Jake

Horn is a lefty who, based on the numbers, has shown some propensity to miss bats which is the name of the game nowadays. Thompson, according to all information available to me, stinks. I believe in the potential of all men but I'm not losing sleep over this trade.

Yeah that has been confusing me. I'm not sure what their angle is at all, TBH, because it seems like they may genuinely backing out of the Arlington Heights situation over it with no viable plan in sight in Chicago.

I find the mayor's openness to this to be interesting given that I would have profiled him as someone hostile to this kind of thing. That's probably good news for the White Sox. I've yet to see any meaningful opposition to the Sox proposals by any public officials, as a matter of fact.

Most folks are aware of the dubious claims made about the economic benefits of public financing for sports stadiums/arenas. Biggest issue tends to be that while there is undeniably significant economic activity generated by a new ballpark, there is lots of economic activity with any investment of that size into a similar plot of land. Jerry's best argument here, IMO, is that this is not true about the 78. For the reasons discussed previously ITT, as best as I can tell the 78 has somewhat limited options in terms of what kinds of stuff you could build there due to the ground it's on, the stuff that is built near it, etc. And there's some proof in the pudding too: there's literally nothing there! Crazy that an area right in the heart of Chicago is completely undeveloped. I think it's at least a plausible argument that nothing useful may happen there if the Sox don't get a stadium there. If so, this is a matter of adding economic activity to the city rather than just prioritizing a baseball field over some other form of development. It's unclear to me how far he can get with the line of argument that the Sox may end up leaving town if they don't get a good stadium deal. It sure seems like many stakeholders including Sox fans, are happy to tell the team to f*** off and go play in some other city. Maybe it's the Cubs' world and we're just living in it.

I took Jerry's statements in the article to mean that he personally won't take the Sox out of Chicago, but when he's dead his son will have to sell and any owner that doesn't intrinsically love the Sox/Chicago like he does will want to get the hell out of there if they aren't contractually obligated to a nice Chicago-based stadium.

Not to carry too much water for JR, but I do think this factoid of no $100M is partly just due to circumstances. Hahn seemed to be a true believer in conservative payroll management and I suspect someone else in charge could have convinced Jerry to go big on a contract somewhere along the line. And presumably he was willing to give someone like Machado over $200M (i.e., Sox didn't get him but I assume the offers were made in good faith and not just for the purpose of leaking out "we tried" afterwards). Sox have had fairly high payrolls in the very recent past. I've been frustrated with how the Sox never hit the accelerator when the window was open and no doubt Jerry could have opened up the pocketbook further, but I also think the guy he just fired was telling him the plan was good.

With regard to public funding, I am generally very skeptical of giving these rich guys handouts. So far we haven't heard anything too egregious about the proposed 78 deal so we'll see on that. But as a general thought...I'm not a fan of unilateral disarmament either. I don't need the Sox to be the one team who ends up with a shitty ballpark because they didn't get public help. The Sox can be the team who got a shitty ballpark with public help (joking, maybe)

I suppose one way to think about it is that he can get acclimated in a pretty low stakes environment — the amount of people watching games is probably going to be half (or less) of what it would/will be when the team is good. He can take his lumps out of the spotlight and when folks jump back on the bandwagon he'll be his best self, hopefully.

Seems good, looking forward to seeing what it's like.

Why is it weird? I thought a big lesson of the TA controversies was his apparent pro-procreation stance.

The White Sox gave Martin Maldonado $4.5M

This. I think it was always bad baseball strategy to make any decisions based on whether it would improve your draft position, but any doubt about it is gone now with the lottery system in place. Make an honest effort at producing a competent ballclub and see what happens. Who knows, maybe you'll get the #1 pick anyway.

Not enough brainpower to come up with a list but I'll say that I've never been able to make myself hate a player just because he wasn't good. Waste of energy to be mad at a guy because Jerry Reinsdorf gave him a contract IMO. On the flip side, I think it's fine to like a guy mostly because he is good at baseball (although it's not required, obviously; see Albert Belle for more details).

The idea of Robert as a good target for the Mariners is crazy. They have one of the few players who has an argument for doing literally everything (including long-term cost control) better than Robert does at the same position.

