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There wasn't a strike thrown in the zone that until the pitch that Burger hit on the line out to LF for the 3rd out . Everyone wants to be the hero and move the runner along. It's like to hell with everything we know about this pitcher. Even after the Vaughn AB is there a coach who watches the game stream that can start screaming "He hasn't thrown a pitch in the zone yet. Make him throw you a strike before you start swinging the bat ! " I just want to be fair to Grandal who was in the on deck circle and may not know that every pitch wasn't in the zone unless informed of it and told specifically don't swing the bat until you get a called strike 1. That's why teams have coaches . I just wonder if other teams have someone watching the game on TV close enough to the dugout to relay stuff like that to another coach. No one should be afraid to pass along useful information. I don't think it's illegal to watch the game on TV and make observations and relay those observations, as long as you arent stealing signs.

Eh I don't know how meaningless other games are. You're in a division of under .500 teams . Every time you win there's a better than 50/50 chance a couple of teams above you in the standings are going to lose. Win more games than everyone else in your division and you win the division. I do agree that division games are more important because you control your fate. You beat them you auto gain a game on them. But like I said when you win any non division game you're going to gain ground on someone too. But you also control your own fate by just winning more games period .

No MLB team has room for Hamilton he's only had 22 AB since the start of the 2022 season and has 1 hit. Great guy,great fielder, cheerleader and runner but if you can't hit there's not a place for you as a bench piece. Coach, maybe when he retires when teams finally stop giving him the prorated MLB minimum $720K. I'd hang around too if I could get 200K for a couple months work which is more like fun for him.

Well you did say hit .650. I'm sure you meant OPS but Caulfield answered it like you meant batting average because you phrased it like batting average. If rosters were expanded to 27 Billy Hamilton might have a place on a few MLB teams. 26 man rosters no one wanted him. He seems to be a great guy in the club house,very fast, great base runner, very solid defender. Probably in the future the Sox will employ him. But it's not really trolling to suggest Billy Hamilton will hit. 065 when he's hitting .045 for his only 22 AB in the majors covering 2022 and 2023. Love him all you want to but he has no place on a quality team nor a rebuilding team except as a coach. The fact that he's employed as a player on the Sox pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the Sox lack of depth.

The Dodgers signed him.

That draft might be the only draft I paid a lot of attention to, although I never delved into stats. I do remember liking India because he had a good baseball name . Maybe you can take some consolation that if the Sox took India they probably would've traded him or he'd be right where Madrigal is now.

https://www.umpscorecards.com/teams/ According to that the Sox are getting calls 8th best of 30 teams. I don't know what all the columns mean but totFav is the main one where I got the info. This is just balls and strikes. In 2022 umpires across the league missed 7.44% of all called balls and strikes. They missed over 27,500 total pitches out of nearly 380,000 that crossed the plate without an offering from the batter. Umpire performance has remained stable the last couple of years. Overall, umpire BCR was 7.46% in 2021, almost exactly the same as it was this year. Umpires also fared much better inside the zone, only missing 6.11% of pitches in the zone. The much higher mark of 10.05% pitches outside the zone called a strike suggests that umpires preferred to have larger zones, favoring pitchers more than hitters. https://www.umpscores.com/post/the-final-call-season-end

Colas still slumping but 2 walks and a steal !! All he has to do is start getting some extra base hits while he takes walks. 10.75 BB% now. 19.35% K %

Yea I know , last year it was free , free. I think half of their subscriptions come from people who forget to cancel ?

3 triples ? Has to be a while since the Sox had 3 triples in a game. lucky to see 1 a month from the usually lame and slow footed Sox. Romy started a trend

Look at you not caring ! ?

You care, you're here .?

I looked at your Vaughn bWAR of1.6 and thought wtf . He's not even close to that. 2021: .1 2022: -.2 2023: -.1 Total: -.2 Try again. you're only 1.8 bWAR off if you go by fWAR he's a -1.1 , (-.3, -.5 and -.3 so far in 2023)

It's not free this year like it was last year. I had no problems with it last year.

