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That would certainly have been interesting. But it is easier to build a contender from where they are now than from absolute bottom, even with the trade returns from the sell-off. If they traded away Pedroia and Lester, they would immediately be trying to find players exactly like Pedroia and Lester. Signing Napoli now doesn't impede any rebuild, especially compared to trading a prospect for the mythical available 1B who is younger and better.
But that's kind of my point. If they're not going to contend in 2013 and 2014 - and I agree that they're not - then WTF are they signing Napoli-1B for?
If they want to go the Napoli route, fine, but then they really do need to sign Hamilton and Greinke and maybe trade for one more impact player - maybe take on a bad contract to do it. They have the money.
I think the problem is that if you have too many above average players, then you start running out of places to play stars. The Red Sox can now expect non-star level production from 3B, SS, C, 1B, LF and probably RF. Ortiz is a star DH, but that adds less value than a star anywhere else. Who knows what Ellsbury is?
2.5 stars might be all you really need to have one of the better lineups in the game, but it isn't very exciting.
To expand on this. Fully half of all free agent signings are objectively bad deals (or at least that was true the last time I checked and I've seen no evidence that it's changed in recent years) and I think you'll find a over-weighting of the best case is a factor. I've argued that a slight systemic pessimism is a good way to start. (And it's really only a slight systemic under-valuing)
To counter this I also favor paying a premium for elite players. Yeah, some don't work out but as a group great players hold a higher percentage of their value for a longer period. The further you go down the ladder the more you're likely to regret a signing(some real great signings are undervalued part-timers or minor league free agents. But the Phelpsers are harder to find these days). If systemic pessimism keeps you from signing a second tier player that's generally a good thing (and yes, a decent team with a real hole can get a lot of value from the right second tier player. Guidelines only)
His post said he expected them to contend in 2014.
Right, sorry, I misread that.
I think most of the regular Sox-fan posters here (based on their comments the past few months) believe that competing for the playoffs in 2014 is perfectly within reason. I think there are even a couple (MCoA?) that think they'll still be in the hunt for the 2nd wild card in 2013, with a few things breaking right.
from MLBTradeRumors
I will say, if I saw the Red Sox as a hopeless case headed for 70 wins next year, I would also oppose the Napoli signing. If the Sox are that bad, they should be blown up.
However, the 2012 Sox underplayed expected wins by 5-7 games. Plus they had terrible injury problems and ended up fielding replacement-level performers at a number of positions. Plus they got terrible performances from some of their better players, who will project to improve next year. Plus Bobby Valentine. Gonzalez is a big loss, and even Gonzalez->Napoli is maybe a 2-win downgrade. But I see the Sox currently as a 75-80 win club that is going to add several more solid major league players before the offseason is over. They're on track to be non-sucky in 2013 and legitimate competitors for the division in 2014.
Yeah that seems to be the common thinking: have hope for 2014, and success in 2013 is gravy. This timetable (if the org shares it) gives them more options to acquire that needed star(s) mentioned by Ray in #102 - they can conceivably get Hamilton now, or whoever is available via trade in-season, or acquire someone next offseason. In the meanwhile, they should still try to improve the team for 2013 in ways that don't impede the future.
Agent: Scott Boras
First of all I think they should be contending in 2014. I agree they need an impact player though. One of the reasons I hated the trade at the time (and still do) is that I don't really feel great about overspending on Hamilton or taking on a bad contract to land some other star, I would have preferred to ride with Gonzalez.
That ship has sailed though. Adding Napoli isn't a bad thing. He doesn't block anyone in the minors, the earliest Travis Shaw is ready is late 2014 and if he becomes a slugger then Napoli can DH in 2015 with Shaw at 1st base. Yeah, they've "blocked" first base from acquiring a star in a trade but who are these stars they are going to get? The first basemen with an OPS+ of 120 or better the last three years are;
Cabrera
Votto
Pujols
Fielder
Konerko
Gonzalez
Butler
Morneau
Goldschmidt
Teixeira
Howard
Butler and Goldschmidt are potentially available but presumably would cost something meaningful in talent. Frankly, the next group between 110-120 is probably where you find some potentially interesting guys; Ike Davis, Trumbo, Belt, but I don't see a major star in that group. I don't think the Sox are well served just punting 2013 for the hell of it. If they had a first baseman ready to go in the minors (say a Parmalee type) I'd like to give him a run out much the way I'd like to see them do with Kalish and Iglesias, but playing a 30 year old Mauro Gomez or someone of that ilk doesn't do it for me. Napoli doesn't block anyone, he doesn't tie up money of any consequence.
