Offseason rumors
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If I’m Breslow, I’m trying to get Boras to bite on sending *both* Snell and Montgomery to Boston on short, high-AAV deals, say, 3/$90m for Snell with an opt out after year two and 4/$100m with a player option for a fifth year that vests with 90 games started.
Then you deal Jansen and Martin for relief prospects and salary relief to get under the cap, put Houck and Whitlock in the pen, sign Donovan Solano for $3m and go make the playoffs.
Then you deal Jansen and Martin for relief prospects and salary relief to get under the cap, put Houck and Whitlock in the pen, sign Donovan Solano for $3m and go make the playoffs.
To be fair, when ISN'T this the case?
Just looking back to 2015 (when the Sox signed Price):
Price, Greinke, Hewyard, Davis, Upton, Cueto and Zimmerman.
2016: Cespedes, Chapman, Fowler, Jansen, Desmond and Turner (what an abysmal FA year that was).
2017: Hosmer, Darvish, JDM, Lorenzo Cain and Arrietta (Darvish and JDM ended up good deals).
2018: Harper, Machado, Corbin, Eovaldi, Pollock, McCutcheon and Kikuchi (a pretty good class, with 3 "hits" and McCutcheon remaining useful enough if overpaid).
2019: Cole, Rendon, Strasburg, Wheeler, Donaldson, Bumgarner, Ryu (pretty decent class with 4 hits in the top 7, but also 3 crippling misses, including 2 of the top 3)
2020: Springer, Realmuto, Bauer, LeMahieu, Ozuna, Hendricks and McCann.
2021: Seager, Bryant, Semien, Freeman, Baez, Story, Scherzer, Ray, Gausman, Correa, Castellanos and Schwarber (Probably one of the best in recent memory. Seager, Semien, Freeman, Scherzer, Gausman, Castellanos and Schwarber are all deals I'd generally like at this point.)
2022: Judge, Turner, Bogaerts, Correa, deGrom, Swanson, Rodon, Nimmo, Diaz, Yoshida. (Still too early to tell).
Point being, in pretty much every year, and in ever class, you can certainly find flaws with players. Even someone as consistently studly as Freeman or Cole one could look at his age at the time of the deal and age toward the end of the contract as a "flaw." Harper is probably the only one on there where you really couldn't find a flaw with the player at the time of the deal.
Heck, Manny might be the single best big money FA signing I can think of (there are probably others, but he comes to mind) and even he was certainly a "flawed" player.
If you look for a "flawless" player in free agency, you're basically never going to sign anyone to a big contract.
It would be great if ownership approved $55 million in new spending this year, but doubt it. And if there were teams willing to take all of Jansen or Martin’s money, they would be gone by now.
We're a post season contender right now. "serious contender" means a team with reasonable expectations of competing for a world series.
You say "would have" which is fine, but it's in response to a sentence that included the words "currently available." I was up for signing Ohtani and Yamamota and a right handed hitter. I think the team misjudged the pitching market and when they realized this fact, decided they'd rather wait until next year rather than pay stud money to almost-but-not-quite-studs.
The fangraphs thing upthread a bit has the Sox as the 10th best team in baseball. That seems about right to me. Who is currently available that would push the team to ninth, let alone into the top 3-4 where the real contenders are? I don't think that player exists. I also think it's silly to spend money for the sake of being seen to spend money.
All these arguments about the team not spending money and free agents not wanting to come here are the same shit that was going around in the mid to late nineties. It was bullshit then and it's bullshit now. This ownership group has always been willing to spend money, and the free agents will sign here when the Sox make the best offer.
That would be awesome, but I sincerely doubt it's happening. But I'd prefer you to be right as opposed to me!
However, Jansen is presently shut down from throwing, so I don't think he could be traded right now, even if the Red Sox wanted to. It's a part of the reason I was hopeful it'd have happened back in December (ostensibly before he injured himself) because that is what generally happens, old pitchers get injured. But he's here and it doesn't look like he's going anywhere. That said, I'd be trying like crazy to trade Martin and eat his full salary for a hopefully decent SP prospect, but I doubt that will happen either.
(Just for fun, I'll say Martin at full freight to the Cubs for Ben Brown - which ChC probably wouldn't do - or Michael Arias, which they might.)
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Yeah, this. To suddenly spend $50M+ per in mid February would be a hell of a pivot. I also can’t imagine that giving up the QO pick for a short term deal to Snell is appealing to the team.
Finding a team that needs a closer and has $16M lying around also seems like it would be a challenge.
Exactly. That’s basically what this ownership group is telling us. They’re done signing anyone to a big contract unless they’re a unicorn like Yamamoto, or a home grown star that is willing to sign early like Devers.
We have to get used to this as fans unless ownership changes, or changes their minds.
