Greg Hibbard

For the life of me I cannot figure out why Tim didn’t just stay at first. He made the turn without even really hesitating

What in the heck is going on here

That was hilarious

Home run from the right side tonight.

FINALLY!

My lord Avi is like Mr. BABIP. At it goes, he goes.

First of all, the Sox went 3-4 on west coast road trip against fairly good teams. The west coast is a place where good Sox teams went to die virtually every year for a very long time. Also, regarding the series at Tampa - since when is sweeping a road series anywhere something to just gloss over? Any road sweep is pretty amazing - good or bad team. Tampa isn't exactly Baltimore or KC. Should play better against teams playing out the string? You mean virtually half of the major league teams post all star break every season? Good, because they're going to be playing a lot of games against those teams every single year. This team is by and large not great at hitting right now. As a group they have a .721 OPS since the ASB. It's not just Moncada that's slumping - Avi has been pretty bad the last couple weeks. Every night I look up and down our lineup and it's a sub .250 wasteland. Routinely 7 of 9 guys are in the .215-.248 range. Meanwhile - you're right - Covey is either really good or really bad - and it's often inning by inning. We're so shellshocked into uncertainty with Giolito and Lopez that 8 ER or 0 ER isn't surprising anymore. Even when they are in back to back starts. I don't know. I guess I look at it that despite all the inconsistency this team has found away to scratch out a .500 record over a meaningful sample. I look at 32 games as not some 10 game blip on the radar, but a pretty healthy slice of a season. Even if they are playing a little hotter than they should by a game or two, it means they MAY be a 70-75 win team AS IS, without Kopech and Eloy, and with Moncada basically shitting the bed. Don't forget that even though Abreu has been hotter recently, he's still having one of his worst seasons as a pro.

I seem to recall easier this season some were (kind of mysteriously?) complaining about the Sox losing just too many games this season... So amid this terrible Moncada slump, and with the lineup and pitching staff generally having a hard time looking terribly consistent, the Sox have somehow put together a 32-game stretch of .500 ball. Rodon and Abreu have been the anchors obviously. What’s most interesting here is that just 9 of those 32 games are against the Royals, and we only went 5-4. The Yanks and Indians are in there, and so was a west coast trip through LAA and SEA, two pretty decent teams. We also had a road series at Tampa, a location that always seems to give us fits when we were competitive. So what gives? Is this team improving as a whole to a 75ish win caliber team, or is this just luck, variance or both?

A bunt? After KC pitching gives up three home runs???

Looking at Batting Average alone really doesn't do justice to the type of hitter he is. He's not a one dimensional high average hitter. Much of his value comes from bases on balls, xbh, and speed.

But if we all concede that he’s gotten hosed on probably 20, maybe even close to 30 called strikes that should have been balls, his k rate comes down significantly. Nobody can argue he hasn’t at least gotten “unlucky” with called third strikes, which is something that just doesn’t show up in the stat line. If even 10 at bats change from strikeouts to walks it has a 6 point effect on BA and a 20 point effect on OBP. now imagine a year he was “lucky” in that department

I’m not saying they’re alike. You missed my point. I’m saying that extremely good players have somewhat bad seasons, and extremely bad stretches of seasons.

Some of you need to get a serious grip on reality. 19 starts ago Moncada was at .234 BA with a .733 OPS and is going through a particularly brutal stretch during his rookie season. It’s almost as if some of you have never watched the game of baseball before. God forbid you should have to suffer through something like, I dunno, the 2003 season of Paul Konerko without jumping off of the freaking ship and screaming bloody murder every 15 friggin seconds. Get a damned grip. A 20 game BRUTAL stretch of yes bad play but also VARIANCE in a HIGH VARIANCE game is....normal? Especially for an extremely young major league player. Newsflash: rookies gonna play bad sometimes. Yeesh

How do people feel about Rodon's FIP tho? Is he due for a stat regression at some point?

using terms like "trainwreck" and "awful" to describe Moncada's 2018 season show absolutely no understanding of the game of baseball

His July average being .231 isn't really telling us the whole story. His OPS that month was .749.

I'm not really too well-versed on what makes for a great defensive catcher. Is it pitch-framing, calling a game, holding runners - what metrics are evaluated? It doesn't seem like it's evaluated defensively like other positions. What would make Narvaez better?

It is perfectly acceptable for a pretty talented young Major league player to have a bad, uncharacteristic half-season while he is adjusting to the major leagues. This is essentially what we are talking about here, right? I mean through the first half, he was a very up and down .739 OPS hitter. He was .750 last year. So if we accept the premise that a .743 cumulative OPS would be an acceptable place for him to be at offensively in 2018, which I do, what we are actually left with is this current, 18 game, second half outlier where he is looking completely lost. Can we maybe just suppose this is an 18 game outlier?

I buried the same post at the end of the game thread, but my crude math Narvaez is now .368/.428/.547/.975 since June 1? Can that be correct??? I’ve been mostly writing off this hot streak because he’s typically not a power guy so I would expect any slump to have a severe effect on his OPS. However, the dude is just 26 and has now shown pretty good consistency with average across almost 200 games and 620 PAs, his power seems to be incrementally improving. What do people think the ceiling is here offensively and defensively?

Jesus, Narvaez is hitting .368/.428/.547/.975 since June 1???? Can that be correct???

It’s so funny that Narvaez is Mr. Automatic in this lineup

Moncada needs a day off and some extra bp.

Just put Palka in center. After all, #AuthenticFans remember the #SteveSaxExperiment

This is the same organization that once tried to field Jose Valentin in CF tho

Engel is gonna get 150 more ABs because a potentially sensational defensive play is all anyone in that dugout has left to hold on to this season