Jake

And whatever the number is right now, you'd have to double it after a good month in MLB.

I'd lead with an offer of $40M for 7 years with 2-3 team or possibly vesting options.

Yeah now that I think of it, it's almost criminal that we didn't call up Bummer

Stupid. There was no rush to move Avilan and he's the type of pitcher who should get you a prospect more in the mold of Charlie Tilson.

Worth noting that the CBA will be renegotiated before these guys potentially reach free agency and all the monkeying around with service time happening now may not even matter.

I am sympathetic to the view that pitcher health is so hard to project 6 years into the future that you need to optimize for the next 2-3 years and just let the rest shake out. And if they are about to trade Shields and ended up calling Spencer Adams or something, it would have made the games they're (no longer) playing way too obvious.

Still happy with his ABs tonight. That was a pitch that would have been tough to hit and wasn't close.

FWIW I think Anderson had said his vision problem was very minor

I hope Abreu is a White Sox forever

Changed his approach so much that he purged the concept of the walk from his mind

After Beckham, Flowers, and Anderson, I won't be buying the glasses as the fix until I get some more compelling evidence

If Hahn gets to the point that he wants to trade Rodon, then you fire Hahn and let the next guy do it. If he can't get the team to at least think it is competing before Rodon becomes a FA, then we need new management.

That was indeed a weird article because it doesn't really include any new information from anyone about his defense other than Collins saying he has improved his work with the pitchers, whatever that entails. If you're going to puff, at least get somebody to say that he's doing X Y and Z. FWIW, I think we kind of screwed the pooch by having him catch fewer games this year than he did last year. This was because of the time-sharing with Zavala, but it has to have been a negative for Collins who has talked in the past about being affected by the heavy catching load. His offense has trailed off a bit since he's taken a larger share of the catching duties as well, suggesting the need for acclimating him to the workload.

Absurd that Kopech hasn't been in MLB for the past few weeks.

Ryan Sweeney comp still holding up reasonably well for Rutherford

Just sign the kid to a long-term deal and call him up

I'm not as high on Madrigal as some others are just because I haven't yet seen that he has a lot of physical talent. There is some mystery about whether he can play SS, and for some reason the Sox aren't trying it yet, but for now I see a 2B who gets very good reviews with the glove. I worry about what will happen when the better-than-eyeballs analytics get their hands on his defense. Maybe he'll be a great defensive 2B, it'll be important for his value that he is. He clearly isn't super strong, but it's hard to tell where he is on that spectrum. He can make contact with the best of them, but that isn't everything. I worry that you could end up with a guy who bats .300 but with such little power that he's still not actually very valuable. Overall, I see his floor as Chris Getz and I'm not sure who his ceiling is but it doesn't strike me as super high. I wasn't against the Sox drafting him because he's relatively low risk. But I'll also say that I was more enthusiastic about Trea Turner as a draft prospect, who ultimately went later in the round than Madrigal did. Of course, I hope I'm wrong!

lol, Sox really plastering the ball right now

This time he did know it was a strike by the time the catcher caught it, he was just badly fooled by the pitch. Still clearly battling two (or more) different thought processes up there

I've yet to hear a great alternative, but the system is surely bad when it punishes teams for making the right baseball decisions (developing players in MLB the moment it is appropriate).

Normally you wouldn't let Covey make his next start but there might be a riot if we called someone other than Kopech up from AAA to do it.

I thought the Yoan looking K was not a product of him reverting to his previous approach but just misreading the pitch. He usually shows some recognition on the close strike 3 calls that there's a chance he's being rung up but he looked utterly surprised by it in this particular AB.

Unpopular opinion: Moncada can play some D

I'd say his ceiling is slightly worse hitting than this and a better job of keeping the ball in front of him behind the plate. Per Baseball Prospectus, this year he ranks: 102 out of 102 in runs from blocking balls (includes passed balls on pitches that didn't literally require a block) 95 out of 102 in runs from framing 36 out of 102 in runs from throwing 102 out of 102 overall catcher defense (just a fraction worse than Willson Contreras) Last year, he was 106 out of 111. Note that the largest component of catcher defense (in terms of how much influence it has over how many runs get scored) per most current research is pitch framing and both FanGraphs and Baseball Reference do not incorporate any framing metrics into WAR.

I think it is worth saying that executive/management experience has long been a very undervalued skillset in baseball front offices and it's a skillset that is probably rarely present alongside baseball scouting talent, given that those are both specialized skills that don't build on each other. Also I would advise being cautious with comparisons to Atlanta since we know they were brazenly cheating for years.