No player in free agency is going to take less money to sign somewhere else because the highest offer team didn’t pay someone else 5 years ago.
‘Ready to deliver’ – The 2025 Offseason News (& rumors?) Thread
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Do players think Mookie’s career is some sort of cautionary tale? They traded him, and he went on to win two more rings. Why would FAs care about what a team did with a pre-FA player? None of this makes any sense.
If you have essentially right of first refusal on a generational player, you don’t take it, you trade him for something less than a haul, and you are essentially bang average for five years afterward, free agents might fairly question whether your club leadership is prepared to do what it takes to win enough baseball games to make their time with the team sufficiently rewarding.
As Olney wrote, that’s not a permanent condition but it might well mean that the Red Sox have a little extra work to do to get the guys they want.
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You know, there's a case to be made with regard to the team being average or below average the last five years and them not being 150% aggressive after every high profile free agent on the market in an attempt to remedy the situation. I could buy that players might look at what they've done (or not done) and view the Sox as not serious enough players in the market.
The Betts part really doesn't sell it though. Not after the Devers extension.
I agree with this. I think Sox fans in general are sick of smoke, it is time for fire, way past time really. Sox need to deliver big time this year or the fanbase will be livid. May need to overpay for the first guy or two and do so for the right guys. Need to make players feel management will get who is needed to win.
Relievers are inconsistent. It’s usually how they end up there in the first place.
I get that. But there are degrees of inconsistency. Guerrero concerns me because of his control issues. That's all I'm saying.
Right, which is why he ended up as a reliever. If he had great control he’d’ve been a starter. It usually goes “Hey, Pitcher X has control issues, but if he only has to throw 20 pitches, he can throw 99 mph.” “Bullpen it is.” Even very good relievers have control issues (or have you forgotten the Kimbrel era?).
Anyone here concerned about signing Fried to a 6-year deal? He'll be 31 when the season starts, and signing pitchers that age to long-term deals is inherently fraught with danger. Clearly he's a quality pitcher, but he also has thrown more than 170 innings just twice in his career. As far as starting pitching these days goes, he does fine, but it's not like he's some humongous workhorse. Though, I guess those guys don't really exist anymore anyway.
I guess one nice thing about him is that he has a reverse split over his career, so pitching in Fenway poses no special problem for him.
Career
- vs. RHB (2790 PA): .235/.290/.346/.636
- vs. LHB (739 PA): .244/.314/.371/.685
It's just that that's a long contract to sign a 31-year old pitcher to.
I guess one nice thing about him is that he has a reverse split over his career, so pitching in Fenway poses no special problem for him.
Career
- vs. RHB (2790 PA): .235/.290/.346/.636
- vs. LHB (739 PA): .244/.314/.371/.685
It's just that that's a long contract to sign a 31-year old pitcher to.
Signing anybody long term is fraught with danger. Yes, pitchers a bit more. But do you want to be on the hook for Kris Bryant, Xander Bogaerts, Anthony Rendon, Andrew Benintendi, Javier Baez, Giancarlo Stanton, etc.? You can try to focus on younger guys, which they are doing with Soto, but 25 year old stud FAs are rare, and when they do come along they just ask for longer deals that end up with just as much risk at the end.
If you want a top-level guy in FA, you have to commit to their decline years. The alternative is to try and keep scoring on Tyler O'Neils and Teoscar Hernandezes year after year. Sometimes those work and sometimes you get Garrett Richards.
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Fried costs just money. My bigger fear is paying prospect capital for a guy like Crochet who may not be any better and watching the guys we trade turn into impact players.
Almost SP they sign has a pretty good chance to become David Price V2.0. The other option is to go with the starting pitching we’ve had, with mediocre value signings.
...most good relievers do not have control issues like Guerrero has control issues. I mean, there's degrees here, right? That's my entire point. We were having a conversation about whether Guerrero would be one of the best relievers in our bullpen next year and I was throwing cold water on that.
Gurerro has not managed a BB rate below 5/9 innings in his minor league career in a full season. Kimbrel's career BB rate is 3.77 per nine, which, while not great, is not 5 BB/9. The only guys who get away with BB rates north of 5/9 innings are guys who strike out 15 people per nine innings like Aroldis Chapman. Until Guerrero proves he can do that, yeah, I'm still going to be concerned.
Here's the list of relievers in baseball organized by BB rate. It's not an encouraging list. Just a few above average guys and a lot of middling relievers.
