Jake

I'm less concerned with the fact that he once cheated than that I don't feel especially reassured that he isn't/isn't trying to anymore.

Provided that this post was not obviously incendiary ("break open those crates!"), which we don't know for sure, and that this is a public school, it's a sad thing that this guy lost his job. The local farmers aren't donors, they are taxpayers. They don't have the right to like the personal beliefs of all local public school faculty

I agree that Bonifacio remains an attractive option. Depth at all of our thinnest positions. Kills lefties.

As a cost saving measure, I was willing to accept the small hard drive in the MacBook Air (128GB). I don't really do storage-intensive things, short of some amateur photography that is stored on external drives. Still, I was shocked at how little drive space I had. I spent all morning trying to find out how to carve out some more drive space since I only had about 12GB free. Then...I realized that Time Machine had created 40GB in local snapshots. One click later and I'm oozing with free space.

I don't love it, but he almost certainly will outperform the alternatives. I prefer him to Rasmus, for sure.

The thing Arrieta has going for him is that ALL his stuff changed last year. It wasn't like he got lucky. He earned those numbers last year. He struck out more, walked less, gave up less homers, pitched more. What he doesn't have going for him is that he's never done that stuff before. Pitchers are fickle creatures, by and large.

You also have to remember that Noesi is relatively young, right-handed, not coming off of a surgery, and put up those numbers after not at all being prepared to be a starting pitcher. They're not the same thing, even if they put up similar numbers. Danks has shown that he can be an upper echelon starter in MLB, but also is getting older and hasn't produced since his surgery. Noesi may have more upside in that we know he's healthy and he did alright out there despite a lot of things working against him last season.

In the context of a hundreds of pages long bill, "I helped write it" could mean so many different things as to make it nearly meaningless. Since he definitely was involved in Romneycare, is this claim made based on portions of Romneycare being carried over to the new bill? Did he write it all himself? Did he answer questions from legislators about what should be in it?

I've heard grammarians say that often is supposed to be pronounced "offen"

Tigers don't want Scherzer? Let's get 'im boys!

QUOTE (Eminor3rd @ Dec 11, 2014 -> 12:21 PM) I think you're right if we assume that Danks cannot be moved. I guess I'm still hoping he can I'm kind of indifferent for now. We can roll with Danks for a while if we have to. He might even pitch well again someday, who knows

QUOTE (Eminor3rd @ Dec 11, 2014 -> 12:17 PM) Good for the bullpen, I still think we need a starter. Rienzo doesn't count though. Other than throwing all of Jerry's money at a Scherzer type of guy, I wouldn't want to give a guaranteed contract to anyone. You have Sale-Shark-Q-Danks to start with, all of whom are basically cemented there. Banks, so long as he's here, has to be in the rotation. Then you have Noesi, who was solid all year and is a great value proposition if he can improve even just modestly from last year. Wouldn't want to release him or anything like that. Ideally, we at least give him a trial run of starts to see if he's for real. Then you have Rodon waiting in the wings for a spot too. We're not super deep, but adding a guaranteed contract player in there could make it where we have guys pitching only because we can't get rid of them (Danks, potential FA)

That's...a fabulous trade. Jennings has a little bit of track record - the ERA makes him look better than he has been - and he is under team control for forever. Reigns was clearly on the far outside of both our bullpen and rotation, and was a realistic possible DFA if we needed the space on the 40. We took on nearly no risk in this deal to get who is probably going to be a valuable piece.

Without moving Danks, it would be odd for them to go after Volquez instead of just sticking with Noesi for that spot.

I'm actually intrigued by Ackley. There are arguments to be made that a swap would be fair and Ackley would suit our needs better since we want more lefty-righty balance and he's not an absolute butcher. The offensive bar is lower for Ackley to remain useful.

You always say you're basically out of cash when you're really about 10% away from your projected maximum. Then you can still get the guy you want, but you might be able to convince him you can't give him what he wants.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Dec 9, 2014 -> 09:39 AM) This is the key. He is only going to pitch 160-175 effectively. How do you want to sparse them out. If you put him in the rotation at the beginning of the season, he will be gassed in August and could hurt the team. My vote would be to sart him in Charlotte and limit his innings early on. It's not out of the possibility that the Sox will have him in the Chicago pen for the first 1/4 of the season then by July work him into the rotation. He will learn to use his pitches to get MLB hitters out and move on to the rotation. I think that is what the Sox will do, although I think starting in the minors would be better. This is actually a plausible and defensible plan. I suppose the budget-conscious thing could be to start in Charlotte and if he succeeds there as expected, call him up and have him do some relief appearances at first to lighten the load. I don't love that plan, though, just because I think it is hard on a lot of guys to switch back and forth to and from the rotation.

QUOTE (Real @ Dec 9, 2014 -> 06:51 AM) Does Danks plus Anderson land Kemp? Salary swap plus a legit prospect? Would you do it if you were Hahn? Right now Kemp is unwantable. We don't have to give up actual good players to get him. It's just a matter of whether we can stomach his contract

I wanted to say that baseball reporting beats all the other sports, but the existence of Harold Reynolds may make that statement inaccurate

Put your sack on the table Hahn, sign Scherzer!!!

"Clearly a rental player" - Heyman

I really don't like giving up the presumptive MLB starting 2B for the next X years for one year of Samardzija. It's well-known, I suppose, that I just don't think Samardzija is that great. I hope the Sox see something in him that hasn't really been there in his past production, which wouldn't merit this kind of return for a one-year rental

My feeling is that if you're going to lose a pick, go ahead and grab other guys while you're at it

There's no good reason to think Micah Johnson is ready for MLB. He played at a pretty "meh" level in AAA last year. It also remains unclear whether he's an acceptable defender. All indications are that he needs more time.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Dec 8, 2014 -> 11:45 PM) I really can't see that. Supposedly WAR looks at "just another guy" that can be acquired but not an average. Kershaw is only 7 wins better than him and that is the top in the game? Sorry to derail the discussion Ill stop but using WAR as the only justification to refute a comment whenit is so abstract always irks me. Yeah, we're comparing to the "average replacement" player, which means that lots of replacements will be better or worse than 0 WAR. I think the main thing about WAR that is counterintuitive is just that it's not going to give any one player a ton of credit for winning a game. You're not going to play so well in a single that game that you get anything close to 1 WAR. But, in our minds, we might be thinking, "this game was won by THIS guy." But WAR says no, all kinds of other guys had to not f*** up to make that possible so they get some measure of credit (even if credit = not being docked WAR). But it also seeks to remove context, so that if Clayton Kershaw played for teams that aren't nearly as good, we still can compare him to players that are on great teams. Pitching WAR is a little more debatable. Over small sample sizes, including at the level of a single season, FIP-based WAR is generally more accurate. Over longer stretches, though, RA/9-WAR is better...you can think of that as an ERA-based WAR. I usually look at both.