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If the Sox are looking for a bridge manager, they went about this the wrong way

Damn... RIP Fernando Mania!

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/41952316/dodgers-legendary-pitcher-fernando-valenzuela-dies-63

Skip Schumaker or Will Venable please

How many of them got a $2 billion handout?

You missed the point then. The White Sox are far from the only billionaire handout in the City of Chicago, and far from the wealthiest. Though they are only one of a very few with a dedicated revenue stream which isn't being redirected from other city services.

Then this page is useless for giving context on this project. If I look at your average bank balance I can’t tell anything about whether you can afford a new house.

There’s a fire station in Englewood currently without a ladder truck and ambulance because the city can’t afford to fix them. They just cancelled two consecutive police academy classes because they literally can’t afford to run them. The state of Illinois is a single notch above junk status on its debt rating. But yeah…let’s totally give the worst team in MLB history with a billionaire owner a bunch of public funds to build a new stadium and get richer even though he completely ripped us off on the last one. How exactly do you think both the City and State got into this situation?

Not really too disappointing when you realize that this will likely just be the bridge manager to when the Sox are able to get back to being a .500 team. And if they somehow strike gold with a competent manager, they can always try to extend him.

That's their average daily balance, not their annual budget. This is also a separate taxing body. But this is far from the only billions spent. He'll they are STILL paying Boeing, who is gone.

That’s disappointing

While the free OTA option is nice, not having streaming options in addition is a whiff. I won’t have a problem watching Sox games because I get MLB.TV for free every year through T-Mobile and I am tech savvy enough to know how to get around the local blackout with a VPN. But not everyone wants to pay for MLB.TV or knows how to use a VPN and just wants an easy and reliable streaming solution like NBC Sports Chicago provided. Should people bust this out as their portable solution for watching Sox/Bulls/Hawks games in the Chicagoland area? Hopefully the slightly bent antenna will still get a good signal…

Skip Schumaker is the first name Chuck mentions here, so maybe they're the final five?

The whole city has $2.6 billion and has added $1.3 billion over the 5 year period shown there, but $1.8 billion on a single project would be normal? That seems like 10x the city commitment of the other projects listed.

Guess what teams are #1 and #2 in MLB in terms of not swinging at balls out of the zone.

The city of Chicago has an ADB of almost 2 billion sitting around in TIF dollars. This kind of spending is very normal. https://igchicago.org/information-portal/data-dashboards/chicago-tif-districts-map-fund-balances/

That’s wild.

The 78 is Futuristic? How so. It's just a piece of low lying vacant land. The largely unrealistic not to scale artistic rendering is a joke. Perhaps you have have been had like many others by a developer looking to cash in and avoid having to pay real estate taxes on a vacant parcel they have failed to develop. Digital over the air broadcasts ? The quality of the picture is as good as cable and light years beyond what we watched back in the old days. But go ahead.

Deadly serious. Since when does the State of Illinois care about spending money they don't have at the expense of 'taxpayers'? Drop in the ocean. Might as well get a new stadium this time.

The Dodgers hired Andrew Friedman because he had the analytical know-how from his time with Tampa Bay. The Dodgers are essentially what would happen if Tampa Bay had a budget.

Ricky Renteria did a shitty job of teaching guys how to be professional. This was literally one of the things I was begging for out of the managerial hire in 2020, better professionalism, because I thought that was important. Then…we somehow found a guy who could make that worse.

Tons. Lineup constructions, pitching decisions, pitch selection, . . . There’s a little more to modern baseball than “throw hard and swing hard.”

Renteria’s tactics suck. However, you can pretty easily change tactics with buy-in. Besides, the 2025 and 2026 teams are going to suck. They’re going to suck really bad. Will tactics actually matter? What the team needs is a clubhouse presence who will show guys how to be professional - not just between the foul lines, but how to prepare and get along with each other… as grown ups. The manager for 2025 and 2026 should be chosen based on how they will prepare the team for 2027 and beyond. To me, tactics don’t matter for these next two years, because the wins and losses are a foregone conclusion - they’re going to suck. So let’s just pick the guy who will set the team up to succeed on their own starting in 2027 (I hope it’s that early).

How much do the NYY and Dodgers use analytics? Seems to me both teams rely on the lift and pull theory of modern baseball as well as the five-inning starter and parade of relievers method. Pretty easy to do that without analytical genuises on staff.

I do. The last thing we need is Tony LaRussa back. The second to last thing we need is someone angrily out of touch with modern baseball. That is clearly Renteria. While he isn’t the worst candidate I can name (Tony LaRussa is), his obsession with analytics being wrong and the game needing to be played the way it was 20 years ago would be a major hindrance for this teams recovery. Renteria’s way of thinking about the game reminds me a ton of Grifol’s.