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Yeah, I think @Harold's Leg Lift has hinted about talks that included Kimbrel and Lux. I would assume there would be more pieces involved though like you suggest.

I did spend some time going through the stats on his huge 2021 dropoff. McNeil has an excellent K-rate, but a generally low exit velocity. He doesn't hit the ball hard, but he makes contact. Compared to 2020 his walk rate did drop off somewhat, but his K-rate didn't spike and there was basically no real drop in his exit velocity compared to 2019, and his exit velocity was higher in 2021 than in 2020. What I do see is that there's a big change in the way he's hitting in 2021. There's a big dropoff in him pulling the ball and a big increase in him going the other way. There's a drop in hard contact and an increase in medium and soft contact. There was a career high in ground ball rate. His BABIP went from being .340 in his first 3 seasons to .280 in 2021 - was that bad luck, or was that the poor quality of his contact? It's a little hard to believe his BABIP stayed above .330 all 3 of his first 3 years and 1000 PAs by luck. Perhaps a little bit unlucky in 2021, but the dropoff in BABIP fits with the dropoff in his contact quality. He also went from a 15% HR/FB rate in 2019 to a 6.5% rate in 2021 - but its hard to see a high HR rate as sustainable with his generally fairly weak contact. One thing that does stand out, going along with the drop in pulling the ball, increase in groundball rate, and drop in HR rate, is that his launch angle has noticeably dropped. Now here's one final problem - since Statcast started recording, the White Sox have had as low of a launch angle as any team in the league, bottom 5 in the league 6 times and bottom 10 in the other season. So, you've got a guy struggling badly in 2021 when he's going the other way, hitting the ball on the ground, and not elevating like he did beforehand. For whatever reason, the White Sox are really bad at launch angle, so if a low launch angle and not pulling the ball are big parts of why he was terrible in 2021, do we think the White Sox can fix that? Or is this a guy who is a particularly bad fit for the White Sox since his success was associated with a higher launch angle and that's a weak spot for the White Sox?

High phrase given for such tasteful and creative useage.

Absolutely heartbreaking. Worked with Jeff for a year and he was awesome and down to earth and helpful. His poor kid lost both parents before the age of 10. Can’t even imagine.

The others were really, really, bad. Actually I forgot Smith was fired. I thought he resigned. Smith was the best they fired, or Dikta. But I'll take Nagy over Fox, Trestman, Jauron, Wannstedt, Gibron, Pardee, Armstrong and any others I'm missing.

Yuck.

Maybe goat cheese?

Wilson started 16 games as a rookie, completed 64.9% of his passes and had a 26/10 TD/INT. That's above average. I'm still waiting for a second example of a QB who didn't look good right away and became good since Drew Brees.

Rodgers and Mahomes sat so doesn’t count. Brady was definitely not above average (statistically) out of the gate. Brees wasn’t either. Peyton Manning had his struggles in year one. Josh Allen wasn’t very good. So I would say most weren’t above average out of the gate. They all flashed though.

Coaches don't win without great players. Some lose with them.

Great, have him design vacation homes for the family and hire someone with better luck.

Keep in mind they fired Lovie after going 10-6. It was playoffs and the Packers. They "made" the playoffs last year, but haven't won a playoff game since Pace has been here and Nagy as well. And have been dominanted by the Packers. They both need to go. George needs to hire a football guy and he and Ted need to get out of the way.

At 10 M per year, Escobar was more than affordable IMO. I assume therefore that they have a better player in mind. Yes...I know what is said about when you assume.

It doesn't. In my lifetime he is the third best head coach of the Bears. So I'm not expecting much from the next hire.

It's terrible by most franchise standards. With the Bears, it's not far from normal. But as bad as Nagy is this year, he has one of the highest winning percentages of Bear's head coaches in our lifetime.

They were .500 or better 3 out of the last 4 years. You are greatly exaggerating how bad this era is…especially relative to the Chicago Bears past 30 years.

If his point is - The bears will mess this up…than he is probably right. Nagy is better than a ton of turds they previously had and it shows the rot runs deeper than the coach. Real changes need to happen and the one bright side is with Pace some of those changes actually happened as they did modernize the front office, training facilities, nutritional programs etc. Pace has his faults…but he started real change as they significantly upgraded how much they spent on non player costs like having more scouts, etc. If he had someone who could mentor him more he would have done better.

If the Sox wanted Escobar we could have had him. They have something better in mind IMO.

Lovie was a good coach. Nagy is an okay coach. Multiple playoffs and 3 seasons .500 or better. Trestman was a brilliant offensive mind but horrific leader of men. He would have been stellar in a coordinator role paired with a head coach like Nagy or Lovie. Nagy is someone who will leave Halas hall with class and If anything Bears did him dirty this year in how they handled the mess. He is a real pro and good man. But it is absolutely a time for a change…but knowing bears…odds are they will hire someone worse. Most teams that are regularly in business of hiring new coaches do.

