Dominikk85

I'm not sure how much you can blame menechino. Sure it was bad but there also was a big amount of injuries. Would they have struggled as much if grandal, eloy, moncada, tim and Robert would have been healthy all year?

Sure but as long jerry is owning the team even if TLR is gone he will probably hire Joe torre or bobby valentine.

Well I guess the medical staff wants to be careful with him and ease him in. There is urgency but sox are only like 4 games back and what they really can't afford is another injury to one of the star players. I think the offense is already coming back around, but lynn and giolito need to get back on track

Bichette helping the sox out, not sure why he is stealing third with their best hitter at the plate.

Signing leury for 3 years was just unnecessary. He is not as bad as he currently is but even if he hits for his usual 85 wrc+ such a player is dime a dozen and you should go year to year with him. Give him a 1 year deal and Play him as long he is decent

The sox definitely need to win today or they could face a sweep the way they are hitting righties against Verlander and javier who are really good right handed pitchers. Sox are 25th in wRC+ against righties (87) and first against lefties (141) so they really better score 7 runs tonight and win that thing as they could have a hard time scoring against the other two astros guys.

It is pretty normal to use a closer in a low leverage spot if he has not pitched more than 2 days or so and there is no closing opportunity to keep him in a rhythm (usually it is about an every other game rhythm). Hendriks hadn't pitched two days in a row so friday was just "time" for him to pitch again.

I agree, stuff like that just happens. Maybe you can question the big amount of oblique and hamstring strains and if there are modern training solutions to reduce those but ankle and knee injuries just happen, you can't do much about that.

Maybe. Mazara did work with a new private hitting coach and actually hit more balls in the air in the minors this year but I doubt he will be that good. Maybe he can be like an average player at best (which of course would have helped the sox a lot in 2020 with him).

Both have very high babips in a small sample though (especially mazara) and will probably regress.

Players definitely decline in their 30s but the average decline from age 30-35 is "only" about 0.5 war per year. In a long term deal that is huge of course (3 war over 6 years) but with many of those guys we are talking about like going from 2-3 war to negative war within a year. Pollock had 3 war last year and - 0.6 so far this year. Encarnacion went from 2.5 to - 0.3 within a year. That is not a normal age decline albeit the risk of a total drop of of course goes up with older players.

They have very good coaching and for example pitching machines that simulate opposing pitcher spin but they also put guys in good spots and platoon everybody not just for handedness but also have guys who are high or low ball or breaking ball hitters so they have every night at least 5 or 6 guys in the lineup who can handle the guy on the mound well.

Yeah but there is a difference between slightly washed up and "worst hitter in mlb", I think most of the guys I mentioned were projected for regression but not all the way rock bottom.

I get it is not all luck as part of the issue is that jerry won't pay up for the top guys, but the kind of "success" they had in the last couple years is just unreal. Sure a lot of them are older and some regression was expected but certainly not that much. Pollock is a good example, he has been injury prone but generally a solid player when healthy. Some regression was expected but he still was projected for a 110-115 wrc+, now he is at 78. Encarnacion had a 130 wrc+ in 2019 and 70 in 2020. Mazara was a mid 90s wrc+ guy and went to worst hitter in the league (66 wrc+). Cesar hernandez of course wasn't as good as the first half of last season indicated but you could have expected like a mid 90s wrc+. Kimbrel also overperformed in the first half last year but no way he is that bad That happened so many times and I'm not sure why it happened. The team gets criticized for not having enough depth and being a stars and scrubs team but really many of those acquisitions shouldn't habe been that bad, they just needed to be 1 WAR guys instead of minus 1 WAR guys and couldn't climb that low bar. That is really strange. Yeah, the front office did buy high on veterans and in some cases it probably was a dead cat bounce but that it always went all the way down is just strange.

I'm surprised the issue is the power. If he "failed" I thought it would have been excessive strikeouts but while he is not a low K guy his K rate generally has been manageable at mid to high 20s and usually with a good walk rate (not this year so far). But the power really apart from 2019 generally has been a bit disappointing for a guy advertised with 70 power. He certainly is better than this year and this is likely due to physical problems but even if you throw out this year he has been more of an average power guy (about mid 100s ISO). I wonder what went wrong there. If you had told me 5 years that he is a guy striking out 35% of the time and thus failing I would have believed it but I would have guessed if he keeps his plate discipline in check he would be a 40 bomb guy. I guess that won't happen so I just hope he gets back to at least 2021 level, then he is a good player albeit not a superstar like people hoped for.

