MikeM said:
Overall i like and am excited about the signing, at least in a it's not my money type of manner. Reading the extra $31.5m won't count against the LT certainly makes me feel better about the risk as well.
But yeah, that is a legit question imo. Taking an aggressive approach here and paying such a super high premium to acquire young/unproven (in this case not even ready) talent makes me ponder if elite talent already established at the MLB level isn't getting undervalued somewhere in that thought process. Especially by a team that is still playing an arguably conservative hand in certain areas of their roster construction.
That's an interesting question, but after some thought, I don't think that's the case. The biggest constraints on the Sox building a team are twofold: the luxury-tax threshold for major-league salaries (with resultant impact on the FA pool), and the ability to get top young amateur talent into the system. Those are the only two resources that have a hard limit (well, that and the 9 lineup spots and 25 roster spots, I suppose). John Henry and co are clearly making plenty of money, and so the team's willingness to spend money isn't an issue. But we only have a limited amount of ML salary that we can really pay before it starts handicapping our future (via the LT), and a very limited access to the top picks (because we usually don't draft early in the 1st round, and because there's a draft we can't just outbid everyone for the best talent like the pre-1965 Yankees).
So given that those are our hard constraints, and that we're at a disadvantage in the draft area all else being equal (because we're not the TB Rays with a 2-3-year contending window every 10 years or so and top-5 picks the rest of the time), where do we find value? Where are the loopholes, the opportunities for incremental spending to yield incremental ML-roster talent? As this signing (and Castillo to a lesser extent, and the various signings of top internationals around the league) illustrates, the international amateur pool is probably the only place right now where we can leverage an unfair advantage.
Does this affect our ability to sign elite MLB talent? Well, Hanley and Panda both have 90 million arguments against that proposition. But even beyond that, let's think about it logically: signing bonuses paid to amateurs don't affect either of our two most limited resources. We're not constrained by total overall organization spend, because (and I'm just imputing this from the evidence here) clearly the business side is doing just fine at generating revenue to match. So what resource might the int'l amateur pool be crowding out? FO resources and Ben's time? Seems unlikely to me.
To me, the simplest explanation is that the greatest value (in terms of player performance exceeding that player's net cost to the team) is found in pre-FA talent, and so it's worth taking some player-development risk on that in order to get opportunity to collect that value. And that risk is even more minor once you consider that unless a player graduates to the majors, they're not taking a roster spot away from anyone - so the amateurs you really want to use this resource on are the absolute-top-of-the-market ones, because anything less than that probably won't beat out our current player pipeline by enough performance to matter.
BCsMightyJoeYoung said:
I'm not sure that the fan base is making that mistake anymore .. Three championships in ten years will do that. There doesn't seem to have been that much gnashing of teeth over losing Lester. Regret over the possible botched negotiations last spring for sure. But I haven't heard many folks saying we should have match the Cubs offer.
Well, for the SoSH take, look no further than the poll
evaluating the pitching moves the week after the Lester decision. SoSH liked the Miley deal, loved the Porcello deal, and saw the Lester sweepstakes as buyer's-remorse waiting to happen and was greatly relieved we didn't win the bidding. I would say Ben has excellent credit at the bank of fandom support and trust. And thank Cthulhu for that.