Jake

I suppose it depends what we mean by company man. He's not going to bad-mouth him, that's for sure. It seems to me that Getz's talent is knowing how to get some of the things he wants from Jerry that others were unable to. Whether he can pry money out of him when it counts, we shall see. We have seen some reporting to the effect that he's managed to convince Jerry to trade some MLB payroll for organizational payroll (analytics, coaches, whatever). That's probably a good trade to make right now and something the previous regime was always unable or unwilling to do; how much was GM vs. owner, I don't know, other than we know the owner has long been skeptical of the organizational spending.

Well I didn't write "Getz is cleary a great judge of baseball talent" But if you're looking for reason to hope, I think you'd look at Getz's apparent vision for how an organization should be run. It doesn't seem to be the Reinsdorf way. Hopefully that might result in him hiring some smart people who give him the kind of advice that leads to better trades, signings, etc.

Nothing too shocking here, but I'm seeing a theme this season that it seems Getz is not philosophically a company man. He doesn't seem to have been aligned with a "side" of Kenny vs. Hahn, seems to highly prioritize staffing up with outsiders, and seems to want the Sox to operate like the teams reputed to operate well. I hated the process that led to his hire and his baseball judgment is clearly suspect. But if he's the Jerry whisperer, and can hire the right people, that could be our way out of the wilderness.

I know, not the biggest deal in the world, but I wonder what's going on with him. From what I can tell, in mid-May the Sox demoted him, he plays for a couple weeks in AAA (as badly or worse relative to MLB), and then is placed on the 7-day IL in AAA with no explanation. Since then, I don't see any updates about him, including the nature of the injury. The Sox have seemingly preferred to release players to make room on the 40-man in the meantime rather than put Shewmake on the 60-day IL (or release him). Any idea what his situation is? Maybe a beat writer has dropped some info on him and I missed it.

lol I would love to see a player like that find a way to be successful in MLB. Not totally unprecedented even if it's very unlikely

Promote Rikuu NOW!!

I kind of get the theory that 1. A large portion of free agent contracts go bad in a hurry and therefore 2. Spending years ahead of the anticipated time of contention has a high chance of leaving you with dead weight rather than a stacked roster. That said, you should really look at the free agent classes of the past 5 or so years. It's...really bad. No matter how much money you want to spend, you're not going to be able to buy yourself into contention in one offseason unless something changes in terms of the quality of player reaching free agency. The ideal is probably identifying the good long-term investments and "buying" them as soon as they are available even if it just moves you from 70 wins to 75. But if it was so easy to identify those players, every team would be building through free agency.

Sizemore is new this year. He's basically a Barfield guy.

Let us also mention that Nishida decided to go to Oregon because he liked their colors and also that he voluntarily used a wood bat in college ball. This guy is built so, so different. I am not capable of thinking rationally about him because I'm not sure he is capable of thinking rationally

He hasn't done anything today, but I just want to state for the record that I want so badly for Rikuu Nishida to succeed

I think the batters played a role here too. Older culture saw striking out as a major negative and didn't properly value walks. So you have hitters going up there who are pretty satisfied to hit a pitch into play the first time they get something hittable, even if they can't square it up. And the pitchers are trying to go the long haul so they're serving up stuff to try to induce that imperfect contact. You're left with batters swinging earlier, with more contact-oriented swings, at softer pitches. Once you had more people looking at the numbers and thinking tactically, all these approaches started falling out of favor. Draw walks, wait for your pitch, realize that a strikeout isn't the end of the world if it means you can make the pitcher throw more pitches and get a chance to hit a meatball out of the park. Then the pitchers realize the hitters aren't swinging at as much bullshit so they need to up their game, leading to higher effort *and* longer at-bats.

Yeah I've always suspected that part of the deal in the "old days" was the meat grinder of amateur and minor league baseball basically filtered out everybody whose arms needed any sort of babying to manage the workload expectations. Not to say I think it's a good system to have guys flaming out like that, but it would make sense to me that it's what was going on.

I won't support Pedro's continued employment, but I'm ever so slightly heartened that Reinsdorf is taking enough interest to sit these guys down and ask what the hell is going on

As far as Pham's true trade value is concerned, I found it noteworthy that Kevin Pillar wasn't moved despite his better defense and good production in LA. Some signs of luck behind his production (no surprise since he's never been an .850 OPS guy) but it wouldn't have been hard to argue that teams should like him more than Pham considering the defense.

Yeah I'm open to just saying you can't let an unheralded prospect make his debut in any kind of pressure situation. And I'm not inclined to give Grifol the benefit of the doubt on much of anything. But yeah...the options are really rotten and it probably had to be either Shuster or Peralta if it wasn't going to be Ellard.