What's the point of signing Giolito?
Who did Breslow acquire that might be a depth starter for 2024 - Criswell, Fitts?
That contract makes no sense to me. If Giolito pitches well he is gone, if he doesn't Boston is on the hook for the second year. It makes a lot of sense of you are competing THIS year.
Depending on your goals, sometimes you have to do the less efficient thing, especially when the cost of the efficiency is only money.
This is a pretty naked appeal to authority, and you're relying on the authority of the same group of people who thought Corey Kluber was a good idea.
The funny thing about this paragraph is that Bloom was thiiiis close to nailing both of those.
Except for the guy in charge.
Breslow has also brought in some high-end pitching evaluation talent (Bailey, Willard, Boddy), so yeah, this is not remotely the same group who decided that $10 million for Kluber was a good idea.
I don’t think changing the authority in question removes the appeal’s fallacy.
This analogy would seem more applicable if the decision to get emergency takeout also required that you throw away some proportional amount of food you've been keeping in the pantry or growing in your backyard.
A strong bullpen is key when you’re trying to hold onto a slim lead
Especially since this has been said since the days of Joe Kerrigan and Jimy Williams. It’s kinda like the baseball equivalent of Jeff Spicoli saying that his Dad has “an awesome set of tools at home” and can fix the car.
The only cost to the move, other than $, is the player at the back end of the 40 man roster without options who would be DFA’d to make room for him. So who’s that, Mata?
I'm not particularly high on Mata but we don't know that until we see what he's got this spring. He's got good stuff, or had.
It depends on the leftover. If it's a leftover piece of steak that I can turn into tacos, then I'll take my chances with that over the mac n' cheese.
I'm not thrilled about the signing, but:
Or they’re going to eat Jansen & Martins money for higher end prospects.
If the goal is to win baseball games and be competitive at the MLB level, does it make sense to preserve a roster spot for Mata and hope he shows up in shape and looks good enough to make the ML roster (where he’ll still be in the bullpen) over signing Montgomery? Those seem like very long odds.
Right, none of these guys are particularly young or on any kind of innings limits. The only way they're not pitching a full starter workload is if they're hurt or bad.
Of course, you’re 100% correct.
That’s fair, though these guys’ development arcs can often be nonlinear.
Huh? Montgomery had a 2.8 bWAR over 29 starts at age 24. He was on his way toward that again at 25 before needing TJS.
Kluber, Carrasco, Bauer, Clevinger, Bieber, Civale, Quantrill, McKenzie, Bibee, Williams and Allen. Not to mention a bullpen that's almost always top third of the league with few journeymen. That's not close?
It's not an "appeal to authority" - it's acknowledging the basic fact that these guys know more than we do. It's pathologically dunning-kruegeresquian [something-something] to confuse that simple fact, which absolutely and unequivocally exists in the real world, with an invalid rhetorical ploy.
This only makes sense if it's the exact same group.
No it’s not. It’s just something that is said every year by every administration. Just like Player X is in the best shape of his life or we want to have a self sustained player development system.
When you argue that because the Sox FO knows more and that supports your position, you are appealing to their authority rather than producing a legitimate argument. Even if they’re ultimately right, you haven’t made a convincing argument to anything more than agreeing with what they did.
This is an incorrect application of the informal fallacy. The fallacy occurs when you appeal to someone that’s not an actual expert. If we were having a debate on the proper model of the universe and I were to cite the opinion of Ken Ham, I would be committing the fallacy because he has no idea what the fuck he’s talking about. If we were discussing philosophy of mind and I were to cite the opinion of Thomas Nagy, John Searle, or Thomas Aquinas, I would not be committing the fallacy because they are actual authorities (and if you want to argue Aquinas I can point you to an academic paper by a neuroscientist on Aquinas’s model of the human mind).
Beyond what Nighthob pointed out, I'm not even arguing a position. I literally made a guess as to the team's motivation for signing Giolito:
For some reason that you've never made clear, you've recently been reflexively contrarian about anything I post, which has led you (and others) to overreaching in an attempt to have some sort of ongoing argument. That serves nobody well. Not me, or yourself, or your allies, or the board generally. You don't have to like me or anything. But please stop doing that.
That's wrong. You appear to be arguing against an appeal to false authority. The appeal to authority has nothing to do with the expertise of the authority in question. The fallacy lies in the idea that this ends the debate, when history has show countless times for this to not be true.
Which opinions exactly? The ones they gave at the press conference to announce the signing? Further explanations that have come down through press outlets about what "the team" might think of Giolitto's potential? Or the in depth analysis of his health and pitch metrics backed up with quantitative data and a detailed working plan for how to help him improve? We're obviously not going to get the last one, which would be much more rigorous, but the rest is inference.
I agree with all that except the last sentence. It'll still matter, they just won't be able to do anything about it.
That potential rotation for NYY would be fascinating due to the massively high ceiling and the near certainty that Rodon and Snell (and to a lesser degree Stroman/Cortes) would almost certainly not be available to pitch as a five-some for big parts of the season due to their injury history. But, if they could time up health and effectiveness, the upside would be unbelievable. And, they really can't afford to waste another season by Cole, since he will inevitably decline over the next 6 years, through his age 38 season. I hope the Yankees do it since I think having Rodon and Snell under huge contracts would become an albatross and they would be less likely bidding on pitchers who would be a better for the Sox.
Well he wasn't doing a medium term sweetheart deal for the Sox, and the Sox weren't paying him $200m after the season he just had. I suspect they think they can keep him if he comes in and revives his career. Get him in the building and then figure out his real long-term deal.
On a cynical note, if the Yankees outspend us by $100 million a year, it really gives them a bigger margin for albatrosses.