I don't know how many guys have come over from Korea, especially guys who started stateside like Fedde. Merrill Kelly is the big success story that I'm familiar with. So for whatever it's worth, Fedde pitched a hell of a lot better in the KBO than Kelly ever did. Of course, scouting is a bit harder than just comparing statistics.

I can see the logic for waiting until the top FA are off the market, but isn't there also some logic to trying to make a deal before that? Some of the teams who may sign those guys will be taking themselves out of Cease's market in doing so. Less competition for Cease's services could lower the price, I would think.

Something that jumped out at me about Soroka when looking through his Statcast numbers, etc. His most valuable pitch in his good season was his sinker. In his brief MLB comeback, it was not. Statcast measures several inches of lost drop from 2019 to 2023. I strongly suspect his return to form will depend on finding the movement he used to have on that pitch. As a one-time sinkerballer myself, I don't really envy him because I never fully grasped what I did to make it move the way it did. Luckily the high-tech gizmos available today allow for much easier trial and error in practice sessions.

Shuster is kind of interesting because his fastball is a truly horrific pitch. Only gets whiffs 9% of the time and gets killed when they aren't whiffing. He only throws it 45% of the time, but maybe even that is too much. Maybe we can figure something out to play up his strengths. Back in the Don Cooper days, I'd be looking for him to show up with a cutter.

The White Sox need major league baseball players (or reasonably convincing replicas) first and foremost, **good** major league baseball players second-most. So this achieves the first goal.

Hard to complain. Upside is pretty limited, but the upside includes having two more solid starting pitchers this year which is worth something. Nicky Lopez isn't inspiring but he's a positive value player who shouldn't be irritating to watch.

I don't know that Jason was trying to imply that the comment was related to his cerebral palsy although I'm not sure about that. But yeah, I see it as Boyer just making it as clear as possible that he found Jason to be too needy for whatever reason. Having someone talk to me like that would give me some motivation to get out of the situation if I had an attractive off-ramp.

Why not? IDK. Being a fan is sort of a gut feeling, don't you think? If another team was really attracting me, I'd be into it. But I'm not there yet, for whatever various reasons. Part of it is I'm no longer in the White Sox's market, which theoretically should help in moving on but now I live even further from the nearest MLB team (the Braves) who I also don't find very appealing for various reasons. So there's no real option that allows me to attach to a local team, since there isn't one, and I have to categorically exclude a number of teams because I'm not signing up to be a fan of a team on the west coast when I live in eastern time 😅. I'm not going to stop hating on the Cubs as that is one of my pastimes. If I wanted to pretend to still be local to the greater Chicagoland region, I could latch onto the Brewers but...yeah doesn't seem like the time to jump on that bandwagon. So for now I'm just a disenchanted Sox fan. I doubt I'll be living in the game threads or watching the games when I have literally anything else to do. But I will hope that somehow they show signs of becoming worth rooting for again. If another team wants to sweep me off my feet in the meantime, then so be it! I tend to think the likeliest outcome is I hang around until the Sox stop kicking me in the nuts so insistently, but an expansion team in the South would get a close look from me if the Sox are still delivering the nut shots when those teams come around. I can't rule out my life circumstances changing either of course...if I found myself on the west coast that would open up some intriguing options, mainly in the NL.

I don't know why the thread went in this direction but I really am curious about how/why Benintendi played so badly on D last year. Early on, I remember a small number of clear misplays that any fielder would be expected to catch. But by end of season I feel like his shortcomings on D were not very obvious by the eye test which suggests he was basically just moving slowly out there either due to a physical problem, effort problem, or inability to read a fly ball.

I didn't want to talk about it when the news broke, but the feeling is still there. After all the baseball-related s%*# I've been served, I didn't really waver. But my overwhelming feeling upon hearing the Benetti news was that I didn't want to be a Sox fan anymore. I feel basically stuck, there's no other team I care for and I continue to harbor the resentments towards various Sox adversaries. But man are the White Sox playing with fire (with me specifically, at least) if the expansion teams get rolling soon...especially if Charlotte gets one.

On top of that, a large portion of teams have starting shortstops in place already and a good portion of those who don't, wouldn't want to make Tim that guy. In baseball terms, it's not hard at all to see how both sides could want a reunion.