The Red Sox announced that Dillon Lawson has been promoted to the role of assistant hitting coach. Lawson had been with the Sox for the last year as the club’s minor league hitting coordinator, and he’ll now take over the role left open by Luis Ortiz, who was one of six coaches Boston announced wouldn’t be returning for the 2025 season. Last week, MassLive.com’s Sean McAdam suggested that Lawson was seen as a logical candidate for the assistant hitting coach job.
This will be Lawson’s second stint on a big league coaching staff, after his previous job as the Yankees’ hitting coach for the 2022 season and the first half of the 2023 season. Somewhat infamously, Lawson became the first coach longtime Yankees GM Brian Cashman ever fired partway through a season, as Cashman installed former MLB veteran Sean Casey as New York’s new hitting coach as the team resumed play after the All-Star break. The change didn’t work, as the Yankees actually had a lower wRC+ (92) under Casey than under Lawson (96).
The 39-year-old Lawson had a long coaching career in college ball, including a year as the University of Missouri’s hitting coach in 2017 that was sandwiched between his first two jobs with a Major League team. Lawson worked as a hitting coach for two separate Astros Single-A affiliates in 2016 and 2018, and then moved on to join the Yankees as a minor league hitting coordinator for the 2019-21 seasons.
Peter Fatse is Boston’s lead hitting coach, with Ben Rosenthal and now Lawson acting as assistants. The Red Sox ranked in the top ten in most offensive categories in 2024, though a team-wide slump over the last six weeks of the season curtailed Boston’s late bid for a wild card spot.
Oh boy…. “Hit strikes hard” is coming to Boston
Wasn’t this the guy that emphasized hard hit rate over anything else for the Yankees? If so, Red Sox are about to rack up strikeouts straight to the top next season…
Lawson will be an assistant hitting coach. So, he may be following the head coach’s philosophy more than his own. We really don’t know at this point.
where did Duran ever say he ignored Fatse? FPG with more lies
Acoss – Hopefully the Sox players will ignore the idiotic swing-as-hard-as-you-can approach like Duran ignored Fatso.
Very clever name warp there Fever. You must have thrived in middle school. I’d bet Fatse has never heard anything like that before too, so you got him good!
redsox – It’s autocorrect on my phone, not intentional. Why would I write it intentionally? He’s not fat at all.
So fever where did Duran ever say he ignored Fatse or are you just making stuff up again?
Jokes on you. The Sox were 3rd in the league with 1570 K’s last season. First had 1625 so not too far off!
Won’t make a bit of difference if the emphasis is still on the analytics-driven swing hard at every pitch approach.
That is Lawson’s approach.
I doubt analytics concludes to swing at every pitch.
Analytics is about doing damage on fat strikes, whenever they appear in the count, It does not advocate swinging at pitches out of the zone.
Jarren Duran is a great example of a player who benefitted from that analytic-driven approach. He hadn’t been swinging aggressively enough, was getting into bad counts, and then wasn’t hitting those pitcher’s pitches hard enough to do any damage. You’ll remember Pedroia’s advice to him?
If you tailor your approach to maximize exit velocities, with a launch trajectory a bit over level, then good things happen.
TFF17 – Analytics gets credit for the age old belief that you want to look for your pitch and then nail it? To be fair, that’s really not an analytics concept, it’s a hitting concept from before I played decades ago.
FYI… Pedroia is a product of travel baseball and how it changed many of the long time concepts of “putting the ball in play”. My children all got trained to swing much harder than I recommended. I believed the concepts of Ted Williams which are very different from what Pedroia preached.
Pedroia was taught by a new generation of trainers who did everything possible to have their players standout in showcases. It did get you noticed in the new world of elite travel baseball because the emphasis changed from making hard contact by selecting pitches where you anticipate them to swinging as fast as possible. Concepts like choking up and putting the ball in play with two strikes vanished from the showcases conducted around the country.
Think about Pedroia’s size and why he needed to believe in and follow the over swinging concepts popular at the time. Old school players still thought changing your approach with two strikes was the more effective approach to hitting but once velocity of contact became popular over well placed hits, trainers completely rejected the techniques of great hitters like Williams and adopted the new “showcase” philosophy to get their players noticed.
Personally, it worked for Pedroia but it was bad for baseball and still is. Like fashion, baseball concepts evolved and retro becomes popular again many years later. Finally, we are starting to rethink the concept of max swing velocity on every pitch. It won’t change quickly because money earned is now tied to dumb concepts like exit velocity rather than batting average and on base percentage.
The concept of how to win a baseball game has completely changed thanks to skewing the principles that lead to victories. Basically, like most sports, baseball has been individualized and the team concept has been lost in many cases. The old school managers that foster team work, which isn’t to be confused with playing your back-ups more so everyone likes the manager, are far more effective.
In 2024, watching teams like KC, Arizona and Pittsburgh was far more enjoyable to me because it reminded me of what baseball used to be as a game. It was about team work and winning not bat flipping, showmanship and exit velocity.
I loved Peddy batting fourth in the line-up and swinging out of his shoes but frankly it was the opposite of what i taught young players wanting to learn the game. I guess that makes me a dinosaur to some of the younger generation but I’ll take a manager who emphasizes team over self anytime and I’ll take a player who understands when to create zones to look for pitches and when to choke up and use the pitcher’s choice to direct the ball into a hole between the defenders. I always laugh when metric supporters say that can’t be done and BABIP measures luck not skill. BABIP is most erroneous when metrics people try to apply concepts that don’t apply for great hitters who do direct the ball to the holes available in the defense.. It’s not only possible but it was a way of life for players like Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Pete Rose and Ted Williams. BABIP was meaningless when applied to great hitters because they had skills BABIP assumes isn’t possible.
The players you referenced in the last paragraph would pass out in the modern day batters box. The velocity of todays pitchers combined with the tilt, movement and extension pitchers get nowadays(a product of analytics, driveline etc.) simply did not exist even 10 years ago when pedroia was playing. 10-15 years ago a guy throwing high 90s was considered special. Today is a prerequisite to eleven be thought of as a high leverage bp arm or starter. I’m sorry to burst your bubble but hitters in the modern day are facing 4 to 5 different pitchers in any given game. Unlike when Ted Williams played they saw the same pitcher the entire game and the entire rotation consisted of 3 players.
It’s utterly ridiculous to malign analytics because it doesn’t align with your nostalgic view of the past. Analytics can’t lie, the composite picture says that when you create the ideal exit velo + launch angle your % of recording a hit and scoring runs increases. How is that disputable!?
“Analytics gets credit for the age old belief that you want to look for your pitch and then nail it?”
That’s Fever’s line, not mine, but the data sure supports that approach. As I’ve emphasized repeatedly “analytics” is just people trying to make sense of the game using newly available rich data. The game itself hasn’t changed much, so we should expect that the new conclusions are broadly similar to the old.
Pedroia didn’t have much raw power, but he had an incredible ability to put the bat on the ball. Thus he taught himself to swing his hardest, relying on his natural talent to make contact. And by swinging his hardest, he was able to hit the ball with authority.
When Duran first came up in 2021, he was whiffing too often, so his initial adjustment was to take something off his swing to improve his strikeout rate, and work on plate discipline. In fact he improved both his BB rate and his K rate — but he killed his natural power in the process. Pedroia talked to him in Spring Training of 2023, at which time he started swinging harder again, his exit velocities improved, and he became a really good hitter.
