I was wrong about Byrd/Murton too.

Still expect to here a lot of rumors this winter about moving Byrd. Hopefully for a pitcher, we shall see.

smart of them to deal him for Harden.

The Rangers tried to shut him down earlier this season.

the prevailing opinion was not that he would be a star. just that byrd was a fluke and murton was probably a bit better and locked up longer.

appears hes actually worse.

and while in this case I do think there was legitimate logic to saying it was better to keep byrd, you cant always confused the result with the decision with hindsight.. there are trades that would look bad now that would have been logically sound, good trades in the offseason.

I think Murton has some value, and is better than what he’s shown so far this year…

On the other hand, I think that this was an instance where folks didn’t acknowledge the extent to which Murton’s value was dependent on his average, and underrated the defensive edge Byrd had.

I freely admit, initially, my feeling was that you make a Murton for Byrd move, no question…but the more I looked at it, the more I came to believe that Murton was a nice complimentary piece, but not someone who was likely to be a solid everyday major leaguer, particularly given his defensive limitations, and that Byrd had more short-term value. Murton for Byrd could be a positive move, long-term, mainly because of the service time issues, but the gain appears to be marginal, and I just didn’t see that that sort of marginal and very uncertain gain was worth it.

being clearly above average and well above average this year in CF while last year had him hurting the team when he was manning CF. Based on which metric you want to use, he is anywhere from 3-12 runs above average and 11-12 runs above a replacement player in CF. Last year he was between 13 and 23 runs below average while being 3-6 runs below a replacement player.

how much of that was the boston implosion

who’s stuff just is better out of the rotation. Feldman may have had that problem last year as a RP. His stuff was no longer top notch like in the minors, his delivery was caught on to, and he wasn’t out there long enough in a game to set his off-speed stuff and breaking ball up much.

125 OPS+ on the season. Between May 17th (his first start since returning from injury) and August 2 (went 1-19 in his last 4 games with 4 BBs), he had a .792 OPS. On the season he has a .328 BABIP, far from unsustainable for a guy who has a career .326 BABIP. Every good player has hot streaks and during those hot streaks, you’re often going to find a great BABIP. It doesn’t mean that this is all a mirage, just the way baseball always evens out (remember that .174 BABIP in April).