Jake

I am not a fan of ranking Collins outside the T100.

I think part of it is we assumed he'd either be an All-Star or a Courtney Hawkins redux and somehow he's looking like a solid MLB regular, the part of distribution of outcomes nobody was really betting on.

https://2080baseball.com/spotlight/kodi-medeiros/ Report from a couple weeks ago had him 90-92 in that particular outing.

The MLB Pipeline writeup specifically mentions Medeiros having lost velocity from the time he was drafted and later got it back. Wouldn't be surprising that people have different notes on velocity if it has bounced around so much.

Longenhangen's velo report is lower than what Baseball America and MLB Pipeline report. Also a tip for looking at his stats: Make sure to account for the very high number of hit batsmen; his walk numbers appear just about decent until you account for that.

They've got some Beckham kid hitting pretty well in Tacoma...?

I played with a couple guys whose arm in the outfield played much better than a radar gun would have made you think. As you mention, accuracy was a big part of it since being off target by a little bit will cost all the time saved by throwing harder and usually more than that. The other thing about those guys in my experience is they threw very straight balls with pure backspin. I'm not a physicist, but it sure seemed to me that these throws played better than their nominal top velocity because they didn't have to travel as far (because they didn't have to hook/slice on the way to the target) and didn't decelerate as much in the air. Those things also make the accuracy part easier to accomplish.

I'm not a huge fan of the move but if the Sox don't rule out the possibility of his returning to starting it makes some sense. The general benefit of moving a guy like this to the pen is you don't really make him work through the struggles anymore. The Sox have stated previously that they felt he was unable to turn around a bad start once it went bad. From a developmental perspective, if he too frequently gets out of whack with no ability to correct that same outing, it makes sense to put him in a role where you can painlessly pull him as soon as you see it's one of those days. You can think of it like this: Practicing the right things will make you better, but practicing the wrong things makes you worse. The starting role may have been pushing him into endless repetitions of bad motions, bad thought processes, etc. You can nip that in the bud out of the pen. That said, he still has a starter's repertoire so you might want to keep him on deck for some starts if he's doing well and the opportunity presents itself, sort of like the Chris Volstad role.

I think this is a way to tell Cordell that they're still easing him back into his proper level of play while the Sox are likely more motivated by how badly he played at AAA earlier this year. I do fully expect that if he crushes the ball for a week or two they'll find a spot for him in AAA. Coming into the season he looked like a MLB guy, but he clearly took his demotion at that time about as well as Matt Davidson took his first missed cut with the Sox.

Of course Moncada has a .770 home / .700 away split in MLB, so maybe AAA is informative after all! Not to mention a guy going from an .820 AAA OPS to a .750 OPS (in 2017) or .730 OPS (total) in MLB is hardly evidence of a guy morphing into a new player when advancing a level. At any rate, I don't think it's too controversial to say that Eloy's bat is better prepared at 20 games into his AAA career than Yoan's was. Eloy played a considerably higher number of games at the A and AA levels than Yoan prior to getting to where he is now. Eloy also has succeeded in a different way than Yoan in that he's never struggled to make contact which is a good indicator that he is not likely to go into a death spiral if promoted too aggressively. The question isn't whether Eloy must be promoted today, but whether what we've seen is fairly convincing that he's ready.

Where is Eloy?

I don't see any particular reason to keep Robbins. He may turn out to be a better AAA player than some guys kept ahead of him but I see little MLB upside in him.

There is a lot of evidence to suggest the "real" Eloy is much more like the one you've seen in his home games than the one you've seen in his road games. His lack of strikeouts thus far is another encouraging sign that he's not lucking out due to some massive ballpark effect. Oftentimes you see guys on short-term hot streaks and under the hood is a bunch of strikeouts and sky-high BABIP. Not here, he just looks like an improved version of the same guy we've seen for 12 months.

I don't recall the specifics but @ptatc made a post when this most recent injury was announced and it didn't leave me feeling optimistic about Nate in the long term. The thrust IIRC is that while this injury in isolation shouldn't be insurmountable, it suggests his throwing motion is just so tough on the elbow that after one thing is surgically repaired, that excess stress is just finding a new weakest link. Made me think that he'd either have to dial back the intensity quite a bit (would be hard for anyone to do) or rebuild his motion (also hard to do) if he wants to achieve lasting health.

As fathom alluded to, I do suspect there's a chance that he is so unique in his willingness to take pitches just outside the zone with 2 strikes that he may just be exposing how hard it is for umpires to call those pitches. While most of the calls in the Twitter thread are shown to be rarely called strikes in general, if you isolate every instance of a rare event it can look like the rare event happens constantly. The data necessary to see whether he does worse on two strikes than most batters exists but would be hard to wrangle. What you might want to see is something like whether his average strike zone is different than other players'.

Misjudged it by a foot and a half but was able to jump and reach enough to catch it anyway

Weak sauce, Ricky!

FWIW, that was a hell of a throw by Haniger

LOL Omar with the baserunning

Omar is really hitting. Here's hoping he remembers how to catch soon.

He has a shot at being a MLBer, in large part because he has shown he can catch the ball well enough out there. Note that I'm not saying he's some kind of plus defender, but he won't have to hit a bunch to make up for his defense like a Palka will.

The last thing you want to do is delay their development. If you're talking about a couple weeks like with Bryant, then who cares. But while you want to pay him less and keep him longer, you also want to compete sooner. You don't know how long he'll need to play in MLB before he's going to play good. Avisail Garcia needed about 300 games before he was ready. If Eloy posts something like an .800 OPS in AAA the rest of the year, we'll feel okay not promoting him yet. But it will also leave us in a situation where half the board wants to delay his call-up next year until the Super 2 deadline or maybe just punt the whole year.

Gotta say, at this fairly early date I'm not feeling great about the 2017 draft.

I was under the impression that this is what they do now.

Engel is at least a sensational defensive talent and not much worse than Tilson was at the plate. Tilson is also someone who might benefit from more time in the minors while I have doubts that Engel would get anything from it.