It isn’t that plate discipline isn’t important — because the improvements he made in that regard in 2022 carried over to 2023 and beyond — but to be a successful major league hitter you have to manage plate discipline while swinging incredibly hard. The game is a lot faster in the majors than in the minors, or in college, or in high school. For that matter it is a lot faster than it was 30 years ago in the majors.
What you describe works great at lower levels, but very few players can implement it effectively in the majors these days. Not when everybody and their brother throws 95+.
BABIP varies for different hitters (Valdez will always tend to a lower BABIP because of the way he swings), however Ted Williams had a career BABIP of .328. That isn’t exceptional, and in fact is below what I would anticipate for Jarren Duran. Williams was a great hitter because he rarely struck out (and because he walked a ton) and because he often hit the ball OUT of play. His BABIP wasn’t his primary skill.
el_chapo, the debate is really the multi-way tradeoff between increasing BB, holding down K, putting the ball over the wall, and putting the ball in play for effect (among other things).
You can boost BB by taking more pitches, but then you get into a lot of two-strike counts in which strikeouts rise and quality of contact falls off.
You can cut down on strikeouts by swinging early, but that also holds back BB. And if you swing at marginal pitches, you risk weak contact.
You can boost home runs by hitting everything in the air. Problem is that a fly ball that doesn’t leave the park has pretty poor outcomes.
You can improve BABIP by aiming for a launch angle around 10 degrees, but that is a little low for generating power.
The game is too fast to make decisions after the pitch is delivered, so you have to know what you are going to do when you step into the batters box. After that it is all instinct and reactions.
No easy answers. If it was easy, everybody would do it.
Sagacity, all your perceptions are meaningless without some useful evidence to back them up. You think baseball coaches have an interest in accepting inferior results? It *couldn’t be more obvious* that the nature of pitching has changed, and to go with it the nature of hitting must change. I think it’s a safe bet that team analystis did hard work to study various approaches and determine what in general (because there is no one-size-fits-all) works best for hitters versus today’s increased velocities, spin/break, and pitching use that reduces exposure to the same pitchers.
You talk of Pedroia as if his approach was arbitrary, and that’s ridiculous – it’s well understood that Pedroia’s approach was closer to unique, and worked specifically for him because his hand-eye coordination allowed him to swing so hard on vast bulk of teams and still productively square up pitches. That wouldn’t work for most hitters, the same that the approach of a Ted Williams (who was all about squaring up the ball and maximizing launch angle and exit velocity, just on an intuitive basis…he also was heavy pull, basically discarding a whole bunch of the “team” approaches you’re talking about) or an Edgar Martinez with their remarkable vision.
Heck, you’re way off base to even declare that the most common “modern” hitting approaches are anti-“team”. On what basis? OBVIOUSLY, the best thing for the team is to be as productive as you can versus today’s pitching, and it’s not as if guys can simply flip a switch and succeed with any given approach. What if choking up and focusing on two-strike contact resulted in too limited of a strikeout-avoidance gain for the resulting loss in quality of contact? Have you ever *studied* this question? Can you provide evidence that hitters are being less net productive and thus hurting their teams because, as in your eyes, they’re going for big two-strike contact instead of increased rate of contact. Have you ever, shocker of shocker, considered that your perception might be completely wrong?
PS You got the analytics argument about BABIP wrong. What they actually understand is that BABIP can vary quite a bit over a smaller period but inevitably regresses towards a reliable mean…for a given player. There is an understanding of what league-wide BABIP is, but it is also understood that different players have different baselines for their individual BABIP.
The point about BABIP is that any player who is varying far from his established BABIP (if there is enough data to identify what that is) can be expected to regress towards his usual mean…not that the outcome of balls in play are entirely based on luck. In other words, in a smaller sample size luck can lead to more or fewer balls falling in for hits (which is understood to be a primary source of BABIP spikes and valleys), but for the vast majority of players this irons out.
Obviously, if you fail to grasp what analytics is preaching, you’re going to see its messages as misguided.
To some extent you can judge BABIP ability from the minors — just have to allow for the fact that major league defenses are stronger, and thus all BABIP falls.
It isn’t immutable, either. BABIP is influenced by speed, launch angles, and exit velocities.
Then you have Connor Wong, who ran a good streak for a couple months by dinking sliders down-and-away into right field.
redsoxu571 – I read everything you wrote and not one thing was substantiated. You believe guys today know more than guys from the past. I’m shocked. It’s a generational thing.
You don’t care that the guys professing the knowledge have no real experience at it. I’m shocked. Another generation thing where understanding the game isn’t as important as counting everything.
I didn’t say Pedroia did anything arbitrarily, you did. Reading comprehension is important. I said Peddy was a small player and to make his mark he decided that the hitting coaches of his generation were right when it came to him, he had to swing as hard as he could in all situations. That philosophy worked great during the times in his career where his hand eye coordination was at it’s peak, the rest of the time, he struggled and had bad slumps. It’s to be expected from a flawed hitting approach.
Your perspective is clouded by an overwhelming amount of raw data that can’t be put into perspective so people GUESS. These aren’t players who know the nuances of the game, they are kids that played video games and feel as if they understand the game. These are marketing people who have found niches in the game that allow players to look better than they are by being showcase trained in what the stat guys are marketing to the baseball guys.
We don’t have to agree. Go forward thinking whatever you want about how to win games. I gave you my perspective as somebody who has been in the game much longer than you. Did you even use wood bats if you played in high school?
You can preach all you want about the benefits of the metrics and if you believe in them, that’s your choice, not mine.
When you finish with a statement of me not grasping what analytics is preaching, you show your ignorance. You don’t know me. You don’t know what degrees I have to refute the fundamentals of the formulas. You don’t know how many games I played in my lifetime and under what managers I played. You don’t know how many years I have taught the game to players ranging from 5 to 21 in hopes of getting them opportunities to play in the MLB. You don’t know how many are currently playing in the MLB.
You simply think you know more than others while I have the experience of having done it for decades, analyzed the data for decades and selected the actual relevant information from my studies. But go ahead, I love your theory that this must be right because people you don’t know profess it to be right.
Notice that I haven’t insulted you for choosing to believe in something I am convinced is incorrect, I have simply disagreed with you. Yet another generational thing, you have the right to believe in concepts that are incorrect without being insulted.
TFF17 = There in lies why BABIP is a joke. If a player dinks the ball into right is it luck or is a contingency plan for what he wants to do with the many different pitches he faces from a pitcher. BABIP says he got lucky without any regard to the facts of the situation. It’s a generalized estimate not a fact.
All the metrics are. It’s a gross estimate with lots of assumptions that don’t apply to any single swing of the bat and that get lumped into categories that focus on one or two aspects of the contact with the ball but not all of the many that impact where the ball goes.
In the end, metrics followers like yourself, look for patterns in the data that they can conclude from. Judging BABIP ability from the minors is a perfect example. The data is random so any pattern you see is a rationalization of the data, kinda like suggesting if you flip a coin 100 times and 44 times it’s heads it suggests that coin is likely to produce 44 heads each 100 times you flip it. That’s absolutely wrong. Nothing can be estimated from those flips because the future is an uncertainty. Just like guessing that 44% of Player A’s balls put in play will go to a player or not go to a player. It’s a ridiculous value as a prediction. It’s a unique set of information that is not repeatable so why suggest it produces meaning information. IT’S NOT REPEATABLE!!! So it’s totally irrelevant!!.
