Balta1701

If he comes out as a reliever, picks up an extra few mph, and gets comfortable by the deadline, perhaps he could still be movable by then? I can't get bent out of shape about this with how he's looked in the spring, it looks like nothing has changed.

I will never stop thinking that the biggest mistake the White Sox made with this player was failing to put him in AAA for 2021. Give him as many innings as he can take, let him build is arm up post surgery, let him get innings so that he can recover the consistency and control he was starting to develop in mid-2018, and maybe avoid the mental pressures of being tossed back into the big leagues after what was clearly a stressful 2020 for him.

You're looking at lots of guys who are pretty far out in the future, which means that the White Sox have absorbed lots of risk in terms of development and injury coming back for a guy who has been an elite starter for at least a period in his career. Let's say either one guy who is really really good, like all-star level good at their position + a minor contributor (backup or a reliever), or two guys who are at least quality starting players for the team, around 27-28.

Sigh. With how last year went and how this offseason went, you can't even justify this by saying "If he's good maybe we can move him at the trade deadline."

I would like to go back in time to pre-2023 and tell people here at Soxtalk that the only pitcher in the 2023 White Sox rotation who will make a start for them in 2024 is likely to be Touki Toussaint.

I'm surprised they didn't give him a chance to start in April, but hell why not, he's not showing anything positive in the spring either and that might as well count for something.

We started a Fire Chris Getz thread on the day he was announced I believe. It's probably on page 2 of Pale Hose Talk because it's regularly bumped. It will probably be bumped pretty regularly this year. The development of the players he has acquired will determine whether it finally falls back a few pages in 2025 or it challenges the Cease thread in length by 2026.

Who was in charge of pitching development for the last 7 years? It seems like they've divided up the job differently now so that means blame will get shifted differently, but there is plenty of blame to go around. Had the White Sox regularly been churning out positive contributors for the last 7 years they wouldn't be in the mess they're in now. Or hell, practically any contributors at this point.

If they bring up Thorpe in September and he's awesome, people will absolutely be giving Bannister credit for this. Same thing with basically any pitcher currently in the system.

Fulmer was still on the MLB.com top 100 list in early 2017, I checked. He was brought up by Rick Hahn in 2016 from AA because Hahn needed someone to save his bullpen. Moncada spent most of a year in AAA. He was called up because Frazier was traded, and showed by 2018 that this was an aggressive promotion since he hadn't figured out how to handle the strike zone. Lopez spent several years in the White Sox's minors and couldn't figure out how to have success until he was moved to the bullpen. Eloy spent so long in the White Sox minor league system that he wrote an article saying "I'm Ready" for the Players Tribune. Kopech spent 1.5 seasons in the White Sox minor leagues prior to his callup. The White Sox absolutely had plenty of time to put these guys in position for success. It's not all Getz, Hahn absolutely screwed with these guys, but this is a bloody ton of talent - to get so little long term success out of them is an indictment of the entire development system.

I agree it's unfair to pin it all on Getz. Most of that, frankly, I pin on Hahn, who was awful. However, it is a blatant, obvious, consistent, and undeniable record of developmental failure. This record would absolutely have meant that no other team in MLB would hire him for the same position, let alone promoted him. At the very least, there is reason for skepticism until proven otherwise, and this record should follow him around for the next few years. If the White Sox in 2027 have a 70 win big league team and a bottom 15 system, the previous failures at development would definitely be a relevant part of his record and would justify tossing him overboard. If multiple guys break out and this team is back to 88 wins, then the more recent success would be more important than the previous failures.

Chris Getz took over as director of White Sox player development in 2017 according to his Wikipedia page. At the time, the White Sox had the #1 system in baseball, including up to 10 top-100 prospects as per the mid-2017 MLB.com rankings. That was then supplemented by top 5 draft picks in 2018 and 2019 and a top 15 pick in 2020, as well as all of the other draft rounds. This should have been an absolutely enormous batch of talent to develop. We look back at guys like Kopech, Eloy, Moncada, Lopez, Fuller, Rutherford, Collins with skepticism now, but a big portion of that is that they did not develop as well as guys ranked this highly should.

