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Looking back at that scenario it shows how antiquated and inept this organization is. Both are great players but Harper brings exactly what they needed. EXACTLY! They felt they could get Machado for a lower price by surrounding him with family, friends and other Latin players. In reality they didn't really need him if they felt Moncada was worth the extension. Jerry is holding the pearls close to his chest and using none of the value of the franchise to make it better. He lives on his budget and the fans fans dearly. He is not selling and losing 75% of the value of his asset but he is also not using his asset to take on debt and make the organization a winner. There is no reward for him he already has won. He doesn't give two craps though. The Bulls again led the NBA in attendance and they have been dogshit since he ran his greatest asset out of town 25 years ago.

As bad as things went last year, they still got 132 starts from the starting five. If that didn’t happen, could have easily lost 90+. The idea that everything that could go wrong did go wrong is false

I cannot imagine there are many Sox fans that would sit here in April 2023 and say that the Sox made the right decision in coming out of that offseason withOUT one of Harper/Machado. It was a massive failure, and in hindsight, the deals were pretty fair compared to what is getting signed now a days. It was a huge miss, I think everyone would agree on that. Doesn't mean that signing Grandal wasn't the best signing for the club that offseason (it was), or that signing Benintendi wasn't the 2nd best option for the Sox team needs after Nimmo who got a disgusting overpay. The Sox need to sign more guys in the Grandal / Benintendi range, not less. Of course sprinkling in a true superstar would help, but until JR moves on and new ownership is in place, that's not gonna happen.

The reason you’re so tired of it is because it’s a multi-year, organizational philosophy issue that many of us have been complaining about for all of those years. Pointing out that the Sox couldn’t sign a star backup shortstop this season is a strawman — literally no one is making that argument. But pretending that consistently competitive franchises haven’t been prioritizing the development and retention of multi-positional, situationally specialized 2-WAR players all over the diamond for almost a decade is being purposefully blind to the reality of the meta-game. Now that Al Avila is out in Detroit, there’s one team left in baseball that still builds its roster around the idea of nine position players and five starting pitchers.

No FA signing is fixing this mess. Not that they would even be in the running for true impact talent in the first place.

I have been on Soxtalk on and off since 2008 and *checks own profile* almost 20k posts, and this is an annual topic of discussion every single year. Granted, the team does in fact end up being mediocre or is trash more often than it's not, but still. Just part of being a Sox fan, I guess

Let's see what some home cooking does, we've played 10 out of 13 games on the road to start the season. If they stink up the joint these next 6 games then your prognostication might be correct.

April 13, 1965 - The Sox turned the tide so to speak from 1964, beating the Orioles in Baltimore opening day, by the score of 5-3. They lost to the same club to open the 1964 season at Comiskey Park by the exact same margin. Tommy John, making his White Sox debut, picked up the save for Gary Peters. He struck out “Boog” Powell with two on in the ninth inning to close it out. The 1965 White Sox would win 95 games under Al Lopez in his last full season as Sox skipper. They finished in second place, seven games out. April 13, 2009 - The White Sox beat the Tigers, 10-6, in a unique game in baseball history. Jermaine Dye and Paul Konerko hit back-to-back home runs in the second inning — both times reaching the 300-homer career mark! According to Baseball-Reference, no teammates have EVER reached 300, 400, or 500 home run milestones in the same game, much less the same inning or with back-to-back blasts.

I don’t want to jump the gun on him but if he keeps up this pace he’ll end the season with 44 2B, 44 3B, and 88 HR. Exciting prospect.

McDougal hitting 97 98 on the fastball according to the broadcast. 3 walks in the first though. Can't find the zone.

When they signed Machado's dog I thought they went a little too far frankly.

I remember at the time talking to my brother and we both thought that the real play was Harper, but they never really tried to pursue him as far as I can tell. They went all in on Machado, unfortunately their version of all in was signing his brother in law and a friend of his, instead of offering Machado the $$$. This team is short sighted as far as free agents. And the one time they try to pony up with Wheeler, they lose out because his wife wants to live on the East Coast. Very Frustrating.