Eh, he’s projected at 0.8 fWAR. Can’t imagine he’d bring back much of a return.
WAR doesn't capture market value for relievers. Josh Hader was his a WAR of 3 once and is making 19 mil for 5 years. Martin got Cy Young votes last year. He'd get a nice return, if not Soto-to-Padres level.
Actually, maybe it’s just Fangraphs as bWAR his him at 3.2 war last year. He’s 37, and saw a pretty huge drop in his K rate last year. Obviously was still excellent, but not sure a guy throwing 50 innings is hugely valuable for the Sox, if there’s a good return out there may be worth it. Of course, if Jansen is hurt, Martin is probably the closer.
Agreed. And “what they do” is a long track record of spending to just above or below the CBT threshold.
I think the vast majority of us are morons.
This team was thoroughly mediocre last year (pythag = 81-81) and should be a little better. Say that's four wins worth. That's an 85-win caliber team which would be in a playoff race until the last week or so and maybe make it in. It doesn't take much to be a playoff contender. Just be slightly better than average and you're a playoff contender.
I think people are radically underestimating this team because it just so happens that four of the top ten teams in baseball are in our division.
There is some truth to that for sure. Especially now where teams are more aggressive in extending stars.
However, I would argue every single year you just listed had players with more certainty than this years class.
Yup. I posted it (I think somewhere in this thread) but I don't get where the idea that the Sox were going to all of a sudden be huge spenders this year really came from. In the vast majority of their years at the helm, they haven't blown through the Lux Tax the way some were predicting, and more often than not, they've started the year below the Luxury Tax.
I admit that I too took the cheese a little this year and thought that the "full throttle" comments might have meant they'd have spent big money on a pitcher or two (while then making subsequent moves to be close to the Luxury Tax) or even just sign JM now and remain well below the Luxury Tax, but they've pretty much always been adverse to big SP signings (excepting Lackey and Price).
I'll admit, I'm surprised they're going to be this low (and I thought for sure they'd end up with someone like ERod, Stroman, Imanaga, etc), but they're not going to. I did think the system was good enough to land someone via trade (not Burnes, but enticing Miami to trade Cabrera, LAA to trade Canning or Silseth, that type of thing) but that looks increasingly unlikely, at least as of today.
I'm not sure if I buy that they are better on paper today than they were last year, but I sure hope you are right and they are playing competitive baseball into late September.
I dunno about late September, but you have to be really bad (or unlucky) to not be playing "meaningful" baseball in lets say August.
Which is why the owners all desperately wanted WC3 and the players really didn't. It's very easy to claim contention with even lets say a $125m payroll into August. If your goal is only to "be in contention for the playoffs", then generally there are only 4 or 5 teams in each league that aren't within a handful of games of WC3 by August.
I'm very down on this team, and I think they'll still be within 5 games of WC by around August 15th. Which means they'll probably be better than Oakland, KC, ChW and LAA. Probably right there with Minnesota, Detroit and Cleveland (a few games out of WC3), several games behind Seattle, Texas and TB and a ton behind the Astros, Yankees, O's, and Blue Jays.
YMMV on if this is "good" or "good enough".
Just having Story out there for a hundred games or so instead of 35 or whatever is a significant improvement, moving Yoshida to DH is an improvement, and if they end up with Rafaela in CF a lot, that's a big improvement all on defense which would have the knock on effect of improving the pitching.
I’ve been saying this for a while and would LOVE it to happen. I highly doubt it would, but this changes everything.
While this may be true anecdotally (yes, I agree Story is far better than Hernandez as a SS) I don't get what makes anyone so sure this is going to have a tangible effect on the pitching. Story was back in August of last year (for August and September) and played very well defensively at SS (just couldn't hit).
Here were the team ERAs by month:
256ip in Mar / April and 4.99
227 in May with 4.36
250 in June with 3.82
203 in July with 3.72
248 in August with 5.33 (Story came back on Aug 8th last year)
246 in September with 4.72.
So of the 6 months of the season, their worst and 3rd worst months of the season were when Story was playing SS. Sure it got a good bit better when Rafaela and Abreu were playing nearly every day (September) but you were still talking a 4.72ERA, which isn't going to get the team anywhere.
I'm not arguing that the defense wasn't horrific last year (it was) but you're returning much of the same defense and pretty much the same pitching staff from August and September of last year - when the pitching was atrocious but the defense was ostensibly better - or at least had the same players we're hopeful will make it "better" this year. I'm also not arguing that Story isn't better than Hernandez, etc (he is) I'm arguing that I don't think it's going to result in nearly the huge effects that people want to assume it will. At least it didn't last year - with pretty much the same defense and the same pitching staff.
