Jake

Hate seeing Moncada lunging for the bag like that

I think if the Sox wanted to put the best lineup out there every day, it would usually include Leury

Moving Moncada to 3B was a tell that the Sox think Madrigal will be up soon. Maybe not this season, but they clearly don't think it will be much longer than that.

No. Only one comparable deal has been signed and Scott Kingery was still in MLB spring training when he signed it. Whether a player has ever been sent down in camp only to make his debut on opening day anyway, I'm not sure.

I expect him to be called up but I'm sure interested in what the Sox say about why they optioned him to the minors and decide to call him up after the contract.

Main thing with Giolito is he's at least missing some bats in between getting hammered on his mistakes. There's a clear Gavin Floyd comparison but it's becoming a very optimistic one.

The way I see it is you have to price in (if you're Eloy) the value of getting to FA a year earlier. So you might take a kind of small guarantee to get to potential FA earlier, and you'll be okay with big dollar options on those years.

As has been suggested, if true I suspect the 8 years 100 million is a maximum value rather than guaranteed length/value.

They also used to pitch underhand.

The main question is if at the end of the season we feel comfortable that we have several core pieces going forward. Potential candidates for that status: Eloy Yoan Tim Anderson Reynaldo Lopez Lucas Giolito Dylan Cease Michael Kopech There are of course other players who may end up core pieces, but they are too far away for us to know by the end of the year. Kopech is sort of in that situation, but we have good reason to think he'll be a core piece in spite of his injury. To be honest, solid seasons from Eloy, Yoan, and one starting pitcher will be enough to keep me hopeful. I don't rule out a big step forward for Tim but I think that's mostly wishful thinking and he'll always be kind of a peripheral guy who is nice to have but isn't pushing you over the top. I also think Rodon is still important but that's now more of a near-term concern.

This is the correct take. You change all these things basically at the same time and you have no idea which change causes which outcomes. They are at least staggering the mound distance change but it may be confounded with end of season fatigue.

It's pretty simple. It's easier to make contact with a low pitch, but the contact on a high pitch is more likely to be productive contact. Part of the reason pitchers like to throw fastballs in the low part of the zone is to generate weak contact, but also to set up offspeed pitches that are designed to look like the same pitch. When you fool a guy with speed, you want the pitch low because he'll pull away from it. But if you only throw offspeed pitches low, then you'll have no deception on them.

They made the correct call to keep Narvaez instead of Smith. Later on the Mariners put on a fire sale and we decided to join the fun, leaving an opening at backup catcher.

First of all, as a general rule I strongly dislike the idea of sex offender registries and so on. If you're a menace to society, then you can't be in society. If your punishment is over, your punishment is over. People who commit crimes and serve their punishment should be allowed to be full participants in society. Everybody wants to say that sure the person shouldn't be in prison, but they shouldn't be allowed to do [insert whatever thing here]. This was I believe the most complete reporting on what happened: https://portlandtribune.com/pt/12-sports/385703-274945-penalties-paid-heimlich-ready-to-return-for-beavers-baseball From the public safety perspective, it appears experts believe Heimlich is a very low risk to re-offend. His court-appointed therapist told the court he should have his restrictions as soon as allowed, saying they "do nothing to protect the community and serve no other useful purpose." The only reason this ultimately came to light was an error on the part of state police in Oregon, who misunderstood the laws under which Heimlich was sentenced. If not for the news coverage, a criminal background check would not yield any results for Heimlich. He is not a registered sex offender. In the eyes of the law, he has no criminal history. Heimlich has only "admitted" to the offense under a single circumstance: his guilty plea required him to write an apology letter that had to be written as if he committed the offense. Maybe that's enough for you to say he is an admitted offender, but in my view it would be very naive to assume that only guilty people take guilty pleas. The alternative that Heimlich faced after the accusation against him was to fight in a quasi-court setting (this is the juvenile justice system, not the court us adults at Soxtalk would go to if we were accused of such crimes). Heimlich's lawyer, the family says, advised that in such juvenile proceedings the accuser is always believed unless they are unequivocally proven wrong. There was an unusual circumstance here in that when Heimlich's brother divorced, he was granted full custody of the child. Nobody has said publicly why that happened but it is not what typically happens. It was understood that Heimlich's brother would see his custody questioned if he didn't react appropriately to this accusation. This is just to say that there was much more at stake here than Heimlich's own interests. So I don't know what he did. I think there's a chance he is innocent as he claims. The best evidence against him is that the child told somebody it happened; I'm generally inclined to believe the accuser and I wouldn't sign Heimlich if I wasn't comfortable with the possibility that he did what he was accused of doing. I would advise against using his guilty plea as evidence of his guilt as there was abundant reason for an innocent person in his situation to accept the deal offered to him: go to counseling, avoid the niece, and after a few years it's all over and nobody will ever find out (unless some police officer in another state accidentally leaks your name into the public record). The alternative is a drawn out hearing process that will likely ruin your relationship with several members of the family and if found guilty, time in juvenile detention. All that being said, I'm not hoping for the Sox to sign him no matter how talented he may be — I'm thinking he's being overrated just because he's basically untouchable — because the Sox are not exactly in a position where they have built up goodwill they can burn on a controversial thing like this.

Good to see everyone is handling bad performances by players on the fringe of the roster well.

I'm starting to think Fulmer ought to just go the Lance McCullers route and just use his fastball as a last resort

I assume there must be no stadium gun since nobody on Twitter has mentioned any of the pitchers' velocity

Besides giving record-breaking free agent contracts to Manny/Bryce, I'm not sure what else you'd expect. We've engaged in a series of low-risk transactions, some with potential reward and others with the limited reward of filling massive holes on the MLB roster for which we had no good internal options.

You can see the makings of a good team here...maybe even a good coach!

If it's true that the Sox told Guyer to expect to get ABs for us, I see no way Delmonico can make the team out of spring training. And if they plan to really give Guyer a spot on the roster, that will mean one of Engel or Palka goes away when Eloy comes up.

That makes no difference is what I'm saying (other than the money you pay now being worth more than paying the same amount later). You're basically buying out all of his productive years for a lump sum and you're assuming his productive years stop sometime well before year 13. So talking about the average cost per year is pretty misleading in terms of how much he's being valued at.

Don't talk about $25M AAV. The expected return in the final 3 years of the deal is basically $0. You have to evaluate the deal in terms of the total investment and the total production you expect over the life of the deal. It ends up being more about whether you think you can get $330 million of production in ~7 years. Maybe! You do get some upside in that if he is unusually long-lasting in terms of his performance, you can still capitalize in those later years. The benefit the Sox wouldn't get is luxury tax relief because we will never be close to it.

The big mystery in all of it is why EPO. The benefit would be minimal at best and I think more likely that it would have no performance benefit.

I'm sure the Giants would happily play-act interest to try to push the Dodgers into the most expensive contract possible.