Boy that Peavy deal was a weird one ultimately — had totally forgotten that Frankie Montas was one of the Boston prospects shipped to Chicago as part of it — but it's worth noting that if you cut Detroit out of the three-team swap, it ended up being three low-level lottery ticket prospects for a veteran pitcher with an ERA above 4. And that's probably the best-case scenario for dealing someone like Kluber or Paxton.
But Detroit was involved, and the Sox sent out Jose Iglesias. Iglesias went to the Tigers who sent a competent Avisail Garcia onward to the White Sox, and a then-broken Brayan Villarreal back to the Sox in what appeared to be a bit of a salary dump.
The Dodgers might not have much interest in trading for a SP, Grove is only starting for a few more weeks until Ryan Pepiot is back, and they also have two pretty solid pitching prospects in Bobby Miller and Gavin Stone waiting in the wings at AAA. Those two are getting as close to ready as they'll ever be, so I'd be willing to bet the Dodgers will go with internal options first.
You’re probably right. The Sox lack of expendable premium pitching is going to make any kind of deal for an impact bat really difficult. Unless they are willing to be bold and someone is interested in Sale.
Watched some MLB Network on a plane yesterday, interesting talk between Harold Reynolds and I think Dan O'Dowd about how, nowadays, a lot of players don't develop properly because teams won't leave them in positions where they can learn from failure for any length of time. "Back in the day" teams would have guys in high minors and MLB roles where they would be allowed to struggle and would find their true level eventually. I'd be interested to know if this is still true of "lesser" teams (like the Rays) who end up developing a large number of players, compared to teams like the Sox who seem to be in a perpetual win-now footing. Anyway, the point is with guys like Whitlock and Houck especially, who haven't shown they can succeed as starters, you'd be giving them a far better chance if you didn't suggest that they have five games to figure it out before they pull the plug on you.
They got more than that out of Peavy, as he was under contract the following year too- he made 20 starts and then they traded him to San Francisco for Heath Hembree and Edwin Escobar.
This seems exactly right. We hear over and over about how Houck and Whitlock can’t get guys out a third time through the order, but the team almost never lets them try to work through it. A few years ago, it was almost comical how they would pull Houck at the slightest sign of trouble. One of the worst things about last year was the lost year for these two guys, they were jerked around and we never learned whether they could be counted on as starters, so here we go again.
Well, we don’t really know if his value is at an all time low, though. I agree that I wouldn’t kick in much cash to dump him, but there may be a team to two with pitching coaches who think they can fix Sale.
OK, can we knock off further trade speculation? We’ve already touched on it with your earlier desire to trade Pivetta, and this isn’t he thread to shadow GM in. Start another thread for that if you want.
Shit, I’m not a moderator (neither is the poster who took such offense to your original post) but your post wasn’t offensive in the slightest and fits with the thread.
I mean this is kinda how it works, no? If someone thinks they see something they can fix, they’ll probably kick the tires and see what the asking price is. If it’s amenable, a trade is possible. More likely, everyone sees what we’ve seen over three starts and doesn’t want to give up anything of value for a high priced lottery ticket.
This is exactly right. As has been lamented around here for months now, Sale hasn't pitched a whole lot the last three years. While most of the lament has been suggesting that it means he won't stay healthy going forward, what I think it really means is that it's going to take him some time to fine tune the raw skills back to closer to where he was pre-injury. There will be bumps in the road. The idea is that it will all come together the more reps he gets.
This is a thread to discuss the 2023 starting rotation - what we actually have, pros and cons.
Do we have another such for Sale? Has anyone looked at Savant to see if there's any difference in the quality of his pitches this year?
His 4-seam looks weak as hell to me.. I just watched the first inning though
For what it’s worth, I don’t believe the bolded anymore. I’m sure they have built a deep reservoir of analytics nerds (I’m an analytics nerd so not meant as offensive) but analytics nerds can’t correct the pitching motion. It’s very hard to know what’s going on behind the curtain, but I wonder if Bloom knows any actual baseball people aside from the ones he met at the Sloan conference
Thanks - I'd look myself but Savant and getting work done are just not compatible for me. I go there and an hour will magically disappear from the clock.
This is a more than fair response to my glibness, and I referred explicitly to coaching in my wailing, but I'm thinking specifically in terms of building the team not trying to coax a couple extra wins out of it.
Four of those guys — Sale, Whitlock, Houck and Kluber — throw sinkers at least 20–25% of the time; that's a pitch that's going to get golfed out in a hurry if you miss your spot with it or leave it up. All but Sale are running zone contact rates of 80% or higher (he's at 77.6%); when they throw strikes, they're getting punished for it. All have below-average chase rates, so when they don't throw strikes, they're not getting bites. And Sale and Kluber are both living in dangerous velocity bands, Kluber in particular. Crawford, meanwhile, is the only starter so far with a swinging-strike rate above 13%; everyone else is in the 10–12 range.
You have to wonder if this isn't a coaching issue - there was a stated intent (at some point) not to throw as many balls, resulting in more walks. So pitchers are throwing more in the zone, and that's showing up as HRs?
He's also throwing stuff right down the middle of the plate so while there are lots of swings and misses he's also giving up hard contact because his command is currently non-existent.
I've been able to see a "reason" for almost every decision made this winter. I haven't agreed with all of them, not did I expect all of them to work out.
I'm not really sure how we could have watched the team in spring training, during which Dalbec started at shortstop SIX TIMES, and be surprised that he might play there during the regular season. This wasn't Cora trying to get fired or defy management. We all saw the likelihood of it happening the moment he was the call-up to replace Duvall.
As an emergency defensive swap after a PH appearance, Dalbec already appeared at 2B. I really didn't think he'd start at SS absent a true emergency, or a meaningless late-in-a-lost-season game.
Not built for it or management isn't allowing them to go deeper yet?
I don't expect Kluber or Sale to be getting past 90 pitches all that often given their ages and injury histories, and while I expect Pivetta to do that, he's a better bet to be closing in on 100 pitches by the end of the fourth. It's less about letting them build up and more about the fact that they're not efficient pitchers.
They're not going to get much past 90 pitches if they're getting clobbered early and often.
My point was they've all been kept on short leashes regardless of how they were performing. Crawford, for example, was pulled after 65 pitches while only giving up one run on five hits and six strikeouts. Houck was pulled from his last start after 74 pitches having given up 2 runs on 3 hits and 2 walks while striking out 4. He also had an 8-2 lead so if there's a time to push him another inning, that would have been it. Sale came out of his start in Detroit having thrown 74 pitches while giving up 3 runs on 4 hits, 3 walks, and 7 Ks. He'd also struck out the side in the 5th. He could have come out for the sixth there but didn't.
to present day. I looked on Baseball Savant using their Illustrator to get some visuals on Sale from 2017 to present day. Obviously not much date for 2023 and his injury years. I looked at his release point, pitch usage, velocity, movement, and spin rate.
2019
2019
2019