If the next year they put up a similar number on a completely different set of circumstances you try to trend the data. That’s like suggesting 44 heads, followed by 45 heads the next year will suggest the coin will more likely come up at 44 the third year than the 50, the actual probability that never changes. The 50 isn’t an accurate prediction of the future either. Metric people believe their estimated data to be accurate but in the end it’s ALWAYS a guess as a prediction.
Gambling works the same way as metrics. You have someone set a probability and then you GUESS whether it’s going to be too high, low or exactly correct. That’s all WAR is. That’s all the estimates are if used in any fashion other than a one time historical value that won’t be repeated since the circumstances that created the data will never be repeated.
I hope this helps. Predicting stats for players is NOT a science it’s a GUESS. Hoping to limit the range of each prediction is the original purpose of metrics. Unfortunately, when applied in a non-scientific way that suggests levels of accuracy that do NOT exist, the word ESTIMATE must be used because stats are factual occurrences recorded. There is no such thing as projected stats, those are estimates due to the unpredictability of the future. Projected stat categories is nothing more than ONE perspective on what a stat category will be in the future. It’s not a stat, it’s an estimate.
Right, predictions are an art, not a science. Much like investing in the stock market, which is one of my other hats. If it were easy, everybody would do it. At least I don’t suffer five figure losses when I make a mistake in predicting baseball outcomes (and the fun is in what I don’t anticipate).
TFF17 – I get that you believe in the gambling of the stock market and baseball. I respect that you believe you will win in the end and make lots of money. I hope that is the case.
We aren’t that different in what we like to do, we just have chosen different routes to achieve similar goals. My sons and I have debated many of the same topics that you and I discuss. I hope like you, they are successful in their gambling in the stock market. I have been fortunate in debating with them the future of specific players because they pull out the metrics and I pull out the facts and try to show why the facts are more reliable than the metrics. One thing is always true, nobody can successfully estimate the future with certainty. Nobody can predict injuries and nobody can predict what ownership, GMs and Managers will do to impact the career of players. I enjoy our discussions because I think we both know that the future is not certain but it’s fun to guess what it might be. Nothing is better than predicting a player will be a star or a bust and being right. Some players are easy like Swihart and Jeter Downs, other predicted failures are met with far more resistance like Mayer and Bleis. In the end, its fun to develop trends of performance that lead to suggestions for players in the future but one can never forget that not even the most reliable trends are full proof. If Mayer does become a good player in the future he will have overcome a past that had leading indicators that suggested he would be a bust. It’s not a science it’s just probabilities so when I point out that historically players who are drafted high in the draft and perform below expectations all throughout the lower minors end up busts, it’s not a guarantee it’s just a high probability and that player could be an exception. That’s why it’s so hard to discuss players on this site since people deal in absolutes when there are none. Your reasonableness in discussing players makes it something to look forward to.
When assessing players in the lower minors, statistics don’t take you very far. It’s all scouting below AA — and for that matter I don’t have quality data on players below AAA. I know I’m not a great scout, so I follow the professional pundits on that rather than attempting to formulate an opinion of my own. You likely have greater scouting insight.
AA stats tell you a little about how a player might perform in the majors, and AAA stats tell you a little more. You mention Swihart? His last good stat line in the minors was in 2014 at AA, where he hit for the best power of his career AND made consistently solid contact. But he wasn’t able to translate that to AAA, and of course never did much in the majors. Biggest difference between AA and AAA is the breaking balls —
he was horrible on sliders and curves.
I have decent faith in Anthony and Campbell, as they put up strong lines in AAA on their first try. Grissom too, for that matter, if he can get healthy again. All three dominated AAA at a young age.
Book is out on Mayer. Hasn’t played above AA yet, and he is known to have some problems with breaking balls. I’ll trust the scouts (who love him), but don’t have a basis for an opinion of my own.
Teel looks like a decent major leaguer, better than Swihart, but I’m not seeing him as a star. Hope he surprises me positively.
TFF17 – Think about the activities that a young players goes through. A top five pick like Mayer is likely to have several things impacting his draft location:
1 – He is being marketed by a very well connected organization who is linked to many well known agents
2 – He performed well prior to the draft
3 – He feasted on average and below average pitching as a hitter in High School or in College
4 – He performed well in showcase events
5 – He’s confident from all the accolades generated by his parents, coaches and marketing company.
The true test as to whether he belonged in his draft position is usually identified immediately. The truly great players dominate the lower minors. I disagree that below AA it’s all about scouting. Scouting can make an average hitter much better but a great hitter is going to dominate immediately because he’s playing against far lesser talents.
Mayer as a HS SS drafted in 2021 played in just 26 games at ROK ball in 2021. Against the lowest level of pitching in the minors he hit .275. One year later Jackson Holliday was a HS SS drafted in 2022 and played in just 8 games at ROK ball and hit .409. That doesn’t seal either players career but it’s a leading indicator that Holliday came out of HS better prepared for professional baseball. Both were 18 year olds.
At 19 Mayer hit .286 and .265 at A and Hi-A. Holliday .396 at A, .314 at Hi-A, .338 at AA and .267 at AAA. The two are not in the same tier of skills. In fact, Mayer might be as many as three tiers lower than Holliday. So when a franchise and their fans look at Mayer and rave about him I throw a red flag and say BS. This guy is performing at the lowest levels of the minors like a league average player at best, not a 4th pick level of player.
Colton Cowser was picked immediately following Mayer in the 2021 draft as a college player. Cowser hit .500 in 7 games before being promoted to A ball where he hit .357. Like Holliday he climbed to AAA by the end of year two. Yes, he was older than Mayer BUT he got picked after Mayer which was a huge mistake by Bloom.
Do you believe Holliday and Cowser had superior scouting over Mayer before AA ball or could it be they were both far more talented? I believe their numbers show tendencies that suggest they are both headed toward all-star level seasons in the MLB. I can’t say anything close to that about Mayer. Some fans can watch Mayer and rave about his skills much like what scouts do at showcases but in the end, when he was asked to perform he simply came up far short of the standards set by guys like Holliday and Cowser.
Does that make Mayer a bust? No not yet. He’s young and has time to rebound and try to find the alleged skill set that scouts saw prior to the draft BUT so much of the draft prep is about how hard a player is marketed that guys like Jeter Downs and Mayer can be ranked far above their actual value. That’s how guys like Tom Brady and Mookie Betts end up superstars drafted in the later rounds. Give Mookie Mayer’s promotional team and Mookie probably goes in the first round. It’s unfortunate but it’s been a way of life for players that I have coached and helped with getting placed in the draft since the early 1990s.
Since the development of select training facilities in the early 1990s the game has become about money. The parents with money get their kids into programs they don’t qualify for and smart organizations give scholarships to train with them for the truly talented players that aren’t wealthy. Many of the very talented kids never get the opportunity to train at the high tech facilities and it’s those kids that have the greatest mountain to climb to make it to the MLB. I have great respect for those players and I tend to not respect the players who wrongfully got hyped and selected far earlier in the draft than they should have been. Jeter Downs and Marcelo Mayer are two of those players. I don’t dislike the boys, I dislike the system that allows those boys to get an advantage over others that are more talented. For that same reason, I am disgusted with the career of Rafael Devers. He NEVER should have been allowed to play the field based on his performance in the field since age 14 when he was discovered by Boston scouts. He couldn’t field back then and he still can’t . Is he a great hitter? Yes, he’s developed into a top flight hitter but his defense has NEVER improved, he’s simply gotten more help from the score keepers and yet he’s still on a pace to be the 3B with the most errors since the dead ball era.
