JoeC

I am OK with a Harrison-type production at 2B next year IF we plug the outfield holes.

He probably included it as part of his legendary "gift baskets" for his guests.

Shows how much demand there is for Guaranteed Rate Field dirt.

Thank you Jose. You are a model of consistency (including when you suck every April), class, and a personification of hustle and grit. I hate you for giving me a reason to cheer for Houston, but I hope you get the ring that Jerry and friends couldn't deliver for you.

...and an ASSISTANT hitting coach? This team's starting to act like it's important to teach guys to do stuff.

I mean, I didn't mean it to be "witty," but thank you. They've taken 2 catchers in the first round (including supplemental first round) in the past 12 drafts. Like you said, the draft is a crap shoot. Drafting catchers is even more of a crap shoot. My suggestion would be to work on developing catchers already in our system. Seems like they are somehow inadvertently doing that to produce adequate catchers, but to your point, it would be nice to develop someone who is an above-average receiver + bat.

…like they did with Collins?

Yep. Years of hoarding 1B / DH types will finally pay off.

Can I be the sarcastic / cynical asshole and unrealistically predict Vaughn + cash for Jose at the deadline?

That's the "put us over the edge" premium that we instead chose to give to our bullpen.

Ditto. My heart cries, but my head agrees with the move

That said, depending on how the Sox free up payroll elsewhere, this could be a high-ceiling signing. Two TJ surgeries is tough. There are not one but two holes in your elbow where the ligament is now surgically attached, so the bone itself is more prone to breakage. Penciling him in as a #5 starter puts you into a good position, and I hope that he doesn't have to be counted on to be anything more (read: "I hope the guys like Kopech, Gio, and Lynn can perform like they should").

The issue with the COVID protocol wasn't necessarily that he broke the protocol, but that he lied to the team about it afterwards. If you recall, this happened in 2020, when COVID fears were peaking. He (and Plesac) went out for dinner with friends (at the time a breach of protocol), then lied about it and boarded the team plane, thus putting the entire team and its short-term competitiveness into question. Heck - even Plesac said he broke protocol, and the team went out and got a car service to drive him back to Cleveland so he wouldn't have to risk exposing his teammates on the flight. Remember - positive COVID tests and exposures meant that you were immediately quarantined, and the team had to call up someone from their Taxi squad. With MLB's policies being a very strict "any exposure gets you quarantined" policy, if Clevinger would have been exposed to COVID, that could have put a vast majority of the Cleveland players into isolation, and therefore ineligible to play. Regardless of hindsight and what we may know about COVID now, looking at the potential consequences involved purely in terms of the impact on the baseball team, that was a stupid decision compounded by a breach of trust. His actions could have taken Cleveland out of the race very quickly.

Too soon

Hahn will somehow pull it off.

Slightly smaller, IIRC.

You could say that about the PCL or International League, I feel like. One difference other than the size of the baseballs in NPB vs. MLB I thought was that in NPB they use a 6-man rotation with Mondays as regularly scheduled off days for all teams. So you end up with effectively a 7-day cycle vs. a 5-day cycle in the big leagues. Could be wrong on that though.

I love that Moncada isn’t allowed to do anything besides baseball in the offseason.

Agreed. He should be fired for giving LA a player in return for signing a player they released.

There's a 2022 joke in there that just writes itself, probably.

Was he really that bad? My personal impression is that he wasn't any worse than Sheets / Vaughn, but he just whined about having to play out of position and thus got out of it.

FWIW, if this is the guy I'm thinking of, Paul Goodman is viewed as a guru in the field of injury recovery and prevention, in addition to the "traditional" strength training aspects.

At least for Plesac it was more than just the one incident of being a knucklehead. not sure about Clevinger though

Ah yes - that's the asinine quote I was looking for.

I think the Reinsdorf / Hahn / Sox stuff has turned the entire fanbase into cynics.