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That inning by MK gave my goosebumps What could have been. Good luck to Michael Kopech and his journey, It did not work out here......it doesn't for most

I commend that you'll wait to see how all parties involved turn out but from the very start that trade looked lopsided. Fedde had proven the changes he made in Korea were legit .He has a solid big strong body, and ptched extremely well for the Sox and had the extra year of control. Vargas was on a downward spiral with the Dodgers .He could put up great AAA numbers but he had no position to play and had yet to figure out MLB pitching. Fedde may very well be a 5 WAR starting pitcher for the Cards next year. All he has to do is have a 2025 as good ashis 2024. At the time of the trade he was more valuale to the Cards than Tommy Edman was who hadn't played all year. No one's pretending Kopech is a Cy Young finalist but as far as I know the Dodgers did nothing to fix him unless someone can find something specific that I couldn't. The fact is in his last 5 appearances with the Sox he pitched 5.2 innings 0 R, 1 hit 1BB and 8K after he finally started to trust his coaches. He just continued doing with the Dodgers what he had with the Sox . 24 G, 24 IP, 9 H ,3 ER, 29 K, 10 BB 1.13 ERA , 4-0 Record, 6 Saves , .792 WHIP and thats with a walk rate of 3.8 per 9 IP which is still a bit too high. But over his last 29.2 innings he may have been the most valuable RP in baseball. It's not like he had lost his stuff but he had lost his way. He was stuck between the pitcher he wanted to be and the pitcher he could be and it took him a while to trust a lesser vision of himself in his mind and accept his new role as a RP and how best to approach that role. The Dodgers were 19 -5 in games that Kopech pitched. Someone of the 3 guys the Sox got has to become a productive MLB player. It would be nice if it was Vargas but he couldn't have been any worse than he was with the Sox with a -1.0 bWAR in 42 games. Kopech gave the Dodgers 1.0 bWAR in his 24 games and and a dominant late innings presence. The trade from the very beginning felt 1decent prospect short or a better headliner short. We got something you might be able to squint at and eek out a MLB player somewhere down the road for productive MLB talent.

The moving to the suburbs trend died 30 years ago. It's just not viable for baseball in this day and age. JR is angling for a better location so he can con someone else into building a playground around a shiny new ballpark. That won't happen with a suburban location. He'd have a new ballpark and a whole new set of attendance issues/excuses, while suffering similar struggles as he has in Armour Square. After 30 years of disinvestment around 35th & Shields, no one else is paying to develop that land either, so nothing is going to change for the foreseeable future.

this is one of those things about the suburbs. There's extreme winners and losers. For anyone on north and west or farther south sides, 35th and shields is a little painful but not bad. Move them to Tinley /Orland Park and it's painful east and south, and there's no "take a train after work and uber home" left. For football, I never minded the idea of them going to arlington heights. But for baseball, inconvenience is death for me attending a weeknight game.

It makes a lot of difference.

Likely not a ton in the win column, but the right hire can make a tremendous difference on individuals breaking into the league.

Dodgers paid a steep price for Kopech and Edman, but sometimes you have to give up a talent of Miguel Vargas' level.

Sure, let's move the team to a place where driving is the only option, and watch JR charge through the nose for parking. You can kiss any casual fan interest/attendance goodbye in Orland/Tinley as well. The Tinley Park White Sox would be a bigger ghost town than Euro Disney...

Already excited for the people who say the team is terrible and the manager doesn’t matter to get mad about whoever they hire.

Also known as - replacing 2 starting pitchers.

Did you just watch the train going off the tracks with Grifol? Are you watching what Hinch is doing? It matters.

I would add Lou Brown to the manager search list.

the manager for the next 2-3 years will make no difference whatsoever. getz has to know this

Hard to win a 5 game series when the last time you scored is the second inning of game 3

Still got to beat the bad teams. If Arizona doesn’t lose to the Sox they are in the playoffs.

That's the sentiment I have read a few times, and agree with. I don't know if Getz was asking for the moon and the stars and ran out of time, or whatnot. I hope he gets better making trades.

