Jake

I'm finding the evidence of a "surge" in TJS to be mixed. Cherry-picked example from a month ago: Although in the longer term, obviously there are more Tommy Johns than, say, 15 years ago. I still can't help but wonder how much of this is related to more players getting the surgery rather than retire and how much is that, generally, we're coddling injury-prone pitchers all the way to the majors. "Coddling" sounds pejorative but I really mean it as a description — are we protecting guys so much that rather than flame out as a 16 year old, they make it to pro ball before the inevitable strikes? I don't know.

In an analysis like this, I tend to totally discount the negative WAR values — we could demote or get rid of those guys if there was a need to immediately improve those spots. And, of course, Sox are playing a longer game here. Shuster is probably the most key player. Hasn't been super impressive yet, but he's got a while to potentially return value. That's true of Gowens also but he's much more of a long shot. Shewmake is under control for a long time as well but it's getting harder to see how he becomes a good player. But sure, let's put him in AAA and see if he ever figures something out and/or gains 25 pounds. Bummer has a 0.2 fWAR but also a 0.0 RA9/WAR because he once again has a worse ERA than FIP. Unlike last season, his Statcast xERA matches his ERA. Bummer is at least doing something a little different so far, cutting his walk rate in half. But his fastball velocity has dropped another mph (after a mph drop last year) and his whiff rate has dropped a lot perhaps as a consequence. So part of the evaluation concerns whether you think Bummer would have gained value if the Sox held onto him.

Emblematic of the whole discourse that the column misquotes Schriffen at the key moment. Scoop Jackson quotes him as saying "for all you haters" Didn't sound right to me so I played it back and indeed he said, "for all the haters" — you know, language that implies the haters are not part of the people watching NBC Sports Chicago But I guess people hear whatever they want to hear

My main take on this whole thing is: it ain't that deep

Even the worst teams get hot, have some lucky wins, etc. That's what the Sox weren't having at all in the first 25 games. They played as badly as possible and managed to win even less than their piss-poor performance deserved. I don't expect any fundamental change going forward but hopefully it's a sign that Hawk's old adage that every team will win 50 and lose 50 will hold true for the Sox.

I've been a member of Soxtalk for more of my life than I've not been a member of Soxtalk...

Ask Hawk who he would hire/promote/fire if given the powers of GM and you'll figure out who knows what they're doing. Just keep everybody that Hawk wants to fire

Had to look this up on Statcast: Colson Montgomery has struck out 33 times this year, 17 of them looking. No major leaguer had half of his strikeouts looking last year and of those with high proportions of strikeouts looking, none of them were high strikeout players (so usually, if a lot of your Ks are looking, it's partly because you're so hard to strike out by swinging). For April 2024, Colson is an extremely high strikeout player.

Once Lenyn screwed up that rundown with the Sox I knew he was on his way back down. It has seemed at times like the MLB struggles are more than just hitting. I hope he gets another shot but I also felt it was understandable that we didn't want to see him any longer after his most recent run.

Just FWIW, Sox are paying Benintendi no matter what. If we tried to make him play in AAA, he could just walk away and keep the money.

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.