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I personally do have a sense of urgency to move Alexei. I know that I'll be sad when I realize we've taken his defense for granted, but he's never going to be more valuable than he is this year, he's likely to start losing a step pretty soon, and if this crop of prospects is going to yield anything, it's going to have to net us a MI or two. I'm not thrilled with the AAA crop necessarily, but we've gotta see if Semien or Sanchez can play SS because we need to acquire someone else if they can't. He may defy time, but Alexei isn't likely to be an above average contributor in a few years.

QUOTE (Chilihead90 @ Jun 30, 2014 -> 01:16 AM) I can not stand mediocrity. I know we all went over this topic last season around this time as well, but I would rather this team tank the rest of the way, or dominate the rest of the way. I don't want to see a midround draft pick next June. I'd like to see the team take a substantial step for ward this year so that I can go into the offseason feeling confident about the move that were made and looking forward to adding more talent for 2015. This represents a much more likely road to success than two or three consecutive 90-100 loss seasons all of a sudden turning into a 90-100 wins one year.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Jun 28, 2014 -> 07:33 PM) No, it's that. There is always failure in the pen. It's when it happens over time and nobody is effective is the only time that it comes into play. I've never heard an individual player use it as an excuse when he pitched poorly. you only see it when the entire pen is ineffective and no one has that role. It's not an excuse for failure individually as frequently you have players moved in an out. It's just that when you have effective bullpens they need to have confidence in their role. When everyone is pitching poorly there is no confidence anywhere. Do you have confidence and go pitch well or do you have to pitch well before you have confidence. There is a little of both to make an effective pitcher and an effective staff. I haven't heard the players say it either, but it comes up around here constantly NOT as a byproduct (as you described), but as some sort of solution. Such as caulfield's post that spawned my original tantrum: QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Jun 28, 2014 -> 09:46 AM) We're on our fourth closer of the season already, essentially. Jones, Lindstrom, Belisario and now ??? (Guerra/Petricka). If you go with the "hot hand," how many blown saves do they get to prove they're not the hot hand? There's just no way that this strategy, with the talent we have remaining in our pen (or lack thereof), is going to yield anything close to an 80-85% save conversion rate. Who would even be the "hot hand" now? Petricka? Putnam? Guerra? They each have their own unique set of pro's and con's. The ONLY time the pen was working well was when Putnam knew he was the 7th inning guy, Belisario 8th and Lindstrom 9th. If you keep changing their roles every night, it just won't work very effectively. Bullpens need to have consistency and established roles...defined expectations. The solution to our bullpen issues is to have better players, not to find a mystical order in which to line our current players up.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Jun 28, 2014 -> 06:00 PM) You will only see this when the bullpen is ineffective. An effective bullpen will have the defined roles. With the way they are pitching now it doesn't matter what you do. Right, because they're getting people out. When they fail though, "well I need a defined role" isn't an excuse. That's my point. You can't have a defined role when you can't be relied upon.

QUOTE (GreenSox @ Jun 28, 2014 -> 04:15 PM) I think Ventura charted it out well: Daryl Van Schouwen @CST_soxvan · 6h Relivers like having defined roles. "I'm sure they do,'' Ventura said. 'But the role is when you come in get some outs. It's pretty simple.' Boom

Yeah, I guess I just expect more out of them mentally. I'm not saying it's easy, but that's why they make so much money. If they can't stay mentally prepared because they've sucked so much as a group that their roles are in flux, it's a knock on them, not on the manager.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Jun 28, 2014 -> 04:11 PM) Yes, they have a greater chance to injure their arms. They are not like bench players who know they will pinch hit if a lefty comes in (although that is defined as well). Pitchers in the pen will not be as effective if they aren't mentally prepared to go in. Then they should be mentally prepared to go in.

QUOTE (GreenSox @ Jun 28, 2014 -> 04:00 PM) I'm no expert, but I always thought that to the SABRE guys, " a run is a run" no matter when it comes. I think you do need your best reliever, and certainly the one able to get the K, when you have runners on in late innings. You don't need your best for a clean 9th. That said, I also believe (and the SABRE guys disagree) that there is more pressure in the 9th and that some pitchers simply spit the bit in the 9th Run sequencing is crucial for maximizing productivity and thus maximizing wins. When you hear guys say "a run is a run," they're referring to the fact that stats that are the product of run sequencing isn't predictable, so if you're trying to rate a guy based on how many runs he's likely to produce, you want to treat it like "a run is a run" because we can't expect previous sequencing to repeat itself. That's one of the reasons SABR guys don't like RBI.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Jun 28, 2014 -> 04:05 PM) but that's not what they do. They start with the stretching and therband work well before they begin to throw other wise no one would be ready for over an inning once they are called. It's not like they do nothing until they call to the pen. Good, they're professional athletes. They should be ready to play during games, just like other bench players. My point is it isn't like they blow their arms throwing to prepare.

