Dominikk85

The disappointing thing about him is the plate discipline. In college he was advertised as having pristine plate discipline. In mlb his contact ability is fine but he consistently has above average chase rates and low walk rates. In college he walked a ton every year. Not sure what the issue is. Either he got pitched around so much that he walked despite mediocre pitch recognition or he has more trouble seeing mlb stuff than college stuff. His lack of ability to pull fly balls might actually be a coaching issue as sox have preached oppo approach and hit over power. I still think under the right circumstances he could take a step forward. 90% zone contact and a 112 Max EV is a good combination even though a mid 30s percent chase rate is not ideal of course but also not extremely egregious. With the right coaching I could seem him having a season where he hits 280 with 30 bombs.

Abreu is a legend but I think his batspeed is just gone, he can't turn around fastballs above 95 anymore. Last year he didn't pull a single fastball above 95 in the air, that is just the physical skill gone. He is still a good hitter and if he faces pitchers who throw 89 with 78 mph sliders he will destroy them but velo is just killing him and in mlb he doesn't see many guys who throw 90 but most are 95+ on fastball and 86+ on the slider nowadays.

I think it is a good hire. He has worked very successfully in Baltimore before. Yes he was fired but it was also after being promoted to a very different position. Mlb hitting coaching is quite different from being a minor league hitting coordinator, that is much more about game planning, mental stuff and relationships to players. As a hitting coordinator his role is to coach the coaches so that they ideally have a shared vision of what they want to teach to those kids.

The rich get richer, dodgers hired the probably best public pitching analyst max Bay (guy who modeled stuff + for eno sarris) https://x.com/choice_fielder/status/1853480735770050680?t=zVpZ34k9CzB5J4aka2ZNFQ&s=19

More important than having a top notch analytics group is having structures that implement the findings. There are 1000s of great baseball analysts out there who can do great work. There are still differences in quality of analytics but the key point is how it is implemented in scouting and coaching. What makes the really good orgs good is not that they are super cutting edge but that they are very good in communicating and implementing it across the whole Organisation. I read some posts by drivelines Kyle boddy a couple years ago where he claimed in some orgs reports by the analytics department are put into the bin without being read. Or slightly better but still bad others where the reports are being read and then guy reading it says "cool, that's interesting, now what should I do with it?" What will make or break the sox is not hiring a couple smart guys but having leadership implementing structures that forces everyone to actually implement the stuff. The sox did hire some smart guys in the past like for example Ryan Johansen who is a biomechanics expert but it clearly wasn't implemented as many of the sox hitters had a groundball, opposite field focused approach with a lot of chase. When the sox want to do it better this time they need to create better implementation structures and remove structures where old school coaches are laughing off analytics and just continue their way

Yes, also Santander might be really bad defensively relatively soon so if his bat Slips a little you have another expensive mediocre DH.

I think the sale return was great at the time. Moncada was a risky Player at that point but he was actually good for the sox before covid and injuries. Nobody could have seen that. Not everyone saw him at 1 overall but everyone had him top5. Kopech was a top50 overall prospect at the time and a great second piece. Sale was insanely good and at a great age and contract obviously but getting a consensus top5 prospect, a consensus top50 prospect was quite good. The big issue was that all those trade returns either were injury prone, underperformed or both.

The Os System isn't all that great anymore when you consider holliday, mayo and basallo untouchable. Sure getting one of the 3 as a headliner would be great but the Os weakest positions are second, third and first base and those are exactly the positions that their big 3 prospects project to play at (basallo can catch but most see him better Suited at 1B as he isn't a good defender). The Os need holliday at second and urias isn't great at third either so that keeps those two. At first mountcastle isn't bad but after they moved back the left field wall his power doesn't really play there anymore and he is more of a 15-20 homer guy with an ok but not great hit tool. The Os might want more than .270 with 20 homers from the 1b spot. But if anyone out of the 3 would be available it would be basallo.

I'm kinda scared to hear that. A too "noisy" hand load can hurt you and cause timing issues and it can make sense to quiet it down, especially when you are wild like Gary sheffield but vargas already has a pretty small and quiet hand load. I'm working with some hitters and I don't love the slight hand lift he does and would prefer the load to be more "connected" to the shoulders (more in line with the natural coiling of the hips and trunk) but it still isn't a very noisy load and with the sox "expertise" in player development I fear they will deaden his hands completely and kill the bit of power he has making him a total slap guy like the sox did with so many hitters

I also hate the lottery. Maybe have a lottery between the 4 worst teams or so, but that the guardians who had the 9th worst record and made the alds a year before (more a down year of some guys rather than being really bad) got the first pick imo is a distortion of competition.

I don't love the New rule. I get that eternal tanking is bad but when you are rock bottom you need 2-3 good picks in a row. The Os got 4 top5 picks in a row (1,2,5,1) which gave them a huge competitive advantage and a big part of their core (Rutschman, holliday, cowser). I would prefer it to not get more than 4 or 5 top10 picks in a decade rather than not twice in a row. Imo really bad teams should be able to tank hard for 3 years in a row, what you don't want is teams who tank all the time. Give teams an incentive to be good for 5-6 years before they rebuild and punish teams who tank, be good for 1 or 2 years and then sell off again (I know this happened to the sox too but kinda due to some catastrophic events and not intention to tank again quickly).

Burger has great power and good batted ball quality so when he is hot he can outslug his plate discipline issues but generally players with a 4:1 k:bb ratio that is backed up by a high 30s chase rate and low 80s zone contact don't tend to age well. That approach (Bad k to bb ratio and hoping that batted ball quality makes up for it has been the whole approach of the sox core during the short competitive run. Abreu, eloy, Tim, burger and others all had the same thing going. For abreu, anderson and for some rare times he was healthy for eloy it has worked but that approach can crash quickly if power or contact drop a little as we have seen. So I do think trading him made sense when you want to build for in 2-3 years. You can of course question the timing of the trade and the return they got.

I still understand trading him. When he is hot he is great but he also is a low on base percentage slugger with little defensive value and an extensive injury history. That type of Player usually doesn't age very well and even in their prime they can have long slumps. One month he might hit .190 with 1 homer and the next hit .300 with 9 homers. For now the bottom line has been fine (like 250 with 25-30 homers) but in his early 30s the 190 months could become more frequent and the 300 months less frequent and then he quickly is a replacement level player. The return for burger doesn't look good and they probably should have gotten a better return but the trade market for low OBP corner mashers is not really good in the modern game. I kinda understand the trade. Eder was struggling coming off surgery but before he was considered a high level pitching prospect. The alternative probably would have been to get a pair of lower variance high 40 fv guys (sox current 10-15 range in system) and maybe that would look better now but the ceiling of that is probably getting two bench bats or low leverage relievers. At least with Eder there was a chance he bounces back to #3 starter ceiling but of course also the risk he flames out of baseball and has no mlb career.

Maybe with a good September he can regain some value. But overall it has been a mess, sucks that he was first hurt and then bad so trade value was way down. And not being able to trade crochet wasn't great either.

Didn't quite happen unfortunately. Hopefully Robert has a good second half and get them a haul in the off season.