“ During the Pittsburgh Trials in 1985, Raines admitted he kept a vial of cocaine in his uniform pocket. Raines slid into bases headfirst so he didn’t break the vial.”
What was the play? He dove for a ball, deflected it and left it for Story to pick up? Would they have gotten the runner had Devers gotten up and grabbed the ball? Did any runners advance more than they would have otherwise? If not, I don't understand the anger.
Dive to his left on a hard hit ball that just deflected off his glove to the LFer - no bases advanced by him laying on the ground. I was more worried that he'd injured the wrist he got plunked on than him "dogging it"
It's fine to be disappointed, but they've significantly overperformed preseason expectations (betting market & unbiased prognostication) in a tax reset year with a fairly significant # of clustered injuries.
I said it before, I'll say it again, I'd pump the breaks in saying that we've "significantly overperformed expectations". This team has rookies about to hit a wall, starters that can't give us five innings and a bullpen that looks spent. A rough September is very possible, and we could end up around .500, especially with our schedule.
Well, the betting market projected a .478 winning % & we currently have a .519 winning percentage.
That's why it's fine to be disappointed. I expected them to win about 84 games (& bet on them to win more than 77.5) so they're about in line with my expectations so far.
To be clear, I don't think our overall injury situation was that bad. Just the timing of it kind of sucked. 4 of our starters missed the beginning of the season & then 4 were out at the same time until pretty recently. If they weren't all missing at the same time, it makes it much easier to absorb those losses.
No, I think that was my guesstimated budget below the 2nd line, but I didn't put much thought into arb estimates, & I think it was fairly conservative.
I think the answers are "probably" & "probably".
Yeah, this is where I'm at. This was, as I understood, supposed to be a development year with the upside of a playoff team. The pitching going to absolute pieces and the defense being a disaster was a risk, but not one that I think anyone could have been certain of. Sale going down? Sure, of course. Houck, Whitlock AND Kluber all going down or being ineffective too? Seems extreme. Filling the rotation out for next year is going to be tough. I don't want them to splurge on a free agent in their 30s, and I think the market for Yamamoto is going to be steep, though they should absolutely be in on him. Rolling with Bello, Kutter, Yamamoto, Houck and Sale, along with some insurance, might be tenable. I don't know.
Turns out I predicted 85 wins. I must have been feeling optimistic.
Re the bolded: no, it absolutely could not easily be something like that. A 1-9 lineup of productive homegrown talent never happens. Never. They were close in 2018. In fact, the strategy you outline sounds a lot like the 2018 team, which, according to Bloom, was totally unsustainable, so, ~shrug emoji.~
Yes. That's exactly what I said & the situation where we had the worst farm system in baseball left over is the exact same situation we are in now.
I'm kind of ambivalent about Yamamoto, but one major thing he's got going for him is that he'd only be in his age-31 season at the end of a 7-year deal, which is massive for a pitcher nowadays.
Yeah, this is the tough one. They got burned by Price and by Sale. But they need starting pitching, and ideally elite starting pitching, and it's hard to acquire it without either paying for it heftily or developing it.
I’ve said repeatedly here that my expectation was that we’d be legitimately in the playoff race at the start of Labor Day weekend. After that it’d be gravy.
How many “out” would be completely out by Labor Day? I felt like 3.5 max at the end of August
One question about that 80 M. How much of that do you want to allocate to extentions? I mean just in the past 4-6 weeks we've been calling for Bello, Casas, Duran, Verdugo and even Turner to be extended. Who do we lock in and how much pitching might the rest buy? Right now the team needs at the very least a #1 and/or a #2 type. Those aren't coming cheap.
Normally I wouldn't consider 6.5 insurmountable, but the way they got there over the last 5 games makes me believe it is. It just feels like the organization prioritized next year's bullpen health so much that they totally gave up on this season over the last week. The first Dodgers game where they left a clearly laboring and ineffective Pivetta for an extra inning after blowing the lead, the third Dodgers game where they let Murphy throw 90 non competitive pitches, the absolute disaster on Monday (when they had the lead and you could already see Barraclough blowing it before the 3rd batter of the 6th inning came up).... it just screams "WE GIVE UP" to me.
I mean that was not intentional by the FO...
View: https://twitter.com/IanMBrowne/status/1696683761838993437
It wasn't intentional, but if your plan is to go with a three-man rotation for a month and then rely on starters coming off long injury stints to go deep into games (particularly ones who have been inconsistent all season to begin with), then it is negligent.
It probably depends on what players are willing to sign extensions at amounts you're willing to pay. Like I don't want a $30m extension budget & then find out that Casas & Bello won't take them so I just give them to Duran & Crawford. But it's definitely a balance & definitely something they 100% should be exploring. I should do some real math sometime soon so we can do a deeper dive into what the budget really looks like & what their options really are.
Yeah, I'm gonna need you to pull the stick out of your ass. He stays on the ground for an extra five or ten seconds or so. That's not disrespecting the game. Disrespecting the game is when you don't even bother to try, throw games, or generally don't give a fuck about anything but your paycheck.
Yeah, if I’m being generous I figure 3-4 games back in the loss column cuts it for me.
Five months ago many of us, myself included, worried that our starting rotation was not nearly good enough.
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Agree completely. I liked what I saw from Houck pre-injury and am excited to see if he can take that next step. Without the information the Sox gathered this year on the young players, it would have been much more difficult moving forward.
The game has been full of cheaters over the years. My point was simply that I've never seen anybody simply lie down in the middle of a play before, other than due to injury. I believe that is incredibly disrespectful to the game.
At the trade deadline, I was really hoping they'd pick up Lance Lynn. It wouldn't have cost anybody we care about. The White Sox were having a fire sale.
I totally hear you, and that's precisely why my personal expectation was not "make the playoffs" or "win the AL". I've said here all season that you gotta let the younger guys pitch, you gotta play Cassas, etc.
But we didn’t count on only those guys. We had a rotation of Sale, Kluber, Paxton, Bello, Whitlock, Pivetta, Houck and Crawford, with two additional SP/long reliever-types on the 40-man. That’s adequate, on paper.
Thanks for the response and I should take a sec to say that the question wasn't necessarily posed directly to you. It was more of a general thought put out there using the $80 M as a jumping off point as that money is going to have to be spread around a bit. Fortunately there aren't a lot of holes to fill. We have 4 OFs under contract and every IF position is covered. IMO, that 5th OF slot and 2B need to be improved. Perhaps one, the other or both could come in the form of a trade. I know there are high hopes for Rafaela, but I feel one of the two needs to be a significant upgrade and that's in addition to extending at least two guys and looking to beef up perhaps two rotation spots.
But it hasn’t been adequate. I mean, look at the rotation, it’s averaging under 5 innings a start this season.
The game is not played on paper. All of those guys came into the year with injury concerns, performance concerns, or both. It's Bloom's way of trying to piecemeal the rotation together and this is what you get. Go out and spend real money on starting pitching to put at the top of the rotation.
