittable. The right decision was to bring in someone else to face Correa as Rodon had given everything he could give, his fastball was notably slower on the radar gun, and Grandal wasn't going to want to call a breaking ball. This is a situation where you know your players' strengths and weaknesses and make a decision based on them. 2. Pulling Jimenez for defense is a lot different than pulling Engel, bringing in Cesar to pinch hit for him because of "reasons", and moving Leury to RF. With how bad Cesar was offensively the last 2 months, the latter is a completely bizarre decision. 3. Yes, they actually had plenty of pitchers consistently available. In game 2 where Giolito should have been pulled early, the whole bullpen was rested, in fact you can find my posts in that game thread saying "The one thing we can't do is let Giolito get in trouble and then lose the game, there are too many pitchers available". The only pitcher who shouldn't have been used was Crochet, who was used in mopup duty the night before and was bad enough on back-to-back games that you'd have to be really dumb to bring him into that game early because there's almost no way he'd avoid giving up a run (Narrator: that happened). 4. They also had Lance Lynn available on normal rest for a starter in game 4. Instead of using him, at home, they went to Kopech - 40 hours after he had thrown 45 high stress pitches in game 3, and then once he got out of trouble in one inning, they left him out there for the next inning (Lynn could literally have come in to start a clean inning). Kopech never once threw that many pitches and then threw again on two days rest the whole year, so the decision to leave him out there was just baffling. Even Tony LaRussa said before the game that Kopech was probably the one guy who wasn't available, but Lynn should be ready to go. In each of these cases, the runs were hung on the pitcher (Giolito in game 2, Crochet in game 2, Kimbrel and Bummer in game 2, Rodon in game 4, Kopech in game 4), and all of these situations were just plain stupid decisions.

Yes. Better defensive positioning. No confusing substitutions that make the team worse on defense. Pull people early, not when it’s too late and they’re out of gas. Don’t have your pitchers do things they were really bad at in the regular season or never did during the regular season at all. All coaching things.