There's zero harm in bringing him up to face RHP. None. It couldn't possibly hurt the team because they're awful anyway, and if he's put into positions where he can best succeed his development will be just fine. What will hurt his development is leaving him to stew in AAA while Dalbec continues to be awful, that would only make Casas wonder why he's not up yet.
The harm would be the opportunity cost of not having him face LH in the minors.
IIRC platoon splits never really resolve themselves, either a guy can hit LH or he can't. Bill James wrote about this many years ago, I'll see if I can dig up the article. The study showed that they never really go away. Letting Casas face LHP in the minors won't really do much of anything.
You said 'never', and he had a .921 OPS at home in 2011 and a .912 OPS on the road, Yankee Stadium actually really hurt him as it cut deeply into his doubles and triples that he piled up in DET.One guy being the exception doesn't mean anything. I suspect that the little league park he was playing in at the time had something to do with that as well.
Bloom has a preemptive answer for you:
Every move Bloom has made for this season has fallen flat on its face so I'm confident in saying he couldn't be more wrong there.
Chaim went into the season with Casas as Plan B for Bobby. Plan B is clearly needed. He can make up all the excuses that he wants, but it's just a lot of words to maintain the status quo of a situation he created.
Also, Dave Dombrowski was canned less than a year after the team won 119 games.
Any plan that seriously involved Travis Shaw in 2022 probably wasn't a very good one.
Face of the matter is that the Sox are worse than the A's despite outspending them tenfold.
Why not? His name was on the team.
Yup, seems MLB is screwing with the balls again
After the NBA forced them to fire Hinke and knock off the garbage with the tanking.
Again, why should we trust Bloom's judgment? He built this team after all. His judgment was that they would be good. Lou Gorman had far more information than any of us did about Jeff Bagwell, the trade was a good one!
Of course it *could* hurt him. We've explained how. It would retard (is it ok to use this word in this context? it's technically correct) his development against LHP, which would, long-term, hurt his ability to play baseball at the MLB level. The place for him to improve against LHP is in the minors.
"I think this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part."
Again, I don't think about 100 PAs in the minors against LHP will make a damn bit of difference in Casas' development. He's not going to suddenly figure out LHP, aside from Granderson as Jon Abbey pointed out, no one really does that.
he will likely have about 50-60 plate appearances against lefties the rest of the way. Will that really tell us much?
As pointed out earlier in the thread, the offense showed alarming signs in the second half last year that it could be a problem going into this year.
You don't think it will, but clearly the Red Sox think it could. And nobody thinks he'll "suddenly" figure it out. Just that he could show gradual improvement over some time.
It will help his development more than not getting those plate appearances would.
Again. Why not?
This strikes me as a false choice. You can bring him up now to face RHP with the idea of helping the 2022 team as he cannot possibly be worse than Dalbec. If you want to get him work against LHP you can either let him do that in the majors in non-key situations or he can play in the fall league after the season ends.
That's just not true.
It really kind of is the choice though. How many AB against lefties will he have in "non-key" situations in the majors, when he's ostensibly there to help the club win games? I mean if he's up with the Sox, you can't start him against lefties, because you have to assume that you're trying to win those games, and he's a terrible option and yeah, those ABs are assumed to be "key". Only if he came in as a sub in a blowout AND happened to face a lefty late in a game would he even get to face a LHP.
We knew he'd be streaky. In his short career he'd already shown that. But nobody thought he'd be THIS bad. Not even you.
I don't believe in the gambler's fallacy. More seriously, his hot streaks came with a different ball. I'm not sure he's due for anything except benching and demotion.
The way the bullpen has been handled this season seems like a tell. If you told Bloom and Cora tomorrow that they need to win the next five games or they're fired, Whitlock would be closing. In reality, Bloom and Cora are focused on the future, so they're stretching Whitlock out and hoping that he and Houck are part of the rotation of the future even if it costs them games now. Part of me thinks that management saw the teams the MFY and Jays put together and decided they weren't going to turn the team's development plan upside-down to compete.
Sure, just as soon as Dusten Knight, Adam Plutko, Cesar Valdez, John Gant, Edgar Garcia, and David Hess show up on the Red Sox schedule.
Well do you buy and sell stocks? Do you tend to sell low or when stocks are low, do you tend to buy figuring they'll go up? And if you don't believe in the gambler's fallacy, you have no reason to think that Dalbec will continue to suck, because past events have no bearing on future ones.
Putting Whitlock in the rotation would be a sign of planning for the future if they had done it at the beginning of the season, but it was done when shithead Houck had to be dropped from the rotation because he couldn't play in Toronto. That's not a sign of long term planning, that's a sign of fixing things on the fly.
A. Bloom is not the GM. Brian O'Halloran is, and I don't think we're talking about him. B. Bloom's not going anywhere. This is a multiyear process.
Well against this lineup this year, those guys would all post an ERA of like 2.00.
