User Comments, Suggestions, or Complaints | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Advertising
|
Demarini, Easton and TPX Baseball Bats
|
AllianceTickets.com has cheap MLB Tickets. Get all your Colorado Rockies Tickets, Seattle Mariners Tickets, San Francisco Giants Tickets and all your favorite baseball tickets here. We also carry cheap Denver Broncos Tickets, Seattle Seahawks Tickets and Denver Nuggets Tickets. |
For wholesale prices on baseball gifts and equipment, check these stores out! |
Page rendered in 0.6981 seconds
58 querie(s) executed
Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
The Sox came into the season as the worst projected Sox team of the Henry/Lucchino era. Then they got hit with injuries. They're not very good, if "very good" means, up to the quality of the typical Red Sox roster from 2003-2011. That's not a new thing to admit.
The failure of the Dan Bard experiment means that we should see the roster as closer to 88-91 wins to start the season, rather than 90-93. Plus the injuries, that's something like a 84-87 win roster. I don't think there's much difference between the position I've taken and the "not very good" position, but perhaps you mean something even more extreme?
Depends on the injuries. If they have to replace Beckett with someone out of AAA then there's a pretty good chance the "L" number will be higher than the "W" number at season's end.
There are some parts of the plan that did work as well. You mentioned Doubront, but there was also the decision to deal Scutaro has worked out. Padilla and Miller seem to be doing well in the pen. And pretty soon Mark Prior will be our relief ace!
I think I was arguing exactly that pre-season.
I'm tired of reading about injuries, as if other teams have't had them. Here in DC the Nats lost their best outfielder, their star 3b, and their closer for most of the season, too. That hasn't exactly stopped them from success.
I think the Sox FO did a fine job. The bullpen and the bench have been sore spots in the past, and guess what? We have a really effective bullpen and bench -- a bullpen so effective it hasn't suffered much even minus Bard and Bailey and Melancon! A bench so effective it is carrying the team!
Anyone miss Marco Scutaro? I didn't think so.
The problem, again, is not the front office or the 5th starter or the fact that a couple guys we traded are playing well in no-pressure, second-division environments.
Agreed. Yes, the outfield has been hit ridiculously hard. But, other than Byrd, the fill-ins have done a pretty good job out there (and the outfield really wasn't expected to be a team strength anyway).
And the pitching staff has been pretty healthy (with the exception of Bailey, who wasn't there to begin with).
I don't see how injuries have been a significant problem for this team.
And I'm also with AG in 9. I didn't think they would be very good back in March, and wrote as much, and yet they've still managed to play below my modest expectations.
I wonder if something is up with Lester...though he's usually a slow starter.
The Red Sox lost their star CF, their projected-to-be-good LF, and their closer for most of the season. They have missed a month from their star 3B, their average RF, and their 6th starter, and nagging injuries have cost the team a couple starts from their #2 and a few games from the star second baseman. This is a significantly heavier load of injuries than a team normally expects, and I think it has cost the club several wins in expectation.
The Bard decision was stupid. It made no sense from the beginning and it weakened an already weak spot. This was the wrong path taken and looks worse than it actually was. The Sox aren't missing Lowrie/Reddick, they are missing Ellsbury, Pedroia, AGon, Youk, Crawford, Beckett and Lester. The blame for this season falls more on Theo/ownership/Francona/bad luck and timing than Cherington.
One place the Sox might have scrimped a bit so that they could have more cash for a starter was DH. Ortiz is having a wonderful year, but he's costing about twice what Willingham and Kubel got. I don't think that decision was up to Ben either, though.
That's unfair. He put Doubront in the rotation, brought up Middlebrooks, acquired Ross, acquired Shoppach, acquired Padilla, and moved Miller to the pen. These moves helped the team.
Doubront forced himself into the rotation with his spring performance and showing up to camp in good shape, anyone would've done that. Middlebrooks came up because Youkilis was hurt, anyone would've done that. Ross was a decent signing, but worse than having Reddick everyday in RF would be. Shoppach was a solid signing to backup Salty. Padilla was a nice scrapheap pickup. Miller to the pen was an obvious move that should've already happened last year.
