Jake

FWIW, let's not assume Cease would have had a good start to the season with the Sox. I think the clubhouse is toxic to good baseball right now (I'm not talking about guys being nice/not nice to each other).

From publicly available information, Pham is quite plausibly the best healthy player on the White Sox right now. He should have been signed 3 months ago. There is value to making extremely modest efforts at avoiding being an all-time laughingstock. I'm starting to think it's harmful to everyone in the clubhouse to be absolutely horrible, so I'm okay with signing some real live major league baseball players in hopes that not all of them wither and die when they get the White Sox reverse Midas touch.

Weak hits and umpire conspiring against Crochet today

If you'd like to feel a bit more pessimistic, Colson's HR only had a 91mph EV. Doubt it gets out of many/any MLB ballparks.

Yeah I remembered us letting go of Alan Thomas and then at least one additional trainer after Hermie retired. I generally feel like players determine the results more than these other things, but whatever is going on isn't working. We'll have new players soon enough, we'll see if the staff changes as well.

We have too many injuries. But, it's not surprising that a lot of them come when running to first. I'm certain that must be the single most common injurious play for position players. Much of the game you are almost required to stand still. When hitting, you remain in place but do a very different sort of high effort movement...then you must suddenly turn and run full speed. Usually turns out okay, until it doesn't. But the sudden need to go full speed in a game that doesn't otherwise require you to run fast that frequently seems like an obvious area of risk especially given the starting position post-swing. Two different guys blowing out adductors over a week and a half definitely strikes me as odd though. I hope Reinsdorf, who presumably cares about the massive investments made in these players, might be willing to pay an outsider to audit our training and rehab situation.

We seem to readily accept the unpredictability of baseball when thinking about the possibility that good Sox teams may end up not being successful. But we don't apply that logic when things are down. With at least a modest effort at competitiveness, you absolutely cannot rule out the Sox being in the playoff picture in the next 3 years. That might involve a not-actually-great team catching some lucky breaks and sneaking in, but that's baseball. Once you're in the playoffs, who knows what may happen. I know we haven't been blessed with a lot of playoff appearances and trust in leadership is at an all-time low. But it's still baseball. Inept organizations regularly encounter modest success. The only way to ensure you avoid success is ship out everything that isn't nailed down.

For reference, murderer's row in Norfolk also looks absolutely mortal by these metrics. Seems like something funny going on with the numbers.

FWIW, Colson Montgomery has an xwOBA of .188, per Baseball Savant. Not sure whether there are any special caveats when looking at expected statistics at the AAA level.

You build your batting average on balls hit like that, nothing wrong with it. It's the other at bats I'm worried about

If I was GM, I'd have a very hard time every giving guaranteed money to a pitcher when I don't have to. Lots of discourse lately about pitcher health, but nobody knows what to do or even how to predict which pitchers will be the healthy exceptions. It's hard enough to project future performance in baseball when assuming good health...for pitchers you simply can't assume reasonably good health.

Let's hope Shuster is working on something, I guess.

That may be true although I think he has some understanding of the idea that fans decide to attend based on the quality of the team. But that's all consistent with his general claim that he reinvests the team's revenue into the organization (whether we believe that is literally true or not). The best thing he could do, much more important than his willingness to spend, is hire good baseball people to run the team. He has hired some different people for sure but I (and most of you) are not super confident that they are any good.

I find it helpful to think of Jerry not as some simply evil guy who is only motivated by money, but a guy who does want to win yet strongly holds a number of wrong views about how to do it. This is why for most criticisms of his apparent philosophies with spending (we never spend on development, we never sign high-profile free agents, etc.) have clear counterexamples from his time in ownership (was a big investor in minor league coaches relative to other owners when he took over, gave Joe Borchard a record contract, gave Albert Belle a record contract). He tries stuff, thinks he learns a lesson from it, and changes his strategy. Does it always work? No, in fact it usually doesn't. Does he care about money? Yeah, he seems to, but I do find it silly to act like the Sox are some outlier penny-pinching organization given the existing data on payrolls that we can all see.

One thing I'll agree with is that if basically every prospect fails, it would mean our system is worse than we think it is.

TBH, I don't care about the balance of pitching/hitting coming back in a trade like this. Just get the most value you can. Pitching is sort of easy in that you can never have too much but there's not enough guys locked into the lineup to worry about getting too much position player talent right now either. I'd just take whatever I can get.

Don't feel like digging it up but Law is down on Zavala, saying he got some negative reports on the kid's level of effort/focus and has gotten more worried about his propensity to whiff.

Bold statement I know, but chances are the Sox are projecting some of the players involved differently than we are.

Iriarte made a few relief appearances right after he was promoted last year and finished the season how he began, as a starter. I suspect the relief appearances were more about load management than anything else.

Thorpe led minor league starters in swinging strike rate last season so I think I'll wait to see somebody actually hit him before I freak out about poorly sourced reports on his current velocity.

Seems like Thorpe has a not-unreasonable chance to outperform Cease as soon as this season. The other guys are riskier although you'd expect Iriarte to at least reach the MLB bullpen if reasonably healthy. Zavala more of a lottery ticket but interesting. Wilson is a weird add although he probably makes the games more watchable this year. He may be flipped at the deadline for something useful. Thorpe being basically ready for MLB with high-ceiling is a lot of upside in my view: up to 7 years of production.

What is the source of the 5 players claim?

Not going to bother finding the source, but I saw some research that IIRC was presented at SABR last year showing that spring training stats are useful — your projections will be more accurate if you incorporate spring training stats into your models. The main issue with spring training is sample size, so of course you don't want to conclude too much from 25 at bats or whatever it may be. On the team level, you do have a bigger sample size although it's cluttered with non-rostered guys. But the fact that your minor leaguers are terrible is also relevant for how the season will end up going.

Pritzker is going to take a meeting with the Sox ownership group and significantly soften his stance if not totally turn it around.

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.