Jake

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.

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.