So it was a bit of an exaggeration that everything has gone wrong, but the biggest moves have been utter disasters.
Lowrie, first 56 games last year: .803 OPS, afteward: .624
There's a ways to go.
Personally, I think the front office made a mistake, but it was in trying to patch the 2011 team. I would not have minded if they had blown up the team and not tried to contend in 2012. But they made that choice, and having made that choice they did a fine job mixing and matching the secondary parts. The problem, again, is the primary parts not plaing like primary parts.
By the way, it's another minor point, but Zimmerman has missed more than 10 games, and he's been playing hurt.
If Reddick got hit by a bus, then it'd be irrelevant. But otherwise, reality is a good way of checking to see if a trade was a good idea.
The GM has far, far more information about how good players are than we do. If he trades someone away, and they play better than projected, I don't chalk that up to nothing but luck. It's a failure of evaluation as well.
I'm not sure this part of the plan is blameworthy. Getting one of {Doubront,Bard} as an effective back of the rotation starter isn't such a bad outcome for a team facing the apparent budget constraints the Sox were under, especially with Dice-K as an eventual fallback.
I agree about the trading for cheap relievers having failed, though. They could have scraped the bottom of the free agent barrel and ended up with the same sort of bullpen they have right now.
Now watch them all implode at once.
Yet another injured outfielder. At least this clears room for them to call up Kalish.
And they do!
I'll be in Section 528. Look up and wave while wearing the Valentine nose/mustache disguise so I know it's you.
There is talk that Alfonso Soriano might be available, but so is Manny Ramirez!
1) Injured (Ellsbury, Bailey, Youkilis, Crawford, Jenks - those five guys alone are $50 million this year)
2) Underperforming, but we expect will improve (Gonzalez, Pedroia, Lester, Bard - those four guys alone are making $38 million this year)
3) Make money, and are immovably bad and expensive (Lackey, Beckett, Matsuzaka - those three guys are making $41 million friggin' dollars this year!)
Think about it: the 12 guys on this list - which does include Ortiz, Buchholz, Doubront, the entire f###ing bullpen, Saltalamacchia, Shoppach, Ross, Sweeney, Middlebrooks, Aviles, Nava, and others - is making $129 million this year. Except for Ortiz, the guys playing the best are making by far the least money.
The Red Sox problem is they have a payroll of a top-tier playoff team, and the roster of a .500 team. That's it.
I don't think that the failure of Cherington's offseason plan is the primary reason the Sox are several games off the playoff pace. I think that injuries and underperformance from stars are the two biggest problems with the Sox.
However, Cherington had a very clear offseason plan. It was a bold and unexpected plan, and it governed everything the Sox did in preparing their roster for the season. And it has landed with a big, ugly splat. I think that's worth discussing, and worth significantly criticizing Cherington for.
Take it with a grain of salt , but I can see this all exploding soon - unless they start winning, winning is cool.
That was the other big offseason decision - to attempt to redeem this roster, and give them another chance to win together rather than break them up. The front office brought in a very different manager and left the core of the roster (and much of its periphery) in place. If the clubhouse devolves, that plan will have been a failure.
I agree with Phil that so long as they win, things will probably be fine in the clubhouse.
+0.2 Bedard (8 starts)
-0.3 Matsuzaka (7)
-0.5 Miller (12)
-0.7 Weiland (5)
-1.9 Wakefield (23)
-2.1 Lackey (28)
----
-5.3 total (83 starts)
Given those numbers, getting 23 starts from Bard and Doubront at -0.1 is basically a miracle.
Sure, I see Lowrie with his +1.8 WAR for Houston and Reddick with his +2.5 WAR for Oakland and I wish they were doing that for Boston. But we've also gotten +2.4 WAR from Aviles and +0.9 from Sweeney.
Meanwhile, Bailey is a good pitcher who had a freak injury, and Melancon has actually pitched very well this year -- albeit for Pawtucket. I expect both of those guys to be useful.
Again, I get that everyone has some remorse that Lowrie and Reddick have done well in other laundry. You see the offseason plan as empty ("disastrous") while I see it as at least half full and probably better than that.
I still think the Lowrie move is going to look OK but I've long been less impressed with him than others. So far that move has been a bust.