For what it’s worth, I believe a hitter at ROK, A and HI-A should dominate with respect to average. Average tells you the young hitters hand eye coordination. Power, eye for the strike zone and ability to go to all fields become far more important as they start facing AA pitchers. If you take a look at what Kristian Campbell did in 2023 and 2024 you’ll see how similar it was to Holliday and Cowser. To me, I see that as a sign he has a huge future if Boston doesn’t mishandle him like they did Duran and now Rafaela. He deserves far more respect than Duran and Rafaela got. He should be treated better than guys like Abreu and Wong who got preferential treatment throughout 2024 thanks to Cora. Campbell is a budding star but he needs the support of the organization or he needs to tell the organization to f off like Mookie did when Swihart was the favorite son and Mookie had to fully prove his greatness before being acknowledged by the organization.
Roman Anthony also put up Campbell type numbers in 2023 and 2024 after being Boston’s third choice (rd 2). Bloom waste two more HS SS picks before finally selecting a quality player late in the second round. He has the same upside potential that Campbell has based on his two year performance.
So for me, as of today Campbell and Anthony are the most likely to follow in the footsteps of Duran and Houck and end up all-stars in the not too distant future. Teel stumbled a bit in 2024 but his 2023 and 2024 was so good overall that he too could be an all-star in the future but it’s hard to say since we watched Adley Rutschman look like the second coming of Johnny Bench or Buster Posey and then he slumped badly in year two. I think Teel’s hitting skills are a tier down from Rutschman’s but that still makes him one of the best catchers in the AL East along with Rutschman.
There is lots to be excited about with the young players. Unfortunately, there are many obstacles to future success that may create many years similar to 2024 where fans can love the development of the young players but the overall wins won’t happen thanks to bad defense and bad managing. Overall, I can live with just seeing the young players develop but it sure would be nice to some baseball logic applied to the front office’s choices in manager, line-ups and free agents.
Same guy who coached Joey Gallo and Josh Donaldson to swing even harder.
I can only hope the Redsox try and improve the team ON the field as much as the coaching staff and front office….
What ever happened to “see the ball, hit the ball”?
get off my lawn.
not – Why do you think the Sox left so many RISP stranded with less than 2 outs? Because they were unable to put the ball in play, striking out the second-most in MLB.
Fever, I don’t think you’ve actually bothered to look at data. Feels like you’re just shooting from the hip.
The Red Sox were roughly league average in scoring runners from 3rd with fewer than 2 outs and in advancing runners from 2nd with 0 outs, for example. Looking at the former split, pretty much all the high-end Red Sox hitters hit will in those spots – the likes of Dominic Smith, Reese McGuire, and Romy Gonzalez failed badly with runners on 3rd and fewer than 2 outs, which makes sense because they were bad hitters in general.
The Red Sox also led baseball in BABIP, which according to you is a skill and doing well in it reflects team baseball. If, according to you, BABIP success is a result of conscious and heady hitting approaches, the Red Sox should be getting credit from your direction.
You might want to workshop the facts and your perceptions a bit before spouting more on this topic.
Fenway Park boosts BABIP. Small foul territory and a short left field. Especially good for LHH if I recall correctly, though RHH get more of a power boost.
@RedSoxU, are you familiar with the “Clutch” statistic as calculated by Fangraphs on their Win Probability page? That measures game impact against the “average” value of the outcomes, i.e. timing and situational hitting.
The Red Sox “Clutch” measure was -5.61, which honestly is pretty bad, second worst in the majors. A combination of lineup construction and “clutch hitting”.
redsox – Your handle isn’t that familiar to me, so I can understand you’re probably not familiar with my posting. If you were to look back at it, you’ll find I bring more data to support my points than most anybody.
You want an example of a “good” hitter failing badly with RISP? Look no further than one Tyler O’Neill, he of the 31 HR and just 61 RBI. How often has a guy with at least 30 homers driven in less than double the number of RBI batting almost exclusively 3rd, 4th or 5th as he did?
And it’s not like he had low OBP guys batting in front of him. 107 times he stepped to the plate with RISP, and in that situation he batted only .231 and drove in only 33 runs. This is a guy who had only 2 SF’s all year, tied for 140th.
BABIP is definitely in large part a skill, how else can you hit a ball really hard or perfectly place it? My dislike of BABIP is the way it’s referred to around here as “luck”. That always seems to be the fallback around here when people can’t explain something, they just call it “luck”.
You are forgetting other ways BABIP is impacted, such as a lightning fast Duran beating out what would normally be a routine ground ball out.
What does the Red Sox leading in BABIP have to do with them producing runs with RISP?
You’re the one spouting off on a tangent. Anybody who watched the Sox in the second half of the season knows how big a problem leaving runners in scoring position was for them.
I am skeptical that hitters can “place” a batted ball. They can vary their swing for launch angle or to left/right field, but they don’t have enough control to reliably place the ball in the gap between the third baseman and shortstop, or between the left fielder and center fielder. Major league pitching is simply too good to permit that degree of control.
Speed, GB/FB tendency, exit velocities, pull tendencies all influence BABIP. Of course most of these don’t change much for a player from one year to the next, so once you understand a hitter’s profile you can estimate what his BABIP “should” be and use that as a baseline.
tff – You lost me on this one. How does foul territory impact BABIP?
And doesn’t the smaller LF at Fenway make it HARDER to get base hits because there’s less territory for the left fielder to cover?
I was gonna say the expansive CF and RF made it easier to boost BABIP.
Fewer foul balls caught? That impacts the denominator.
The Green Monster is unique in that a lot of balls are “in play” yet not playable. A fly ball that would be easily caught in Yankees Stadium goes in for a double.
You are right that the expansive RF also boosts BABIP, by turning home runs into long doubles. I wasn’t thinking of that because it doesn’t boost offense.
Fenway is a very good park for BA and a great park for BABIP. On both sides.
tff – You don’t think the angle of the bat upon contact is a factor in placement?
How do you think Devers decided to start going oppo this year, and then went out and actually did it?
Sure if you try to loop the ball just over the infield you’d be sacrificing power, but sometimes all you need in certain situations is a single.
tff – Thanks, I thought BABIP stood for ya know, balls in play which means doesn’t include foul balls?
This is what I came up with when searching BABIP:
Batting Average on Balls in Play (BABIP)
This statistic is based on balls hit into the field of play, and excludes foul balls, strikeouts, walks, and home runs.
Yes, launch angle is huge. Part of the reason Hamilton developed into a respectable ML player this year is that he learned to optimize his launch angle.
I also mentioned the ability of a hitter to choose WHICH field to aim for, as you mention with Devers.
I just don’t believe hitters can locate more specifically than “hit it to RF” or “push a ground ball to the left side” or something like that. Gross control, not fine control.
The problem with Wong’s approach is that pitchers eventually adjusted, taking that away from him (and exploiting the weaknesses that approach opened up). Is a big part of why his offense fell off in the second half.
“Hits minus home runs, divided by at-bats minus home runs minus strikeouts plus sacrifice flies (H – HR)/(AB – HR – K + SF)”
Foul balls that are in the seats are not counted. Foul balls that are caught count as an AB in the denominator.
tff – Interesting, thanks!
Did you hear about the movement to speed up play by calling batters out if they foul off a 2-strike pitch? Supporters of the rule point out it’s already done with bunting.
Me personally, I do NOT want that rule change.
