southsider2k5

I am not.

Other than Robert, our OF is godawful, and I refuse to pretend otherwise. Even if you want to make a case for a marginal improvement over a young guy, these are deals on 30something players who will be long gone by the time this team is .500 again, let alone when they are good. Literal zero chance of them helping the Sox to winning baseball. Why we should be excited to waste ABs on guys who will be on 16 inch fields somewhere by the time the Sox are good again is beyond me, and I am definitely not about to get excited about it.

Look, the guys who replaced them aren't anymore "major league calibur" than the guys they replaced. They are 4A players at best.

It feels like this meme come to life.

This is crazy considering how many of them aren't rookies.

That is interesting as I really did think this would be a hard contract to agree to with his depressed arb earnings, and his large separation between that and what he could be worth if he is a full time starter without injury problems who hit his ceiling.

I can see why we need a change.

I do see it as a purposeful misrepresentation of the facts at hand, especially with a complete unwillingness to go back and verify and also state it as an absolute fact without knowing. But in this day and age, I guess a lot of people don't really worry about those standards.

Seems pretty obvious to me that there is a difference between even saying this was a "great trade" and "He will be great", but apparently that is just me.

It has to be a HUGE number. I am sure they were already looking at a cut back from what they were going to make anyway just because of the crash in MLB rights, but they are missing some huge majority of their Chicago customers at Comcast right now. They stand a real chance at putting up an Astro's like 0.0 rating this year at some point.

I feel like we need the "they are the same picture" meme with Hahn and Getz.

Add into this the Hoosier Hysteria for Indiana HS basketball and you have it all.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Not going to. Could be. Big, big difference.

I don't know. I think broadcasting games this year might qualify as torture under the Geneva Conventions.

Hagen I think will legitimately be ready in a sooner time frame just because he has a decent history of pitching deep into games in college and an innings base. Dutch I am glad they are pushing back on because he is still going to have to learn how to be a starter in reality. Dude has never had to try to harness his stuff for 6 to 7 innings. It's a learning curve. Granted I am sure he has the stuff and physical stature to hold up, but he still have to get there both physically and mentally.

The first pick is a lottery, so no win total locks that in unfortunately. The best we can hope for is the most chances at winning the lottery, and cross our fingers for some Derrick Rose type stuff, and not some Eddy Curry/Tyson Chandler type stuff.

I can help but thinking most of these algorithms are written with smoothing techniques which have problems with outliers. It is a pretty common issue with statistical modeling. Because models don't have an example of any of an extreme of an outlier as the Sox last season, they assume it can't happen again, but with a little bit more consideration to maybe it could, and will spit out a result that is still probably too optimistic based on what has actually happened with this team in the last season in terms of boots on the ground. This was a 121 loss team, which season over season, has seen a pretty decent outflow of talent. Your example in terms of talent actually isn't a bad comparison to what the Sox are seeing. They are fielding a team that models probably can't really comprehend when compared with all of the other examples the model has to base it's historical analysis on. It wouldn't expect 12 year old on a 17 year old team, just like it wouldn't expect what happened last year to the Sox to happen again, even though on paper, today, this team is worse overall.

I never put my total down, but I am in for 45. Hopefully I am wrong, but here we go.

I know people keep repeating "luck", but after dumping two of the best pitchers in baseball, I don't think our "luck" is going to get any better. It looked like bad baseball, by bad players to me, and I don't see anyone on the roster right now that really is going to change that appreciably. Some guys will be up, but we still lack major league starters at almost every single position on the field, and that only gets worse when the inevitable loss of Luis Robert happens to either trade or injury. We may start to get some interesting players as the season goes on, but it will be fighting wildfires with a garden hose.

Kenneth Grant would be wild. Kid is from Merrillville IN. Saw and met him at conference football games with my local HS.

Do a search

Yeah, and I am pretty sure he was already busted for making stuff up.

I mean if you could actually provide an iota of proof instead of 9 paragraphs of rant, that would be a good place to start.

Doing his job for him.