Well sure but hindsight is 2020 isn't it. Who knew that signing a left handed power hitting superstar RF would have been a good idea, especially one who actually seemed to want to play here?? Plus he was already 26 years old.

That's the best area to come out in

And they're far too talented and payroll heavy to bottom out entirely and get another Top 5-7 draft pick...ofc, we only have Rodon (no QO)/Madrigal (Cubbie)/Vaughn to show for those three years of suffering. It's really crazy if you look at all the castoffs on the Rays' roster and only Franco and Arozarena being exceptionally talented offensive players. But that pitching/draft/development pipeline...my god. Waves and waves and waves of pitching. That's after Brent Honeywell, Brendan McKay and Matthew Liberatore all struggled as high draft picks. And Glasnow was out for almost all of last season. But they made the smart move with Eflin (Phillies) and then Springs has been simply amazing looking at where he came from. McClanahan's a total stud. Rasmussen, Fairbanks and that deep bullpen of arms. https://www.thebaseballcube.com/content/player/169358/tranx/ Jeffrey Springs' career transaction list....circuitous https://www.thebaseballcube.com/content/player/188180/tranx/ Drew Rasmussen was signed for only $135,000 in the 6th round by the Brewers coming off TJ surgery at Oregon State Just two prime examples.

90 losses, 88 losses, 87 losses. It's all the same crap...another losing season, another year urinated away in a supposed "window of contention." If you can't at the very least win more games than you lose the number of losses really is irrelevant (save for draft position)

Maybe this isn't the correct thread to post this, I just got to finally say it loud and clear. I am sooo done with Bummer!

Zavala > Grandal.

There's a very good chance that Giolito, Anderson and Hendricks are gone by the deadline with the team already 10 under .500. Remove 4-6 WAR and you can see 72-90 pretty easily. 82 was the projection by most systems. We've already gone 5-8. What sounds more likely, we play 21 over from this point out to go 90-72, or we are 15 under rest of the way for 72-90? I sure know which one I'd bet on given even odds.

They cant stay healthy. This team looks dead to rights and that's just with batters being hurt. What do you think is going to happen if some of these starters miss time? Its going to be UGLY.

New season same old story. The same players getting 'little' injuries that then turn into bigger injuries. It will only be a matter of time before Grandal or Robert pick up an injury. There is no point having 'talent' if it struggles to get on the field, and constantly missing games with minor injuries then affects form and the replacements we have are not up to it due to the poor squad building of Hahn and co.

Feel for Scholtens...going back down with a bad taste in his mouth after the way that game ended. Blame our 3B. Hopefully he uses it as positive motivation. Then again, he might never see the big leagues again.

Simas looking good. 6K through 3 scoreless. Side note: If all the games are going to be at the same time, I'm gonna need some kind of multistream option like the MLB.TV side has.

Maybe a better question would be what free agent would WANT to sign with this organization unless they overpay given the poor track record.

What’s the deal on Crochet? In early spring training it was he’d be back by May. Then when the actual season started it was mid-May. Now according to that Merkin article it late May or early June. It’s s%*# like this that drives me crazy. Why don’t our guys get better. Look at Moncada, when we 1st heard, it was a game of the Minnesota series, then the entire series. Isn’t the latest now that Moncada will miss the Baltimore series. Does it ever happen the other way: where a player comes back earlier than expected from an injury, ever?

They let our best hitter and clubhouse leader and possibly (?) the cog that drives the Cuban Pipeline to Chicago go to a team that has absolutely crushed us in recent years yes he's older, he's slower, and based on fWAR (especially last year) not worth 20/yr but imo he's gonna bounce back and have a great year in Houston, his early numbers aren't concerning at all to me. I'd rather have Abreu at DH than a guy who plays 100 games a year.

