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I am just going to say it. The White Sox will never win a World Series title with Tony LaRussa as their manager.

This cannot be a serious comment. Tony LaRussa is literally on record saying data is great and all, but at the end of the day he trust "observational" analytics... which is a stupid fancy way of saying he trusts the eye test and his gut. Last year, with Ricky in charge and shifting on 30% of plays, the White Sox ranked SECOND in baseball in DRS. This year, with LaRussa in charge and shifting 20% of AB's, The White Sox ranked third from LAST in baseball in DRS. Fielding analytics are volatile, but they're not that volatile. This team took a 20 year step back by hiring LaRussa to run the team. Calling Tony La Russa one of the pioneers of analytics in baseball is one of the most delusional things I've ever read.

In 2019 the Sox ranked 15th in shifts, doing it 22.3% of PA’s In 2020 the Sox ranked 22nd in shifts, but they actually increased the amount of shifts they employed, doing it 29.3% of PA’s In 2021, the Sox ranked 27th, and the number dropped to 20.3% So I’m not so sure it wasn’t a LaRussa decision……and I don’t think you should be either.

I’m glad he’s coming back ???

I mean, have you ever listened to the guy speak?? Have you seen the videos of his DUI arrest? He's a drunken old man, who likely suffers from alcohol induced dementia. Sorry if the truth bothers you. People making up La Russa drinking jokes is on nobody but TLR. Do you realize how poor your judgement has to be, to drive so drunk, that you FALL ASLEEP at the wheel? He's lucky he didn't kill someone. The fact that it wasn't the first time makes it even worse. That poor judgement is also reflected in his managing. He fucking sucks.

He can't do a better job Greg. He can barely get himself to the park sober. Reinsdorf doesn't care because all the suckers bought 2022 season packages so they could go to the first home playoff game in 13 years. I'll watch on TV and root for the players to succeed, but that motherfucker of an owner isn't getting a dime of my money in tickets or parking until Tony is gone.

Cardinals fire Shildt, even after the absurd finish they had to the season. Meanwhile, in Chicago, we continue to settle for mediocrity. Which is why the Cardinals are a great organization, and the White Sox are a joke.

Some days when I'm low and I think all is lost for the future of my beloved Palehose, I close my eyes and repeat...this guy won a World Series...this guy won a World Series....

A lot of fans would have started Vaughn instead of Leury in Game 3, and the Sox would have been swept. Astros have been dominant under different managers. 10 - 1 loss is not the Manager's fault. I do not want Hahn OR LaRussa to return, but scapegoating on them does not seem to be impressing the people that matter. Cubs won once in 100+ years. What about their organization and Manager? Where are they at now? When is the last WS that the Rays won? Look, the Sox lost to a better team, primarily because of their pitching staff. Sox got taught. It is what it is. OK, let's hear a few more LaRussa drinking jokes if that makes you feel better.

I love the posters who say to hell with analytics.... What a fucking meatball take.

Which his ego is too big for. Instead we are going to waste our window we waited years for.

Hopefully we still have talent left here in 2024 that can win.

The Sox are who they always have been; sure they "rebuilt" but that was a concession Jerry could live with because it saved them some money. They'll always be the "serious talking" half-assed walking organization when it comes to operating like a contender. They have always talked the talk, but they don't walk the walk. The organization is riddled with nepotism, the "advancements" and tech were just getting 5 years behind other teams instead of being 10, and the payroll is going to be the same spend high at positions that high doesn't cost much so you can claim you were playing with the big boys. The Sox won't pony up big cash to supplement the core like they claimed, instead they'll claim that cash was used to keep the core... whatever that means. Fact is, the Sox don't know how to act like big boys, and their owner is stuck in a game that existed three decades ago. As long as LaRussa is in charge, we'll continue to see shit like this: 28 Chicago White Sox -12 -21 -6 -14 3 2 0 7 -11 3 14 -5 -40 29 New York Yankees -10 -5 -7 -12 -5 -15 -5 -5 6 -1 16 2 -41 30 Philadelphia Phillies 10 -8 -9 4 -11 -18 -9 0 -9 -9 9 -4 -54 White Sox -40 defensive runs. 20% shifts compared to league average of 30% and compared to 46% from Astros and 50% from Dodgers. As long as the Sox have a dinosaur in the dugout, they'll continue playing a game that hasn't existed since the Mesozoic era.

Either he starts getting with the times or Sox will be in the same spot if not worse next year.

