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I had forgot they also signed Chuckie Robinson. Maybe some of these guys are being hired to mentor the young catchers in the finer points of singing kumbaya.

I like Beavers myself. Primed for a big year .

There it is. Thank you. It's all just turning over the roster, roster churning, call it whatever you will. It's a Hail Mary , a wing and a prayer, a wish upon a star. How do you do ? Out with the old in with the new in another JR stew. Right before your eyes. We'll pull laughter from the skies Then he laughs until he cries. Then he dies, then he dies.

Lol what other choice do they have. Please enlighten me with a better plan that makes sense with our current 40 man roster and owner. Lay it out for me. Show me your baseball IQ.

They might as well hire a priest to pray for the prospects to all show remarkable health and huge statistic leaps. Either that or a crossroads deal with a demon.

I don't think they could win the AZL title.

I think the only reason they may have $130M payroll is because JR says that's what you are getting so spend it on what you think we need to... (Fill in the blank). The whole starting pitcher staff could be traded at the deadline or whichever ones out perform expectations. If they got another $10M to spend try getting another guy who has a decent shot to be flipped. They're going to flipping as many short term contracts as they can. The 2024 trade deadline will be just like the 2023 deadline without the veteran pitchers to bring in a few prospects. It's all about what you can get for Fedde, Soroka Kopech , Toussaint and Scholtens, basically whoever can stick in the rotation long enough and manages to have decent stats. That can be none of them or if we get lucky 2 of them.

If they signed Kiermaier I might believe that but I think you have to be on your last legs dumpster dive or a AAAA type to play for the sox in 2024. Keirmaier has yet to regress to the putrid stage.

You gotta be bleeping me ! This year isn't going to be about trying for wins. I'd be 100% floored if the Sox spent money on 6 more guy you mentioned. 2024 is about getting anyone in the Starting rotation and Moncada and Eloy traded and clearing as much payroll as possible off the books and gathering as many prospects as they can with a year or 2 of playing for the Sox. If Maldonado is a done deal already even that shocks me unless after a year off Stassi can't cut it. I see zero reason for him otherwise when you have Lee, Perez and Hackeburg for peanuts .

I'm talking about putting up some numbers that look good enough to trade for. I'm surely not talking about win loss records. There are are plenty of ways for the pitchers to show they are good without the FO thinking they are tricking someone.They need tradable assets and they need some short term pieces to step up. Good coaching ,good defense and a catcher who calls a good game are all keys to helping a pitching staff . He's just doing what's necessary to get out of a hole not thinking it's some master plan. Just hoping all that stuff turns some question marks into prospects. Everybody needs pitching at the deadline. It's not just the short term SP that needs to step up it's short term guys like Moncada, Eloy and even a guy under contract for longer like Benintendi to show that they they have value so they can be traded. There's zero reasons to keep any of those guys.

I suppose as usual you misunderstood. Sox have either cheap dumpster dives pitchers or guys that are short term contracts in the Starting rotation Getz's plan for now is focused on the short term. Cease Fedde ,Kopech, Soroka, Toussaint, Scholtens are all short term guys. Getz is stressing defense from guys with no bats because he needs those pitchers numbers to look as good as possible at the trade deadline. The focus is not winning, it's praying and hoping that better defense can make some of those guys worth a prospect or 2. They have no one but Cease and Robert, Jr. left to trade to get the bats you want. But they will also get pitching. There's no doubt about that. You better hope and pray ,along with Getz ,that Bannister and Katz can pull a rabbit out of their ass and make 1 or 2 of that mess of a starting staff worth getting a couple of prospects. Getz needs a HR on the Cease trade.

Wish you luck. Our experience with young pitchers is injuries and inconsistency. You're in your windows right now. Your record from last year indicates you had just as good of a chance of winning the World Series as anyone. The O's have an abundance of depth. You also have 3 OF you know u have to trade. One very soon with Santander. You can see what you get for your OFs+ a prospect. It gets real hard to trade guy mid season especially in a tight pennant race if he's having a good year. But a team like the Os cannot afford losing quality players for nothing. You got a nice bunch of good OF prospects but one of them needs to take Santander's place ASAP. I hope you don't have to go through the struggles with the injuries and inconsistencies that makes winning so hard without establish veteran pitchers. That's why you see Verlander and Scherzer going to contenders year after year. If you see your GM stocking up on expensive relief pitching , like,let's say Craig Kimble good luck with that. Been there done that. We know what it's like to not have an owner try to finish off the rebuild. In your division you need to capitalize on your chances to win a Championship. A little bad luck and before you know it you're back to 4th place. Maybe the guys in charge of your franchise aren't as stupid and care so little about winning as ours do. ?

Getz is undergoing a trial by fire now by his peers. They are testing his resolve. I think it was very important to make the Bummer trade to establish some kind of barometer with the other GMs how to value pitching even if the return for Bummer didn't impress you. It should impress you . One wild relief pitcher on a losing team netting 4 assets likely to be on the Opening Day roster should tell you a lot of things. 1.This team is going to be terrible. 2. They are seriously about defense to make all the short term tradable starting pitching assets look as good as possible. Getz knows that could include Cease. This is a game of chicken pure and simple. The whining about the asking price is part of the squeeze and I wouldn't expect a Cease trade soon unless Getz finds his Neo.