Ouch. That would be a huge change.
tff – Hey I’ve got one other analytics question. Last weekend I had a huge debate about WAR whereas someone said a player’s position automatically boosts their WAR if it’s a more difficult one such as shortstop, CF etc.
So in other words, a league average shortstop would supposedly have a higher WAR than a league average 1B or DH.
How is that possible when WAR is based on all players playing the exact same position?
I understand certain positions are harder and therefore have more value, but if a shortstop’s WAR is based on how he compares to all other shortstops then wouldn’t a 1B’s WAR be based on how he compares to all other 1B and therefore not be impacted by the WAR of any shortstops?
Best source to understand how WAR is put together is Fangraphs, as they offer more detail and a better glossary. Their system is a bit different from BR, mostly because they address defense and pitching differently, but the concept is largely parallel.
Fangraphs breaks it down into four components – batting (vs. league average), baserunning (vs. league average), defense (vs. positional average), and finally positional value. That last is highest for C, SS, and CF/2B/3B in that order, then LF/RF, and finally lowest for 1B and finally DH.
library.fangraphs.com/misc/war/positional-adjustme…
This doesn’t necessarily mean a player is worth more at SS than at 3B or 2B. An average defensive shortstop is generally capable of playing plus defense at 3B once they learn the position (think Machado). A below average shortstop with a weak arm could be an above average 2B. The defensive comps at CF and SS are much harder than at LF/RF or 2B/3B, so a move down the spectrum can even improve overall WAR. Mostly about putting players at a position that suits their skills (is that too “old school”?).
Devers would lose value moving to 1B by this system, as his current defense isn’t bad enough to justify the 15 run difference in defensive value. He would need to play Gold Glove defense at 1B to compensate for that (and that isn’t a realistic expectation). Similarly, Casas would lose value moving to DH, as his defense is roughly average. He does some things well.
Duran moving to LF wouldn’t cost as much, or at least it wouldn’t if the Fenway LF were large enough for his speed to count. He would lose ten runs of positional value but gain much or all of that back with easier comps.
Rafaela is good enough in CF to make up for the fact that it is nominally a “less valuable” position than SS.
Shortstop tends to be one of the more valuable positions, mostly because you end up with some tremendous athletes there. Guys like Bobby Witt who excel at multiple aspects of the game. Positions like LF and 2B tend to get filled with whoever is left over after the premium positions are addressed.
tff – So then WAR is a comparison of all players at all positions, not just the same position …. darn, I lost that one. LOL!
Thanks for the detailed explanation, I appreciate it.
Yes and no. The positional value factor is designed to allow for fair comparisons across positions. But it is debatable whether the numbers used are “correct”. My guess is that the actual comparison is different for different players (different skill sets) and for different roster situations.
At the team level, the positional adjustments are irrelevant, since you give equal innings to every position. The goal for the team is for each position to be as far above average as possible.
TFF17 – Is it safe to say HRs not over the fence are adjusted back into the calculation since ball was in play?
TFF17 – Do you believe projected WAR is anything more than ONE person’s guess about the future? What about WAR based on that day? Is that accurate?
Do you believe a past WAR value is anything more than ONE person’s opinion on the value of the contribution of a player?
How can you justify the rationalization that happens in calculating WAR when it is the accumulation of all plays in baseball normalized by arbitrary methods? When I say arbitrary methods I am talking about the amalgamation of opinions within a select group of people who have no greater understanding than most about the parameters they are choosing. (I know this because estimates like WAR are in a constant state of refinement thus no definitive answer)
What is gained by creating arbitrary estimates of value? They aren’t accurate. They are a single perspective of how to define value created by a player. There is no RIGHT answer as to how to evaluate a player’s contribution so why create a general index that has as many flaws in it as each individual’s opinion on what makes for value in a baseball player?
We have accurate measurements in the stats of the game, Why does baseball need to pretend there is an all knowing measurement that quantifies the quality of a player precisely and more accurately than stats?
Isn’t it just an extension of what-if concepts presented in computer games simulating circumstances that will never exist in hopes of declaring a pecking order of greatness which can’t truly be created fairly because greatness is in the eye of the beholder?
Never been a fan of extending computer simulation games into usable data because there are simply too many flaws in the assumptions. Why not measure players by their actual results not fabricated numbers that are supposed to represent something other than the truth?
Nobody truly needs to be told Williams was better than Ruth or any other great player. That’s an opinion just like the metrics. Do we really need to fuel the debates to feel good about our knowledge of the what-ifs that go on during player comparisons?
There are billions of dollars of meaningless data that is supposed to be predictive in nature yet teams still conclude things like Swihart is going to be better than Mookie. What if all that wasted money went towards maintaining the same profitability in baseball but at lower prices for the average baseball fan? Would that make the game better to you?
It would to me. WAR vs lower ticket prices. I say lower ticket prices makes the game better and more enjoyable for the masses.
Sag – That is an excellent question!!
Whomever invented BABIP obviously didn’t think it through very carefully, and what it’s trying to accomplish is heavily skewed by variables such as Park Factor, Exit Velo, etc. It does nothing to distinguish between luck, bad defense.or solid hard hit balls..
BABIP is just a number, Fever, it doesn’t “try” to do anything.
Luck averages out over a multi-year sample. BABIP in some sense is a flag to identify that luck. When a player runs a .400 BABIP over half a season, odds are high that his BA will drop in the second half. That isn’t a sustainable or repeatable number.
As far as I know, no adjustments are made for inside-the-park home runs. They aren’t common, though.
tff – It was created for a reason, as all statistics are.
“The purpose of BABIP is to evaluate a player’s performance by removing outcomes that are not affected by the opposing defense.”.
How is BABIP any different than BA? When a hitter gets legit lucky quite often, his BA gets inflated … no different than BABIP.
Sure BABIP is always higher than BA because .300 is considered “average” for BABIP, but that doesn’t matter. The fluctuations of BABIP essentially mirror the fluctuations of BA. It’s a classic case of creating a redundant statistic just for the sake of creating something new.
And when you think about it, homeruns shouldn’t be excluded because of supposedly “not being affected by the opposing defense”. There’s lucky homeruns such as wind aided fly balls that land at the base of the Pesky Pole, and there’s homeruns taken away by spectacular over the fence catches.
Sag, it seems like you are confused as to what the actual goal of WAR is. No one who contributed to the development or calculation of WAR would claim that it is a perfect measurement or that it measures the quality of a player “more accurately than stats.” It also is very much not “an extension of what-if concepts presented in computer games simulating circumstances that will never exist.”
This explainer of WAR, I think, would be helpful to you. In the first paragraph alone it refers to WAR as an “attempt” and an “estimate” to provide a “useful reference point for comparing players.”
library.fangraphs.com/misc/war/
Squeeze – Well said. WAR is indeed an estimate with plenty of flaws.
I think the main issue that most people have with it is the way some here rely so heavily on it when judging players.
There are some people here who believe MVP should always go to the player with the highest WAR, which is absurd.
I disagree with that quote, Fever. Nor have I ever seen it used that way. It is typically used as a measure of “luck”. Might be perfectly good reasons why a player runs a very high or very low BABIP for a short period of time, but they aren’t sustainable.
Over the first half of the season, Refsnyder hit for a .367 wOBA with a .391 BABIP. That is far higher than his career average of .319, so one would have expected him to fall off in the second half. Wong had a .354 wOBA supported by a .366 BABIP, vs. a career average of .343.
In fact Refsnyder fell back to a .344 wOBA in the second half and Wong fell back to a .300 wOBA. While BABIP wasn’t the only contribution to that (Wong’s strikeouts also rose), it was clearly a contributing factor.
