*****Official Texas Rangers World Series Title Defense Thread***** [Staff Warning]

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WestTexasAg
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South Platte said:

With this rotation Seattle has no reason not to make a deep run. This weekend felt like we were getting strangled by the '90's Braves.
They gotta make the playoffs first.
Grapesoda2525
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Rodriguez played out of his mind. I'm still pissed Bochy didn't bring in Yates for the 4 out save.
bmac_aggie18
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Any chance we DFA Foscue? Dude is still sporting a .063 / .118 / .094 Line
Super Aggie 64
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Dave Raymond does not know the Kirby's Dream Land theme?
Super Aggie 64
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Hello Win Column!
South Platte
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bmac_aggie18 said:

Any chance we DFA Foscue? Dude is still sporting a .063 / .118 / .094 Line
He may bat his age before the season is over.
KT 90
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After last night, Foscue is 2 for 34 with 2 walks and 15 k's. Keep giving him some AB's, but yikes, that is not good.
hawk1689
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I'm stunned that they haven't given Dustin Harris a shot yet. He's been a solid hitter in our system for several years. I wonder if he has an attitude problem or something?
Tksymm7
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Jose Altuve quietly had an all-time ejection last night. Taking the shoe off and THEN the sock legendary stuff.
rbtexan
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hawk1689 said:

I'm stunned that they haven't given Dustin Harris a shot yet. He's been a solid hitter in our system for several years. I wonder if he has an attitude problem or something?
He started as an infielder (3rd/1st I believe) and they moved him to LF. I know initially he was apparently pretty awful defensively, but has gotten better. It probably has to do with his defense, if I had to guess.

Also, since he got to the higher levels in the minors he hasn't exactly been hitting the cover off the ball. Last couple of seasons he's hit .259 and .272 this year. I'm not sure he'd be any better than Foscue, and we've all seen what he isn't doing in the majors. Truth is that we really don't have any great hitters at the upper levels of the minors, just guys.
Jimbo Franchione
WestTexasAg
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KT 90 said:

After last night, Foscue is 2 for 34 with 2 walks and 15 k's. Keep giving him some AB's, but yikes, that is not good.

0 for 5 with 3 Ks. Now hitting .059. Brutal.
DannyDuberstein
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Poor defense college player that they drafted for his bat. 4 years later. SMH
rbtexan
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As an organization, we HAVE to get past this idea of "let's bring this kid up (who really hasn't earned it) and see if there's anything there."

All we heard was what a good hitter Foscue is, but I kept looking at the stats and never saw it. At some point, you are what the numbers on the back of your baseball card say you are. Crim, Harris, etc. - those are nothing more than roster fillers, there's no star power there whatsoever. Obviously not everyone is going to be a star and I get that...but we can't keep thinking "oh, if we just bring up _____, that'll fix the offense/pitching". Rookies struggle, that's what they do. Hopefully they develop into something but it typically takes time.

Bottom line, whatever salvation exists for our anemic offense doesn't exist at the minor league level, at least not this season or next.
Jimbo Franchione
Proposition Joe
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You can call them "roster fillers", but you still have to be able to field a team.

Meaning you can't just go out and pay for some replacement player if one of your guys goes down -- you do that and you're going to have even more "misses" because you'll be letting guys go to make room on your 40-man.

When Jung went down, you needed someone who could take his spot. Justin Foscue was already on the 40-man (since we had to place him there to protect him in the Rule 5 Draft since we drafted him back in 2020).

That's why he got the call, not because the franchise suddenly decided "oh this kid is ready to bust out on the big league level!". 90% of guys making their major league debut mid-season are doing so out of necessity, not because the front office thinks they are just sure-fire big league producers based on their "baseball card".

And as for guys with good but not great minor league numbers (0.270ish) rarely panning out on the big league level? Evan Carter was called up because Adolis Garcia got hurt. Carter was a 0.285 hitter in Frisco without a ton of pop.

And without his call-up we likely don't win a World Series.
rbtexan
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Proposition Joe said:

You can call them "roster fillers", but you still have to be able to field a team.

Meaning you can't just go out and pay for some replacement player if one of your guys goes down -- you do that and you're going to have even more "misses" because you'll be letting guys go to make room on your 40-man.

When Jung went down, you needed someone who could take his spot. Justin Foscue was already on the 40-man (since we had to place him there to protect him in the Rule 5 Draft since we drafted him back in 2020).