I think it's awfully difficult to call the decision to go with Valentine anything better than "meh." I'll concede I was unfairly harsh on him earlier in the year but even with the injuries I don't see .500 as a particularly impressive achievement so far.
The success of the bullpen has mostly been a function of excellent pitching from Atchison, Miller, and Albers. Aceves has not been good, in the aggregate, and neither has Padilla. Melancon has been worthless and has shown no real upside beyond "maybe he could be another Matt Albers". The fact that guys we already had in the organization have been effective relievers isn't evidence that the plan worked, it's evidence that the plan was even worse than we thought - trading good young talent for relievers should not have been necessary in the first place.
i would cut the sox front office slack on that one.
While I agree with your overall point I think we need to figure out a better way to judge pitchers than the aggregate. Someone (maybe Ray) noted in the AJ Burnett thread a few days ago how great he has been outside of one horrible outing. Just using Padilla as an example his ERA looks bad due to that horrible outing against New York. Now I'm not going to say "oh, his ERA should be 2.52" because you can't just dismiss the bad outing of one pitcher without dismissing the worst outing of every pitcher for comparison purposes.
I think Padilla has been very good though. A large portion of his outings have been good to great and he has augmented that with spectacular numbers on inherited runners. That all may have zero predictive value but in judging his season I think it is relevant.
he typically creates at least one ugly brouhaha a season
Except that in 2011 they couldn't. And gee, in 2010 they couldn't, either -- we used basically six starters that year and the bottom three had WAR of +0.8, -1.1 and -0.8, for a net of -1.1. It's actually not that easy to do.
This team has a Pythag record of 36-30. All of the problems with the secondary parts that they had last year were fixed in the offseason. They decided to stand pat on the primary parts, and that has been the problem. If the primary parts had played well and we'd played even with the resulting Pythag, we'd be something like 40-26 and we wouldn't be having this discussion. Bobby V would be on the cover of Sports Illustrated and the story would be about how he was pushing all the right buttons to keep the injury-riddled Sox in contention. (I'm not saying that would be deserved.)
There's nothing wrong with this team that winning won't cure and there's nothing stopping this team from winning than the performance of the supposedly core players.
Possibly, this team wasn't as good as you thought.
Judging relievers in the aggregate is a dangerous game for a partial season. Aceves allowed 8 of 18 earned runs in two games.
Yes but those weren't meaningless runs. If you don't want to judge his season w/ the aggregate, you can judge it by saying he lost 2 huge leads in the first 2 months of the season. That is not having a good season so far.
The moves made for short term concerns - Scutaro out, Aviles starting, Padilla acquired, Miller converted to relief, Shoppach backup to Salty, Ortiz arbitration, Ross acquired, Sweeney acquired, Aceves closing - have on balance gone considerably well, without hurting the team long term. (Marlon Byrd did not work out well, but we're talking offseason moves.)
In a sense the Bard conversion is similar to the Crawford and Lackey contracts, in that it was supposed to be for both short-term and long-term, but the short term was so disastrous that the long-term value is unlikely to be attained. Bard produced negative value as a starter, and has taken a step back developmentally. While this worked out OK with Buchholz a few years back, there's no guarantee Bard's MLB career will ever return significant value.
The difference between the Bard conversion and the Crawford/Lackey contracts is that the backsteps with Bard do not hamstring the rest of the club. Bard is now in the minors and taking up a spot on the 40-man roster, and is signed to a contract they could eat if they had to. That's it. Crawford and Lackey are drawing huge salaries to sit on the DL, where they are producing more value than they did on the field. Their salaries are a key part of what we perceive as budgetary problems for the team, restricting the players they can pursue.
EDIT: Now that I review the list again, I suppose converting Miller to relief could be argued as a "long term" move rather than "short term". IMO it was done to shore up the bullpen, but YMMV.