Welp the lefties out of the pen weren't exactly nails. This game is ova !

I wonder if anyone here thought because Zavala started that Gio was all set for a great game because of all the great stats provided by the Bogus Stats Bureau .

Why the hell is Crochet still in ?

Top 5 in the batting order 1 for 13. Still in it but the BP now has to be nails. These low hit totals once the Sox got on the road is bad. Luckily against Cleveland 3 walks scored in 1 inning. ANy power the Sox are getting isn't coming with anyone on base lately 0 walks from Faedo and 10K.

I'm really sorry that you think you are making your point using young pitchers like Kopech and Cease . As any baseball fan knows young pitchers are wildly inconsistent and 2020 was the Covid year, While Cease was still working to perfect his craft as a young pitcher in the 2020 and '21 seasons Grandal was his primary catcher in the Covid shortened 2020 season and the 2021 Spring Training shortened Opening Day pushed back a week season. 2021 was also the year MLB banned "sticky" substances for pitchers on June 21,20021. 2020 was Grandal's 1st year with the Sox .Zavala didn't catch him at all in his 12 starts in 2020. Grandal caught 8 of his 12 games. This Cease couldn't make it past the 5th inning in his last 6 starts because he walked 22 in only 26.2 IP. His FIP for 12 starts was 6.36 . James McCann caught him for the other 4 games So Grandal had an 8 game head start of catching bad Cease. The Dylan Cease who had no control and no command of his pitches. I'm sorry I can't make a pretty post with colors with only tiny bits of info to impress fans who are too lazy to do a deeper dive and take you at your biased Grandal point of view. But as I said before these things require perspective and a narrative. So Grandal and McCann were catching him in 2020. With your Cease stats you aren't specific when you started compiling your Grandal and Zavala catching Cease stats. All you said was a season plus worth of stats My research shows that Grandal caught Cease another 13 times in 2021 before Zavala got his 1st start 7/11/21 . So 8 starts from 2020 and 13 from 2021 = 21 starts of the non great Cease before Zavala even caught 1 game .In total Zavala caught 4 games of Cease in 2021 and Collins caught 11 . So the majority of his time catching Cease was in Cease's 2nd place Cy Young finish 2022 season. Maybe you should have said I am including all Grandal stats catching Cease from 2020 through 2023 instead of intentionally being deceptive about Grandal doing a lot of catching of Cease during his early years trying to learn the ropes to become a good MLB pitcher. In 2022 when Cease became great, Grandal had a terrible year and we found out later he was catching with a very bad back. Zavala caught Cease 17 times in 2022. Grandal caught him 9 times and none between 6-10-22 through the end of Sept 2022 because Grandal was injured and DNP from June11 through 7-21-2022. With Grandal out Zavala and Reese McGuire shared catching duties with McGuire who got 8 starts at catcher and 7 for Zavala. McGuire was traded 8-1-2022. Zavala caught Cease's next 10 starts after the trade. Clearly most of the Zavala starts catching Cease came either in 2022 when he was great and 2023 when he was supposed to be great again (21 of 25 games) or 84%. Our poster included every game Grandal has caught Cease from 2020 through 2023. Only 16 of his total 41 starts for Cease came in 2022 and 2023 or 39% . The other 25 starts for Grandal catching Cease came in Cease's formative years of 2020 and 2021 or 69%. Hardly a fair comparison . It is difficult to say if the sample size is larger enough to say Cease pitches better to Seby . There is some correlation .Clearly in 2022 and 2023 Cease did pitch better with Seby. However Seby's 84 % of his total games caught with Cease and only 39% of Grandal's total coming in 2022 (when Grandal was clearly badly hurt) and 2023 kind of messes with the conclusions that were drawn since Seby didn't catch Cease during Ceases bad and growing pains years of 2020 and 2021. The Kopech correlation didn't hold much water since he's still in his pitching infancy and only had 10 really good starts in 2022 before he hurt his knee and his stats fell apart after that. Grandal caught 5 of those 10 starts and Reese McGuire the other 5. McGuire actually caught his 2 worst starts among the 10 His 11th start was when he injured himself after .2 IP and came out with no earned runs with McGuire catching. Sample size is way too small of an uninjured Kopech and in 2023 trying to find his way back to early 2022 form after a late start in ST to draw any conclusions from a handful of starts. In the 5 starts Kopech made with Grandal catching he only gave up 2 earned runs in 27 IP. Clearly , once again, context matters. Catching a hot pitcher makes a catcher look very good. I will certainly give Zavala his props for establishing himself as a decent catcher after the Grandal injury but I'm not going to give him any credit for Cease becoming a great pitcher in 2022. He was in the right place at the right time. Giolito would take time and I've already spent way too much time pouring through game longs for 3 seasons on 2 different pitcher. Let's just say Giolito decided to add some weight in 2022 and it threw off his mechanics . He also got Covid and then a nasty infection that he said just drained him. Remember the sweaty Gio we saw last year ? That was him being sick and still out there trying. There's also a decent amount of speculation that the ban on sticky substances hurt Lucas a lot so his 2022 season was such a disaster that people here were saying he should be non tendered. I wouldn't put much stock in any Catchers ERA for Gio in 2022. From 2019 through 2021Giolito got a lot of Cy Young votes all 3 years even though each year his ERA was right around 3.50 . But that's pretty good but not elite. Again just like with Cease we're dealing with a much larger sample size for Grandal catching Gio than Zavala . I don't have time to go through game logs from 2022 but when a pitcher sucks like Gio did in 2022 he must have sucked for both catchers .If someone wants to go through games logs or knows of a place to find CERA with certain pitchers feel free to impress me. I'm sure Zavala probably didn't catch Gio much in 2021 since he only caught Cease 4 times that year and Collins was still catching most games that Grandal didn't start. Maybe the stats favor Grandal since he was catching Gio in 2020 and 2021 when he was still getting Cy Young votes. If 2021 is in Zavala's favor then the sample size has to be pretty small. 2023 the sample size for both is also too small. That leaves 2022 when Gio was really bad. Which Gio you got from start to start was not determined by the catcher but by his health and his out of wack mechanics due to the weight he gained. It's the reason that he took off the weight after the 2022 season ended.

