Eminor3rd

Nothin. Haven’t been able to keep up with Korea the past couple years.

Literally anyone as long as the entire org changes too.

Lots of players get hurt, all the time. Good teams figured out you have to invest in dealing with that issue about 15 years ago. It’s part free agency, part player development, but it’s an investment that must be made and maintained. The past three years has been a case study on how to waste money gambling. Every significant move they made, big or small, was a risky proposition — and that’s why they were able to make the moves. Signing famous players as they reached the end of their primes, yes does technically add talent to the team, but when you are unwilling or unable to deal with the downside, you’re just torpedoing yourself. I've been among many who have been lambasted for being a doomsayer and too negative on this board for the past few offseasons, but I’m telling you, this s%*# looked bad AS it was happening. This does not require the benefit of hindsight. This roster has every appearance of having been assembled by someone who does not understand what they’re doing; it has some measure of flash, no substance. And it happened in an organizations that has built the most impressively nuclear-fallout proof echo chamber of coaching and player development anyone has ever seen. It’s just, it’s a train wreck. There no other company in America with so much money on the line, that would allow this to continue for so long. It’s total incompetence.

Yeah 12:10s f*** with all of us

My bad! Had to be at work early

Told you guys

A chronic inability/unwillingness to roster more than four actual starters at any given time.

Agreed, the Sox have spent their money so insanely inefficiently the past few offseasons, that they simply cannot afford a $12m veteran role player. At all.

7s and 10s almost exclusively these days, on guitar. I’m over thirds. Now it’s tens

Doesn’t matter who’s pitching. Cueto? Who cares. I’ll be physically present at this one, so I’ll take responsibility for the thread. This one will be a win. EDIT: Cueto vs. Eduardo Rodriguez

?

That’s gotta be the worst defensive OF config in the league this year.

Just keep chucking sliders out of the zone and we’re good.

It takes a lot of coincidences for the tigers to score 5 runs

Hoping to witness a sweep this weekend. But not the one people will expect from me.

Of those, only Kaz Matsui, Hideki Matsui, and Seiya Suzuki were actually "expected" to be real impact players. Maybe Fukudome as well. People often assume that any player who comes over is the best that Japan has to offer, but it's most often not the case. Aoki and Akiyama are examples of great players who were clearly past their prime and everyone on both sides of the water knew it, Taguchi and Iwamura were examples of players that were "above average" NPB players at the time but were more like top 50-ish players than elite in that league. In other words, Kaz Matsui was certainly a bust, maybe Fukudome was. I think the jury is still out on Seiya. Hideki had a good career. The rest may have been disappointing, but were never really expected to be anything other than average-ish players anyway. It's really difficult not to think of NPB as just another minor league, but the reality is just that there are so many political and developmental differences that you just can't compare the players and opportunities apples to apples with other prospects/international signings, etc. The pitchers tend to get posted at the "right" time much more often than the hitters do, for sure. Which is probably part of your point.

Haven't read the FG article, but: Murakami is a generational talent, but he's a pure slugger and actually less athletics than Matsui was at his age. If the Swallows post him in the next couple years, he has a chance to be a star hitter in MLB. But if he doesn't come over until 29, he may look a lot like Matsui did. Which is fine, but not terribly exciting. The next name to watch for this offseason is Kodai Senga. I'll probably start a thread about him like I usually do, but the TL;DR is that it's the best raw stuff from a posted NPB player since Darvish. Can touch 100 mph, high spin, with three pitches (Fastball, slider, splitter) that should be plus in MLB. The command is NOT a plus, it's passable but can abandon him at times. On average, he is wild in the zone but has been overwhelming to hitters here for a long time. He's been long-sought by MLB teams but the Hawks refuse to post anyone, so he's had to wait until free agency despite having been telling the media he's wanted to be posted for the last four or five years. I think he's the safest bet to be successful in a long time simply because if he can't cut it as a starter, the stuff is so good that he could absolutely fallback into a high-leverage relief role. I think every team is gonna kick the tires and I think he's going to make a lot of money. If he would have been posted when he wanted at 26, he'd be a no-doubt $100mm+ contract. Now he's 30 and has been a bit banged up, but the stuff has generally held and the injuries have been scattered around his body and not elbow-related. Sasaki is the only player in Japan with better raw stuff than Senga, but he's 20 and a phenom and very popular. He'll come over but it won't be for a while. He's also still a prospect. He's already thrown a perfect game, but will get tagged for 5+ sometimes when his mechanics are off. He'll be a thing for MLB fans soon, just not yet. He'd go 1:1 in the draft if he was available. Yoshinobu Yamamoto is also super young and is a thousand times more polished. Mid-90's when he wants to, 4 or 5 good pitches though usually only 3 are on at once. I expect he'll be next in line after Senga.

That pitch right there to Sheets. That’s the season for me.

I should caveat this with, Abreu needs to transition to a 50/50 share of DH and 1B with Vaughn in my scenario. Eloy has no trade value, and thus needs to hit enough to keep his glove out there or needs to go, IMO.

Keep Abreu, keep Vaughn, and go sign a player that relegates Sheets to “depth in Charlotte.” That shouldn’t be very difficult, honestly. Eloy needs time to recover so that he doesn’t reinjure himself. Hopefully that happens over the offseason. If he can’t play the OF without getting hurt, he hasn’t shown enough to be rosterable as a pure DH. He needs to keep getting opportunities in LF until he plays himself out of those or he gets replaced by a better player. The latter scenario might need to happen sooner than we want it. But if it does, that’s fine. Eloy can go back to Charlotte and try to climb the ladder again. If he’s as good as we hoped, then we won’t have any problem getting another shot if he can stay on the field.

If “real” is a roughly replacement level player, then yes. ~110 wRC+ with poor defense is sort of how most of us always pegged him, though, I think.

Super excited to see Trout & Harper versus possibly four of the most talented arms Japan has ever produced: Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Kodai Senga, and the next phenom, Roki Sasaki. I don’t know if Samurai Japan has ever had four 100mph, high spin arms at the same time before.

Better and more exciting than MLB, by far, to me.

I’ve heard rumblings that Jeff Lunhow is thinking about getting back in.

They didn’t, haha