That's why he got the call, not because the franchise suddenly decided "oh this kid is ready to bust out on the big league level!". 90% of guys making their major league debut mid-season are doing so out of necessity, not because the front office thinks they are just sure-fire big league producers based on their "baseball card".

And as for guys with good but not great minor league numbers (0.270ish) rarely panning out on the big league level? Evan Carter was called up because Adolis Garcia got hurt. Carter was a 0.285 hitter in Frisco without a ton of pop.

And without his call-up we likely don't win a World Series.
Sorry, but no.

Carter was one of the top prospects in the minors and was 20 years old with about 2 1/2minor league seasons. Foscue, Crim, Harris...all in their mid 20s, none considered elite prospects (Foscue was a bad draft evaluation and should've never gone as high as he did). Crim is 27, Foscue is 26 - Harris is 24 but has about 6 minor league seasons under his belt. Those are apples & orange comparisons, and oh by the way, what was Carter hitting this season before his injury? .188 There's no bigger Even Carter fan than me, but the jury is still out on what he'll become.

Sure, a player can come up and get on a hot streak. I remember in the 70s the Rangers called up a guy named Kurt Bevacqua, 30 year old journeyman. He got called up, got hot and hit .333 and almost helped carried the team to a championship in '77. The next season he hit .222 and was for all intents & purposes gone.

You're absolutely correct that most players make their debut out of necessity, but that's not what has been discussed on this forum. Over and over there's been posts clamoring to bring up Foscue because our offense was so bad and he's supposedly such a good hitter....and look at what he's done since he got the call up.

If anything, we ruined Foscue - we should've traded him this past off-season to some team that could've let him develop in the majors (A's), because if you're expecting your team to compete for a championship you simply can't afford to do that. Now teams know what he is, and isn't.

The Rangers should be good next year, but putting too much hope or faith in unproven commodities is likely to lead to what we saw happen this year.
Jimbo Franchione
Proposition Joe
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Ok, so that begs the two questions:

Who would you have played instead of Foscue?

and

What do you think we could have gotten for Foscue in the offseason? He'd still be Rule 5 eligible, so anyone who traded for him would have to keep him on their 40 or risk losing him. So they'd ultimately be trading for a 1-season audition -- the same 1-year audition we were giving him.

No one is going to give you that much of value for that, you're just going to get similar lotto tickets.

The Rule 5 basically prevents teams from "waiting until they know for sure" to bring talent up. If you aren't sure within 4 years, then every other team is going to get a chance at him.

Hell, you can make a better case that bringing Foscue up was the move to make. He got significant at-bats, showed he's not ready (and may never be), and did so in a year that his actual performance really didn't matter to the team's chances - we weren't making the playoffs with or without him.

It's similar to those talking about how we shoulda dealt Adolis at his peak value or the like. Playing armchair GM after the fact is really easy, but the thing is -- most every other team is dealing with the same data you are.



Quote:

The Rangers should be good next year, but putting too much hope or faith in unproven commodities is likely to lead to what we saw happen this year.

Foscue had zero bearing on what we did this year.

Two major injuries and Jonah Heim and Adolis Garcia falling off a cliff are why we failed this year -- neither of which were unproven commodities.

And interestingly enough -- the guy who did his best to keep us in the hunt was an unproven commodity that we had around as a backup named Josh Smith.
94chem
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Two words...
House
Money
94chem,
That, sir, was the greatest post in the history of TexAgs. I salute you. -- Dough
toucan82
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just win, baby
alvtimes
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dang who gave the canadian dorks the box by the field mic????
Grapesoda2525
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Proposition Joe said:

Ok, so that begs the two questions:

Who would you have played instead of Foscue?

and

What do you think we could have gotten for Foscue in the offseason? He'd still be Rule 5 eligible, so anyone who traded for him would have to keep him on their 40 or risk losing him. So they'd ultimately be trading for a 1-season audition -- the same 1-year audition we were giving him.

No one is going to give you that much of value for that, you're just going to get similar lotto tickets.

The Rule 5 basically prevents teams from "waiting until they know for sure" to bring talent up. If you aren't sure within 4 years, then every other team is going to get a chance at him.

Hell, you can make a better case that bringing Foscue up was the move to make. He got significant at-bats, showed he's not ready (and may never be), and did so in a year that his actual performance really didn't matter to the team's chances - we weren't making the playoffs with or without him.

