Jake

It's early, he has some flaws, he has some strengths, and I'm just happy it hasn't turned into a complete disaster.

Yoan has played: 149, 132, 52 (out of 60), 144, and 104 games in the seasons of his career. Last season was really the only time he missed a significant period and the amount of games he played would be the second best of Byron Buxton's life. Here's my feeling on Yoan. He seems to be "banged up" frequently, which may affect his play, but he's usually on the field. I think this may relate to his personality and willingness to tell people when he's hurting. You see it when he gets hurt in the middle of games from collisions, foul balls off the body, etc. He at first looks really hurt, needs a bunch of time to work it out, and eventually stays in the game. I suspect he is dealing with stuff that other guys are but he may be different from some other guys in terms of his willingness to keep the coaching staff up to date and maybe advocate for rest at times. The polar opposite in recent memory is Jose Abreu who basically always played, often had barely-discussed nagging injuries, and rarely showed outward signs of pain.

I still wonder about the potential risks of having a guy sit down all game except a few brief moments where he may need to sprint blast

So if you drop both Leury and Romy, who plays 2B if Andrus has to fill in at SS?

We start with: 1B Vaughn 2B Andrus 3B Moncada SS Anderson C Grandal LF Benintendi CF Robert RF ??? DH Eloy That’s 8 guys. Add Seby Zavala as backup catcher and you have 9 of the 13 accounted for. Also potentially in the mix: Gavin Sheets RF/1B/DH Leury Garcia 3B/SS/2B/LF/CF/RF Romy Gonzalez 3B/SS/2B Oscar Colas RF Jake Burger 3B/1B/DH Billy Hamilton LF/CF Jake Marisnick LF/CF/RF One of the above will need to start in RF and 3 more will occupy bench spots. Sheets, Romy, Burger, and Colas all have minor league options AFAIK. Your choices for RF are Colas, Sheets, Leury, Marisnick, or Eloy + some non-OF at DH. I don't think the Sox would start Hamilton in RF except under special circumstances. If I were in charge, I think I'd go Colas in RF plus Romy, Marisnick, and Sheets on the bench. I'm not totally sold on Colas, in which case I guess I'm stuck with Sheets/Marisnick platoon and Romy + ??? I don't know, Leury or Hamilton?

I would urge not to over-interpret the statement from this person who doesn't speak English as a first language. I suspect he merely means he hasn't given up on the idea that he can catch the ball out there and I say good for him, I hope he can prove the doubters wrong. I'll be shocked if he causes the team any clubhouse problems when he sees most of his reps coming at DH.

What is so impressive to me is that he basically missed the entire process of minor league development and is still doing more than holding his own. I see nothing to suggest that he should be playing the outfield for any period of time, but that's okay since that was never a standard he should have been held to. He's probably going to struggle again (in fact I can see that Statcast thinks he's been on a lucky streak) but his ability to take his lumps at this level without falling apart is great. Really the main drawback is it has cost us the ability to see what his ceiling looks like since he missed the chance to dominate minor league competition and show what he looks like when he's fully "on."

FWIW, Statcast seems to indicate that Hendriks is releasing the ball closer to home plate this year than last year (by about 0.2 feet). Maybe the cause of a back issue? Of course you can release closer to home for reasons besides the follow-through.

Worth keeping in mind that the option increases in value every 50 plate appearances starting at 400. Pollock's track record tells us it's a dicey proposition for him to get much over 400, but if he does manage to play nearly every day it's a $15M option.

Yeah I was mainly trying to figure out if we were going to try to do some weird thing where we DH Eloy a bunch just to keep Pollock out of RF.

Does Pollock have the arm to play RF?

Been a while since I strolled down the page on Soxtalk. Looks like The Buster was put out to pasture, eh?

I suppose the other way of looking at this is if you think he can get MLB hitters out right away, you just want to get as much value out of him before the inevitable injury that may leave him unable to regain his pre-injury performance.

I've been on Soxtalk for longer than the time in my life before I joined Soxtalk.

He's pitching somewhere? I can't find any stats on him, was wondering what happened to him.

Seby can't hit, I don't care how well he catches. Yes, 3 homer game notwithstanding. Unless Frank Menecchino just taught him something that he didn't know when he struck out 40% of his PA in Charlotte, Seby's gotta go and shouldn't be playing this much as it is.

Seems like most of the outsiders in particular fail to appreciate the context of Jose getting hit all the time. I'm no fan of the "old ways" where you protect your guys by beaning people — but I also understand that it's frustrating when your guy gets drilled all the time and none of the people doing the drilling perceive much of a cost. So at some point, maybe rather than resort to throwing baseballs at each other it might be useful to at least show the opposition that you might get somebody telling you to F off if you can't safely execute your gameplan.

Still haven't gotten the all-clear from the Sox beat writers.

He's a rock solid MLB starter, hard to complain about this.

I'm still trying to figure out if Kopech and/or Eloy will be in the top 10 or left off entirely. EDIT: On reflection, I don't think they'll be on there at all. Eloy didn't make it last season and there's no way he's raised his stock enough to go into the top 10. Same goes for Kopech.

The Athletic did a similar article a little while back and it was much better.

FWIW, to me Moncada is the clear answer.

It's very hard to predict the future in baseball but I'd rather be the Sox than most of the other teams.

Would you rather have Moncada on his current deal or Madrigal with his current contract situation?

Well I've seen at least one comment from Tony that he's very happy with Burger's play so far but the last thing he wants to see is a young guy like that on the bench. I don't really know where he's supposed to play, I'm not super optimistic that he's going to defend at 2B. Could DH some but that's probably not the ideal role for him either.