Right. I like him alot and would prefer not to trade him. McNeil is a guy I would probably trade him for. It hurts our pen though, for sure. Best case scenario - the Sox use Crochet like they did Kopech last year. Get him up to 80-100 innings and he takes some spot starts during the summer. He's in rotation in 2023, albeit maxed around 150 IP. Then you have him for 24-26 ideally a TOR starter. Its a lot to give up. Typing this out is making me talk myself out of it. But he's also an arm injury in the next 18 months away from never being a SP. You definitely trade those guys. Problem for me is if he has a dominant season in 22 doing what I mention above, you can get alot more than McNeil for him next winter. Idunno. I'd certainly try to get McNeil without Crochet (and definitely without Vaughn), but just don't see how that's possible unless Mets are desperate enough to shed $ that we could take a bad contract with him. For me, this offseason still predicates on Conforto. Sign Conforto, and I am largely unconcerned about 2B. Conforto + McNeil is a dream, but its also probably overkill in this division. Keep Crochet if you have Conforto, go grab Villar or some shit on the cheap and go to battle.

more of this, less of Coby please

I wouldn't have loved it at the time, but would have liked more than the Kimbrel trade. Both with hindsight, and without it. Ahhh - thanks for clarifying. So basically, Sox were not willing to go 2/$20M on EE? Not super encouraging.

All this being said, I’d probably prefer seeing the Dodgers would do something like Crochet for Lux. Maybe make it expand it to include Kimbrel and other pieces, but I’d rather go with the younger guy with more team control if I’m giving an arm like Crochet.

What I expect to see out of the offense is a top 5 offensive line. Once you have that, you have flexibility in basing your offensive scheme around the strengths of your skill players as opposed to basing it on how long you have until your quarterback is getting hit. If you continue to let the offensive line be shit, then it doesn't matter what scheme you run.

How about something like Keuchel, Collins and Crochet for McCann & McNeil. If the Sox have to add in an extra prospect of the lottery ticket variety, then ok. Bad money is going both ways (Keuchel and McCann). But ultimately - combine this deal with dumping Kimbrel off somewhere, and the Sox have money to sign Conforto, another reliever like Tepera and a #4-5 starter to replace Keuchel.

Yea that's the same thing

I absolutely adore fans who take positions like this, yet still spend time and energy on this franchise. If you truly believe this, yet still put anything into it at all, YOU are the biggest dupe of all. Woke, bitter, and loyal is one heck of a mountain to die on.

Huh?

Jeff McNeil is really good. I don’t want to trade Crochet, but have to give to get and Sox seem committed to him being a reliever so it’s probably a deal I make.

Pitching wins pennants and you need a lot of it through the season. Why would we trade from our strength And weaken it to fill a supposed hole in our lineup, which we may have other options?

Chick, you probably gave this a lot more thought than Heyman did before he made that tweet/comment. And, you are correct.

Then for me, Heyman is wrong. The Sox don’t seem like a fit. We don’t have enough young and cheap top talent to burn like that. The Dodgers, the Padres, they have enough to light on fire for a McNeil. Not the Sox. Lets recall that Hahn has been saying we want to maintain this for a very long time. You do that by maintaining a cheap and talented youth pipeline. Not selling it all off for a window. Not feeling it at all if folks are throwing Crochet etc on the bonfire.

Why are we treating 2020 this way?

Which would make the Kimbrel trade more pitiful. And some haven't learned their lesson yet, and want the Sox to trade Vaughn. The Sox need a few cheap productive players or a new owner if you don't want the "windows to quickly close.

It also means being in the bottom group requires you to be extraordinarily bad. the Bears are.

The NFL thread is an interesting place for this take, as the NFL is a league where all the time we see teams come out of seemingly no where to make the playoffs and even win championships. Philadelphia won a super bowl. They have since replaced their coach and QB. Were their executives a failure? Atlanta was basically 1 play from winning a Super Bowl, since then they've fired their coach and struggled. Are their execs failures? Denver lost a super bowl with an elite offense then won the next one with an elite defense, but they've fallen apart since then, did Elway get stupider? Can they be regular failures and still put together teams that good? I went back through the last 13 super bowls (26 teams) and found that it looks like 17 different teams have made an appearance in that time frame. Aside from New England/Brady being a cheat code/actually smarter and better than everyone else, it instead seems to me that there are a pool of about 2/3 of the teams in the NFL that are ok, that could genuinely compete in a normal year, sometimes those teams take a step back to rebuild or find a new QB, but then they're back a few years later and eventually have a big enough season to make a Super Bowl. Then, there's about 1/3 of the league that is regularly bad - Jacksonville, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Las Vegas, the Jets, the Washingtonians, I'm sure you could add a few others. Those teams make the playoffs like once every 5 or 6 years, and are constantly changing coaches, failing on high draft picks, etc. For those teams, it genuinely starts with ownership - culture issues like DC or Jacksonville, consistently bad hires like Cleveland and Detroit.

From 2005-2016, there were 3 Stanley Cup wins, 2 World Series wins, and one Super Bowl appearance. Not too bad.

San Diego State's athletics director hinted that they may not play in the Arizona Bowl if invited due to the Barstool partnership