And I’d be good with that. Imanaga is a guy who I think is worth investing in. Ditto for Montgomery. Less excited about Giolito but don’t really care if it’s a short deal. We all recoil at the “bridge year” label but I truly feel 2024 is going to be one based on the current roster and where the prospects are.
Agreed, which is why I think this will continue to be more of a bridge year. I think they have a price they’d be comfortable with Montgomery on but that they will walk away if/when someone outbids them. They have no real way of obtaining an impact SP in trade without giving up one of the core guys they seem to be wanting to build around so, while the system is improved, I don’t think Breslow really has to a ton to work with here. Guys like Rafaela, Yorke, Jordan, Bleis, etc. just don’t have that kind of value.
Someone on Twitter was saying Giolito's the perfect Bailey/Breslow guy. I don't know what that means and of course it's just an internet person, but maybe there's hidden value there? Honestly, fixing slightly broken but otherwise quality pitchers is usually what the best teams do. Importing a Japanese guy with no strings attached is a nice alternative, but generally this is the way to go.
Honestly, I could probably be sold on it. Giolito isn’t that far removed from a really nice multi-year stretch. Have no idea what his issues are lately but maybe worth a shot. Add Imanaga and Giolito to Bello, Pivetta, Sale, Houck, Crawford and you have a decent group of guys. I’d also be aggressive with Woodruff if you think his shoulder isn’t going to be completely shot. Wouldn’t help in 2024 but you might have a legit top-of-the-rotation guy in 2025.
This is never going to be the case. This team isn’t the Kansas City Royals. They are one of the most profitable teams in MLB and the frustration many are feeling right now is that people feel that they aren’t acting like one. They can afford to take huge swings in player acquisition and sustain a few misses without missing a beat.
The 2019 team is instructive, IMO. Payroll was $242m, highest in the league. But, Sale (30yrs old) had a down year. Price (33) also had a down year and was injured. Porcello (30) was healthy but terrible. Nearly $70m in AAV that produced very little. Eovaldi for $17m also produced very little.
And what have we gotten instead? No Mookie and a lot of bad baseball. 2021 was fun, but that team's performance was fluky - they were fortunate to even make the playoffs as they faltered at the regular season finish line. Otherwise, it's been last place finishes, sub 500 baseball. If we kept Mookie and played similar baseball, at least we'd get to see Mookie play.
Everyone knew Sale was cooked. Just an utterly unconscionable extension by Dumbo (and ownership, a contract that large would need executive signoff). He already had to be babied like late-career Pedro, except at least Pedro had an all-time off-speed pitch that could work even when all his other pitches were ineffective.
But how about one $25mm pitcher post-2024 when the Sale contract is off the books? Everything in moderation, but no need to have a hard and fast rule which would exclude you from guys like Scherzer and Verlander who become available. And 30-something year old pitchers are prone to take less total years. Sometimes the veteran pitcher is a much better solution than internal options who haven't performed long in the major leagues, or getting a younger pitcher via trade when nearly ALL such pitchers made available have warts.
This 1000x over. It's so much more advantageous to use that 10 million to acquire/"overpay" good players than to go shopping at job lot. Bloom preferred job lot. Thus out of a job. You have to "overpay" to get elite talent. The trade is maybe you don't spend as much on the middle class players. Which is a good thing because in most cases a team full of average is, well, average.
The problem now is that the Devers, Story and Yoshida deals are all arguably underwater today.
Yes, I’m not down on Breslow and the guy has only had a couple of months so we don’t have anything to go off of yet. Hard to really analyze him until we see more data. I’m sure he’s scouring every roster and talking to tons of agents at this point. I’d love to see some low cost pitching upside plays along with a signing of a guy like Imanaga. I really don’t think the trade market will yield much for us because our non-elite prospect pieces like Yorke, Rafaela, etc. just aren’t enough to move the needle but we’ll see.
Story really is key here. Since the start of 2021, he has an OPS+ of 95. There’s a lot going on with him with leaving Colorado, injuries, etc. but we desperately need this guy to actually start hitting. I get that defense was a large part of his value but he has an OPS+ of 86 with the Red Sox, which is just a killer for this team.