QUOTE (The Ultimate Champion @ Jun 28, 2014 -> 01:47 PM) When your role is "pitcher" and you are doing it for fun because you want to and you are unpaid regardless of performance, and when you have really no pressure and play in an environment where stats don't matter... it's very different. I need a routine to get my ass out bed in the morning and start the day. I think so do most people. You also need a role pretty much anywhere, and if your "role" is more of a jack-of-all-trades type or something where you do a lot of different things and make different types of decisions, you at least need to be able to identify what your strengths and weaknesses are so you know what you can or should do and what ou should have someone else do. It's not realistic to be able to plan every single inning of every single day out for a RP. If "be ready to pitch between 8 and 10 on game days" is too much for someone to handle, they don't belong in the major leagues. If children can do it for fun, the world's best adults should be able to do it for millions of dollars.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Jun 28, 2014 -> 11:15 AM) whether you think it or not it's reality. There is a big difference as to when to pitch. In the ninth there is no safety net, you pitch poorly the team loses. If you pitch in the 8th there is always a chance you can come back with offense. Picture if you worked for an insurance company and you have auto clients. You mess up ona couple of bad policies and you lose a few thousand dollars. Now let's say you handle flood insurance in a coastal region and messed up the re-insurance when Katirna hit. Same job different pressure. Pitchers also like defined role for the comfort and confidence. All players need this as it's a game of dealing with failures. when you are in a comfort zone it's easier to deal with these failures. Remember when Frank Thomas was blasted because he didn't want to screw up is pregame routine and the Sox wanted to change it to allow fans into batting practice early? All baseball players do this and need this. whether you agree or not, this is the mentality of the MLB player. Now some rare ones are mentality strong enough not to deal with it. However, nearly all of them need this routine to be comfortable. How do you know this? It's an excuse. None of us "needed" this in little league, High School, or American Legion when I played. We all did just fine.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Jun 28, 2014 -> 11:19 AM) It is unreasonable to need to be prepared for an unknown every night. When do you start to warm up. Does everyone in the pen start warming up in the sixth inning? That would really wear everyone out pretty quickly in the season. No, you warm up when they call to the bullpen and ask you to warm up.

QUOTE (The Ultimate Champion @ Jun 28, 2014 -> 11:32 AM) I think it's more of a mental/preparedness thing. When you have an idea when you will be coming in you are more "ready" than you would be otherwise. I think it's a comfort thing. Also the lack of established roles often leads to having to work multiple innings one day, a single batter the next, one inning here, two guys there, etc. and that can create an odd work/rest habit for a pitcher. Hawk always talks about how everyone needs a routine, and really that's true in life in general. Re: the inning stuff, it's not really an "inning" thing as much as a situational thing. Managers don't necessarily go to their closer in the 9th, they go to their closer in the ninth if they are winning, or maybe late in the 8th if they are winning, or maybe in the 11th after they've taken the lead, or top of the ninth with a tie playing at home sometimes, etc. A closer closes out games, a setup man deals with generally higher leverage situations, whether it is coming in for the 8th to start a clean inning and bridge to the closer or coming in with 1 out in the 7th to get the big double play or whatever, just basically dealing with men on. And so on. Players can read the course/flow of the game and can start to see when they will need to appear. If you are a good SU guy on a team with another good SU guy and you pitched last night, and your starter definitely looks like he is going 7, then you pretty much know you aren't getting in unless it is a catastrophy. Of course the other side of that is if every single day is a catastrophy, and you're spending a lot of time losing and behind on the scoreboard, regardless of inning, you can't really establish roles anyway. And now we seem to be in this spot, and it kind of becomes exactly like you say, where either you come in and get outs or you probably get released, sent back down to the minors, etc. Generally there isn't much you can do with a s*** bullpen. One thing you definitely CAN do however is give trust to the guys who have earned it. Robin's lack of trust in Putnam this year has pissed me off and is absolutely stupid. Let him prove he can't get the lefty out, let him prove he walked the guy because he's lost it, etc. The f***ing guy has earned it. Yeah, so be prepared to come in any time between the 6th and 9th. As long as that is the expectation, that is really not at all an unreasonable request. Be prepared to get dudes out tonight when the starter needs help.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 28, 2014 -> 11:34 AM) How well would you do if your boss walked in tomorrow and told you that you were doing someone else's job? Happens every day. I work in minor league baseball -- we pull tarp, we take tickets, we hand out programs, then turn around and meet with vendors and clients, do media buys, and show up at charity events. And, in the case of a reliever, my whole point is that it ISN'T really someone else's job. The job is to pitch for a short stint, and the goal is to not allow runs. It's the same job in slightly different situations. It would be like if you were a waiter at the bar area, and someone asked you to be the waiter for the outside porch one day. You'd do just fine.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Jun 28, 2014 -> 09:46 AM) We're on our fourth closer of the season already, essentially. Jones, Lindstrom, Belisario and now ??? (Guerra/Petricka). If you go with the "hot hand," how many blown saves do they get to prove they're not the hot hand? There's just no way that this strategy, with the talent we have remaining in our pen (or lack thereof), is going to yield anything close to an 80-85% save conversion rate. Who would even be the "hot hand" now? Petricka? Putnam? Guerra? They each have their own unique set of pro's and con's. The ONLY time the pen was working well was when Putnam knew he was the 7th inning guy, Belisario 8th and Lindstrom 9th. If you keep changing their roles every night, it just won't work very effectively. Bullpens need to have consistency and established roles...defined expectations. Lol, and that's worked SO well so far. Also, a tangent point, I really hate how the whole "defined roles are the only way anyone can perform" adage is treated like some law of physics. Why do we accept that these guys need to be coddled and handed excuses? Your name is called -- get guys out! That's it! Quit being a weiner and do your goddamn job. The closer is the only guy who really has a predictable timetable anyway. Every other reliever could be called on at any time from the 6th to the end of the game depending upon matchups and how deep the starter goes. The "setup guy" probably gets the 8th inning in maybe 50% of the games, and that's only if he's the right handedness. It's all a bunch of agent crap, IMO. RPs are supposed to go in and get batters out. Don't allow runs somewhere between 8:30 and 10:00 at night. Doesn't matter what inning it's in, and if you're so delicate that you can only perform if you can pinpoint the exact moment that you'll get your ten minutes of work in, then go back to the Bush League.