He fired everyone but his cronies and literally nothing changed.

Someone had to get the axe, and Getz sure wasn't firing himself.

Pham went from a 710 ops with the White Sox down to 654 with the Cardinals and finally finished with a 2024 Soxish 587 in over 100 at bats in KC. 5/15 in postseason, but only a 646 ops, and his defensive metrics are always negative. So he got worse and worse during the course of the year, simply wore down, probably. The White Sox would still have finished with 100-105 losses even with those two KC starters inserted. 99% sure their combined outfield OPS was 29th or 30th in MLB in 2024. Probably right there with the White Sox, actually. The writing, though, might have been on the wall for the Royals offense after they limped their way into October. From Aug. 28 to the end of the season, the Royals went 11-18. And in that 29-game span, 18 of those games saw them score three runs or fewer. As a team, they ranked last in MLB in wRC+ (59), AVG (.200), OBP (.268) and SLG (.303) during that 29-game span to close the season, according to FanGraphs. In terms of the ALDS in particular, what wasn’t as expected was the silence of the two main bats in the Royals’ lineup: 1/16 Bobby Witt Jr. and Vinnie Pasquantino. After a year that put him in the AL MVP conversation with a .332 AVG, a .977 OPS, 32 HR and 109 RBI, followed by a Wild Card series that saw him drive home two of the Royals’ three runs, Witt was virtually nowhere to be found in the ALDS. justbaseball.com

"I like to look at it as the real White Sox showing up...,.,finished the season on a winning streak.....Staaaannndd UP!!!"

Glad you're alright, @The Mighty Mite. We're right outside Jacksonville and luckily haven't had much hurricane damage since we moved here from Old Town in 2022. Worst was our trampoline netting getting destroyed from 100 mph wind gusts during Helene. Milton was about 3 inches of rain and nothing else, though low-lying areas near the St. Johns river and the Atlantic coast had flooding. Second the flood zone note. Glad we paid attention to that when deciding on our home. Below sea level, within a couple miles of the Gulf or Atlantic, or near any larger bodies of water are a no-go.

But they were one of the best teams (maybe the best?) in baseball in the 2nd half. They made the playoffs because they beat up on other teams too, not just the Sox. KC had the same record against the Sox as Detroit did and they were right ahead of Detroit in the standings so it's not like it matters much.

How much of that Sox money was wasted in DFAs or in the interest of making Birmingham better.

Everyone is into the Rays model but the real challenge comes when paying your 5 war players. Baseball is the least predictable of sports and yet we treat it like it's not.

Vargas is also out of options. If he looks as bad as he looked last year, when does he go DFA? Spring? Halfway? Do they give him a full season? At this point he’s a sunk cost and in a tier with Fletcher, DeLoach, and Colas as a failed prospect who you may or may not want to give another shot to. He’s behind Sosa, who at least got hot at the end of the year.

You cannot beat Tatis. That might be the worst trade in the history of the franchise, and on the Mt Rushmore of MLB.

We didn't just trade for him, we fell completely in love with him and crafted a ridiculously lopsided trade to loop in another team to just take every possible asset the Sox had to offer. Vargas was clearly Getz's guy and he was an unmitigated disaster by every measure.

In 2024 the Chicago White Sox had the highest payroll in the AL Central.

We traded for a Luis Arraez who can't hit.

They aren't even in the playoffs without starting off 10-1 vs the White Sox.

The problem is I am not even sure there are more than 4 or 5 people on this roster who will have even a decent major league career. We are filled with filler.

Obviously no one is going to be able to turn bad players into good players, but a manager can definitely bring a culture shift to the locker room and dugout. That’s really the most important part, bringing in someone that is going to change the way this team has been doing things for a decade +.

Think he mights it doesn’t make that much of a difference. It’s still going to be a bad team. Yes, having Hinch over TLR would have made sense when they made that choice but getting a great manager now with the roster how it is honestly doesn’t matter. Maybe, 5-10 more wins? Still dogshit.