The problems on this team I think are heavily on star players not performing for one reason or another (Gonzalez, Pedroia, Lester, Ellsbury, Crawford). However, Cherington made a series of moves that did not work and it is more than fair to be critical of him for those;
Bard to the rotation - Failed
Trade Reddick - Failed
Trade Lowrie - Failed
(all "failed" are so far, they could turn around)
Those are major failures that have had a sizable impact to this team. I liked the Reddick for Bailey deal but we don't get to be surprised when an injury-prone pitcher goes down with an injury. I liked the Lowrie move but Melancon has been awful so far. The fact is that the Red Sox would be considerably better off with Jed Lowrie at short, Josh Reddick in right and Andrew Bailey and Mark Melancon in Oakland and Houston respectively.
is not the point, unless you are penalizing him for not being "Clairvoyantington".
Zips projected Lowrie at 89 ops+ and Reddick at 85. Trading players with projected seasons like those and having them blow up doesn't constitute a major failure.
In my mind, Lowrie was a bad deal from the start as it forced Aviles into a fulltime gig and gave them less flexibility around the infield.
Reddick looked like the better trade but Bailey got injured and Reddick has had a 65-game career year.
And then he descended to a point where he sucked, completely lost confidence in himself and the coaching staff, and had to be sent to AAA to prevent further damage to the team. That he had a good month prior to his implosion does not make it a huge success.
I still think in the long term it was - and is - a good move. But success? No, not yet, not at all.
- - - - -
Competing for a playoff berth while pulling off the Bard conversion would have been like pulling off the roommate switch. It was an ambitious plan that didn't have much margin for the kind of result they had.
Ask yourself this: What conditions would have allowed for the team to attempt to convert Bard to starter? (EDIT: Just to be clear, this is a hypothetical. Given a hypothetical roster with hypothetical skill, including Bard in the bullpen, what would they need those hypotheticals to be in order for the transition to be worth attempting?)
AAA, or Kansas City.
I think that's a bad and unrealistic way to judge a GM. A GM is not a fan or a blogger. He has scouts and coaches and professional numbers guys, and he's supposed to be way better at this than we are. Particularly with young players, who have a wide range of possible projections and future value, we should judge a GM based on whether he picks the right young players and gives away the right ones.
(I mean, how do you judge drafts? Is Kolbrin Vitek still a solid pick because he was projected in the middle of the first round? Was Dustin Pedroia just an eh selection because he wasn't seen as a first-round talent? At some point with young players, you have to judge based on outcomes, not just expectation.)
Doubront hasn't produced much of any value for the Sox yet, but I think he has pitched well and I expect him to do better as the season goes on. I was giving Cherington extra credit there, beyond what value has been produced from his decision to put Doubront in the rotation, because I think based on observation that he made the right call.
It depends on who he listens to, which might be a fair way to judge the GM anyway. But if all the scouts said, "Bard will be great in the rotation!" and no one said (as I saw here) "We could lose a reliable and dominant bullpen arm AND a starter if this goes badly", did he make the "right" move? Reality says "clearly not", but maybe in that moment it was absolutely the right call.
I agree that he has to judge on what he sees and hears. But there is no evidence, outside of a small sample, that he pulled the wrong triggers. It's not like they didn't have extensive knowledge of Reddick and Lowrie. They decided what their value was. They may have been mistaken. It certainly isn't the reason the Sox are struggling. That lies at the feet of the established players.
This is not equivalent to judging players who've been in your farm system for four years. A draft has a much larger margin for error.
The next major reasons are injuries and underperformance of stars.
However, I think the club has clearly been hurt by the failure of Ben Cherington's offseason plan, as they could have won more games with Lowrie and Reddick in the lineup or coming off the bench, with Dan Bard in the pen and Aceves in the rotation, and money saved that could have been spent on a better 5th/6th starter.
I don't think that's likely. I think Reddick is pretty clearly legit, Melancon is pretty clearly a disaster, Andrew Bailey is going to cost more than he produces before hitting free agency, and Dan Bard is really unlikely to be a good major league starting pitcher. And so the plan is at best unsuccessful, with major failure being the most likely outcome. But it could conceivably all turn out great and I'd love to be proven stupid.
(Well, I don't want Reddick to fail or Lowrie to get hurt. I wouldn't love that. But I'd love for all the guys Cherington acquired or shifted positions to be great, and I wouldn't be so badly concerned about overpaying for talent if it were clear he acquired major talents or moved his players to positions where they'd be most successful.)