You notice I never once said Seby wasn't a better catcher or maybe even a better pitch caller. As a matter of fact I made sure I said that the cherry picked stats make some kind of point but not the point that the poster who strongly over reacted to them jumped to. There is some validity to what he said but using just this season to over emphasize his point isn't a good process. There will always be pitchers who feel more comfortable with a certain catcher. But those same pitchers would tell you that it's their job to execute their pitches . Pitchers sucking is on the pitcher not the catcher. If a hitter crushes a curve ball when the hitter was not picking up the fastballs well a pitcher can shake that pitch off. Plus if the pitcher throws a good curve to the location the catcher wanted it then it's a good call by the catcher. However if the pitcher hangs that curve ball and misses his spot it's on him not the catcher. Great pitchers have all kinds of catchers during the course of their careers. The good or great ones can pitch well to any MLB catcher. I have also been on record as saying that a good hitting catcher is a luxury and using high draft picks on catchers is not something I would do. I actually prefer a strong defensive catcher if your lineup isn't so bad to need offense from the catcher. There are plenty of cheap defensive catchers around. Grandal should not be resigned and every effort should be made to get something for him . That's an easy call even if the Sox get back in the race. He's a broken down guy too often injured now. I'm impressed that he's hitting as well as he is but it might be helpful when the trade deadline approaches. I don't care what kind of offers the Sox get. He has to go.

