The Red Sox announced a number of moves before tonight’s series opener with Oakland. Infielder Yu Chang is back from the 60-day injured list and starter James Paxton returned from paternity leave. In corresponding moves, infielder David Hamilton was optioned while reliever Kaleb Ort was placed on the 15-day injured list due to right elbow inflammation. Boston designated reliever Ryan Sherriff for assignment to create a 40-man roster spot for Chang’s return.
Chang has been down since late April after fracturing the hamate bone in his wrist. He’s expected to assume the primary shortstop role now that he’s healthy, at least until Trevor Story is able to return from the internal brace procedure on his elbow. Chang steps back into the starting lineup tonight, hitting ninth against A’s southpaw Sam Long.
Boston has used a revolving door at shortstop in Story’s absence. They haven’t found any kind of consistency. Boston shortstops have hit .214/.284/.328 on the season. They’re 25th in on-base percentage and 28th in slugging. Chang contributed to those offensive struggles, hitting only .136/.174/.341 through 47 trips to the plate. He has a modest offensive track record at the big league level, but the Sox will hope he can at least stabilize things defensively.
Hamilton had picked up 10 starts at the position since receiving his first big league call a few weeks ago. The 25-year-old infielder hit .138/.265/.207 to begin his career. He’ll head back to Triple-A Worcester, while Chang’s return pushes Sherriff off the roster entirely.
Boston signed Sherriff to an offseason minor league contract and selected his contract two months ago. The left-hander made five big league appearances, allowing two runs in 6 2/3 innings. He’s now up to 51 MLB frames over parts of five seasons, putting together a 3.53 ERA despite a middling 18.5% strikeout rate.
Sherriff has had a decent season in Worcester, allowing 2.82 earned runs per nine while fanning just under 26% of opposing hitters. He’d unfortunately been on the minor league injured list since late June and was reinstated yesterday. The Sox will have a week to trade him or put him on waivers.
Reds need to jump on this lefty. Have Law, need Sherriff to enforce it.
I see they got a Farmer and Young working in the fields. Young might be too young to be doing that.
They got Steer for cattle farming too
Steer is doing well and that’s no bull.
cguy – Then the Reds would need Rougned for the trifecta.
Sherriff enforcing Law and Odor.
“Yu shot the Sheriff”, but Yu did not shoot the deputy.
Ort on the fake DL to keep roster space
Ham – Of course you’re likely right. He’ll probably eventually be pitching in minor league rehab games to get his issues worked out.
As much as I can’t stand seeing him on the mound, I do give him credit for chopping off all his hair to donate for kids with cancer. He’s not a good pitcher, but he’s a good guy.
If this guy had anything left, he’d still be the “Sheriff” of the Tampa Bay Rays.
There’s no Sherriff in town.
Once a reliever leaves Tampa, he has generally been used up and is of very little value.
But did they designate the deputy?
They should send him to Rock Ridge, they need a Sherriff.
In some ways this move is surprising, when you consider there’s some much worse arms still in the pen.
Scott? Jacques? Garza?
I’d have looked twice at dumping one of them first over Sherriff, even accounting fornthebsample size of all of them. You still need more 40 man moves, I get it, so they may also be on the hot seat, but at least go with the guy who has had better results for now.
Jacques is fine for lower leverage situations. Funky arm slot and decent stuff, plus he can be optioned, so he’s not going anywhere
Soxx – What exactly makes Jacques fine?
Not the 6.23 ERA
Not the 1.615 WHIP
If his stuff was decent, I just don’t see the Pirates cutting him loose like they did.
Agreed Fever. Other than berradino however, don’t see any lefty relievers the team has (other than Murphy) who are worth a roster spot.
Probably saw the good news today where Schreiber.. RH may be, but went 2/3 inning in his 1st rehab game. he’s been missed and not among the crowd myself who wants lefties on the roster just to have a cpl. if they are bad, no matter which side they throw from.
Funny how releasing players puts the fear of god in them
Options don’t matter when you aren’t an effective mlb-caliber reliever. He’s still not worthy of a 40-man spot.
So, in the example of Jacques, what makes him any more effective in a low leverage situation than say keeping Sherriff?
In the big picture you shouldn’t be arguing for or against ANY of these guys. But, there’s a 40-man crunch, and, big-picture, looming rule 5 liabilities again in a few months. So, why not keep the guy who has had better results is the question?
Jacques’ 1.79 FIP may be what is keeping him around.
Here’s the thing about fip… it’s formula calculated via:
(13*HR + 3*(BB+HBP) – 2*SO)/IP + Constantlg
What it means is that a pitcher who doesn’t give up hrs, and doesn’t give up walks by pitching to contact, especially if they take advantage of the strikeout-heavy lineups teams are selling out on for power, well, it’ll be skewed.
He gives up a lot of hits, and, they excluded bases reached on errors by the infield behind him. That FIP, to me, is something of an oddity based on how the metric is calculated – not a sign he’s better than his numbers indicate.
It also means fip even more than some other metrics is susceptible to small sample size bias.
You may be right though, the slide rule brigade probably told bloom what to do and he blindly did it, not applying some baseball common sense to the decision.
So, only the statistics you pay attention to are reliable? Every statistic is an “oddity based on how the metric is calculated”.
I wouldn’t say I only go for ‘reliable’ metrics because many of the advanced statistics do have some degree of variance.
But, when there is a metric that is SO FAR out of bounds based on a clearly identifiable flaw, yes, I discount it in that instance and that player.