Batters have a lot of control over their BABIP. Pitchers have less control over the quality of contact, but still some. (Burnes in particular has held batters to a .258 BABIP over the last three years.)
Fever, this is a short-response format, so you get a lot of incomplete thoughts.
Besides, people believe a lot of strange things.
WAR makes a decent starting point, though. If you think it misrepresents a player, then point to a specific aspect that it fails to capture properly.
One thing I like about WAR is that it does a good job of highlighting players who do multiple things well. Abreu, for example, has moderate power, moderate speed, pretty good defense at an average position — and it adds up to a really nice package (in a platoon role). You’ll find other players who do one thing very well, but then give up much or all of that value in the other categories. Yoshida is at least as good a hitter as Abreu (better at putting the ball in play, a little less secondary production) but he is a rock on the basepaths and a very poor fielder.
In short-format responses, it is very tempting to jump to the conclusion – Abreu brings more to the table than Yoshida.
FPG, I fully agree that many people have misunderstandings about WAR, but I think that that has also unfortunately lead many to believe that it is intended to be a end-all-be-all stat that wholly encompasses player value which even its creators will tell you isn’t true.
tff – Factoring in luck DOES impact a player’s evaluation.
If a player has an excessively high BABIP, certain people (including writers here) view it as the player not being as good as their traditional stats show because the assume he was just “lucky”.
Conversely, an excessively low BABIP convinces people the player is better than his traditional numbers show because they believe he had “bad luck”.
How is your Ref example any different with BA? As I said, it’s not. He had a .295 BA in the first half, everyone expected that BA to come down in the second half. But BABIP was flawed as there is no way he crashed 87 points to a basically league average .304 BABIP. Both his BA and OPS came down 30 points which is far more reasonable. He was definitely better than a league-average hitter over the entire season.
Whether you look at BA or BABIP, there’s a lot of small-sample luck involved.
If you look at BA, then you need to make the specific assessment that Refsnyder isn’t a .295 hitter. BABIP is a little cleaner because you don’t need to take strikeouts into account to assess whether or not it is a fluke. But I agree that you can make the same argument either way.
Give me examples of players you think are overrated or underrated? I agree in principle, but I would be hesitant to make a sweeping statement like that.
Note that players can legitimately have a BABIP expectation as low as .240 or as high as .360, so it needs to be really extreme to have any confidence that it is out of line. You’re on more solid ground when you compare BABIP to a player’s prior history — which of course can be done with BA as well.
Fever Pitch Guy – One thing that needs to change is calling any metrics comprised of averages of averages a statistic. Once normalization of any kind gets incorporated into a data element it moves out of the stat category and into the estimate category. Metrics are NOT stats.
Squeeze32 – Thanks for the reference. I am very familar with it and I wish fans actually read it more often to realize the huge limitations of it.
Fundamentally, let me just say to estimate the value of a player and their contribution at a point in time is an ambitious challenge. I get that people wanted to quantify the contribution BUT it just can’t be done because of the massive number of variables that make up a player’s contribution.
The idea that a number of wins can be concocted from the actual stats that a player produces is ridiculous. It presupposes so many things about the game that are pure opinions by the creator of the formulas.
The question I always ask is why go through the hassle of faking an index to compare people when there are already numbers that can be used.
If you lose a player with 24 HRs, a Batting Average of .330, an OBP of .430 and a slugging percentage of .600. You don’t need to contrive a number that represents the number of wins you’ve just lost, you simply need to replace the production you’ve lost. What goes into that production has so many moving parts that there is no way to specifically replace wins. The wins are dependent on batting orders and how they might change when you move a player into the line-up from another team. The 4 WAR guy might not be a 4 WAY guy batting 2nd vs 5th, or batting in the Red Sox line-up versus the Yankee line-up.
For 100 years managers simply figures out that they lost a power hitting right fielder and tried to replace them. They didn’t need to have a fake guess on how many wins he might produce, they simply needed to replace the skills or in the case of the really good managers they would look at their whole team skill set and figure out how to maximize run production using the now open roster spot.
So, if you have a board game like Strat-O=Magic or a computer game like MLB 2000 it’s fun to create values and work with them to simulate reality. I get why WAR is meaningful to a generation of baseball fans who like “what-if” scenarios but to confuse them with real baseball stats is misguided. If a metric estimate suggests trends and fans want to believe the relationships are accurate, that’s their choice but mathematically it’s simply a coincidence and it’s clearly not predictive in nature.
Squeeze32, when you state that WAR is not an extension of What-If concepts presented in computer games you need to rethink your comment. Literally, that’s exactly what it is. It solves the question of what is the relative value of a player compared to all other players. It’s a WHAT-IF answer to the question, what-if we normalized conditions and circumstances in baseball what would this player be worth and how does that compare to all other players now and in the past. It is the ULTIMATE WHAT-IF question for baseball.
Fun to think about and argue about but the results are not factual because the index is built on the biases of the creator or creators.
TFF17 – The weakness in WAR is purpose. The measurements are all point in time which means it’s a snapshot. If you take a picture of the standings on day 34, is that picture reflective of day 1 as well or day 100? If not, how valid is it to making a decision that affects future unpredictable results?
It’s data. It’s not accurate for a time span or a point in time. Stats are historic. If WAR didn’t incorporate all the normalizations then it would be a reflection of the past but by normalizing it you destroy the accuracy. No two players are alike so to assume performance can be equated to all players is absurd. It moves the result farther from reality which is the actual stats.
Yup. WAR is a measure of what has happened in the past, and there is no guarantee of what will happen in the future. You can guess how players might age, but there is a LOT of individual variation. Often it comes down to a question of which players happen to get injured. Pedroia might have had a longer career without that dirty slide.
You can think of projections as an average future for players with that profile in the past. Again, there is a LOT of uncertainty. The ZiPS projections don’t advertise it heavily, but they produce 20%ile and 80%ile projections in addition to the headline average. There is a world of difference between those two numbers, as well as 40% of the players whose outcomes fall *outside* that range.
Life is uncertain. You can either let that uncertainty paralyze you, or you can find ways to reach sensible decisions despite the uncertainty. Executed properly, investing isn’t gambling any more than baseball analysis is. I don’t have a pension, so I have to invest to support my retirement. Either I do it myself, and work to get it right, or I pay somebody else a boatload of money to do it for me. I’ll trust my own skills, as well as my humility in not pretending any certainty that I don’t possess.
TFF17 – Loved your response. I got my MBA many many years ago and I spent my lifetime pouring my money into strategies that went against the general financial trends of the last several decades. Our 401K were loaded with Blue Chip stocks and I didn’t care that it wasn’t diversified because I didn’t want to water down the results. Many say that is risky but I had a very wealthy professor tell me that his family wealth came from the strategy and the dreaded single blue chip that dramatically fails never happened. After 40 years I can make the same statement. My son got his MBA over 30 years later and was taught to try to beat the big time investors in the market who have insider information. He tried cypto and it didn’t turn out so well after an enormous start. To me, crypto was like metrics, it was not real or meaningful just a gimmick commodity to make first in players rich and leave the general public high and dry. My only advice to you as I sit here after my work years is to think of the stock market like baseball. The blue chips are how you build a team and a very small portion of your team can be risky young guys who you feel have huge upsides. Think of their earnings like the tip a waiter receives not the actual bill. The bill is made up of Blue Chips. Take the Mookies, Freemans, Ohtanis of the world on your fantasy team and save a spot for a kid like Campbell who comes out of nowhere and blows people away. I hope all your hopes for retirement come true, it’s nice to sit back after decades of hustle and bustle and just enjoy life. If only Cora and Devers would cooperate, I could enjoy things more and still have another ring or two before I pass. The Mookie deal was a 5 year minimum impact trade and to a retired person, that’s a long time to wait for another shot at a ring. That’s why so many of my suggestions have such urgency to them. For those in my age group, we waited many decades for a ring and divisional titles. Throwing it all away made no sense to me and still doesn’t.