This team.

Belisario gives up another homer; Robin Ventura should be fired.

QUOTE (IowaSoxFan @ Jun 27, 2014 -> 04:03 PM) Thats exactly the point. You don't acquire assets by trading off spare parts. Thats great, you can have two really good pitchers and end up in the cellar every year. Yes some bust, most don't meet their ceilings which is why you need to get multiple prospects back to compensate for the risk that you take in dealing an established quality big league player. Give up on the rebuild? More like finish what was started. Last season was a good first step, but with the current make-up of the roster and the lack of impact prospects at positions of need in the farm system mean that we need to make more moves that can help re-shape the roster into being a contender in the near term. 2016 should be the target year to push the chips into making a run, Abreu gets expensive that season and it will give us three more years of the Sale/Abreu combo. I think the Rays depth was certainly overrated then and with Rodon, the long term impact of dealing Q should be mitigated. If 2016 is your year, you need Quintana more than a couple guys that are 2-4 years from making an impact. This only works if all the prospects develop into exactly what you want in exactly the amount of time you want them to. Which will never happen. The guy you trade is Alexei. He's 32. Good now, not that likely to be good in two years.

QUOTE (lasttriptotulsa @ Jun 27, 2014 -> 04:05 PM) And the answer at this point is who knows? Abreu hasn't played half a season yet and Rizzo's only been good for half a season. They're both fairly young and both Chicago teams should feel pretty good about their 1B situations. QFT

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ Jun 27, 2014 -> 03:56 PM) Con somebody message me when this thread resumes being about draft picks??? Lol no. I imagine a guy sitting at an important business meeting, negotiating commissions for a huge corporate merger. This deal could salvage dozens of jobs and allow the partners a chance to recoup a large fraction of the profits they agreed to forego in last year's AOL/Time-Warner buyout, in order to ensure that the vision of their product wasn't bastardized. Unfortunately, venture funding dried up after a few deadlines were missed, and suddenly a loan had to be secured to meet payroll over the last three months. It all looks good but there's a tension in the room, borne of the desperation that results from being at the proverbial "one yard line" with so much at stake. Suddenly, a vibration from a smartphone in a pocket. What's this? A notification. A new post has been made to a subscribed thread on Soxtalk.com. Ok, whatever, no big deal, I'm sure it's just anoth-- wait. what? The DRAFT PICK THREAD? "Gentlemen I- I'm sorry but I need to go look into something," says the ragged, sleep-addled man."It's just, uh, well we can resume this conversation tomorrow, yes?" Ignoring the poorly concealed frustration of the businessmen in the conference room, the man hastily packs his briefcase and exits the room with a smile. The drive home is hazy; the cat sneaks outside via the front door, left carelessly ajar upon the man's entrance. Laptop opened. Bookmark clicked. PHT. Draft Pick Thread. *scroll wheel* *scroll wheel* "Con somebody message me when this thread resumes being about draft picks???"

