Balta1701

Are the checks really going to keep coming in for a .250 winning percentage and a $180 million payroll with money deferred to next year just to make that happen?

There’s an old legend of a father who insisted to his son that the 62 Mets were a .250 team, no better no worse. The son took this as a bet because after all 162 isn’t divisible by 4, so a .250 winning percentage is impossible. Two rainouts later the father won the bet. Anyway this is what the 62 Mets must have been like.

That’s not an answer.

Who would you have preferred?

I gotta say Eloy, because compared to everyone else there was nothing rushed or messed up about his trip through the org. No position changes, no skipping levels, no being rushed upwards because someone got traded.

Do other teams do anything like this? I’ve been complaining about the White Sox sequence with prospects for nearly 20 years. -Rush to the big leagues, gotta get that bat in the lineup now. -Struggles when they arrive -Rapidly loses playing time to some crappy veteran, we’re trying to win we gotta get that veteran bat in the lineup right now. -Traded away, gotta get that veteran presence to help our lineup.

If Cease hits his stride like he did last season, I’d certainly try to move him at the deadline. -Youre asking for a big return, two top prospects and some filler or a true top 10 prospect ready to go, something like that. -A team giving up that much can think about 3 playoff runs instead of 2. -Although hopefully low, the risk of injury is always nonzero. -In the offseason, many teams have enough money to spend that they have several options. Deadline budgets can be tighter, making his arb status more important. Of course, it might turn out that no team meets that price either way, and you hold him until your price goes down or he gets hurt. It also could turn out that Cease is inconsistent the rest of the season and we are holding him until a new pitching coach is brought in next year.

However, unlike Lynn for example, Cease has a pattern of his fastball starting low and improving during the season. His fastball is only down 0.6 mph from April 2022, and it’s 0.3 mph from May of 2021. So it is slightly down, but not to the extent the full year number suggests.

They went all-in on 2015 and finished in 4th place. They grabbed their clothes, sold those off to go all in again in 2016, and finished in 4th place. They’ve gotten to buy back in before.

I think it's the exact opposite. For a guy who is both struggling and who has been as banged up in his career as Robert (or Anderson, Eloy, Moncada, or Tired Legs Vaughn), you should be proactive in resting these guys. Particularly when they're slumping, give them time to go get some practice swings and let all the little sore things heal for a day. Those minor things turn into things you start favoring, and then those turn into injuries when you step wrong or swing wrong.

At least I'm consistent. Here's me defending Tony LaRussa resting people and saying that resting people is well justified, it's the one good thing he's doing, but he needs to stop being an idiot about failing to think ahead in games or about having guys stuck on the bench who can't play but who aren't put on the IL (boy did that ever ramp up in 2022). I defended LaRussa resting these guys!

You'd describe Luis Robert's career as "Healthy"?

I completely disagree with this.

This is one of my long-running buttons with some managers (Ozzie was awful about this). They take guys and run them into the ground, and then we complain at the end of the year how run-down someone is or how they got hurt so much. Especially in April when the weather is iffy, with guys who have serious injuries in their history, and when there's a backup OF on the roster who isn't hitting much worse than Robert, give him some extra days off.

Luis Robert has had 1 day off out of 27 games this April. He got a little time to sit yesterday because of the blowout, but this is a pace to play 156 games this year. Thankfully, he has no history of serious injuries where you'd worry about keeping him healthy with extra rest. Elvis Andrus has started every game for the White Sox. Andrew Vaughn was off in the 2nd game of the season and has played every day since. 2 of those days were at DH. Today will be Jake Burger's 14th straight game at 3b since an off day. Thankfully again, no record of serious injury there.

No specific recent thread where this fits:

Hell the As don’t deserve money either, their fans will be happier if you find ways to go without paying the team.

I think the way you get things to sound good to Hahn when he is hiring a hitting coach is to talk about how you don’t want to be patient just for the sake of taking walks, but that you want to be patient but not miss your pitch to put in play. For some guys (Anderson, Moncada pre injury) that’s exactly what they need to hear and it’s a setup that works for them. For other guys (Robert, Eloy) they hear this as swing aggressively if you think you can make contact. They’re the ones who need someone to tell them and work with them constantly on not swinging at garbage. I also wouldn’t be surprised one but if this years hitting coaches talked about taking advantage of the shift rules with more contact.

Well that explains what happened to Soxfest

I think that is within the realm of possibilities. They had an 8 game losing streak in April of 22 and I remember joking that it looked like the Mon-Stars stole all their baseball abilities because of how awful their play was, particularly on defense. They recovered and somehow wound up a .500 team, although that took things like “Cueto” and “Andrus is a God” to happen. They’re not as bad as the As. I would have guessed they were a 4th place team this year because they’re always a 4th place team under Hahn. This team will fall behind the Royals if they’re even close to this bad. Are they truly this bad? Maybe, maybe not. This is really bad.

I think that’s 2 straight “competitive” seasons with an 8 game losing streak in April?

I was promised pictures of a set of collapsed columns on top of Hahn and I demand satisfaction.