Greg Hibbard

This is the exact type of series against say a bad royals club in 2010 that would have soxtalk rant and rave for about 10 pages about how garbage everything is and how everyone needs to go

Exactly

Man, Engel is making a really strong case lately to ignore whatever offensive shortcomings he may have

Hilarious outcome. I’m loving that Yankees fans must be utterly furious watching them blow a very meaningful must win home series against what they no doubt view as a garbage nothing team

Apparently it’s Ryan LaMarre career highlight night at Yankee Stadium tonight

Lopez is Mr. Hard Contact tonight

This lineup looks like one of the joke lineups we put together earlier this season

11 strikeouts in his last 11 games (46 PAs / 41 ABs). If that trend continues that could be very good.

I think Avi's future largely depends on his first half next year. If he has a great first half, I could see the Sox trying to make a play to keep him, but if he's largely in .700-.750 territy he's probably toast. There's more upside seeing where Palka/Delmonico/Engel turn into and a .750 OPS corner OF is a dime a dozen. I think he's going to have arthroscopic surgery on his knee in an attempt to address his chronic hamstring problems this offseason? Hopefully that's a good thing for him. I think the jury's out whether he's truly grown into an .800 OPS player or more like the .740-.760 OPS player he's been every season but last year. I think the Sox will largely hedge their bets between Davidson / Palka / Delmonico / Avi / Engel playing 2/3rds time at various positions in an attempt to get all players at least 400 PAs to know where to go in 2020, which will I think determine their FA course.

I never realized until today that Moncada and Frank Thomas have the same birthday.

?

I wish Yoan would not take the first pitch so often, especially with a pitcher like this

Avi looks more and more to me like a 1+season BABIP mirage as this season wears on.

I edited the topic title ?

Assuming a BABIP of .300, if Moncada had a league average number of strikeouts (64 less) he would have probably 19 more hits. However, we all knew coming into his career that he was a higher strikeout hitter, so I would think a more realistic projection for what he was expected to do was that he should be somewhere in between where he is now and the league average....say at 145 strikeouts. So if he had 34 less strikeouts, assuming a BABIP of .300, he would have 9 more hits and would be hitting .237. So let’s just put this in perspective that because Yoan Moncada doesn’t have like NINE more hits his rookie year, some folks in this thread think he is totally garbage / a bust compared to being at least acceptable or very good. Right?

How many more strikeouts does Moncada have compared to the league average hitter with as many at bats?

I understand that Ks are worse than other putouts in that you don’t put the ball in play, and thus don’t have the opportunity for a productive out or to run up some insanely good BABIP swing, but I think strikeouts are severely overrated. It’s another out and not all strikeouts are equal. I mean, does it really matter if you lead off an inning striking out or weakly grounding to the pitcher? Does it matter if you hit a sky high infield fly vs striking out with runners on first and second?

It’s likely than Moncada will wind up the year with 50-55 xbh and 70+ walks. I certainly would’ve taken those numbers from him in a heartbeat if you had told me those preseason.

You said that, but also “weak contact stranding runners everywhere” which is what I was specifically responding to

The Sox aren’t among the league leaders in LOB

Not too surprising, as the youth/speed angle has been touted much of the year. I think it’s an interesting stat. The temptation I have is to be impressed... but how much do stolen bases and triples correspond to increased run production or wins, though? The least number of triples an AL team has is 10 (compared to the Sox’ 36) - with a league average of 20. The stolen bases range from 100 all the way down to 29 with a league average of 64 (the Sox have 85). What’s interesting about the triples number is that the Sox are among the teams that have the fewest doubles in AL. Given that the Sox probably have acquired their triples from stretching otherwise doubles into three bases (if you halve their triples and add it to their doubles total, they have nearly the league average in both), and that they have 20 more stolen bases than the league average, it seems as though the speed component has provided 38 bases “above replacement” to their total of 1755. The trouble is of course that their total bases are about 50 total bases below the league average. The Sox are also fourth from last in runs scored in the AL, although much of that probably has to do with their lack of hitting in general (bottom tier in OPS). So what’s the factor? Digging deeper into team stats, we discover this team is generally bad at taking walks, and in my opinion, it’s the single biggest contributor to our overall offensive woes (and indirectly to OPS). We have a couple guys who walk at an above average clip, but most are way below average or dreadful. All of this is to say I wonder if front office and management in general severely overrates the speed component of the game compared to the walk component. Stolen bases and triples really don’t seem to be as much of a factor in run production, at least not as much as OBP and walks. What does everyone else think?

Moncada now leads this game in unintentional productive outs

Again I ask what the heck was McEwing doing pinch hitting for delmonico in the ninth last night as hot as he is

Why on earth would you pinch hit for delmonico

Horrible