Smiling Joe Hesketh said:
But the problem of just saying "Well those aren't Nick's ideas" is that Ncik does zero critical thinking on any of those idea. Trade X for Harvey? Why would either team do that? He got a lot of stuff that was just flinging shit against a wall and presented it to us in that form instead of trying to provide context/insight/clarification on any of it.
In short and as usual, it was completely useless garbage.
SJH is correct. People give reporters shitty ideas all of the time, a big part of their job is to separate the crap from the good stuff (which I know you know, E5). I mean if Cafardo is going to just publish a bunch of things his friends say, what's the point of having him write? Skip the middle man, title the column "Shit Scouts Say" and be done with it.
Cafardo is supposed to be their national baseball writer and if a scout says, "Hey maybe the Sox should trade Xander to the Mets for Matt Harvey" and not really investigate what that would mean to Boston AND the Mets is just lazy writing. And to couch it with a "A scout friend of mine says" or "Just an idea!" is worthless. Because you know what, if you go down that road it might be an interesting story. How many position players are traded straight up for pitchers? How many young position players are traded straight up for young pitchers? We know the Mets have a pretty good rotation and might be able to withstand the loss of Harvey, but how about the Sox are the guys in the minors ready to take Xander's spot? Would they be as good or better? Does it matter? Maybe it doesn't, the Red Sox have won three World Series with three different shortstops who have been good but no one would say they were elite. The last elite shortstop was Garciaparra and they didn't win shit with him (though not his fault).
Like most Cafardo thoughts, there is a kernel of a good story there but he never brings it out.
Same thing with the Chapman thing. Are the Sox looking for a closer? What would they give up for him? It's probably going to be a lot, is it worth it? And the Price thing, holy shit you can write 20 inches on him potentially signing here and why he won't: him and David Ortiz apparently hate each other. You don't even have to use new fangled numbers, just write about intangibles and clubhouse bullshit and crap like that. I mean, it would be a terrible story, but at least it's an effort.
But the Lee Mazzilli thing was useless. Fuck that dude.