And ironically the #1 reason Machado provided for signing with SD was the presence of former Sox prospect Tatis Jr. With Moncada at third and Anderson at SS, Harper was always the best choice, especially from a marketing standpoint since Manny was pretty much a villain back then before earning a lot of respect back with his level of play and especially maturity/leadership.

Those numbers included 2008/10/12 too...strip away those three seasons and you are much closer to Bottom 5.

Well since the start of the 2007 season the Sox have had only five winning seasons out of 16 years so those numbers make sense.

I think they should still get credit for major league production. He could have easily flamed out. But yeah I think if I were an Owner that gave a s%*#, I'd look at the Braves and say "you have had similar payroll, you have similar rules/advantages (draft picks, lottery pools), why haven't you had similar results?". Hell they lost their lat am operation for years and still were able to keep a top 15 farm until this year when they emptied out for Sean Murphy. There are real things that make it harder to make the sox competitive. But...it is what it is. Get over it. Similar orgs are kicking your ass. If Hahn had any shame he'd retire. Also he should apologize to me and give me his degrees.

" The numbers that stabilize quickly" is doing an unacceptable amount of work in this tweet. Rather than asserting that, we can readily look at his historic monthly numbers. All of these will be month by month, combining his performance against all pitches - he's had basically 1/2 of a month this year, and that shows up as a point at the end. Showing monthly performance is important because it lets us see the scatter in his historic performance. This is a good one to start with, because we see that his barrel rate is quite low right now, although not the true lowest of his career. However, we also see that he commonly bounces between 5 and 15%, with a high of 20%, so a single 2 week period at 2.5% is low, but the range is so large that the difference between 2.5% and 5% isn't certainly predictive. Here is the next one, Exit Velocity. Obviously this is actually down, again it's the second lowest of his career. But, monthly totals varied last year by almost 6 mph, and his best highest exit velocity was associated with his slow start. This is concerning but there's a lot of variation again. Is Jose Abreu suddenly failing to swing at pitches in the zone? It's slightly low, but it's not unreasonably low compared to his career. Is he chasing more than normal? His chase rate is higher than his career average, but it's no higher than in any random month throughout his career. Thus, is the phrase "He's swinging at a lot more junk" accurate and well supported, on the grounds that his numbers these first 2 weeks are higher than his career mark? It may be true that it has ticked up relative to his career mark, but it's totally within the realm of monthly performance in recent years. Here is something that is abnormal. When he is swinging outside the zone, he is making less contact. This is about the only one where I would say his performance is extreme relative to any other month of his career. But, again, the variation helps here - remember this is 2 weeks of performance, so you'd expect that the variance over 2 weeks would be larger than the monthly variance. Abreu is making less contact than last year on average, but he's making more contact than May of 2021, for example. Here's another case where comparing his 1 month performance to the average over last year is missing the variation he showed last year. There might be something to him making a little less contact, and perhaps some of the other things such as his low exit velocity stay put and wind up mattering to him. But given the monthly variance, the claim made in that tweet is stretching the data beyond the breaking point, it isn't fair to draw that conclusion from the measurements we have so far.

I sorta feel like it’s unfair to not give credit for cease, kopech who were both raw in A. Which I mainly mention because I feel like the problem is just not getting enough talent into the org. I think paddy is a good evaluator but literally doesn’t bring in big enough classes. I think Shirley is interesting but made a big mistake with his 2020 / Draft strategies that went too targeted with bonuses at a time when our minors essentially were barren. You had scouting director and intl director both go after small classes with higher certainty quality guys at the same time. Ok if one does it, but both at same time made this an inch by inch rebuild. You’d assume Hahn would be like creating an overarching vision for these guys to understand how to execute, but it seems like they are managed as “you are talented and safe; just go find some guys you like!!!” This org desperately needs to be treated as a bottom market for it to be competitive, because Hahn is way too lazy to exploit all talent avenues to their fullest.

After this past offseason, the Sox are due to hand out a $30M+ contract to an aging RP, so my money's on Hader.

