Jake

We also have taken a few college relievers and tried to make them into starters, which is a whole other unconventional way of doing things.

Anyone who knows me I don't take this lightly, but I'm officially pushing the panic button on Hansen

Hard to see this particular game as emblematic of some larger thing. Our ace got us into the 8th with a lead and our star rookie reliever got shelled in the 9th the day after closing one down like it was nothing.

Hard to know what to think of that Gurriel play because I've basically never seen a player do that.

Thinking back to when Kris Bryant was in AA and AAA, I just remembered looking at that >25% K% and wondering if it was going to cause him problems in MLB. He of course would strike out 30% of the time as a rookie which did hold him down to a mortal .850-ish OPS. Now we have another great bat in Eloy who is younger — and hasn't put up the incredible raw run production that Bryant did, to be fair — but with no problems at all making consistent contact at the plate.

Following up on this, I managed to get Baseball Savant to give me month by month splits for Yoan as RHH... April: .268 wOBA May: .110 wOBA June: .150 wOBA July: .334 wOBA (not including today)

I've been thinking that his ABs have been much more competitive against LHP as of late, even when he hasn't gotten the results.

It's getting really difficult to justify keeping him down there.

What in the world would Aaron Bummer have to do to get his spot back on the MLB club?

Hard for me to understand what has changed recently with Moncada to make you question him, especially with regard to concerns about his ability to make contact:

When I see Madrigal swing I marvel at how all that load and weight shift tends to be wasted on a ball pounded into the ground. I haven't watched him play enough to say for sure but it seems like he might get something out of a little more loft.

Avi was not an average MLB player prior to his breakout last year. He was a slightly below average hitter who was playing defense badly. There would be no harm having Fulmer be a 5.50 ERA pitcher in AAA at this point, but they can do what they want to do with him.

"Very few" players have the language he's requesting in this year's draft, say the Bears. Well the player is the best LB in the draft per the Bears so I would sure as hell consider giving him the elite contract treatment.

I would think that sounds like the type of player who out-performs his speed on the basepaths.

We really don't have much left-handed starting pitching in our system, so from that perspective this makes sense too. It looks like Medeiros has the raw stuff to be an effective starter, whichever portion of the rotation that is. If hearing a new voice/growing up/continued development gets him to hone the command, you got something very nice here.

That's the first time that pitch-tipping came to mind for me there. It's a very hittable hung curveball but you almost never see a guy go up and swing at that on 0-0 unless the pitcher has been throwing that pitch to start guys off throughout the game.

Well they've hit the changeup pretty well, but the same could be said for his fastball. He's thrown 9 breaking balls, 8 of which were called balls. That's probably not helping him much.

Why is Madrigal getting caught stealing? Are they pickoffs?

Sure, but that's why I brought up Colon as a comparison because other than a brief time early in his career he wasn't a big strikeout guy but was able to be successful throwing 80%+ fastballs. Lopez might also find a little more success with his fastball if he could get himself ahead in the count a little more often, which is hard to do when he can hardly throw an offspeed pitch for a strike (not that he's pounding the zone with his fastball either).

Reynaldo really has a lot of young Bartolo Colon to him. I wonder if he'd be better off trying to emulate that approach and simplifying things, just throwing the fastball and one chosen offspeed with a third pitch just once in a blue moon.

I'd agree that Reynaldo looks like he's due for a little bonus rest if the Sox can buy some for him. His velocity varies so much within and between games that I don't know whether I should think it's because he's tired, consciously backing off, or what.

So what's the deal with Vieira? Started the season struggling terribly with walks, but in the past 2 months-ish has really cut back on the walks. In spite of not many walks, they've still been scoring on him. So how does he look? What are they hitting?

Of course FG ranks him T100 as a 1B, which is fair IMO