I am convinced that improving for next year never impedes the future. What's the best example of a bad team that signed a player or players to effect modest improvements, but therefore cut themselves off from longterm contention? There have been ghastly FA signings by bad clubs (Derek Bell might be the nadir standard), but they've been bad because the players were fixing to be bad anyway, and fulfilled their rotten promise. I'm trying to think of a bad team that signed a reasonably good player who lived up to reasonably good potential, but then hamstrung his team for the future in the course of and by virtue of being decent over a term of years. If there are examples of this, I'm all ears :)
If they can't afford to sign Napoli and Sanchez, they should not have signed Napoli. Sanchez is much younger, a Sox prospect who was unfortunately traded in the Beckett deal, and well worth signing for a long term deal at less than or around the $13mm/year they are giving Napoli. If Sanchez gets over 6/100, there's an excuse for not signing him, but not otherwise.
I generally agree with you. I think most of the examples of foolishly going for short-term improvement instead of future concerns would be trades, not FA signings. But maybe there were some in which teams signed a closer to a 1-year deal and lost a compensation draft pick.
Out of curiosity, why didn't this happen when you predicted it after 2005? or 2006? What is different now than when you predicted after 2007? Why didn't it happen as you said it would after 2008, 2009, and 2010? If your reasoning led you to be completely and undeniably wrong for so many years, why do you still trust it?
The Sox have a lot of muscular, lumbering, bad baserunner guys now: Papi, Gomes, Lavarnaway, Salty, Ross, Napoli. These ARE your father's Red Sox.
Get some athletes Ben?
Thats kinda how I see it. And I think they're gonna make a "splash" move.
Now they need a right fielder, a shortstop, and a starting pitcher. Two of those three at least should be athletes.
Isn't that true of most teams? Certainly three of those four positions are almost always held by guys who are not out there for their wheels.
Concur 100%
But after being heroically inaccurate about how Henry's outside financial endeavors will affect the Sox for so many consecutive years it is hard to see how you would have a shred of confidence in your own predicting ability concerning these matters to declare anything whatsoever on the topic, even with the Dodgers trade.
Your analysis is excellent, except for this point. signing Napoli doesn't block the Sox from doing anything. He's eminently tradable under this deal, they can or they can also play him to C, and DH (over time, Papi ain't lasting forever) to make room for anyone, even Votto if he fell into their lap.
While I agree with Karl's contention Henry must be really strapped now, whether they have their prior resources or not they have to field a better team before they can field a great one, and "Bear" Napoli will help them improve and also fill the seats with an under appreciated fan base.
What about those unambiguously wrong predictions that you have been giving about the Sox payroll for the past 8 years? What about those numerous completely inaccurate and false forecasts that you made? How many more consecutive failures of analysis will you need to have before suspecting that you have less than no expertise concerning how Henry's outside finances affect the Sox' payroll?
I am guessing Nava and Sweeney (assuming they offer him arb?) will fight it out for the privilege of being Jonny Gomes' platoon partner.
I remain irrationally hopeful that a trade for Justin Upton is on the horizon, although that seems less likely now that Arizona dealt Chris Young. I am a big Dexter Fowler fan, but the only way the Sox get him is to overwhelm the Rockies with prospects or hope they buy out his arb years with a new contract and then immediately decide he's too expensive. Hamilton is the elephant in the room for the RF job, but if the Sox are prepared to go down that path it's not clear to me that they'd be a whole lot better off than if they'd just stuck with Gonzo.
Really? If you could use Gonzalez to rid yourself of Crawford, and replace him with Hamilton at a similar AAV, that's seems to be a pretty big win.
(coke to snapper)
Ah, missed that. Thanks.
However, I have major reservations about Hamilton's health (compounded by the recent track record of the Sox medical team) and his ability to cope with the scrutiny that comes with playing baseball in Boston. If he's commanding the 6+ years / $100M+ contract that everyone thought he'd get, then that looks like another Crawford and Lackey disaster waiting to happen.
Possibly, but the Red Sox are around as good a shape as a team can be to absorb a disaster right now. It's hard to absorb a Crawford AND a Lackey AND a lousy Beckett AND all your other stars playing poorly/injured, but just a few of those things the Red Sox can probably handle. They only have 2 guys signed past 2014 - Buchholz and (now) Napoli. Obviously they should stay careful, but this could be a pretty radically different team in the next few years. I mean, I guess they already are to some extent given the big trade, but I can't remember a Red Sox team with this many short-term/arb guys.
The best conclusion here is that someone else will offer Hamilton fair market value and he'll take their contract instead. But a long-term deal with Hamilton seems unlikely, based on the reporting and on the many public statements by the front office about their concerns about long-term FA contracts.