I'm a fan for a long time. I've seen it all. Never too high about the rebuild. Never too low about the downfall since mid season 2021. Injuries as a myth is laughable. Arguably our 2 biggest offensive prospects were Robert and Eloy. They have been on the same team for 3+ seasons, marred by COVID and labor troubled seasons. They have both been injured often and missed so many games that you can legitimately say, and get very little argument, that neither has ever had a season that wasn't screwed up by COVID, labor issues, massive injuries and internal issues caused by the owner hiring TLR and his many other "philosophies" of what to spend money on. There's been so many problems that we often can't list them all in our shorts posts arguing back and forth about it all. Did I think deep down even at the heights of the frenzy of optimism that the rebuild would result in a Championship like it did for the Cubs and Astros. Hell no. Optimism flows and we forget who is running the show. Do I think this season is over because now that the negativity has reached pitch forks and torches levels ? Hell no ! Does it look bad ? Hell yes ! I see them playing better but they either are or aren't who we thought they were. Stay tuned. It aint' over til the fat lady signs even if you hate opera. A lot of endings are predictable especially since only one team can win it all every year. So I might as well sit back relax and watch it all unfold . I can't blame the players for getting injured any more than I can blame Hendriks for getting cancer. I feel bad for them that they've lost so much time. Their injuries may have ruined a lot of seasons and thwarted seeing them at their best together but it's not their fault. They can't live in bubbles playing sports. I don't really like feeling negative towards players because they don't live up to my expectations. But owners and executives are something else. In baseball there are multiple ways to go about team building and multiple executives to hire, fire etc. But if the guy in charge of it all only knows one way to structure his franchise that has proven again and again to be very flawwed then I'm going to be more bothered by the puppeteer than I am by the puppets.

I don't think you can just look at those splits in a vacuum and come to any conclusions. You would have to look at it game by game ,look at the opponent and some other things. I'm not saying that Grandal is a great catcher and pitch caller but Grandal has caught a lot of pitchers with the Sox and those just 3 of them in a 50 game span in a season where those pitchers were not good. Maybe look at Rodon with Grandal catching or Cease from last year. Perspective matters. Yes he's slowing down and not as good as he once was but the poster is a known Grandal hater and Tim Anderson lover is always posting cherry picked stats . I had a running feud with him for a while because he was misusing small sample defensive stats to support Vaughn's defense in the OF. Of course Vaughn was the golden boy then then so I took tons of heat for saying Vaughn was really bad and I didn't care that small sample defensive stats suggested he was adequate. One season of LF defense for 50 -100 games is never enough of a sample size to support any argument that he was fine in the OF. Anyone who saw how slow he was knew those stats were a mirage and that he sure wasn't going to get any faster and with an adequate sample size he had nowhere to go but down. That was in 2021.2022 proved my point. Sample size perspective. Grandal isn't a great catcher by any stretch of the imagination but do you really think Cease, Kopech and Giolito think Grandal is responsible for them being bad early in the season. Do you think the Sox analytics dept. looks at cherry picked stats like this and screams wow we better start letting Seby catch a lot more ? This why data analysis is not so simple as finding a few stats on Baseball Reference and drawing any kind of conclusion from them is arrogant as hell. Maybe just by luck the conclusion is partially accurate but the process is deeply flawed.

I remember when your mystery mod said that the Sox wouldn't even have to supplement the core with veterans or sign free agents because they'd get everything they need from the trades and the draft. I thought that was impossible and said so.

The climb out of the hole coincided with a lot of home games against teams comparable to the Sox. Even though I like seeing them playing better it was done without Liam. Basically it's been the pitching and home HRs. If they can't win on the road against KC you aren't capable of an 80 game stretch of games to get you back into the race.The team would have to stay incredibly healthy and actually win some games against the better teams. I'll start thinking there's REAL hope when they show they can consistently win home and road against good and bad teams. Not impossible but not probable either. These gains appear temporary . It almost now or never. Changes will need to start this trade deadline if they aren't at .500 by then.

Plus the bullpen seems to have found a groove lately. There's zero reason to have him on the Sox now . As much as he wants to help the team he needs to be a little selfish now and take his time.