Teams know the Sox suck and are running out of assets to trade to try to claw their way back to respectability. They also know Reinsdorf won't extend him . They also know holding him is risky for the Sox if his ERA is once again 4.5 before the deadline. A 4.5 ERA is not what you want to be starting in the 2nd game in a 3 or 5 game series. Getz getting good defensive players is likely prep for making his pitchers tradable at the deadline. They probably don't care much about winning right now as much as they do trying to bring in more legitimate talent. Anyone thinking the Sox can actually compete by keeping him is sadly mistaken. Their best plan is to keep Cease, Fedde,Kopech and Soroka numbers as good as possible and hope to trade them all. Cease preferably before the season starts. This is why they want more pitching prospects . You need to remove those 4 guys from any equation moving forward very shortly. You can probably say the same thing about Scholtens and Toussaint. That's why Getz will not have any rookie in the starting rotationuntil it can't be helped. Anyone trying to split hairs thinking less than 100 losses again should readjust their thinking if you think a 5 or 10 game improvement is any sign of progress. That's not a goal right now which is also why Grifol wasn't fired. He's got a contract. No good reason to pay anyone else. That's a JR move if I ever saw one.

???

That's what's always in the back of my mind. Huge risk when he's so important to jump starting a way back to respectability. LOL. I can't believe I just wrote that while JR is still the owner.

I'm not focused on anything except not giving Reinsdorf more reasons to think he's a baseball genious and see things happen that do not align with his philosophies.

We are very well aligned in this stream of consciousness.

Maybe you haven't heard but boring baseball does not put butts in the seats. People want HRs and wins. Since the Sox have no easy path back to the playoffs and still need butts in the seats for JR in increase payroll we have quite the conundrum. What comes 1st pitching ,defense, no winning boring baseball that leaves the stands empty or hit HRs, run the bases, but exciting non winning , modern, baseball that might put just a few more butts in the seats ? This is not the dead ball era with 450 ft. to CF to hit a HR. The Yankees discovered in the 1920's that a LH slugger putting balls over the fence did wonderful things for them and baseball as a sport.The Sox still havent figured that out 100 years later.

I wouldn't be making any proclamations about the maximum amount of games they lose. The sky's the limit for that.

Sheets , Romy, Remillard I'm right there with you. Colas and Sosa still have a shot but very hard to become a productive MLB hitter when you swing at everything. Colas advanced very quickly despite all his time off by hitting the crap out of the ball even better in AA than he did in A+. Sosa always needed time to adjust to a higher level but once he did he produced. The Sox are now in a position not to give up on either of those 2. But they clearly have sent Colas a strong message about his defense , pitch selection and baserunning that Getz has said he will start the season in AAA. When Spring training is likely to be an open competition for making the 26 that's a pretty strong message to send to Colas. Even if you set the world on fire in ST you are starting the season at AAA. I'm pretty sure it's not a negotiating tactic. The visibility of Bannister so far and even the hiring of Getz signals that JRs philosophies about how he invests in pitching will be followed.

That's why JR hired him. JR won't pay for long term pitching and he hasn't yet ,as far as we know ,increased the quality or quantity of people manning the lower echelon of the pay scale in scouting, drafting and development. I'm not expecting different results from another Jerry lackey hire. JR picked him because their philosophies aligned. We may be encouraged slightly by who Getz has surrounded himself with but the guy we hear about the most is Bannister ,whose specialty is pitching. I'm not sure that we are hearing very much about LH power . Mostly it's been about pitching , speed defense and KW's favorite, athleticism.

Handpicked by JR just like TLR . What could possibly go wrong. Hahn in his own right was a failure but kept his job for a long time because he followed Jerry's edicts and philosophies that handicapped how he did his job right up to the very end when in a last ditch effort to save the rebuild he invested in Clevinger and Benintendi then was allowed along with KW and the rest of the Sox crack FO lackey's tried to make up for the utter lack of scouting and development by acquiring mostly pitching and catching at the trade deadline . So far Getz seems no different.

We are also reminded ,with the release of Luis Patino, that the Rays got 4 prospects from the Padres for Blake Snell headlined by a starting pitcher (Patino) and a catcher (Mejia). Starting pitching and catching are volatile positions . I can't really blame anyone for wanting position player prospects especially LH power hitters who also provide fielding and baserunning value. If your WAR if fully dependent on your pitching arm it's hard to make an impact. A position player with speed and defense can accumulate WAR and contribute to wins even if the bat never fully develops. This is why you have to consider a high floor as well as a high ceiling. The larger the gap between floor and ceiling the bigger the chance for a boom or bust player. Being a LH hitter gives you advantages in a sport where good hitting careers are often predicated on how well you hit RH pitching. It also gives you an advantage running since you are closer to 1st base to start . Vaughn so far is a perfect example. He can't rack up fielding or baserunning WAR. Despite being touted as a generational type hitter he hasn't yet figured out how to hit or get on base against RHP. In general all things being equal, it's just easier to do well against opposite handed pitchers . Conversely it's easier for RHP to get RHH out. As a hitter it's all about how well you see the ball and LHH get to see a lot more pitches that they can see well. The Sox entire history of losing can be tied to many things and having the worst LH hitting among all the teams in baseball history is right there at the top of the list. Was Moncada the only position player among the highly ranked prospects the Sox got in the 1st rebuild trades who hit LH ? Didn't the Sox get a lot of SP also? The whole Eaton trade was Giolito, Dunning and Lopez. Sale got Kopech. Quintana brought Cease. I'd like to see things handled differently this time. However with JR in charge and unwilling to pay for pitching maybe our GMs under him lately don't have much of a choice than to trade for pitching. JR also doesn't invest in scouting and development so drafting pitchers didn't help out the rebuild either nor did his mandates regarding the international draft. So many failures led by Reinsdorf .