You're unncessarily limiting yourself by including guys who are already first basemen. Anyone can play first. Nick Swisher can play first. Josh Hamilton can play first.
You're unncessarily limiting yourself by including guys who are already first basemen. Anyone can play first. Nick Swisher can play first. Josh Hamilton can play first.
With a gaping hole in RF, why would you sign either to play 1B? That just reduces their value.
Fair enough. It doesn't change the general point though. Here is the list of all players with an OPS+ over 120 in the last three years (min. 1000 PA). Scanning quickly the FA available players are;
Hamilton
Napoli
Swisher
Youkilis
Melky (available when the off-season started)
Add in a few guys who could be had in trade;
Butler
Choo
J. Upton
Morneau
I may be missing a few but it's not like there is a ton of available players out there. One of the reasons Napoli is so appealing is that he is "free", no compensation, no player in return and that is not insignificant. I mean, if the Sox could land Butler great but the talent in return would make it much more costly.
Yeah, although if you're trying to get a sense of "guys who will see most of their time at 1B in 2013-2014," I think Jose's original is still a fair comparison.
I realize that's purely a sake-of-argument comment, but: Swisher already plays 1B fairly often, and Hamilton's only experience of the infield is running bases. I can't think of a player I would less want to train to play the infield at this point in his life.
Bobby Jenks
I think the fact that the Red Sox signed someone to play first base in 2013-2014 who wasn't on that list tells you the universe needed to be expanded a bit.
The Boston-scrutiny thing is a complete non-issue. Major league players don't respond this way. It's a myth brought on by the fact that people think players are robots who must react in a certain way to certain circumstances.
Your position is that the people who think that players are robots are the ones who think they WILL have emotional responses to situations? This seems backwards to me.
I mostly agree in the case of Hamilton. This is a guy who has already been under lots of scrutiny throughout his baseball career and has played in 2 world series. He will play under a lot of scrutiny no matter where his next contract is signed, it would not be unique to Boston.
Yes. Because there has been nothing in 150 years of major league history that shows that it is reasonable to believe that established major leaguers crack under pressure. You're doing a pop psychology "evaluation" of Hamilton and then presuming that he's a robot who might react the way your pop psychology fears he might.
But players who hit to a 135 OPS+ over 3000 PAs don't suddenly crack because their cap has a B on it. I know Red Sox fans - of which I am one - are arrogant enough to believe this, but it's not true.
And Boston faces the same major league pitching that other teams face, tweaked for schedule. It's not like Hamilton will be having 90% of his PAs against Koufax and Pedro.
Besides the aforementioned fact that Gonzalez served as a vehicle for dumping Crawford and his contract, there's the fact that Gonzalez wasn't hitting home runs in Boston, while Hamilton has the kind of power that will keep hitting some fly ball home runs to left field while also not losing any of his pull field homers in Fenway's deep RF. An astounding number of Hamilton's pulled homers are of the no doubt variety and he tends to average 410+ feet on his home runs to the right of CF.
This not an all or nothing issue. I think players, by virtue of being human, DO respond to external factors every day of their lives. It doesn't mean that a bit of extra stress turns them into quivering balls of jelly who soil themselves the moment they step on the field in certain situations but some players do respond better or worse to those situations. As a rule I wouldn't base my personnel decisions on those things because the impact is going to be small enough not to meaningfully change what the player accomplishes.
There are situations where I would have it on my radar. Greinke's anxiety issues certainly would be something I would consider and I think Hamilton's addiction issues would be something I would want to make sure I had a good handle on. I think Nate's point about the scrutiny Hamilton has been under in his career is an excellent one and one I completely agree with. What would concern me is how drastic change affects (effects?) addicts. I don't know that answer but if I were a team investing $100 million in the guy I'd make damned sure I knew the answer.
Wasn't all of that true of Adrian Gonzalez in San Diego?
There is no doubt in my mind that a large portion of Crawford's struggles in Boston were psychological in nature. He obviously had physical issues too, but once he got into a bad place it was quite clear from watching him that it had snowballed into a major mental situation for him.
Gonzalez never hit the number of no doubt homers that Hamilton hits. And Gonzalez also had a serious shoulder injury between his best power production and his trade to Boston.
Not like we haven't seen this kind of thing before. At the extreme Blass, Steve Trout, Sax, Knoblauch, Sasser, Ankiel all has psychological issues that threatened their careers.
Just looked it up, Hamilton's HRs in 2012 were over 20 feet of true distance further than Gonzalez' in 2010. Damn.