No. Mods buried this thread long ago.

Oh, I think they were serious. Machado and his family posted a custom made White Sox glove he had made and his kid dressed in white Sox gear on socials. The Padres swooped in last minute and tacked on $50M, and the Sox didn't budge (or didn't believe them). I truly believe the Sox (and Machado) thought it was a done deal until the very final stages. Sox thought it was a bluff, and they were wrong.

You need look no further than the Dodgers.

I think I harped on this last year, but with hybrid work being a thing, I really wish MiLB spread affiliate games throughout the day.

You mean like the Tampa Bay Rays do with one the smallest yearly payrolls and one of the highest yearly ranked farm systems? Of course we all know, it will be a freezing day in hell before this ever happens here until the POS owner dies or sells the team or just maybe, fires the loser GM Rick Hahn and goes and steals a smart executive from a winning baseball organization and culture...perhaps like the Rays.

lolllll A++++++

Great example from a great organization. As it's been said numerous times here, the Tampa Bay Rays always pull off great trades, or score big through their draft every year. They have been doing this since 2008. They are the poster child and absolute blueprint (bar none), for how to build a successful and consistent winning major league organization, with one of the smallest payrolls every year for the last 16 years. They are off to their best start ever at 12-0 and one win short of the all-time best start since 1900. Of course once again, they are doing it with a 28th ranked payroll. However they still kill it in the draft and through proper development of their pitchers and position players in the minors to maintain the #6 ranked farm system. Many years ago, the Dodgers wanted this TB knowledge so they recruited away Andrew Friedman from TB back in 2015, but the Rays still haven't missed a beat and the Rays Braintrust still exists there. Since 2008, best records for MLB teams: 1. Dodgers - 1365-946 2. Yankees - 1345-995 3. Cardinals - 1294-1044 4. Rays - 1279 - 1062 21. White Sox - 1125-1216 Sadly, with all that success over the years, the Rays attendance has always been near the bottom the league. Currently they are averaging 16,769 in 7 home games in 2023 which is 27th. I have a brother who has lived there for 20 years and I am fully aware of why logistically the Rays have poor attendance numbers. However it's still shameful and sad the Tampa fans don't appreciate what they've had for so many years. Yet we as the die-hard Sox fans would absolutely die to have the Rays be our home team. I am sick and tired of this yearly mediocrity from the POS owner and the tons of false promises from his loser GM Rick Hahn and his pathetic front office. Please Jerry sell the god damn team once and for all or fire your horrific GM Rick Hahn and his FO morons and go steal some smart executive away from the Rays.

I would trade Eloy the minute he puts together a solid healthy stretch for cost controlled SPs with upside, probably not going to get much in return but at least stock up on some healthy arms. Just DH Sheets against RHP and work in right handers at DH vs LHP.

Excellent point. Sox pitching experienced very few injuries last year which is a rarity and not likely to repeat. It's been repeated ad nauseum at this point, but the lack of depth in the minors is absolutely mind boggling. This team pissed away 3.5 seasons to tank for high draft picks and the farm is still pretty much a wasteland.

https://www.teamrankings.com/mlb/stat/stolen-bases-per-game CLE and Baltimore lead the majors in. stolen bases...Grandal and Zava will be constantly put to the test. Point 2, they need to start winning consistently at home. Period. Even if the majority of fans are still indifferent, apathetic, disengaged.

There is no window of contention if you are basically out of it two weeks into the season after losing a couple of guys who should have been expected to get injured.

Hanser is the answer. If you rearrange the letters in Hanser, you almost come up with Sure Hands.

I don't think he's done. I don't think he is worth 3/$60M, nor would that have been anything close to a wise use of resources for a team with plenty of 1B/DH types.

It's beome all too common. I don't know if he knows much English, but he needs to go off on an umpire one of these days. Maybe that will get him some calls.

I don't think Grandal was an overpay. The first 2 years he lived up to the contract, obviously last year he did not. 2023 is still tbd.