It's similar to those talking about how we shoulda dealt Adolis at his peak value or the like. Playing armchair GM after the fact is really easy, but the thing is -- most every other team is dealing with the same data you are.



Quote:

The Rangers should be good next year, but putting too much hope or faith in unproven commodities is likely to lead to what we saw happen this year.

Foscue had zero bearing on what we did this year.

Two major injuries and Jonah Heim and Adolis Garcia falling off a cliff are why we failed this year -- neither of which were unproven commodities.

And interestingly enough -- the guy who did his best to keep us in the hunt was an unproven commodity that we had around as a backup named Josh Smith.
I'll say Davis Wendzel hurt us a lot this year.
Proposition Joe
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There's moves here and there that certainly would have helped, maybe even would have kept our head above water. But the same can be said for every team out there every single year.

For those who know my posting history, I'm certainly not above blaming the GM for moves they did or didn't make when a year (or decade) goes sour. But you have to go way down the list of what went wrong this year before you start finding things that the front office really could have avoided and further down for things they should've avoided.

Adolis Garcia averaged a 3.8 WAR the last 3 seasons. Meaning he wasn't a guy that any front office would actively be looking to shed/upgrade. He's put up a 0.1 WAR this year.

Jonah Heim put up a 2.5 and 2.9 WAR the last 2 seasons. On the cheap. Meaning he wasn't a guy that any front office would actively be looking to shed/upgrade. He's put up a 0.9 WAR this year.

Josh Jung put up a 2.4 WAR last season. He was injured most of this season.

Leody Taveras put up a 2.7 WAR last season. On the cheap. Unless your front office has money to burn, that's not a position you upgrade in the offseason.


Now lets take a glance at a few decisions that were made:

Keeping Josh Smith: 3.4 WAR
Drafting Langford and calling him up: 3.1 WAR
Letting Mitch Garver walk: -0.2 WAR
Letting Jordan Montgomery walk: -1.4 WAR


Blaming the front office for anything that happened this year is just dumb.
Mr Gigem
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Five years from now, I think we will look back at this season as a total anomaly.
DannyDuberstein
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100%. They built the team the right way. A combo of injuries and guys dipping did them in. But it's not like they assembled a bunch of old guys that careered the year before and a fall-off should be anticipated. The vets are not that old and they had an infusion of young talent. The stars just aligned the wrong way. With all the **** that happened, they are 7 games out of a wild card. Not what you want, but wouldn't have taken a massive shift in circumstances to make that up
Jimmy McNulty
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Adolis is a weird one. He's not young. No telling what to expect from him moving forward.
94chem
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Just not enough depth to overcome the injuries. Even subtle things like lineup construction were exponential in their effect. Imagine a healthy Jung, Lowe, Carter...all of a sudden, Adolis doesn't look so bad at the bottom of the order, for example.

Imagine this team at 4 games over with a healthy Seager, Rocker, DeGrom, Robertson, Yates...would be a fun last 2 weeks, and a dangerous team.

Lineups are a wolf pack. Regression doesn't occur in a vacuum.
94chem,
That, sir, was the greatest post in the history of TexAgs. I salute you. -- Dough
Proposition Joe
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Mr Gigem said:

Five years from now, I think we will look back at this season as a total anomaly.

You could probably say the same for 2023.

Real production of this roster is somewhere in the middle.

And that's not a bad thing. Take the average of the two years and we're a team right in the thick of things every September with a legitimate chance to make a run.
KT 90
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Early game today, 1:35pm. Rocker out on the bump today.
shack009
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KT 90 said:

Early game today, 1:35pm. Rocker out on the bump today.

Thanks for the heads up. Thought I'd be watching Champions League but definitely want to check out Rocker. Couldn't catch his first start.
Super Aggie 64
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It's Kumar Rocker time in Texas!
fc2112
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At the game and can attest Rocker is YUGE
fc2112
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That sinker of Rockers is outrageous.
KT 90
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Not able to watch closely today, but Rocker is going to hit that 75 pitch count quickly today. Not as sharp as last time in Seattle.
KT 90
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Rocker could have escaped with only one run allowed, but Duran made an error on what should have been the third out. Toronto up 2-0. Pennington came on in relief for Rocker.
rbtexan
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I watched. I thought his stuff looked fantastic but his command was off
Jimbo Franchione
bmac_aggie18
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Toronto's Pitchers aren't off, we're getting no-hit
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