Crawford looked to me like a guy trying to do too much. Rather than just trusting his ability and doing his job he wanted to be perfect. He had a little run of walk off hits in May, 2011 and one thing that struck me is that even allowing for the natural excitement of walk off hits is that the team always seemed a bit more excited when Crawford did something well. I got the impression he was extremely popular within the club. Not sure if you saw the same thing I saw.
Well yuck.
My GOD there is a lot of money in baseball nowadays.
Well, that would make the skeptics look on the Napoli contract more favorably :-)
I don't think it necessarily spoke to popularity among his teammates or anything; I think it was just his teammates seeing the same thing that we were seeing as fans: a supremely talented baseball player who had been playing poorly but now appeared poised to turn things around and play like they guy we all expected (and hoped) to see playing LF in Boston for the next seven years. Of course we now know that it was just a blip on the radar before he went back to looking like someone who hasn't spent his entire adult life being paid to play baseball, never mind one of the best baseball players on the planet.
THIS.
His arm ratings (FG) are positive, for CF. But, I think the issue is that a lot of Victorino's value, at this point, is being a good defensive CF with a league averagish bat.
Take him out of CF, and the bat just doesn't play, unless he's awesome on D, i.e. +15 or better.
The only way he makes sense for the Sox, at that price, is if an Ellsbury trade is imminent.
Edit: half a coke to Nate
Thirded. Or THIS. Or whatever.
Robo says his source is saying 3/37.5
Even then I just have no interest in Victorino. I think he's not going to come close to worth the money. If the Sox want to trade Ellsbury they should trade him and figure out centerfield. Victorino doesn't interest me in the slightest and especially at this price.
Fourthed or QFT'd. Or whatever. Quoted For Truth. Quite ####### True. Whatever.
+6 Bat + 6 Run + 19 Rep + 1 Pos + 3 Def = +34 RAR
An above average hitter, fielder, and runner is easily worth $13M per year. He had a down year in 2012, and there's always risk with a 31-year-old that the downside could have set in suddenly. But a weighted, regressed projection for Victorino looks excellent.
This dude was a full-on All-Star in 2011. If you weight 2011 and 2012 based on commonly accepted practice, he comes out looking very good.
I think that's too strong. B-Ref has him at 2.4 WAR last years, FG at 3.3, and he was a lot better in 2011.
He probably projects around 3 WAR in CF, and that's not awful at $13M, if you net good value from an Ellsbury trade.
Edit: damn I'm slow today. Coke to MCOA.
You're ignoring the fact that he cannot hit right handed pitching though. As currently constructed, the Red Sox lineup presently has one real bat that crushes RHP in Ortiz, and maybe another in Ellsbury if he can channel 2011 (if a Victorino sign doesn't mean trading him too).
#### that, he's Shane ####### Victorino. (I'm not a big Shane Victorino fan, not sure that's coming through). In all seriousness Victorino looks to me like the type of average player who is going to fade quickly. I'll defer to the numbers but I'm not a big fan of this one.
A friend who seems to be spending his day following rumors says Ellsbury for Cliff Lee is being bandied about.
Somehow I'm imagining Brian Cashman saying that in a stage hypnotist's voice :)
I'm hearing Justin Upton for Cliff Lee.
Normal splits for a righty. Victorino is a switch-hitter.
Edit: that sounds more dickish than I meant. Victorino might not have exaggerated splits, but he does have typical RHH splits, which don't help a right-heavy lineup become more balanced.
Three way? Ellsbury to Philly, Lee to AZ, Upton to Boston with the Sox making up money as needed? Not sure that really makes any sense for anyone but rumors are fun.
just messing around: Ellsbury to Arizona, Lee to Boston, Upton to Philly ... with additional prospects from Philly going to Arizona, and the Sox getting some righty-killer platoon guy out of it.
EDIT: And now the report - from Nick Piecoro, excellent Phoenix beat writer - is that Lee/Upton talks aren't happening in the first place. (So you're saying it could be Lee/Ellsbury instead?)
Seriously, that a trade has been "discussed" certainly doesn't mean it's imminent. I can see those pieces being the foundation of something doable. I think you're right that the Sox would have to be the team to make up some ground but that's not impossible. They have the financial and minor league pieces to do some work.
Because of Lee's contract (4 years at $25.6m per), he doesn't have a ton of trade value.
And neither does Ellsbury.
agree completely. I was just having fun with an imaginary 3-way trade idea that combined the Victorino rumors with the Upton-Lee rumors.
The point is this, any concerns that the Sox would have to blow away free agents to get them to come here after the fiasco of 2012 seem to be unfounded so far.
Napoli got a better deal than I expected (and presumably the Rangers expected) but I don't think that had to do with overcoming the Sox' poor season.
Edit: apparently it's a done deal. My approval of this off seasons moves is over.
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