If Guerrero can get that BB rate down, I'd absolutely be excited. His first ten innings were encouraging, I hope it continues.
You mean the David Price who gave us almost 600 innings of 118 ERA+ pitching over four seasons, with WARs of 2.9, 1.6, 3.7 and 1.6? Who had an excellent post-season in 2018?
I know we paid him a ton of money, that he never won Cy Young Awards, that he had injury issues, that he was kind of a jerk, etc... but if that's the downside scenario to signing a free agent pitcher to a long-term contract, sign me up. It's not like he was Chris Sale or Pablo Sandoval for us.
A few years ago I might have said yes, today it doesn't concern me so much. Most of these guys are going to be close to this age when they hit free agency and it's become accepted that to get the first 4 years you're pretty much going to have to pay for 5 or 6. Also, while he may have only pitched more than 170 innings twice he's pitched 165 or more four times in the past 6 seasons starting 30, 28, 30 and 29 games. Add to that one of those seasons where he didn't toss 165 innings was the Covid shortened season of 2020 where he started 11 games and went 7-0 with a 2.25 ERA.
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How could you put those two guys in the same category?
Sandoval with Boston: 161 g, .237/.286/.360/.646, -1.6 bWAR
Sale with Boston: 115 g, 46-30, 3.27 era, 140 era+, 2x in top 5 in CYA, 2x all-star, 17.1 bWAR
I suspect he's cherry-picking the seasons covered by Sale's extension (2020-2023) so as to exclude the rather cost-effective deal he came from Chicago with.
I suppose one way of looking at it is that Price was neither awful (like Sandoval) nor a 6-WAR player (like Sale his first two years in Boston).
But I think he meant that Sale burned the team in a different way than Sandoval, because after 2018 we spent five seasons waiting for Sale to be healthy and it never happened for us.
I have that concern, and the Sox recent decisions suggest they do, too. Aside from draft/develop*, I suppose there's only 2 viable alternatives: Take trade shots at younger pitchers they think are ready to break out (Crochet-ish); and/or much higher AAV over shorter time for FAs. I think their view of long-term contracts to pitchers over 30 is reasonable. I also think (hope?) they realize that unless they strike gold on the development/trade side, they *have* to pony up for an older pitcher once in awhile. I also think (hope again) that Breslow has convinced the FA to at least pay up over the shorter terms, despite the AAV hit, if their (again, reasonable, IMO) view of over-30 pitchers is a bedrock principle. **
*They could do much worse than having d/d Bello, Houck and Crawford. But they probably need someone that's likely to be better than what any of them did last year. (though it's not out of the question that 1, 2, or all 3 will be better than they were last year).
**I'm not as worried about the older ones sucking. Inconsistent availability, IMO, is much more detrimental to a team.
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Yeah, I'm just talking about post-contract extension Chris Sale since that seems to be one of the cautionary tales that has many saying signing someone like Fried or Burnes to a long-term contract is too risky.
Keep in mind that Sale was hurt at the time they gave him the extension. And his body wore down at the end of the couple seasons prior. And he had one more year on his current contract. Feels like it would have been prudent to test drive him in the 2019 season before offering an extension. Even if you wait until mid season to just see how he's holding up.
I mean, I think the team really should have been organizing their efforts around knowing it was imperative they extend Mookie as the face of the franchise, so I question extending even a healthy Sale if it meant a decreased ability to extend Mookie. But let's say it didn't: Sale WAS hurt at the end of the 2018 season, and he was not yet a FA in that off season.
Actually, that’s exactly what I meant. Obviously the individual performance will be different (and we can only hope for postseason heroics) but we can likely expect some good years before the decline. It beats hoping that mediocre/ unreliable SPs make a sudden leap.
Edit: that is I agree post contract extension Sale should be a cautionary tale, though maybe more because he was hurt at the time and not so durable in recent seasons.
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Yeah... comparing age 25-30 seasons Fried has a lot less miles on him and is coming off a pretty strong season of 174 innings.
Every player acquisition has risk associated with it. As does every extension handed out to a player. I think sometimes folks here, who are obviously obsessive in their following of the game, become spooked by that risk. Hence we get a good deal of paralysis-by-analysis where the "best" options are to let as-yet unproven players from the minors develop.
Needless to say, among the biggest benefits of being a big market, large payroll franchise is that it mitigates the long term impact of less-than-perfect acquisitions.