I'm fascinated by how the best run orgs do so well at hiring. The Royals, with new owner, get put in the same situation as our clown show, let Grifol go and hire Quatraro. He works with their young players and helps turn them around. The sox hire Tony LaRussa, a retired, old out of touch manager who was completely wrong for the team. The astros hire Dusty, a retired older manager who was the perfect steady hand for that team. The Mets hired Buck Showalter, a kick in the butt who had mellowed out and got them an exciting year after underperforming for a few. We will sit here and look for a profile we like. But for these roles like GM, like manager, the interviews and reputation and set-up they have matters a lot. Whomever they hire, we have to assume he sucks, because Jerry Reinsdorf believed he would be good. That's called updating our priors, I think.

Really? Because I think Grifol cost a minimum of 20 games this year. I'm not saying this team wasn't awful but he definitely help thrust them towards historically awful.

I think AJ Hinch has made a big difference on that Tigers team (ironically, he shouldve been the Sox mgr instead of TLR). Detroit has no business being 1 win away from the ALCS. He should get a lot of credit for that. The right manager can absolutely make a difference over time. And if they really want to start changing the makeup of this organization, they need to start now, and the new manager should be an indicator of what kind of team they are trying to build for the future.

I'm not sold on any manager, for any team, being worth 20 wins. I'm also not sold on our next manager having significant impact on player development. The rest of the organization will have their thumbprint all over whose on the roster and how much they play. We will get someone with little (Grady) or no MLB managing experience. They will be learning on the job and "growing" with the team. They will also be fired to appease the fans after two or three seasons. With little experience, and tiny pay, they are vulnerable and will do whatever Getz and Co. "suggest" to them. The coaching staff, of which they will have little or no say in the hiring will have a greater impact. For better (hopefully) or worse (likely) this will be Getz's fantasy team playing for real.

an overall lack of depth, with little immediate help from the minors on the horizon A lot of teams can run into this. I don't think teams are as willing to give up their best prospects over perceived best prospects. A GM like Getz is easily fleeced.

The manager could make a difference between a historically bad 121 loss season and just a bad 100 loss season. Equally the manager could help start to change the clubhouse atmosphere and help younger players develop. You just need to look at Grifol and how little he did to help the younger players develop. Yes, the manager will make little difference in terms of get to postseason or anything like that but the nexy manager needs to be the right person or this decline could be terminal if the culture of the club doesn't change.

Very challenging to beat the Semien/Bassitt/Ravelo/Phegley for Ynoa and ONE YEAR of Samardzija Hahn special. KW's worst was probably Todd Ritchie for Kip Wells/Josh Fogg/Sean Lowe...then the Sox would go on for 2-3 seasons without a viable fifth starter (2003 still really strings, as MINN added Kenny Rogers and ran down the Sox in August/Sept. Or Jon Adkins/Durham.

I gotta say, losing GPS signal on Lower Wacker is so fucking annoying

How many names can we float to cover for already giving the job to Grady?

Vargas’ fast swing rate is 8.3% vs. a league average of 22.5%. That is not good bat speed.

Um, duh? What else would this be?

His bat speed is well below average

I'm not writing off Vargas but he does have to make some serious changes to his swing/approach. The PULL THE BALL IN THE AIR swing/approach simply doesn't work. His hands are too close to his body and he has a steep entry w/an extreme uphill path. There's just no room for error with that stupid swing/approach. I hope they go back to basics with him because he does have bat speed and suddenness to go along with a great eye. I'd move his hands away from his body, shorten and flatten his swing and concentrate on barreling the baseball and hitting line drives. If he does that he has a chance to be a good hitter but if he continues with the PULL THE BALL IN THE AIR thing he's done.

I was just sitting around and got pissed off again. Seriously, how in the hell in a sellers market did Getz do a 3 team trade and give away Fedde and Kopech and get back a pile of crap? It must have been my subconscious saying, "bump the thread before it reaches page 2 again"......thank you subconscious.

Some questions have no right answers.

They had reason to release him. Under the Chris Getz developmental program, he was 0-6 with a 15.92 ERA

Must be nice.