Well his really terrible 2020 would be the biggest, no? Second would be his barely-hitting ST 2021, yeah? So plenty of good reasons to be worried... but he was so bad last year, and the offense in general was pretty good, that anything we'd get from him would be an improvement. I suspect his stretch of being one of the most dangerous bats in MLB is over, but I don't see any reason why he won't rebound to something above an .800 OPS with 25HRs.
FWIW, and obviously a small sample size, but he swung the bat pretty well yesterday, and hit a bomb in todays game. Hopefully, his swing is rounding into form at the right time heading into the opener. Last year was such an unprecedented shit show of a season, I'm hard pressed to draw too many conclusions from it, or whatever he needed to work out this spring. If we look up in May and he's still scuffling badly, some alarm bells would go off for me. Otherwise, I think he's still young enough, and still enough of a gifted hitter, to get himself back on track.
I'm predicting 88 wins. SP overperforms, bullpen is good, and lineup is top 3 in the AL.
Yesterday was ugly, but yeah, way too early to worry or panic. The pitching looked pretty solid the first two days, unaided by the defense of course. Losing 3-0 and 4-2 suggests it's the offense that is the bigger concern. Part of that might be the cooler weather, which is not exactly encouraging considering the first road trip takes them to Baltimore and Minnesota. I hope the offense starts resembling what we saw in Fort Myers sooner rather than later. 0-3 can be overcome. 1-8 or something like that, not so much.
I felt they had a slight chance to make it to the WC. But that would be with many things breaking their way.
They got "mauled" in one game. The first two games were close games that ultimately hinged on the bats generating absolutely nothing. Given that that is supposed to be their strength, it's easy enough to be optimistic going forward.
I'm having Kevin Bacon flashbacks from Animal House ("All is well!" while being stampeded).
Well, it'll be over 80 today here in Minnesota (75 yesterday). Then again, it could be 30 next week, though 55-60 is more likely...
I'd add that some iron gloves also played an important role in those two losses. This is something some of us worried about as this roster was put together, so to see it show up as an evident problem right away is not a good sign.
And the third game was a mauling because one starter had a bad start where he gave up a bunch of hits without yielding much hard contact and then the first reliever up showed absolutely nothing and allowed all of the inherited runners to score plus a bunch of his own. If Taylor gets a sac fly and a double play ball, that's a tight game too.
But aren't we just in a fairly brief waiting period between the 2018 team and when Houck, Duran, Downs, Casas, Wong, Ward, Mata, Jimenez etc. come up over the next few seasons? I guess I'm wondering where players you have attachment to come from. (Edited to add: Hell, Noah Song is supposed to get back to baseball during or just after this season...).
Sure that’s possible.
True that the defense did them no favors, but even stellar defense doesn't win a game in which you can't score at all. That defense should be overcome just by having an average offensive day (which for this offense should be 4+ runs a game).
Had to overpay Price (it's a shame he declined so fast... not every FA deal has to be a stinker, see Scherzer, Max... Red Sox need to catch a break sometime here) to maximize our window with the position players. He came through when Sale was down in October 2018 - I have no regrets on the contract, even though we're eating a lot of dead money for two more years.
(I'm worried this is derailing the thread, so .)
Maybe it was a "we're headed for a rebuild anyways at some point in the next few years, so let's go for it in 2019 and 2020 and see if we can win one more with this group" and then that didn't work out.
You mean other than the best single season in Red Sox history? At this point Cora has one year of managing when they did great, and one year of managing when they did shitty. And then they did even worse when he was temporarily replaced. He's not anywhere on my list of concerns at the moment.
To the extent you think Cora's pixie dust did something for the 2018 team, transforming the 2017 AL East winner into something more potent, he owns the beyond-regression that came on his watch.
Sox are definitely at an interesting crossroads... the way Chaim has the team currently constructed, they're definitely transitioning out of their most recent WS core and into (hopefully) a new one. If they stay competitive, then I think the team as it currently is constructed could basically stay together for another 3-4 years with some minor tweaks... or they could use some of the older parts to REALLY rebuild (possibly even adding Xander on the trade block- which I would hate--- but he has to be if the team is falling behind and X is putting up a good season).
I was thinking the same thing reading page one. The early part of the thread really exemplifies how people (in general) “shift the fences” as time goes on. This season would have been a success by most everyone’s expectations at the beginning of the season.
It's not shifting the fences so much as rational readjustment.
I don't think anyone contemplated it. It's a trivia-question-fest sort of year.
A couple of wins off, but I'm pretty happy that what I thought about the team before the year came true(well the bullpen towards the end was spotty but Whitlock/Ottavino/Barnes had quite a run).