I think they can reach the playoffs but the core hitters (abreu, moncada, eloy, grandal, robert, Anderson) will need to both perform and be mostly healthy in the second half. Those hitters (and vaughn who has been good) should do well but the 8th to 14th (sheets, burger,mcguire, leury, engel, mendick, pollock) best hitters of this team are basically quad A level and you can't lean on them too much. If two of those are in the lineup that is fine but if 5 of them are in the lineup team is in trouble and the offense is very bad especially if several of the core players who are actually healthy are underperforming too.

With all the injuries and underperformance at least the madrigal trade doesn't look so bad now. Madrigal still has no power this year but he also has doubled his k rate. Of course the injuries didn't help but still he seems to be a huge scouting failure. I'm not blaming the sox front office and scouts though, many people in the industry believed he would eventually grow into 12-15 homer power with a chance for more. But that he is a 2 homer per year guy who needs to hit. 320 to have any value nobody saw coming. He was a bad pick at 4 but kudos for hahn for leaving the sinking ship and getting something for him.

There are VR systems which end the video after the first half of ball flight and then you have to click on a field with pitch type. Some think that can help but others think that VR is not advanced enough and the impression will be slightly different so it could actually do harm to do it. I have worked with some players using the gamesense app and I think it helped but those were mostly high school level players

The sox system has really failed to produce much except for first basemen after the first group was up. They developed a great core but really the depth behind that is lacking, especially middle infield and starting pitcher. Nobody develops stars all the time but it helps if you can at least call up a 1 WAR player in case of injury so you don't have to play a negative WAR replacement. The sox top 8 or 9 players are as good as any team but depth is lacking and any injury can't be compensated very well. In contrast if you look at the dodgers they always have some injuries too but their replacements are at least competent so they don't have to start a starter with a 7 era when someone goes down.

20-30 years ago players were always taking the first pitch, many coached in high school or little league have been saying don't swing at strike 1, i. E take until a called strike. However in the last years teams have increasingly gone away from auto takes, i. E you swing at every "fat" pitch in every count because you don't want to give the pitcher free strikes. Pitchers are so good these days that you just can't afford to take strike one down the pipe. Yeah, it is bad if you chase ball one but just auto taking is bad in today's game. Problem is the sox have quite a few hitters with very high chase rates. Robert, tim, burger, pollock, leury and Harrison all chase a lot, vaughn, engel and abreu (he actually improved quite a bit in that regard) are about average and really only grandal has plus plate discipline. However newer studies suggest that plate discipline isn't really about approach and patience (few players want to swing at everything) but about the physical ability to project the second half of the ball flight based on how the first half looks and modern pitchers make that harder with tunneling which means trying to make the first half of the pitch flight look the same on all pitch types. Don't forget decision point of swinging when the ball is like 20 ft away so you don't have that info for your decision. 20 years ago those players were simply told to work the count a little and take a few pitches and that works for some time but then pitchers realize that quickly and just attack the zone early and then make that guy still chase later in the count. So the only way to improve that is improving the physical ability to predict ball flight in player development. Some teams have used VR programs for pitch recognition and also some gadgets (like there is a hoop with some triangles in it and you throw a pitch through it and then the hitter tries to memorize where in the hoop the pitch passes through but I don't know if sox player dev uses those tools. Modern pitching makes that quite tough.

Pretty sad that the sox system is so thin that they don't have a guy who can give them 5 innings with a 4.5 era. I wonder if it would make sense to use an opener for dallas as long as you need him. Have an opener go the first 5-6 batters so dallas starts with the bottom of the lineup and only goes through the heart of the order like once or twice at best.

If sox have to play sheets, vaughn and eloy manfred should give them an exemption that grants them to play with an extra outfielder:)

I wouldn't go that far, in a small sample it can also just be luck but yeah you can definitely say management wasn't the issue so far. Still probably TLR will probably cost the team 2 or 3 games over the season but the main issue is getting the stars to hit and get at least one out of the back end starters out of the rotation.

I heard that suggestion on a fantasy baseball a podcast (think it was eno sarris). VV was pretty bad so far and kopech might be on a bit of an innings limit. Why not use VV as an opener for kopech? Let VV throw all out for 1-2 innings (maybe sometimes 3 when it is going well) and then let kopech come in. That way VV can really go all out and maybe do ok-ish (2 innings with 1-2 runs) and then kopech takes over. Good idea?

Not saying undeserved but sox are 11-7 in 1 and 2 run games and 9-13 in 3+ run games. There has been a blown save or two but really the issue has been mostly not hitting and then getting bombed on every keuchel and Velasquez start. The sox allowed more than 6 runs 7 times this season and 5 of them have been keuchel or VV starts. So really sox need their star hitters to hit better and start keuchel and VV less often (i. E getting the rest of the rotation healthy). TLR will of course cost them an occasional win but this really hasn't been the issue this year most of the time, they mostly lost on the big blowouts.