Red Sox News and Notes: Colten Brewer, Draft, FanPulse

We have a few news and note items to catch up on from today. Rather than try to split it up into three different posts, I’ll throw it all together. Deal? Deal.

Red Sox make a few roster moves

We’ll start with the Red Sox-specific bit of news, which is that they made some procedural moves for their roster. Specifically, the have optioned Colten Brewer, Chris Mazza, Matt Hall and Jeffrey Springs to the minors. They also officially added Yairo Muñoz with an invite to spring training.

I’m going to be honest here, I’m not really sure what to make of moves like this in a time like this. This is mostly procedural and generally we would look at this as a sign as to what the roster may look like if/when baseball starts up in 2020. In this case, it would certainly indicate that Ryan Weber and Brian Johnson seemingly have an inside track for the rotation while Ryan Brasier and Austin Brice are likely to make the bullpen. At the very least, that’s what things look like now. That being said, if baseball does start back up there will be another spring training and everything could reasonably change again based on that performance, right? This is all just really weird, is what I’m saying. But, a roster move was made and now I have noted it on this here website.

Framework for 2020 MLB Draft

One of the big questions that the league and the players are trying to figure out is what they are going to do with the MLB Draft this year. Teams are worried about a lack of revenue and making draft expenditures (which rings hollow to me, for whatever that’s worth) and there’s also the fact that basically no college or high school ball has been played and scouts haven’t really been able to scout. So, there had been some talk about cancelling the draft all together. It seems the two sides have come to a different agreement, as reported by ESPN’s Kiley McDaniel this morning.

Pushing the draft back seems like a logical move, but the rest is certainly a boon for the owners and a total slap in the face to the players coming out, who wouldn’t get 90 percent of their bonus until the following summer. Considering that they get paid less than a living wage for a salary, losing all but 10 percent of that bonus up front is going to make life way harder than it should be for these players. Cutting the draft down also means more players are on the open market, which would usually be good except McDaniel later notes that bonuses for undrafted players could be capped at $10,000. As McDaniel says in that linked tweet, this would likely push many high school and college juniors to school. It seems pretty clear from where I’m sitting that this is likely a concession from the players — with the penalties going to guys who are not in their union — for the service time agreement that could give full-time players a full year of service time no matter what happens in 2020.

FanPulse is back, and fans are optimistic about baseball returning this year

FanPulse is back, even if baseball is not. For those who don’t remember or weren’t around for FanPulse, it is a weekly poll that is sent out to fans all across the baseball team sites with different topics every week. Those of you who signed up in the past don’t need to sign up again, but if you are not already signed up you can do so here. It may not be weekly while baseball is on hiatus and there probably won’t be as many team-specific stuff, but we’ll still be asking some questions time and again.

This time around, as one may expect, we were interested in how fans felt about the possibility of baseball returning this year. Here are the results from the four questions.

I’m not going to pretend I know anymore than anyone who took this poll, but I gotta say I am much less optimistic that this ends in time for a 2020 season than other people. It’s entirely possible I’m just spending too much time on Twitter and getting too many constant updates of bad news, though. I will say that if a season does start, it happening before July 1 would totally shock me.