I'm not so sure pitching has to be the difference maker. League-wide OPS is .734, so teams aren't hitting all that well even if good pitching is hard to come by. If you can collect enough hitting, you could mash your way to a lot of wins over teams with more limited lineups.
Does that really work, though? Red Sox had a good offensive team last year but stunk because the pitching / defense was bed. There are plenty of good teams with good pitching / weaker hitting, very few the other way around.
They didn't stink last year. They were a decent team up until September when the offense totally tanked. They had a .651 OPS as a team for the month and went 8-19. If they had continued hitting like they were for the first 5 months of the season, they would have finished over .500 and looked okay.
They didn't really though. https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/2023.shtml
People keep saying this about.... Montgomery.... Xander..... Mookie..... Ohtani..... whoever. There might be one or two contracts that any team will be able to deal with paying out insane amounts without it catching up to signing young talent to long term contracts that don't take them past age 33
I think if they had landed YY, it would have been worth a shot at Monty.
You lost me here. The Sox have spent 9 figures on three players over the previous two offseasons.
I would generally love to sign young players to long term deals, but I dont see the lineup with letting them go to the market in their late 20s. Bello is going to be 25 this year; Casas 24 and they each have 5 years of control remaining. Extensions that allow them to go to FA doesn't really buy any years for the team (Bello cant be a free agent in any event until after his age 29 season, Casas after his age 28 season). They should be looking to cover 7 or 8 years for Bello and 8-10 for Casas to get the remaining prime years that would be the early years of free agency for each.
But what if he’s just an overpaid average player? Papi was great at 40 - outliers do happen. Some guys you overextend for. Guys with MVP pedigrees are ones I’d assume some risk on. I think the oversimplification is everyone assuming that every big contract makes a team the Angels.
Is this what you mean by cavalry:
2: Isn't that exactly what they did in 2021? Was 2018 all that much of a departure given what Price contributed? Is 2013 still relevant?
Yet somehow world's better than the team today...
The team you posted is not remotely better than the team we actually had. It's a joke. Your entire bullpen is two guys with 4.9 and 5.5 eras and another who couldn't even make MLB this year, and they're throwing 780 innings cause we're only getting 650 from your starters. It has no 2B or either catcher.
Like who? Soto hasn’t been a free agent. Seager wasn’t needed due to Xander. Yamamoto played both NY teams to get to the Dodgers. $300m players don’t grow on trees.
2015 - Sandoval 5/95, Ramirez 4/88
We aren't getting Soto and frankly I'm relieved. If his defense is as bad as they say, and he's going to get like $400m, why would we want him? In a vacuum, sure, yeah, great, but a couple $200m bats with defense attached probably wins more.
They did that with Whitlock to a degree. But if you overpay all your promising younger players, you tend to end up with a roster of overpaid players.
Actually this is a pretty easy bet I can I take. Lets Start by filling out places the Sox actually made FA signings
I’m not sure what’s fueling this exercise but a team with Andrew Benintendi on it in 2023 — especially leading off — isn’t winning 90 games.
You can still gamble on paying early for 2-3 guys for the price of a monster FA deal if that's something the team isn't interested in anymore.
That’s an expensive team without depth and nothing in the minors. Maybe 90 wins and not much upside. Less than 90 wins going forward, tax penalties and declining years on homegrown players. Still probably finishes behind most of the division.
Sure, but what did we get anyways? A last place team, with no immediate help in the minors…kinda the same thing. That horrible no good 2019 team we had to gut had two pitchers (Eovaldi & Rodriguez) who are likely better than anyone on the 2024 staff. So it’s not like tearing it up got the team much, certainly not any pitching.
It has the exact same depth and almost the exact same minor league system it has now. This is what you're missing: the Mookie trade didn't do shit to improve the organization. Shockingly, when you remove good baseball players from your baseball team, the team gets worse.
Who effing missed that? I’ve said they screwed up stapling Price to Betts. I’ve also said the 2019 team was shit with Betts, Xander, Devers and JDM. They stunk together and were going to get more expensive and still stink. Keeping them together leads to the same place.
Then what the hell are you arguing? That there was absolutely no way the 2020-2024 Red Sox could have been any different in any way? This was all predetermined? That an organization that was the envy of the baseball world in 2018, loaded with young, homegrown talent, had no other future other than 3 last place finishes in 4 years? What are you arguing.
