unless the White Sox whiff on every free agent I don’t see why they would do this asJD can just opt out again. JD will most likely add the White Sox to his no trade list to make this even more difficult. I hate to say it but it’s looking more and more like a Mookie trade
Yeah. This does not mean JD reports to Fort Myers.
Steadily increasing production from ages 22-26 suggests an imminent collapse at age 27?
My mind has a hard time accepting that compounding past mistakes with more mistakes, (trading Mookie at a discount) makes things better.
Ruth only had 789 PA in his first 4 season batting with the Red Sox (5.4 WAR) and in seasons 1914-15, 1918-19 he compiled 5.2 WAR as a pitcher while he got 15.3 WAR in 1916-17. Yeah, it's a slow start but he got almost 70% of his plate appearances in his final two seasons with the Sox. It's hard to put up big numbers when you don't get the at bats or innings pitched to do it.
he's making 20m a year and has basically averaged 5 war a year over the last 5 years and is just now entering his prime, even if his numbers come back to earth and he's only the player he was in 2014-2018 it's still a good contract, if 2019 was for real then it's a steal
Sure, and we can speculate that as a full-time hitter his age 22-26 seasons probably would have been amazing. But just even discussing Mookie as in the mix with Williams and Ruth says enough.
No, I agree "collapse" was an overstatement, but you could make a pretty good case that Xander--an All-Star at his peak and healthy, with a fabulously team-friendly contract--will never be more valuable than he is now, and that trading him (for the right return, which would have to be extremely high) would be exactly the kind of bold move that the Sox need out of Bloom.
No, at 27 he's in the middle of it, and maybe even a little to the far side of it, according to every rigorous analysis of aging curves I've seen.
This is what I would do if I ran the team.
I'm afraid you're probably right. He'll be a Phillie, if I had to guess.
I'm have little doubt that that's one of the potential strategies within whatever his overall plan is. Taking ownership at face value about trying to get below some or all of the tax threshholds sooner rather than later, I'm resigned to some changes that I wish didn't happen. But I'm sort of excited to see how a guy who seems like he is built for this role executes it.
A first baseman, a second baseman, probably two starting pitchers, relief help and possibly an outfielder ... and they're going to stay in budget
Ah I see your point. But it only makes sense if we are either punting on the next few years or we get back someone similar, e.g. another Xander. Otherwise he's exactly what we need, and we have no replacement.
Bogaerts is one of the leaders in the clubhouse. Trading him would dramatically affect team chemistry.
It's a business. Someone tried to explain this to Brandon Arroyo before he signed a team-friendly deal.
Less about getting someone but keeping the core together for one more season.
Bloom was brought here to find creative ways to shed payroll while staying competitive.
We will see if the player empowerment age extends into baseball. If it does, you do stuff like this at your peril. Baseball is as reliant on free agency signings as just about any sport. It's definitely a much smaller world than football.
I don't think it's as simple as that, because multi-player and multi-team deals are a thing, and free agency is a thing. I think my point is that if Bloom could make the team, say, 10 wins better over the next 5 years by turning over every single player on the 40-man for value in some other form, then I think it's his job to do that, and we should be ready for him to do that.
That would be a valid consideration if you were starting from the assumption that you're bringing back the team essentially as is, and just tweaking around the edges. But if that's the assumption, then of course trading Bogaerts is off the table. You only trade Bogaerts if you're doing a genuine reboot, in which case it's a given that team chemistry will need to be reconstituted from scratch.
I don't think they are going to need to do a complete reboot. I think Bloom is going to try to trim a couple of contracts off while keeping as much of the young core as possible.
They won't get anything close to value for him as a rental. (the same is true for trading JD, who has to be viewed as a rental with his next opt-out.
As RedOctober noted above, that's why Bloom is here - to find the low-cost value guys to fill the holes around the high-paid stars.
Yup. But that was probably likely anyway.
Or a Met - they really need a true CF, and I think they just declined their option on Lagares.
Hey, can you back this up with, well, anything? Otherwise you sound like a mope that calls into EEI.
You're being a little harsh to Nomar (his name screws up my auto-correct). Beginning in 1997, he cranked out a 6-7 WAR every year through 2003, except when he hurt his wrist in 2001. If had been able to put his S.I. body onto the field we would have seen some Bonds-like numbers.
The bolded above is the exact reason he was toast...he never performed near his best days once he went to Chicago.
No, I meant going forward. If he had matched his 2018 numbers last year he probably would have opted out this year. The year he did have made it pretty close to being a coin flip for JD.
But what is the young core at this point, exactly? I feel like even talking about the "young core" is, like, so 2017.
Jeff Passan mentioned it today:
I don't see how we can call Betts part of the "core" when he's only under Sox control for one more year. And calling him and Bogaerts "young" already needs a small asterisk, I think.
We can call him part of the core because that's what he is. There's no sane way that explains away this. If they let him go to another team, it will set this franchise back years.
Agreed. Any talk that involves trading Chris Sale which doesn't involve figuratively blowing the team up completely seems very misguided.
As with way too many of your posts, this is flat-out wrong. The universal DH was discussed last winter, but Manfred very specifically said over the summer that the NL wouldn't have the DH until at least 2022.