Good luck with the gambling, I hope it all works out the way you are hoping for.
tff – That is why hitters need to always adjust to the adjustment of pitchers, nothing beats the element of surprise.
Did you see the message Teoscar sent to the Red Sox after last night’s game? He said making contact is very important because good things happen when you put the ball in play. He is absolutely right!!! Look at those three plays in the 5th inning …. Judge dropping an easy fly ball, Volpe making a bad throw on a routine grounder, and Rizzo/Cole not covering first base on a routine grounder ….. all leading to 5 runs scored. And of course the winning run scored on a Mookie SF …. again, just making contact led to huge runs.
If Lawson and Fatso are gonna continue preaching that strikeouts are good therefore swinging as hard as you can on every pitch is the way to go, the Sox will continue to leave lots of RISP. Perhaps that philosophy was a reason why Teoscar chose the Dodgers instead of the Red Sox?
Good things happen when you make solid contact. Teoscar has plenty of miss in his game, but when he does connect he impacts the ball.
Isn’t so simple as “strikeouts bad”.
The Red Sox will be a better offensive team if they become a better offensive team. Beyond Devers and Duran, who was a GOOD hitter last year? Refsnyder and Abreu in a platoon role, but that qualification is itself limiting. You’re not going to sell me on Wong, Yoshida, or Rafaela. Some skills there but none of them are yet the complete package.
The Red Sox never made a competitive offer to Hernandez…
tff – I would need you to define “good” as it’s obviously based on interpretation.
Realistically, O’Neill vs LHP and Yoshida vs RHP and Casas vs RHP and Gonzalez vs LHP and Abreu vs RHP and Ref vs LHP. and Wong vs LHP. Those are all guys that deserve credit as good hitters, even if they are more suited as platoon players.
I think you’re being a bit too hard on your team. They wouldn’t have been 7th in MLB for OPS and 9th in MLB for Runs Scored if they had only two good hitters.
Fenway makes the offense look a lot better than it really is, boosting run scoring by 14% (2022-2024 average park factor). Adjusting for that, their 751 runs is the equivalent of ~702 runs with a neutral home park, which is below the league average. Similarly, the 747 runs allowed is the equivalent of ~698 runs with a neutral home park.
In some sense it doesn’t matter. They are a .500 team both before and after the adjustment. But if you ignore the adjustments, you might think that the pitching is mediocre (23rd by ERA) while the hitting is pretty good (9th by runs scored). This would encourage you to focus on the pitching and ignore the position players.
In reality, both the run prevention and the run scoring were pretty average for a Fenway team, AND the generally weak defense is part of that run prevention. The pitching is in my opinion in the top ten in the majors, while the position players (offense plus defense combined) is in the bottom ten.
WAR tells a slightly different story. The team position player WAR (by Fangraphs) ranks #15 in the majors while the pitching WAR ranks #11. However that fails to capture the poor situational hitting for the offense — if you account for that then the offense falls to #18 (as measured by WPA) and the defense takes it a couple notches further down.
You are FAR too kind to the offense. They are overall mediocre. Yoshida too.
tff – Didn’t you know I’d bring up Home/Road splits?
Sox were Top Ten in MLB with 385 runs on the road.
Sox were 13th in MLB with just 366 runs in Fenway.
So Fenway may help some teams score more runs, but it doesn’t help the Red Sox.
Have you checked out their record at Fenway over the past few years? It’s quite bad.
What is a “good” player? With apologies, I’ll phrase this in terms of WAR. The specifics of what the conclusions look like for different players at different positions varies.
A “0 WAR” team supposedly would win 48 games. I’m not sure the modeling works well in the extremes (the White Sox this year had a team WAR slightly over 0), but if you want to go into the season with an expectation of 93+ wins then you need a team that can hope to combine for at least +45 WAR.
There are roughly 15 “full time” jobs on the roster. Once upon a time that was nine position players, five starting pitchers, and a closer. (These days some of those SP innings are going to additional relievers, but that merely shifts the value rather than changing the total.)
I’ll define a “good” player as one who contributes a +3 WAR, and an “average” player as one who contributes a +2 WAR. We could argue about specific examples (the conversation should perhaps start from WAR but never END there), but it at least gives us a framework to begin from.
Red Sox who achieved a +3 WAR in 2024: Duran, Devers, Houck, and Abreu.
In addition, I’ll give you Jansen, as the leverage of the closer role boosts his impact to the +3 range (as measured by WPA)..
Red Sox who achieved a +2 WAR in 2024: O’Neill, Pivetta, Bello
We could talk about Crawford, perhaps, as his +1.9 was very close. Hamilton at +1.7 in limited AB. Rafaela might be close to +2 as a full-time CF (rather than splitting time). Slaten had a +1.4 WAR in limited innings — though not especially high leverage. But those weren’t “good” players, they are players who were average or close to average.
So last year they had three “good” players on offense, one “average” player, and a couple more who were close to being average or could have been close to being average if used differently. That’s a lineup that is just five deep. Wong was a liability. Yoshida was a liability. First base and second base were disasters.
I have hopes that Story and Casas will be healthier. Both have the potential to be “good” players. Rafaela could improve. Harder to know what to expect from Anthony, Grissom, Campbell, and Teel, but the potential to be average or better is there. So it is conceivable that they could have a full lineup of players who are average or better in 2025, even if it takes the rookies a little longer to join the higher tier.
As for the pitching? Houck and Jansen doesn’t take far enough, even if backed by “average” players in Bello, Pivetta, Crawford, and Slaten. They have reasonable depth in the pitching going forward, but need to add two aces (SP, RP) to lead the roster.
Fenway is the second best park in the majors for hitters, and didn’t suddenly change last year. If they were bad at home then they were bad at home. That hardly supports your claim that they are good!
Agreed that the one-year Park Factor is 104 vs. 114, but I blame that on the players underperforming at home. Too many late nights partying with the BU kids?
tff – You had mentioned good hitter, so my response was strictly based on hitting.
I totally agree the offer to Teoscar was not competitive, only $14M per year for 2 years compared to $23.5M for just the one year ….. that’s quite the lowball offer. Plus he said he wanted to play for a team that was willing to spend money and a team that wanted to win, which obviously ruled out the Red Sox.
True, if you look just at hitting, then Yoshida moves ahead of Hamilton and Rafaela. I struggle to see just a piece of the picture, though. Because swinging the bat is the ONLY thing that Yoshida does at all competently.
My main point stands. The lineup needs at least as much work as the pitching. Only difference is that we have some youth coming up from the minors to support the lineup, and definitely need to go outside for the ace pitching.
TFF17 and Fever – Been reading your discussion with regard to Hernandez, why would we want him when we have many other higher priority needs?. He may be worth $23.5M to other teams that need an outfielder with his skills but Boston is loaded with young outfielders that are either better right now or will be in the near future. LA and NY have unlimited money so they can throw money at all their problems and if they are wrong they just go withdrawal more and fix their errors without worrying about the impact on profits.