This we don't know. You're projecting one outcome for another situation. We don't know if it is transferable.
But if we can't make any judgments about counter-factual situations, we can't evaluate trades at all. Which claim are you making?
I guess where I come down, though, is that the moves involving those three players were just three moves, they weren't "the whole plan" (and they haven't worked out "so far"). I'd rather look at the offseason as a whole rather than cherry-pick a couple of transactions. Otherwise where does it end? Yes, clearly we should have signed Edwin Jackson and salary-dumped Kevin Youkilis.
The plan all fits together - in order to save money, you convert relievers to starters. In order to re-stock the bullpen, you trade young players for relievers. Those moves are all of a piece, so they can be evaluated together. I'm talking about them because I identified them before the season started as a clever, risky plan by Ben Cherington to build the roster on the cheap.
And, anyway, what else did Cherington do this offseason? He converted Aviles to short and traded Scutaro, he signed Ross after Crawford's injury, and he signed a bunch of cheap depth arms. The major set of moves this offseason were the plan I've been talking about.
You're kidding, right? He has 9.9 k/9 and a K/W ratio around three, and Fangraphs with its FIP-based WAR has him at 1.2, which makes more sense given what he's actually done than BBRef's pathetic and ridiculous 0.2.
The point I was making there is that I expect Doubront's runs allowed numbers to improve over the course of the season, and we clearly agree about that.
It seems like you're making a DIPS argument, based on a relatively minor aspect of my argument, and not one that was germane to my discussion with Toby. If you see Doubront's high runs allowed numbers as simply a function of bad luck, and you see his value as primarily recorded in his context-free HR/BB/K numbers, then you can argue that his value to the team has been pretty good. I tend to be skeptical of hard-DIPS like that (we know it isn't true, in general), and I tend to err on the side of giving pitchers credit or blame for preventing or allowing runs.
In either case, the disagreement in about a minor methodological point, and we agree about the major consideration.
And you are not giving him nearly enough credit for these moves. I mean, by WAR, Aviles has been better than Lowrie and Sweeney/Ross has been as good as Reddick. Scutaro has zero WAR and turned out to be a great salary dump. Bard and Doubront have been, well, I'm not sure how in your world you'd want to compare them -- but they've combined to be only slightly worse, by WAR, than they combined for last year. (Bard was not exactly good last year, remember.) Aceves has been far worse than last year but that's not on the front office -- he's been kept in more or less the same role (bullpen) as last year and it wasn't the front office's plan to make him the closer. In fact, I think the front office's offseason plan was for Aceves to start, but the injury to Bailey and the emergence of Doubront caused them to reverse course.
Lowrie - will never get hurt again, nope, not going to happen
Aviles - sucks at defense and will revert to his terrible form, no credit given to the GM who traded away the two players in front of him on the depth chart
Reddick - obviously has made the jump to superstardom, will haunt the fanbase for the next 12 years
Bard - ###### beyond all reasonable repair
Doubront - come on, we all saw it coming, and he really isn't that good at all
finding 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th outfielders of the season and having only one suck - see above re Reddick, he would have been able to play CF and RF by himself, problem solved
sticking with Salty, picking up Shoppach - shh, this doesn't really matter anyways
Bailey - will never pitch again, will never contribute to the Sox
Melancon - yeah, he sucks, no snark here
$$ - wow, he sure has spent a lot of money for all of his moves...
Did I miss anything that Cherington has pooped on? Can we please just wait and see how the entire season goes?
1. That was a pretty ridiculous description of what is being said here.
2. No. "Too early. Come back in 4 months." would make for a super boring blog post. I hope MCoA doesn't take that advice.
Lowrie - I said up thread that I still think this move is going to wind up good both because of Lowrie doing what Lowrie does and I believe in Melancon.
Aviles - He doesn't have to revert much. He's rocking a .284 OBP and I think it's fair to be a bit skeptical of his defense though it has been very good. I wouldn't be stunned if that is a very real improvement.
Reddick - I think Reddick is looking very much like a player who has taken that next step forward. I thought he was the right guy to deal in January but that's looking like the wrong call. It's not just the power or defense (both of which we knew existed) it's the great improvement in plate discipline.