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Add to that while Grissom isn't a two-way prospect, his defense will probably be no better than average, but he's probably the best hitting prospect we've had come through the system in a while. I'm not saying he'll be better than Casas, but he outperformed him at every level. This is a guy who between A-AAA ball never hit below .319, never posted an OBP south of .400, and slugged around .500 wherever he went, and he's barely 23 years old. It's possible he struggles, but he also handled major league pitching fairly well in his first 200 or so at-bats. He should be a huge improvement over the Valdez-Urias-Arroyo-Reyes poopoo platter we were handed last year.
I see LF, CF, SS, 2B, and RF all changing, so I'm not sure where you're getting that the defense won't be changing. Yoshida should be parked at DH most of the time, (we'll see how the following shakes out) Duran/O'Neill/Abreu into LF, O'Neill/Rafaela into center, Abreu/O'Neill into right, SS to Story and Grissom to 2B. Yoshida out of left should be a huge improvement, and Grissom ought to be better than Valdez and about as good as Arroyo and Urias. I don't see O'Neill or Abreu being a upgrade from Verdugo, but Rafaela could be a huge improvement in CF, and Duran should be much better than Yoshida in left, if that's where he ends up.
Also... no one is arguing that adding Story could have solved our pitching problems in the second half of the year? The argument is that a full season of better defense will aid the pitching staff on the whole. So the ERAs in April/May/June/July might have better if Hernandez wasn't out there, for example.
It could happen with absolutely everything breaking for the Sox and against- The Yankees, Orioles, Jays, Rays, Rangers, Astros, Mariners.
As is they could beat Minnesota, Cleveland or Detroit (maybe KC could sneak in)... but I can see them "competing"..... but that's it. I still think that they're just one of Snell/Montgomery however from being a 90 win team, even in the ALE
The team ERAs by month are just straight up bad data and don't tell us anything about defense whatsoever.
I mentioned specifically looking at August and September (when Story was back) and how the pitching those months was some of the worst of the entire season.
Most of last season (in August and September) included Story at SS; Rafaela in CF; Abreu somewhere in the OF; Verdugo in RF. Hopefully Yoshida is DH a lot, but that also implies far more health from O'Neill than he's demonstrated in 5/6ths of his MLB seasons to date.
Plus, again, the pitching is basically the same.
Will the defense help - yes, but I don't think the effect will be as tangible as some are hoping.
I get that people don't like looking at ERA @simplicio, but it is what happened, and it is what happened with a lot of the same players the team is planning on returning for those months, both on the field and on the pitching staff. I don't see a lot of reason to assume that the results are going to be substantially different in 2024 from what we saw with similar players in August and September of 2023. And they'd have to be substantially different for the team to make the playoffs.
The pitching in August and September was largely gassed because of the way they ran with a 3 man rotation and bullpen games for seven weeks. Citing team ERA in that stretch doesn't really tell much of a story at all about the defense.
Sure, but they're really added no more certainty to their rotation than they had last year, have they?
Anyway, I understand and accept that people want more predictive data, so I'll stop. I just wanted to say it once because my belief is that the defense (while it will probably be better) is not anywhere close to having improved enough to make up for having basically the same pitching staff.
I also wanted to say it in February so that it's not saying something retroactively or with any benefit of hindsight. Hopefully I'm very wrong.
*For the record, I do think the equation changes if elect to a) start Rafaela in CF from Day 1 and b) able to deploy he and Duran in the OF together when they weren't really able to last year. Upgrading CF, LF and RF from what it was last year would go a heck of a long way. But I think it remains a massive TBD on if they're going to go that way or not. We have the PoBO saying you're not going to have a full time DH and Cora saying Yoshida will probably be a full time DH, so I'm just calling that an unknown at this point.*
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The line for contention is low. Unless you really believe all of their plans will collapse, they are contenders.
It tells us something but it isn't a full story. It looked like the pitching ran out of gas at the end of the season which makes sense being Bello, Houck, and Crawford were extending out to career highs in IP. While the defense was a problem and looks fixed, I am not sure it is enough on its own to bridge the 5 win gap people are predicting
If we narrow down the comparison to starting pitchers only, though, this year's class seems better than others.
Here's a question for those who are in tune with these sorts of things. Does anyone have an idea how accurate these projections are? Is there any sort of post season comparison to see how they panned out?
Especially since errors resulting in unearned runs aren't reflected in Earned Run Average.
To change gears slightly here, I would like to make a point and see how others feel. Baseball's hot stove season used to be one of my favorite times of the year. In fact, if the Sox weren't in the World Series, I sort of wanted it to end so free agency could start. The Winter Meetings were AN EVENT! Now, it is just a lot of waiting and nothing happening. In every other major sport, the superstars in FA sign in the first week. I think baseball loses a lot of interest over the winter because of this. MLB Network used to be must see TV around the winter meetings. Then they would do team reports leading up to spring training because most rosters were set at that point. I would think all this inactivity hurts TV numbers too. Why is baseball the only sport where everyone waits? I know personally I hate that it's time for spring training and MVP candidates like Bellinger, and CY Young winners and candidates like Snell and Montgomery don't even have a team to report to. I would think just for the sole purpose of fan interest, MLB would try to do something about this (though I don't have the answer...but other sports might because their off-seasons are FAST ACTION).
