Rundown:
2:45: Recap what went wrong in the Los Angeles Angels series
10:16: Golden Cog weekly winner – Yermin Mercedes
14:19: What’s the plan if Tim Anderson has to go on the IL?
17:17: Offense not hitting on all gears
25:39: Series Preview – Seattle Mariners
40:13: P.O. Sox
Click play below to listen:
Upsetting first weekend, need to get right vs a pretty bad mariners squad who are also throwing a couple lefties out there. Not gonna over react to much of anything until we are 30 or so games in but….
Early concerns remain lack of depth, poor defense, poor situational hitting…. nothing new for the sox organization. Hopefully TLR manages the pen a little better he definitely should of gone to Hendricks yesterday in the 9th.
Hopefully no more Arod ESPN broadcasts good lord that was hard to listen too.
It was hard to watch, too. The camera work was awful.
I don’t know if it’s good news or bad news, but the problems are a different shape than expected. The complaints from the offseason were not adding a better RF (e.g. Springer over Eaton) and a DH (e.g. Cruz), but Mercedes/Collins and Eaton haven’t been problems—in fact, they’ve been bright spots. The defense in LF has been adequate, too, while Robert & Madrigal made critical errors.
Im not going to read into success of Mercedes and Eaton over 4 games as being a good reason to have not upgraded those positions. The lack of depth is still very concerning. You could of added Bradley to this roster for example and right now he would be in LF not a rotation of Hamilton, Vaughn, Garcia…. and you would still be benefitting from a hot Mercedes at DH. When you have no depth your options of how to adjust to injury/slumps ect is super limited. I didnt expect the defense to be this bad and think it will be fine down the road, but the lack of depth and thus the tough spot the sox are now in all year due to Eloy’s injury was totally conceivable.
Oh, I totally agree. I’m just talking about what’s gone wrong in the first weekend. If the Sox had signed Springer & Cruz (and no Eaton), for instance, the first weekend outcomes would have been even worse.
That’s why I said it could be good news or bad news, depending on how you looked at it: good news because the problem areas coming in didn’t look so bad and we can bet that Luis Robert won’t have balls boink off his head all season; or its bad news because we can’t rely on continued performances from Mercedes & Eaton and so things could get even worse.
FWIW – if you have Bradley in LF then you probably don’t get Mercedes’ hot start. I’d assume Vaughn would’ve started at DH and, while he didn’t impress, four slow days at the plate probably wouldn’t be enough to lose your job.
Not saying signing Bradley wouldn’t be a net plus over 162 games – just that we’d have missed out on the only unqualified success of the first series.
Regarding a comment from early in the pod: what Rick Hahn said in regards to why Rick Renteria was fired might not actually have anything to do with why he was fired
In less dour news, ESPN has a 6 minute mini-doc from Scoop Jackson on Nancy Faust and Kiss Him Goodbye. Fun watch. Attached to an article from last year about Faust that if you didn’t read, you definitely need to.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/29705268/how-nancy-faust-organ-set-tone-baseball
Some analysis of a La Russa decision that I don’t think got a ton of attention here (unless it was in the gamethread) https://blogs.fangraphs.com/forgoing-evan-marshall-a-tactical-analysis/
I really think the calculus was that Marshall is more of a soft contact, groundball pitcher while Hendricks is a Strikeout machine. Given the Infield’s jitters in the first series of the year, I’m guessing TLR wanted a punchout and no mistakes.