Bard - No one has said he's ###### beyond repair but shifting him to the rotation has not worked so far.
Doubront - I agree he has been good and MCoA has said the same. But he's not Cy Young, he's been a good pitcher, that's what he's been.
This isn't a very good team anyway, but that's mostly the legacy of Theo's mistakes. Ben hasn't helped, but the main thing now is that he should avoid trading the very good young players and prospects that may well if kept make the future brighter.
Reddick's had a very strange season. In May he walked more than ever and 40% of his hits went for homers. In April and June he looks like the player in 2011, except in June he's rocking a .400 babip. It will be interesting where he ends up.
True. And I feel like judging the success of a 1st year GM after 2 months is fairly ridiculous as well when the team has been beset by numerous injuries and has had poor production from major components of the team that was formed by his predecessor.
edited for clarity
(b) Again, this judges the 2011-12 offseason moves, some of which were to have long-term impacts, based on the first two months. That's fine, but you can't really say a long-term plan failed in the first two months unless the long term is irrelevant, or if the short term performance is so hopeless as to negate all possible long term value. Neither is the case.
The offseason moves that can have only short-term impact have generally been positive. The moves that have long-term impact have not, so far, but we're far away from being done with that. To wit:
...two months into the five years the team has him under their control.
It is certainly true that the long term could work out, but I think that was relatively unlikely before the season started, and more unlikely now.
Jon Lester: -0.3 WAR
Josh Beckett: 0.7 WAR
Clay Buchholz: -0.6 WAR
Kevin Youkilis: -0.1 WAR
The End.
I hated Lowrie for Melancon at the time, and said so. Hated it more when Punto was the offsetting move. Hate it more now. Would Lowrie have been able to succeed in Boston this year? We'll never know. Maybe he would have gotten the fluke injury that, in our timeline, landed on Bailey instead. But having two infielders that can actually hit would have been nice. Then again, if the Sox had Lowrie to put at third, probably WMB never gets called up in May.
And if they keep Reddick instead of Sweeney, probably the Ross signing doesn't happen - this could mean a host of consequences, including the possibility that the Byrd move happens much earlier. Or that Reddick is seen as a potential solution rather than stopgap/platoon bat (like Sweeney), and there IS no corresponding preseason move - this could mean signing Edwin Jackson. Who may or may not have been any good, surely not as good as he's been in our timeline. Of course, if they used OF savings to sign a decent SP, seems likely that Doubront never gets a shot in the rotation (as they were pretty committed to the Bard thing).
So, there you go - Reddick had to get traded for us to find out that Doubront is awesome, and Lowrie had to get traded to make Youk "expendable".
TVE - that was a good one. I briefly considered changing my handle (seriously).
If Cherington's offseason plan was as focused on 2012 as you are focusing it, then Cherington has failed as a GM almost regardless of what the 2012 results are. To do a good job the GM must balance short term and long term needs. At the least, you can say the long-term plans, to this point, have failed to address their 2012 needs. That might be what you're saying, in which case I agree. If you're saying the offseason moves were only with 2012 in mind, then I'd say you're attributing to Cherington an asinine plan, then blaming him when the plan fails. If so, I suggest you reconsider whether the plan was what you think it was. If it was with more than 2012 in mind, then it might not have failed in the long run, but two months in is not the time to evaluate that.
If you break up the offseason moves based on duration of solution, the long term moves haven't helped yet, while the short term moves have mostly helped - yet to no avail because of the extended suckage of players not considered problems.
What I'm saying is that if you have a plan whose balance of short-term and long-term value originally tilts to the short-term, and it turns out to be a short-term failure, I think we can be critical of the plan a couple months in.
I do think that Cherington hoped to get big long-term value out of the conversion of Daniel Bard to the rotation, and it's certainly true that if Bard turns into a good starter, that will overwhelm many of my criticisms here. I am making the assessment, right now, that Bard doesn't appear to have much of a future as a starter. I would love to be wrong.
Cherington with a "no comment" when asked about Youk trade talks. To the extent that confirms that he's at least trying to move Youk I suppose that's newsworthy but I don't think anyone is particularly surprised if that is the case.
You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.
<< Back to main