QUOTE (IowaSoxFan @ Jun 27, 2014 -> 12:39 PM) Shields is better but he was acquired with two years of control while Q would offer at least 6. You are wasting the years of controllable pieces now and not making the moves to strengthen the roster now only pushes that window in which you can contend back further. I would not trade Q for a Garza package either, but remember that it was for a half season rental with no chance to receive a compensation pick when he left, the point of the Garza deal is that the return was high for the amount of service/expected production that the Rangers received in return. Yes Q is what you want a prospect to turn into, but holding your cards doesn't improve your hand. There are no real options in the system to step into the lineup at C or OF over the next few years. The Sox have struggled to attract quality players in FA over the last 30 years and need to get more talent on the roster somehow. Standing pat with the roster the way it is constructed is what is indefensible. Wasting the years that you have Sale and Abreu under contract. You have to trade valuable assets to get valuable assets in return. Sure we can dump some of the players that are struggling, but they will not bring back much of anything and their replacements are likely worse than they are. RH needs to target teams with a surplus at a position of need, like NYM and Atl at C, and use his assets to help make a deal that makes sense. The Sox as constructed now are basically the Mariners of the last decade, one offensive superstar, a bunch of role players, the best pitcher in the league, a solid two, and some hot garbage. Seattle has struggled to attract FA's the same way the Sox have, and to avoid ending up where the Mariners are now, RH should take action now. So you're ready to give up on this rebuild after three months? And the solution is a second rebuild? The Dayton Moore Rebuild™, where a bunch of superhuman prospect classmates all show up to save the day at the exact same time like a Civil War-era cavalry charge, is a fictional ideal. It exists only in dreams. Most of them bust, and most of the rest don't reach their theoretical maximum ceiling, ending up as decent players instead of studs. We must acquire assets that can contribute for several years, lock them up, keep them healthy, and continue to add things to the foundation we have created. If a 25-year old 3-4 fWAR starter with six years of below-market control is NOT a foundational piece, then really, NOTHING is. Also, when the Rays dealt Shields, they were dealing from a position of tremendous depth. Pitching is our biggest weakness at the moment. What would we trade him for? Pitching?

QUOTE (The Ultimate Champion @ Jun 27, 2014 -> 01:11 PM) I will rate your profile 5 stars, and also Dick Allen's profile 5 stars. Edit: I also rated wite's profile 5 stars out of pure sarcasm and St. Roostifer 5 stars because I forgot to do that yesterday. Did you know EMinor that Wite's 4 star rating was higher than either mine or yours, or DA's or Roostifers? That is terrible. I can't believe that. Good god. 3 stars is the badge of one who polarizes, lol. I'm okay with being loved AND hated.

QUOTE (The Ultimate Champion @ Jun 27, 2014 -> 11:54 AM) YES. See, this is why you are one of my favorite posters here, because although we still disagree on some things, you get the big picture. I'm not on the stats side of things, and I'll always be an "eyes" guy first and foremost, but I like it a lot when "stats" people actually get it. That's because what we seek isn't "stats" or "eyes" -- these are merely mediums. What we seek is THE TRUTH

QUOTE (IowaSoxFan @ Jun 27, 2014 -> 11:13 AM) Kinda like the Shields trade? That was pretty far-fetched until it actually happened too. The return the Cubs got for a half of a season of Garza? That was out there as well. The most far-out deal is the rumored package that the Cubs are attempting to acquire from the Jays for Samardjzia. Given Q's ability and contract, he should pull in a similar deal. Shields is better than Quintana, and perceived to be MUCH better than Quintana. I would say that is not a realistic return for Quintana. And I wouldn't trade Quintana for the Garza package, which is kind of the major point. Quintana is, essentially, EXACTLY what you hope that one guy in a prospect package turns into. A solidly above average contributor who is young and controllable and open to signing a team-friendly extension, which Quintana has already done. He is the definition of a building block. The chance that we'd end up with multiple guys like that out of a realistic trade package is like 1%, and if you throw in the fact that it pushes the contention window far enough into the future that you will be wasting good years of the other controllable pieces we have now, you have what I think is a completely indefensible trade. It would be cutting off the nose to spite the face. It would be like selling a box of sandwiches for a loaf of bread and some lunchmeat with the idea that if you can come across some condiments down the road, you might end up with a few more sandwiches.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 27, 2014 -> 10:06 AM) And if Abreu has anywhere near that kind of impact, it will be impressive. Which, as your original point, I also support wholeheartedly.