Boston spends too much time discussing players who are not suited to fit a need. The hope when Breslow came was that we would stop getting two or three or even four DHs and start focusing on the real needs. 3B is critical. SS is critical. 2B is critical. 1B is set. LF, CF, RF are set. DH is set if it’s Devers. The SP#1 is needed, SP2 is Houck, SP3 is Crawford, SP4 is Bello. SP5 has many candidates like Criswell and Winckowski but if you want better results in 2025 a SP2 makes lots of sense so Houck, Crawford and Bello are the 3 to 5 starters making the team much stronger. All the other young pitchers provide quality depth.
So the needs are actually very limited and should be focused upon by Breslow. 3B, SS, 2B exist now but they are all sub=standard for a champion. Story is over the hill and a waste of money, Grissom isn’t ready to play every day, Devers can’t field. Campbell can field but people have disrespected his achievement of Player of the Year in the minors. Most teams would be thrilled to have Campbell like Boston is thrilled to have a mediocre Mayer. Instead, Campbell is being pushed aside so Story can play SS until Mayer. A losing strategy.
Breslow needs a stud 3B who hits and throws right handed or is a switch hitter. Boston needs to pick a solid defensive SS who can hit. If Story proves he can hit, he can be the stop gap until either Campbell or Mayer or one of the other farm system shortstops prove themselves.to be the future SS in Boston. Boston gave up the Cy Young winner and $17Million to get Grissom so they will be committed to making him work. Lets hope he either proves himself or doesn’t within a year or two because he is the current weakest spot in the line-up.
We need to stop talking about guys we don’t need and start talking about the very specific needs that exist in just a few positions if 2025 is to be more than another .500 season.
TFF17 – Have to disagree that Yoshida moves ahead of the soon to be 24 year old Rafaela based on hitting. Yoshida is a niche player that we don’t have a niche for. Rafaela is an elite outfielder that is extremely young and rapidly improving. There is no scenario where Boston needs Yoshida more than Rafaela. Hamilton is a DFA waiting to happen.
I can’t figure out how a 23 year old can be so disrespected after having an excellent minor league campaign to get to the MLB. The guy produced 145 runs out of the 9 spot in the order at age 23!! He made numerous diving catches and has great speed to get to balls in the outfield or at shortstop. His off season adjustments will determine which direction he goes with respect to stardom unless Cora continues to disrespect him like he did Duran. Then Rafaela will need to take a page out of Mookie’s and Jarren’s books and simply explode on the scene despite being treated like a second level prospect.
Fans pigeon holing players comes from vocal leaders on websites like this and the incorrect decisions by the front office. That’s how Mookie got passed over for Swihart and Duran got shoved in the 9th hole like Rafaela. Two years ago many on this site wanted Duran traded and said he couldn’t hit or field. A year ago they thought his break out was a fluke. These same people set a place at the table for Mayer whose done nothing. Bad player evaluations seem to be a way of life on this website. We have guys who scream watch the player live and then pick guys who can’t perform. We have guys who recite metric estimations as if they are meaningful to support other players not worthy of their support.
Give each player a chance, let them learn how to make adjustments and then evaluate them after a reasonable amount of time. Guys don’t usually flourish at a young age in the minors just to come up and fail. It’s the mediocre guys like Mayer that do things like that. Rafaela’s minor league career suggests an above league average player with elite upside, same as Duran. Campbell, Teel and Anthony have even greater potential based on their minor league careers.
These are all young kids so give them a chance like you’ve given Mayer a chance after being mediocre since being drafted until 2024. Rafaela has been dismissed too early by so many Red Sox fans even after out producing all the other rookies on the team in 2024.
Yoshida simply doesn’t fit. That’s Bloom’s fault. He can be a good fit elsewhere so Breslow needs to get his staff working on finding his maximum fit so we can maximize value in a trade.
Rafaela is easily a better player than Yoshida, but last year at least Yoshida was the better hitter.
Yoshida should be DFA. Rafaela should be playing regularly in the OF.
tff – I’m truly shocked to see you say that about DFA’ing Yoshida. You’re usually quite rational, but the thought of releasing a .775 OPS hitter (playing half the time at less than 100%) who came in 6th for ROY just last year is quite irrational.
I guarantee there isn’t a single team in MLB, not even big money teams like the Yankees and Dodgers, that would DFA him right now.
And again even if he disappeared tomorrow, there’s zero chance Devers or Casas would shift over to fulltime DH for next season.
There is no reason to dfa Yoshida if you do that then you eat his entire salary except the league minimum when someone picks him up. He has value and is movable either in a bad contract swap or eating say half his salary. I do agree he’s not a good fit on this roster but he has value.
The Red Sox have a really good base at many positions. Third base is a position that could be addressed if Devers was willing or he had a manager willing to make him the DH but that’s not going to happen. I think we are stuck with another season of Devers at third. The idea of moving Devers to first and Casas to DH imo is not a good one. Why do we think Devers will magically be a better defender at first. Casas is perfectly fine defensively at first. Imo a first basemen’s most important job is saving errant throws from his fielders and to my eye Casas does a good job of this.
Imo since they aren’t imo moving Devers off of third they need to spend the available dollars on pitching. Get a high end guy like Fried in the rotation and then a guy like Tanner Scott in the bullpen and go from on from that point. I see a path next season to the post season and I see quite a bit of decent pitching depth but they really need to address high end pitching in order to compete next season.
Bruin – Well said! Until they are ready to move Devers or Casas to DH, it really doesn’t make sense to get rid of Yoshida.
Word is that Casas is being actively shopped, as his name is frequently being brought up in trade talks. Other teams tend to smell blood when a player is deemed as expendable, and apparently Casas is too much high maintenance for the team’s liking. We shall see, time will tell.
If the offer is right, it could work.
His injury history is concerning, though he has the talent to be special.
Abreu made the list of “most likely to be traded”.
Would you trade Yoshida and a top ten prospect for Arenado? Similar offense, but Arenado is a RHH and a very good defender at 3B. You see where I’m going with that…
Personally I’m not in favor of moving Casas but I’m not in charge. I’m not in favor of moving Devers anywhere but DH where I think he belongs. His bat is special when healthy and his glove well it’s not. While I think Breslow should concentrate on pitching I wouldn’t be at all opposed to signing Bregman freeing up Devers to DH and moving on from Yoshida in a bad contract swap. I don’t see this happening and I hope they don’t move on from Casas. I see a guy that in a fully healthy season hits 35-40 tanks bats .280 with a .400 on base kind of where I think Anthony ends up as well eventually. Devers as a DH also with similar offensive production. I really want to see those three in the lineup could be truly special.
Bruin – I don’t see the need to spend huge money on any infielder. We all know the Sox won’t go crazy with payroll, so I’d rather they use it on pitching – both SP and RP.
I don’t know about Casas, I kinda lost some faith in him this year. I think next year will be huge for him, time to produce like we all expected. The lingering effects of the rib injury and his overall injury history has me concerned.
tff – That depends, how much of the $64M remaining on Arenado’s contract would the Sox have to pay?
I’m a little leery about the Sox taking yet another flyer on a possible rebound candidate. His hitting has really, really taken a dive the past two years and even his defense has gotten worse over that same two year period. Have you heard any explanations as to what may have happened to him? He was sensational in 2022 so I don’t think his earlier offensive performance was strictly a bi-product of Coors Field.
It would be a swap of bad contracts, with Yoshida going the other way.
3/4 throttle