Which is all just to say that I want this front office to acquire good players this offseason so we can get back to competing for titles. If a contract isn’t perfectly optimized, or a player may see decline in year 5 of the deal, or whatever, so be it. We have the resources to withstand that. It's time for action, not caution.
Needless to say, among the biggest benefits of being a big market, large payroll franchise is that it mitigates the long term impact of less-than-perfect acquisitions.
Which is all just to say that I want this front office to acquire good players this offseason so we can get back to competing for titles. If a contract isn’t perfectly optimized, or a player may see decline in year 5 of the deal, or whatever, so be it. We have the resources to withstand that. It's time for action, not caution.
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Yes. The long term risk is inescapable, so the idea is to time it so the first half or so of the deal has the best chance of paying off (i.e., a nucleus of young cost controlled players). That was never the case in the Bloom era. It is now. Time to ante up.
There may not be any signing that would surprise me more than Sasaki. I just don’t see him ending up anywhere other than LA/SD.
These three make it possible to sign Fried. Agree with all about FAs in their 30s, but the key is to not have too many of them. I imagine that's their thinking with Crochet. Maybe if we sign Soto all of a sudden Sasaki will look at us differently? Anyway, we have a young SP core so that limits the risk a lot.
The only reason I’ve paused here is that astonishingly deep Dodgers rotation…but when you factor in the age and amount of innings he’ll reasonably pitch that’s likely a feature.
Did anyone call him a great reliever? I think he’s just a general relief innings guy. The sort that has good years and bad that they make zero attempt to re-sign when he hits free agency.
Seems as deep as their rotation always appears to be, they get to October with a rotation looking like Napoleon’s army coming back from Moscow.
I think there's just been a misunderstanding here. The whole discussion was about where simplicio and I would place him on a depth chart. I suggested he'd probably start the year in AAA if he hadn't refined his control, while simplicio was advancing the proposition that he would be one of our top relievers next year. Just a disagreement about projecting out Guerrero's first foray in the big leagues as compared to his past performance.
Oh, sorry, you’re right, I misunderstood. I have just assumed he was part of the rotating cast of arms that teams cycle through a pen every season.
To be clear, I think he has the potential to be one of our top relievers next year. But with his current game I'd still rate him over guys like Winck/Weissert/Kelly and the lefties in terms of pure stuff, swing and miss and high leverage reliability.
Yes I am concerned. But, we have to take the good with the bad when it comes to player contracts. The current ownership definitely had some bad contracts over the years, and no doubt they will have some bad ones in the next 10 years as well. That is just the cost of doing business in MLB. Of course, no one wants it to happen, but analysis paralysis can save you here and there, but in the long run it is just living in fear. I am not advocating for not doing due diligence, but just that MLB is a risky business and you are gonna take some losses.
Well run baseball teams accept bad outcomes as part of the deal and plan accordingly. I am of the mind that but for a relatively brief and amazing window where the team spent on the product, fans of the Sox have essentially developed generational Fenway Syndrome where we aren't just resigned to the team generally scrimping on its payroll but we actively look to participate in it. "Overpay!", "I wouldn't do that deal" and "That contract carries the risk of..." posts are examples of this mentality.
IMHO, its being a bad consumer and it isn't our problem as fans. The Boston Red Sox should be competing for championships every year by doing everything in their power to bring high end players to Boston, including spending money and taking risk on contracts. Its their job to take on and manage these exposures. If they can't do it, get new people who have the capability to build a roster this way.
I agree with this but I’d add that for a lot of people, getting the best player isn’t the sole goal. It’s winning the transaction, so if Fried is expected to regress in year four and the Sox give him a six-year deal they’re going to look dumb or “lose the transaction” those last two years.
It’s the same with trades. A slight overpay is unacceptable, the Sox have to win at all costs. Yeah, you want the Sox not to overpay but deals aren’t done like that in reality.
So the idea goes back to paralysis by analysis in that if they don’t win all the time, why bother. Which I’m fine with the Sox giving up something down the road to do well now.
I’ll enjoy these things a lot more when the Sox actually sign a couple players of major significance. Until then… whatever.
But this team doesn’t leak! Unless it suits them when season ticket renewals are going incredibly poorly.
Edit: and honestly it’s kind of worked on me. I put a future on a Sox World Series victory last week at very favorable odds. But yeah they still need to back it up.
I hear the window opens in 8 years after the prospects we get for Roman Anthony and Campbell start to develop.