Other teams have windows because of their cap rules plus the draft happens in their offseason instead of the middle of their season. Basically if you wait too long the big money will be gone and a team will draft into the hole they have.
Agree. That definitely plays a part. But at the same time, baseball used to be a lot more fast moving and exciting for fans. You didn't used to have all-stars waiting until spring training starts to sign a contract. Is Scott Boras the single biggest reason why that has changed in recent years?
Yes, he is.
I think additionally teams may be more hesitant about giving up QO picks lately as well, but mostly it's just Boras controlling so much of the top of the market this winter.
View: https://twitter.com/gingersnaphyde/status/1758181012872306940?s=46&t=7XazH1NKZP26a4WUZikbkQ
Dennis Lin of The Athletic is reporting that the Padres could be moving close to a trade that doesn’t involve Ha-Seong Kim. He mentions Jarren Duran and Brewers OF Sal Frelick have come up in talks. Ceddanne Rafaela has also been drawing lots of praise lately. Makes me wonder.
Dennis Lin of The Athletic is reporting that the Padres could be moving close to a trade that doesn’t involve Ha-Seong Kim. He mentions Jarren Duran and Brewers OF Sal Frelick have come up in talks. Ceddanne Rafaela has also been drawing lots of praise lately. Makes me wonder.
I can think of four explanations for where we are:
1. Breslow doesn't think the team has a chance to make the post season. I don't believe that is true really. Giolito is like he was in '21 , Story/Grissom play well, O'Neil stays health. Those things happen you are 85-88 wins.
2. Breslow does not think Montogmery/Snell represent a big enough upgrade over Houck/Whitloct/Crawford to justify the cost. This is defensible, but man if it is true you might get Montgomery on a 3 year deal I don't really see how Breslow can think that.
3. The Red Sox are about to make a serious effort to sign Montgomery and are being quiet about it.
4. FSG has financial problems that limit the amount that can be sent to payrol.
The most likely explanation is 3. It just makes too much sense. None of this other stuff about windows et al make any sense to me.
1. Breslow doesn't think the team has a chance to make the post season. I don't believe that is true really. Giolito is like he was in '21 , Story/Grissom play well, O'Neil stays health. Those things happen you are 85-88 wins.
2. Breslow does not think Montogmery/Snell represent a big enough upgrade over Houck/Whitloct/Crawford to justify the cost. This is defensible, but man if it is true you might get Montgomery on a 3 year deal I don't really see how Breslow can think that.
3. The Red Sox are about to make a serious effort to sign Montgomery and are being quiet about it.
4. FSG has financial problems that limit the amount that can be sent to payrol.
The most likely explanation is 3. It just makes too much sense. None of this other stuff about windows et al make any sense to me.
Keel/Duran/Rafaela for Tatis. I would even throw in Mayer.
That Tatis contract is actually reasonable which is why it won't happen.
I don’t think it’s difficult at all to believe that the Sox just don’t like Montgomery very much at 4+ years, and Montgomery doesn’t like the Sox very much at 3 or fewer.
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Wonder if there is any chance Joe Musgrove could be available. Duran+ for Musgrave would be pretty attractive (depending on who needs to be attached to Duran).
I've often wondered this too. I went back a couple of years ago and looked at Steamer, and they had some historical projections on there, but they were only for a few seasons (I want to say 2019-21, but don't quote me). It'd be awesome if these existed somewhere, but I haven't found anything reliable to find projections for year over year.
FWIW, I was able to find that last year (at least early on) had the Sox projected to be 82-80 but that was at the beginning of November (but all I could find) https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-absurdly-preliminary-2023-zips-projected-standings/.
Thank you. This is - succinctly - the point I was trying to make. Though I was looking at some data of what actually did happen with similar pitchers and similar players to what we're looking at going into this year. I admit to being a bit "old school" in that I like things beyond predictive data, such as what actually happened. But I'm beholden to the scoreboard and not what should possibly "should" have happened. But I prefer not to go too far to the extreme of looking at "just" predictive analytics nor "just" things that are antiquated like wins/losses or batting average, but aim for more of the middle.
The defense will be better than last year. If they go to Rafaela in CF, Duran in LF and an Abreu/O'Neill platoon in RF (until O'Neill gets hurt and Abreu takes over full time), it might be MUCH better. But based on the current depth chart and the returning pitchers (this is the biggest part) I don't think it's going to result in nearly dramatic enough change to really matter in terms of wins and losses.
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