Not start Lynn in game 1 in a god awful matchup. Pretty much every bullpen decision he made the whole series. Pinch hitting Cesar for Engel to start na inning in game 2, and putting Leury in RF where he went on to cost multiple runs with missing a play Engel makes in his sleep. At that point, the series was over. Just plain got our asses kicked in game 4, but bringing Kopech in in that spot in game 4 was another curious one. Not arguing for his guys when there was an awful strike zone, but arguing over a completely meaningless HBP. Tony was fucking awful for the vast majority of the season. Sox xW-L was 97-76. Enough for HFA. At a minimum, Tony cost them that. However, when watching the season unfold with missed reviews, bad pen management, terrible lineups, over resting, etc., he cost them far more.

Anybody thinking Lance Lynn is going to start taking physical fitness seriously in his age 35 season after signing the final contract of his career is fucking nuts.

$18.25 million for a 3.7 WAR in 93 games is pretty damn nice. If that is aging, I will take it.

Awful call to end the game. You don't call that from first unless you know for a fucking fact that he went. Which he didn't. Umps are trash.

Who is acting like they've never done something stupid? I don't manage a Major League Baseball team, so the stupid things I may or may not have done are immaterial to this discussion. Whether you like it or not, with increased responsibility, comes increased accountability. When you're in a leadership position, standards are, and should be, much higher. The fact that TLR has been arrested twice for DUI is pretty telling(here's where analytics comes in). This speaks to a pattern of poor judgement. It points to a pattern of stubbornness, and not learning from your mistakes(especially when you state IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN). These are not attributes I want in the guy managing my favorite baseball team.

Yeah yeah in 19,000 posts I expressed myself poorly one time, everyone quote it.

Guys, I was drunk driving but I'm an alcoholic so it's cool.

He also fell asleep at the wheel in our dugout.

What the fuck are you even talking about? You posted the facts and the BAC level yourself. He was over the legal limit. Period(twice). He fell asleep at the wheel the first time. He hit a curb the second time. Those are the facts. You're the one arguing that "it wasn't that bad" based on his BAC. Obviously the police thought it was, or they wouldn't have arrested the fucking guy. I'm well aware of alcoholism and have first hand experience with it. Maybe if he suffers from alcoholism, he should be in a fucking rehab program, getting help, and not managing a professional baseball team??

For someone who is calling people meatheads for not believing in analytics, you sure dont care about facts: Hate to break it to you but that is well below the "enhanced penalty level" in Arizona. Yeah its a per se dui, but for most of the "dinosaurs" life, that level was legal. Prior to 2000 the majority of states did not consider below .10 as a DUI. But lets talk about meathead analytics.

Preach

Because like most things the White Sox do from an organizational standpoint, they do it poorly. Because their owner is a stupid fuck. Dodgers, Astros, Braves are #1, #3, and #4 in shift rates in the MLB. This is not a coincidence. You dinosaurs really do blow my mind. Stick to your guns regardless of how wrong you are, or how detrimental your position is towards success.

That's fine with me. Vaughn and Sheets look good. The improvement needs to be at catcher (trade Grandal), 2B (can we get Madrigal back?) and tons of new pitchers needed.

This team won’t win under La Russa unless he becomes just a figurehead in the dugout while smarter, younger people run the team in the background.

This is nothing to lose sleep over as it was inevitable he was coming back. Just need Hahn to amass enough talent to overcome La Russa’s poor decision-making. Hopefully he does better this offseason than at the trade deadline.

Yes I'm sure the White Sox fired everybody or gave alot of those guys different roles one year later...

Gotta love how so many people here know with absolute certainty the inner workings of the White Sox organization.

Yes, Tony has shown a real willingness to listen to others thoughts and ideas throughout his career.

Astros played a helluva series, no doubt, but a lot of their success was due to our own shortcomings, imo. Sox played scared. Pitched scared. Coached scared. Hit scared. Ran scared. They completely folded under the pressure of the situation and never once seemed to strut around with an edge over Houston. Houston had a very workmanlike approach to the series, likely due to their vast postseason experience. They knew to attack the zone. They knew to take patient ABs, They shifted the defense at the right times. They ran at the right times. They didn't turn over on outside pitches consistently. They never came across as frazzled when something didn't go their way. It was a yeoman's effort that the Sox need to learn to duplicate in the future. IMO, that needs to start early next season, every time we play a good team. They need to treat every one of those series like it's a playoff series.

Then why were the numbers so much better under Ricky Renteria who was just a year removed?

I doubt any of this was determined by LaRussa. That's the advanced scouting and analytics department. Before you say he doesn't listen to any of that, he was one of the pioneers of it in St. Louis.

