Chicago White Sox

Remind me when Kyle McCulloch led the minors in K’s? I’ll hang up and listen.

There is certainly a path to having a competent pitching staff by next year. That requires Crochet staying healthy, holding onto Fedde, and a few young arms taking a leap (such as Nastrini), but it’s definitely within the realm of possible. Creating a competent offense by next year will prove challenging. Jerry would need to add a couple major bats for it to be possible at all. For example, let’s say Jerry goes out and adds Peter Alonso for 1B and Gleyber Torres for 2B. Is this lineup good enough to make some noise in the AL Central next year? Benintendi, LF* Torres, 2B Robert, CF Alonso, 1B Montgomery, SS* Vaughn, DH Fletcher, RF* Ramos, 3B Quero, CA# Still a massive amount of question marks and it still requires two free agent signings that would be financially possible but unprecedented from a White Sox commitment standpoint. Honestly, the lack of high end positional talent in the system is immensely concerning and I’m not sure what Getz plans to do to help address it unless Jerry will finally sign some large checks. Montgomery alone isn’t enough to get the impact talent to where it needs to be.

There is zero chance Jerry’s children can afford both the Bulls and Sox…they will 100% sell the Sox and keep the Bulls.

DeJong feeding off all that fathom hate!

Renteria drove me nuts with his in-game decision making, but the dude had his guys playing hard most nights. And it seems like several of the guys didn’t do well with Zombie LaRussa’s complete lack of clubhouse rules & oversight.

Yeah, I really liked what I saw today.

I’m going to give it more time before I draw any hard conclusions, but it would be a very bad sign if they missed badly on the Fletcher evaluation given this was there one big swing excluding the Cease trade.

Leadoff man aboard for the Sox

Wasn’t fully paying attention as I’m at my in-laws for Easter, but Fedde looked pretty solid there from what I could tell.

I tried to derail it? I guess I don’t see how the plan for Schultz is consistent with the approach for Crochet so far. They specifically started small with Noah with only two innings in his first couple of starts and gradually ramping up to three and then four prior to his injury. My guess is he would have topped out around five innings max per start and pushed for 80 or 90 total on the season if he had remained healthy. IMO, that would’ve been a very reasonable plan. Meanwhile, Crochet came out and pitched six innings right out of the gate. There doesn’t appear to be any sort of ramp-up plan at the moment, unless going from 87 pitches in a start to roughly 100 somehow constitutes that. You have mentioned him pitching 90 to 100 innings total this year which feels like a reasonable target to me. But how will they achieve that? If he goes five or six every start we’re talking 20 starts max. Do they just shut him down 3/5 through the season? Do they shift back to the bullpen at some point when he caps out? I think the vast majority of this board is supportive of him starting and working towards 100 innings or so. I think the concern we have is do the Sox have a similar limit in mind and do they have a good roadmap in mind to get him there? They are already deviating from the approach used with Noah, which seems to reflect a very common practice in the industry for building up innings in minor league pitchers. As such, it’s only natural for us to be a bit nervous on whether the Sox are going about this the right way. And that raises the second concern which is doing this transition in a major league setting where wins do theoretically matter. This conversion is far more likely to be successful if careful discretion is used throughout to process and that becomes much harder when you have a clown manager who is on the hot seat and could be tempted to push Crochet beyond reasonable limits. Garrett should be handled with kids gloves at all times until proven otherwise and I just don’t see Grifol managing with any sort of tact. There is a very real chance he fucks this up and I’d feel much with a different manager or him at least starting more slowly down in Charlotte.

At least not until Eloy and/or Vaughn show up.

He had one of the worst chase rates in all the minors

Alright boys, it’s been an ugly start to the season with the Sox winless after two and those losses coming against a not great Tigers team. However, there have been some positives to cling to in the early goings. Crochet was electric and went six. Soroka was bad but was able to get through five. The bullpen has generally been very good outside of Leone. We saw the bats come alive a bit more yesterday and Robert has demonstrated significantly improved plate discipline. This isn’t a good baseball team by any stretch, but we don’t need to be good to win a game against the Tigers and as such I say why not fucking today. Without seeing lineups, it’s a bit challenging to comment on today’s matchup. I will say the Sox have barely faced Flaherty in the past and the Tigers haven’t faced Fedde since he added a sweeper, so let’s treat this like a clean slate. That being said, Flaherty is coming off a really nice spring with increased velocity and has historically been much stronger against RHs. As such, I think Shewmake should get a second straight start at SS and I’d also use Sheets at DH ahead of Eloy today given some dumb situational hitting yesterday. I haven’t gotten to see Fedde pitch since signing with us, but am very excited to see this new Bannister endorsed version. I am very familiar with the pre KBO version of Fedde and was never impressed, so hopefully the difference is immediately clear. Either way, hopefully he can give us five or six solid innings today while actually flashing a little bit of stuff. Would be great if he could be a little more than a back of the rotation innings eater. I don’t plan to do any bold predictions today, but I do think we pull off the win on this beautiful Easter Sunday. Let’s fucking go!

What’s crazy is that Yoan put up a 5.5 fWAR season in 2019. While he got a little lucky with the bat that year, his quality of contact was insane with his average exit velocity sitting in the 98th percentile. Combine that with plus plus defense and above average base-running and we had a star on our hands. As just a 24 year old, there was reason to believe Yoan could offset the luck regression with better swing decisions and maintain that level of production moving forward. Unfortunately after signing his extension and after getting COVID in 2020, he just couldn’t replicate that performance, partially due to health reasons and partially what I attribute to drive. It also didn’t help that the dude constantly mixed up his offensive approaches, flexing between extreme patience and the balanced aggressiveness he demonstrated in 2019. Despite that, he did post a 4 fWAR season in 2021 on the heels of a career best 13.6% walk rate. Yoan will forever be considered a bust in White Sox history, but that will always be due to not achieving his vast ceiling rather than being a complete flop like so many Sox prospects before him. I truly believed that Moncada & Robert would regularly put up a combined 10 fWAR seasons and it’s sad we’ll never get that level of production even once. Such a waste of physical talent, but alas that’s the 2022 & 2023 White Sox in a nutshell and Yoan is certainly the poster boy.

I really don’t think “bullpen” is my concern after watching today’s game other than Pedro viewing Leone as his go to guy.

Depends on how tomorrow goes. Will get damn near impossible after four or five series.

Honestly, I don’t like losing in general, but I can take some solace in knowing that every L is getting us a little bit closer to the end of the Grifol era.

What’s weird is that Leone is Pedro’s new Shaw but Shaw is also on the roster. I wonder if Getz forgot to tell Grifol they went with nine relievers and didn’t bring Nastrini with them.

Embarrassing set of at-bats there

I could definitely live with that.

Just for the record, I hate this extra innings bullshit. At least allow one normal inning before you go to this garbage.

So fucking true unfortunately…just more annoying than usual given Pedro & Getz hyping up the baseball IQ of these guys

And still no runs!

absolutely embarrassing…these guys remain completely incompetent in these situations despite Grifol claiming they’re always ready to execute the small things thanks to their great baseball IQ. I can’t wait for every meme bet of the Hahn core (except Robert) to be gone.

It seems painfully obvious that Getz will need to take Maldonado out Old Yeller style at some point and likely before the All Star break. I wanted to believe that there was some part of Martin’s game that was still there like “pitcher handling” but not sure that even matters when the dude looks like Kung Fu Panda after a week long dumpling bender. Hopefully Lee gets a shot while Stassi and can give Pedro a compelling reason to use his bestie Maldonado as little as possible.