Here’s another example. In the offseason I took a lot of flak for arguing that the 162 game averages on Casas were baloney, and, the HR rate he logged wouldn’t even come close to standing up over a regular season. I pointed to how the balls he hit were so called ‘cheap shots’ based on the schedule boston played in the limited time he was called up leading to OF dimensions he would comparatively seldom encounter over a full season vs the frequency in his late 2022 schedule, then I added in the incidence rate of where there was evidence of older, more ‘juiced’ baseballs being used at those locations because of the Aaron Judge pursuit of the record and the press mlb wanted to generate.
My conclusion which was met with ridicule and skepticism was that Casas wouldn’t show the ‘power’ and batting average everyone was claiming he would roll through the season with.
Well, fast forward to this year and Casas has not seen that level of power that the metrics predicted he would have, nor has he hit the HRs that were predicted. Again, because in his particular situation, the data was flawed.
Analytics are fine, advanced stats are fine, but, you’ve got to look one layer deeper on anything that is based on a calculation instead of a counting stat. Sometimes it can be biased in an unreasonable way to where it doesn’t have the predictive value you’d hope or that it was intended for.
FIP only considers what the pitcher can control. ERA considers what a pitcher can control and can’t control. You have not addressed this difference. Once a ball is put into play and is not a HR, the pitcher cannot fully control the outcome as the defense may be above average or below average and the ball may take a lucky or unlucky bounce. Pitchers also cannot control the variation between official scorers. The same play can be scored a hit by one official scorer and an error by another. FIP seems like a more useful way to compare pitchers to me. ERA seems more flawed to me.
Suit, pitchers can control the number of hits they give up which are not errors to a degree by limiting the number of balls put into play. FIP gives no weight to hits allowed, it’s excluded entirely from the calculation which is its shortcoming. If a fielder with normal effort would’ve gotten to the ball, but didn’t, it’s an error and impacts ERA (in a reductive manner on counted runs that result in most cases) anyways.
A better pitcher misses bats. A pitcher who relies on the defense to bail him out and generate an out after expecting the ball to be put in play in my mind is not as good of a pitcher as the guy who was able to keep the batter from having the ball in play and gets him out.
Look at the math in the formula, and the weighting in an absurd context: A pitcher can give up up no hits, 4 walks in an inning of work, with 1k and 2 sac flies. He could give up 3 runs, all earned in the process. His fip would be ((13*0) + (3x(4+0)) – (2×1) / 1 +constant. That’s equal to 12-2 / 1+constant. Or, 10/1+constant
Vs a pitcher who gave up 1 hr, no walks, in an inning of work, no strikeouts. 1 run, earned.
He would have an fip calculation of (13×1) + (3x(0+0) – (2×0) / 1+constant, in other words, 13/1+constantant.
So the pitcher who is solely responsible for giving up 3 runs, issues all the walks, and, gave up the contact with the sac flys where the defense recorded its out, did its job perfectly aside from the pitcher allowing the batter to put the ball in play, he would have a LOWER FIP than the guy who only gave up contact once, and allowed 1/3 of the runs by factors entirely in the pitchers control.
Doesn’t make sense right? And that’s the issue with FIP. It’s not entirely fair for a pitcher to both rely on the defense to bail him out, but then disclaim the fact he is the only reason the defense needs to make a play to begin with. That’s my gripe, it’s like a stat that let’s you have your cake and eat it too. So it needs to be taken with a grain of salt and not given as much weight in those circumstances when the data going shows it will hame an implicit bias.
There are times I like FIP, but not when the data is so obviously skewed.
@GA
Yeah. If you understand the metrics and how they’re calculated you can use critical thinking skills to determine when they hold weight. For example, extreme ground ball pitchers—FIP
Is completely useless.
Bstrowman9 – and that’s probably my biggest gripe with all of the so called ‘advanced metrics’ is.
Not all people even know what they represent, just that certain ranges are good, and others are bad. And some people just use them to compare unequal things, such as why a 1.5war 3B they think is a better more productive player than a 1war DH, not realizing that war is only good to establish comparative performances within the same position due to its weighting. Or, why war isn’t great for most pitchers.
All metrics are good at somethings, bad at others, and contain a built in bias they don’t warn you of on the surface. So you get into the weeds a lot because things don’t say what some people think they do – a general criticism, not leveled at anyone in this thread or in particular, just an observation.
GA: Your extreme example does not change my mind. I see bad defense and bad official scoring costing pitchers quite often which can drastically affect a pitcher’s ERA.
FIP gives no weight to hits allowed,
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It does, indirectly. Since it accounts for HRs, Ks and walks, by default, it accounts for hits, since everything else is BABIP, and BABIP is a pretty consistent ~.300.
suit – You’re very right about bad official scoring.
Not sure if you heard this, official scorers were instructed by MLB to award hits whenever possible so as to give the impression there is more offense in MLB. Sox announcers have been livid about the ridiculous number of errors that were scored as hits. Pitchers certainly can’t be happy about it.
Fever: Wow! No, I hadn’t heard that. Thanks.
They shot the sherif but they did not shoot the deputy.
This thumbnail image is terrifying
Release Kike
I wish
Sheriff don’t like it rocking the casbah
Analytics-who needs Kike on their team? Will they provide a prospect or consider payroll relief?
Who do the analysts say the Sox should move? Paxton, Hanley, Verdugo, Duval, Casas, Turner?
In the next 10 days if Schreiber seems like himself–Trade Hanley move Martin to close and Schreiber to set-up.
I don’t know what position you play Ceddanne but he appears to be good prospect. Kind of reminds me of Wander Franco from a few years back. Or if you feel he has all that Verdugo has do you move Duggie for a pitching prospect?
What’s the point of waiting until the Trade Deadline–“Just do it.”