Yes, and those 3 came in one season. Every other post-season, the Sox lost every series. You ask a very good question. What are the Sox willing to do to improve and become a real contender in 2022? Because this team got exposed big time. I know the Astros are a superior club, but the Sox performance was absolutely awful. A great deal needs to be done if the Sox are going to be a real player.

I bet if you asked at the same point last year, Rick Renteria would have been in the same boat.

Wow. Wonderful news. Tony was the only one who had any fight left in him Game 4. He earned this.

Thats like 400 million dollars right there

Greg has Tim moving to catcher so that league must be fun as hell

Vaughn did not prove that he can hit RH pitchers. He is too slow to be an everyday outfielder. That is why he wasn't used much in the playoffs. He got a hit against Raley who is a garbage pitcher for the Astros. Sheets is probably a better hitter and a candidate to become the Sox DH.

Maybe, but if they stretched him out and he got hurt, then you would say they fucked him up and overworked him. They had a plan for him that was reasonable. It will always be debatable whether it was the best plan (which is what we are doing) but who really knows what the best plan is. Its not an exact science, we just have our opinion. I think the biggest problem with Kopech was scrapping the change-up as a reliever. Hitters just sat FB against him an took the slider. Sliders are much easier to identify from fast balls than change-ups.

Rodon wasn't ready. They've gone into this in detail at this point. Dylan Cease is worse vs the Astros than even Lance Lynn is. Giolito game 2 game the best opportunity to pull out a win in Houston. With how he pitched, it wasn't good enough and certainly wasn't going to be good enough in game 1 either. We lost because literally all the starters were terrible. It didn't matter when they were used or not.

Your numbers for him early in the season were 110 to 100 innings, with 120 probably being too much and 80-90 being so low that you couldn’t fathom him getting fewer than that if they wanted him being a starter.

I just don't agree here. There were 2 plans of action that made sense in my mind: 1) Start him in the minors as opener. Very limited innings early on. Slowly work up to 3-4 inning starts by late May (call it 15-20 milb innings). Call him up in early June when you get the year of control back. At that point, the season is 1/3 over. Averaging 5 inning starts (and certainly giving extra rest where need) over the course of 15-18 starts puts him right around 100 innings by end of the season. Sure, he may be mostly fried by the postseason, but he was anyway and we got basically no benefit out of him anyway with the benefit of hindsight. Maybe his arm is stronger had they gone this route and he's not fried come October. But at least we'd at least have 5 years of control, 2 pre-arb years, and a stretched out front of the rotation stud heading into 2022. Best case scenario IMO. 2) Since they Sox decided that wasn't the best route for whatever reason, the other route was to use him in the MLB pen the first half the year and stretch him out in the 2nd half such that he was available come October. I think the innings shake out about the same as above (if he stays healthy), or maybe just slightly less. But the Sox ditched this plan for whatever reason - likely because TLR found him too valuable in the pen and was only focused on the present. We know how the 2nd half of the season shook out. Short of getting seriously hurt, this was a very bad scenario. We now have a guy who had primarily been used as a 1 inning reliever, has not started regularly since 2018, is not stretched out, another year of pre-arb control gone, and a ton of question marks heading in 2022. Very bad.

LaRussa ordered the Ripken/Murray beanings because Kittle was drilled in the knee so bad he had to be removed from the game and couldn't play the rest of the series.

It tells me 3 things. 1. The Astros are still the kings of the AL 2. They’ve made 5 straight ALCS. The playoffs aren’t as “random” as some are making them out to be 3. I don’t feel great about losing to anyone. I want the Sox to reach that Houston level. This series showed me they aren’t there yet. The Sox aren’t on the Houston “tier” in terms of quality.

ptac, I think there is plenty of reason to be "optimistic" about next season. The White Sox have a very good core. That didn't change because of the playoff failure. But thus far, during this "window," the Sox are 2-5 in the playoffs and quite frankly didn't look very competitive against the class of the AL right now in the Astros. A team like the Rays seemed to run into some bad luck and bounces against the Red Sox......the White Sox got steamrolled. The core is there. But it doesn't seem like that's going to take them to the World Series. They need to improve in other areas. They can't just blame injuries and bad luck in 2021, and come back with the exact same core. There is no reason to expect different results in 2022 with the same group.

Imagine paying big money, a first rounder Madrigal and a good reliever Heuer for a rental that pitched one inning in the playoffs, and sucked most of his time here, and precluded us from getting the RF that we needed. This is a fireable offense. But nobody will be held accountable, like the Trubisky deal with the Bears.