Yes, Dylan Cease had a down year last year and this significantly affected his value as he looks like a very inconsistent pitcher. The question is what drove that downturn last year and whether it is fixable - there was a velocity drop, his slider was hit much harder with the velocity drop, but he still had dominant stuff available, multiple metrics tracked that and people here were stressing that the whole offseason as they tried to justify true top returns for him. If people believed that, then there's a very strong case for holding him and expecting him to be substantially better in 2024 because the stuff was there to produce a much more valuable pitcher at the deadline.

Wheeler signed an extension last week. An additional $126 million over the 3 year period 25-27. He will not be a free agent, your list is out of date. https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/zack-wheeler-extension-phillies-ace-agrees-to-three-year-126-million-deal-ahead-of-free-agency/

But you can say that about how many of the other NRIs the White Sox have already? Is Wilson a vastly better pitcher than them? Maybe, his contact numbers are good, but that's also small sample sizes in Petco park, with a high walk rate. This is a narrow improvement over the other options on paper. If BABIP isn't his friend this year then he's a non-tender candidate next offseason rather than a flip candidate at the deadline.

Santos had a better walk rate and a .337 BABIP. Santos was also quite a bit better at keeping the ball in the ballpark. Pretty distinct pitchers.

Flexen had an ERA over 6 last year, Soroka's success was prior to 2 achilles surgeries, and Fedde was in a different country last year. There's potential here, but the last MLB season for each of those three guys together adds up to -2.1 rWAR. It could absolutely wind up better than this, but it could wind up the worst rotation we've ever seen.

Signing veterans that waste money in rebuilding years and shortly thereafter complaining about payroll limits is definitely a White Sox thing. But again, we'll see, I'm not going to guess what they will do next offseason, too many variables. Attendance is going to be a disaster this season. Their needs next offseason are a big function of how effective their coaches and development are this year, with health on top of that. Definitely possible to see them cutting payroll further, signing more vetz, and having a $90 million payroll next year just as much as it is to see this being their payroll low.

Spotrac has them at $125 million to fill out a roster, but that's also without guys like Pillar, Moustakas, so it will probably go over $130 million when you add in those guys and a few people shuttle back and forth to the IL. Possible some could be traded off of that early in the year. Will they spend less than that next year? Reinsdorf has complained about losing money in 2020, and then supported extra high payrolls in 2022-2023 with teams that had declining fan support. Is it unbelievable that he would try to do some profit-taking next year with an extra low payroll? We will see.

We were wrong on Cease's value around the league because as a whole we were saying that Cease would have a top of the rotation pitcher value and if they didn't get that return they had the option to hold him until the deadline, in the hopes that he could replicate much of his 2022 performance. In the end, the league did not value him as a TOR pitcher, but Getz passed on the option to hold him until the deadline in favor of taking the best deal they could get. If their scouting and development has improved this could still be a good gamble given the players who came back, but this staff currently has zero track record and we can come up with many reasons for skepticism until they do.

To say this a harsher way, this is also writing that the White Sox gave a large discount on Cease because they weren't confident that he could be a top of the rotation pitcher in 2024 and believed it likely that 2022 was a fluke.

This is because he has a career BABIP of .223. League wide that was .297. The Padres, interestingly enough, had a very low BABIP - so is a lot of that a combination of luck and a big ballpark?

A 29 year old reliever with a career 4.33 FIP in 2 seasons who has slightly better ERA than that thanks to Petco park is most definitely filler. It's 40 man roster fluff.

Over the last 2 years, DeJong combined for just over 600 PAs and a .587 OPS. Anderson last year was .582. I’ll accept “a little bit of defense”, but DeJong is basically 2023 Anderson with the bat at this stage in his career.

While this is true, it's also pretty obvious that this guy was included much more due to the 40 man roster slots needed than anything else. The White Sox, however, spent the entire offseason loading up on Meh caliber pitchers who could take 40 man roster spots and who they would hope to be able to flip, so it's not like they had no options if they didn't get this guy back. This just changes which meh caliber relievers they bring north with them.