southsider2k5

Nope. Quite literally they are paying tomorrow for not investing today because they can't "afford" it, yet are still buying a luxury item.

If you want a finance analogy the Sox have a chance to either invest long term, or buy a luxury item on a credit card. The Sox are using their credit card with a 550 credit score, then going to get a payday loan to make it until payday.

Not a chance of this happening in reality.

This is quite literally the point. I am glad you FINALLY got it. When you are 4-5 years from contention, you want guys who fit that window, not guys who will probably be retired at that point.

Is this is a Steven Wilson reference/

That's not radical, that's pretty normal for a decent farm system. That doesn't mean we need to start wheeling them out for old and mediocre middle relievers. Stuff is going to happen, and just like we do now with the last rebuild, the people who think we have too much depth will probably be wrong. s%*# happens, especially with pitchers. If nothing else injuries are going to get quite a few of these guys just because of pure numbers of injuries that happen to pitchers.

Sure, but now you are telling us that the rotation should be good, the bullpen should be good, roster problems are a thing of the past, and our pitching development is going to be fixing all of those problems, and I am supposed to believe that based on what, exactly? This is going to be a mediocre to bad rotation, with a non-present offense. There are plenty of mediocre arms around the system and free agency that we can fill innings with, without wasting futures for them. This is going to be another 100 loss team, and we are supposed to be sinking NOW resources into it? It doesn't add up, especially after all of these problems you are detailing from last year as an excuse, and not an on going reality.

Your contention starts with NONE of these guys making the major league roster, and/or the IL, which seems pretty crazy to me. It also assumes no injury problems in any of the rest of the levels, which is also abjectly unrealistic.

The irony being the best reliever flip he has had so far? A minimum wage guy the Sox drafted and developed themselves. The guys they have traded for? Yeah, not so much.

At least he has a history of doing SOMETHING at the major league level. I don't want him blocking anyone, but he could also fill some ABs as I am sure there will be plenty of failures and roster grinding going on.

This not being a part of the "plan" is quite literally the point. We are grinding up the roster for losing over 100 games again, and giving away future pieces again to do it, making it a realistic proposition that we are giving up pieces which could be actually giving up a piece or two that could be helping a team in the future, like we actually need.

Sox history shows that Sox fans are a highly mobile bunch of fair weather fans. I look at our attendance history and it's massive oscillations over time as proof.

If you STILL don't understand that were a team is starting from, which in this case is very literally 121 losses, is the starting point of how roster building for the current and future seasons should look. Expending future resources for a current season bullpen after a 121 win season is just ridiculous. And again, I will ignore you attempts at insults and whatever else made up stuff you are going to pull in here to distract from you ignoring the main irrefutable point, again.

For someone who likes to talk about people not answering your questions, you literally said nothing here that actually responded to the substance of what was ACTUALLY said. Oh sure, you made up things (again) that weren't actually said, and threw in a few more insults (again), but never actually addressed the actual response.

Literally none of what I said, is accurately reflected here. This entire post is made up for you to create an argument that wasn't there and attempt to knock down. There are plenty of mediocre middle relievers out there who the Sox could populate this roster with, and would not require the movement of their own young talent, nor $5 to $7 million dollars a season (which is your made up number, not mine). The Sox have already brought in back end guys in the million to two million dollar range who will fill innings just as well as a Steven Wilson did last year, and cost us nothing for the future. The results out of the 2025 bullpen literally do not matter. The foundation of this organization is a 121 win team. Any effort to win games in 2025 is inherently wasted, and any resources given up to do it are giving up potential bullets for the timeline where we might actually have a chance to do something. If we want to trade young talent for middle relievers in 4-5 years, because we have a team where the 5th and 6th innings actually matter, do it then, like a normal organization. If the current mantra that we have this amazing group of pitchers whispers from development all of the way up to the major league level is actually true, we should not even need to waste resources trading for these guys in the future, because this amazing development program should be turning them out from guys just like Combs and Fajardo. The theory being not that every guy hits, but if you collect a critical mass of those types of players into your amazing system, you can turn enough of them into major leaguers that the failures don't matter because they are overwhelmed by your successes. We should be in a mass talent collection phase with a focus on guys who will be on a major league roster in 2030, not 2025. In fact in the short Getz era, we have seen the opposite, where it seems to be the guys who we dump who have higher rates of success after leaving the Sox organization versus the ones who we either bring in from the outside, or promote from the inside, are having within the Sox organization. The fact that we are already quickly dumping Getz recent draft picks, and recent trade acquisitions looks like a red flag that already questioning their own work and processes enough to dump these guys for incredibly low ceiling and older middle relievers. Their actions and their words do not flow in the same direction.

And most importantly why are we giving up future pieces that actually fit the type of timeline a 121 win team would be on, for arms that will be dead and buried by the time we could actually use back end type bullpen arms to matter in middle relief?

None of the arms we got are $5 to $7 million arms.

I do pretend to understand that if we wanted cheap mediocre relievers we could just as easily spend non-prospect resources on them in the free agent market instead of giving up on what we supposedly do so well instead. Are you going to pretend that our trades aren't flat out contradicting what our chorus line of press is saying about how great we do at this very activity? Why is the only way we can find any relievers by trading for them with the very pitching prospects we are supposed to be so good at developing?

So we have too much pitching, and not enough pitching, all at the same time. Folks we have Schroedingers bullpen.

I can't help but note that for a system that has such faith in its player development and specifically pitching development, they sure are trading off a lot of young pitchers to get middle aged and very limited ceiling middle aged pitchers to replace them. If this is supposed to be the lodestar of Sox player development, why are we sending future out for guys we should be able to easily replicate in our system? I mean even if we were getting hitters for them, it might be something, but old middle relievers? Make it make sense for me.

A quick search shows the lowest career BABIP against is Phil Niekro at .251 with his HOF knuckleball

He came to the Sox and regressed. HARD. This supposedly new and liberated development team, with the baseball people in charge is sure having problems producing productive baseball players in anything other than something called "process". The whole "revamped" swing thing sounds an awful lot like "best shape of his life" and "healthy by Spring Training" to me.

This is expert trolling. Bravo.

This was about 12 names light. Sigh.

Need Caulfields take here.