mac9001

I hope Lopez becomes the clear favorite. I think they only way we get a productive season out of Rodon is out of the pen. Get a solid 50 pen innings and I'll be thrilled with his season.

Kade has a pretty legit curve. He gets a few of those over for strikes and he'll have him self a nice MLB career.

I still struggle to understand how it all fell apart so badly for Hansen. I saw him pitch in 2017 and was convinced the dude was going to be a stud. The way hitters reacted to his fastball made him seem completely over powering. I was hopeful the transition to the bullpen would get him back on track, but its not looking good.

With so many guys getting pulled by the 5th now its a nice luxury to have guys like Kopech, Crochet, and maybe even Lopez to throw out there for 3 innings.

There's certainty on overinflated confidence in some of our hitters. Moncada and Robert are the epiphany of high risk. Anytime you're dealing with a young hitter with a K-rate north of 30% there's a very high probability his major league tenure is tentative. Both those guys needs BABIPs north of .300 to produce at league average. There's obviously a lot of celling and projection with both those guys, but don't fool yourself into thinking they come with high floors. The probability of failure with both those guys is a real concern.

I feel really good about our likely DH production. It just seems we have enough internal options where somebody will step up and produce. I feel significantly less confident about the back end of the rotation.

If i had more confidence in Cease I would love this move. But personally I don't think anyone should view Cease with any more then the slightest of margins ahead of Lopez. I felt we're one solid rotation arm from solidifying the rotation and this move didn't fill that hole.

If Rodon embraces a pen role he can still make some decent cash in his career. But for his sake I hope his starter days are over. I felt $4m for a potential impact bullpen arm was a fair price to pay. My guess is he just wasn't onboard.

I think it's safe to assume there's nothing "done" at this point. If it's a matter of just signing some paper work it would have leaked by now. If the Sox are truly this far along with Cruz it's because they have something in place to solve the rotation. The Sox have a habit of doing things half-assed. If you're going for a ring, be aggressive. Spend some money, cash your prospect chips in and go all out. If you're going to move Vaugh or Kopech it shouldn't be to fill a rotation hole. It should be part of an aggressive strategy to add impact players to the current roster. I'm hopeful that's the case here. If we're going to sign Cruz but not addresses the rotation it will again prove they lack a coherent strategy and just makes moves in isolation.

I'm not convinced you get Burnes without Kopech or Vaughn, but I'm far more convinced if we were shopping Kopech or Vaughn the target would be better than Burnes.

Just a gut feeling that Q is maxed out. I feel like Richards is probably pushing 98/99 out of the pen.

I like Richards over Q only because I think he could also be an impact arm in the pen. He seems like a guy who could dominate an inning if he was solely focused on throwing 20 really good pitches. If you get 100 IP in the rotation and use him in the pen down the stretch we get to fill two needs half way at once.

If the budget is $15M I'd rather spend 100% on a pitcher than say a 10/5 split. Go get the best SP with all the budget money left.

I wouldn't spend a dollar on a DH. Spend it on starting pitching and fill DHs ABs internally. I'm content with Leury at DH if we can get a solid vet SP. Between Eloy, Yermin, Vaughn, Collins and Abreu we can fill DH ABs.

Ironically Dylan and Dallas have very similar strike throwing profiles. They both avoid the zone, they see heavy contact in the zone, they don't throw a lot of first pitch strikes or generate a lot of swinging strikes. So while I don't necessarily disagree that command it what's holding Dylan back it's clearly possible to be successful with his level of strike throwing. In the end if you're going to have success you need to generate value with your fastball and that's where Dylan is falling short. The main reason being his fastball has poor horizontal movement. He was 40% below avg in 2020 and 76% below avg in 2019. I don't see command overcoming a more fundamental issue of his fastball being straight and hittable despite the velocity. Additionally he was getting crushed on his change up. Just like the 4-seamer his change up lacks any h-movement. He's clearly not deceptive enough on the delivery and the velocity difference alone isn't fooling hitters. His change is effectively a low 80s meatball. The good news is he did improve quite a bit on h-movement in 2020 over 2019. Pitch Value /100

Not going to try and break down nation vs local revenue. But just about everything google spits back shows the NBA crushes baseball in TV revenue. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1120170/broadcasting-rights-sports-by-league/

I think in part the MLB relies on gate revenues a lot more than say the NFL or NBA. The TV deals just aren't as lucrative for baseball teams. In addition the NBA and NFL have set revenue targets the players take home. There's already a baseline if revenue comes in significantly under expectations that players are only entitled to a set percentage. That's clearly where the MLB owners want to go with this, if the players agree to lets say 50% of baseball related revenue (in the event of no fans, this would equate to significant player salary reductions) I'm sure the owners would be pushing to play each and every game. I don't see games being played until the owners have a set revenue split agreement with the players union. There's too much financial risk for the owners to proceed with a season until they have fully quantified their salary risk. I think this partly goes beyond COVID, the MLB owners have seen the other sports leagues pull this off and they're probably ready to mark their line in the sand and hold out or threaten to reduce the game count until the players fold.

Seeing Tyler Flowers on that list makes me optimistic there's a path forward for a guy like Collins. He has enough power and takes enough pitches to probably become passable offensively. If he can continue to show defensive improvement I'm willing to live the struggles when Grandal needs a day off.

There's obviously a deal to be made. It's in everyone's best interest to play as many games as possible, if the players aren't willing to agree to some revenue linked salary concessions then the first move on the part of the owners will be to limit games. One would hope there's a middle ground on the salary side that plays the most games possible.

From a purely resource standpoint spending money on anyone to primarily DH seems like a bad idea. Spend it on pitching and take your chances on filling DH ABs internally. Give the (old) kid a chance.

There's an elevated level of risk with a 34 year old. If we're going to spend $10M on a RFer and another $10M for one more back end rotation vet I would have preferred spending top dollar on a TOR arm like Bauer and rolling the dice with Dunning and Engel. To me Lynn is a get to the post season move, its not a WS move. That's why I consider it marginal. This could have been a WS move if we already had another TOR in fold.

This is a bit of a disappointment if its not part of a broader more aggressive plan. This makes us better in 2021, but only marginally. If you go out and get a guy like Bauer I like this as a final piece. But even with Lynn onboard we're still short a big time arm.

It probably doesn't make sense for a guy like Oh tani, but Matt D is a fringe big leaguer. He should be perusing every avenue in bringing value to a team. One roster spot it worth a mediocre bat and arm.

I've always been somewhat surprised that aren't more guys that play the field/pitch. If you can throw 90+ I'd at least throw some MiLB bullpen innings to see what happens. The roster flexibility of having an extra bullpen arm (even mediocre) would be fairly valuable.

That's exactly what's likely to happen this off-season (big bullpen spend). Just sit back and give it a few months.