Leaderboard

what's Abreu's ceiling? a sub 800 OPS guy as a headliner seems light as f***, I guarantee someone else beats that, a 25yo light hitting RF who strikes out 140 times a year, the f***

I feel like you just beat him down to the tune of the Animaniacs nations of the world song.

Yes, he was a player. Wait, did you mean baseball?

Dodger Stadium says "hello..."

Point of emphasis: MINORS

And now CHSN is on this morning but for some reason they are blacking out the replay of the Bulls game. Which makes little sense.

In buy-low type of deals, sure. In deals for our best players? No (unless they’re like the third piece at most).

I'm out where you are and the picture quality I get with an attic mounted antenna is indistinguishable from cable TV. It was fun mounting mine and aiming it toward the Hancock with my iphone app. This was a blast from the past having grown up during a time where almost everyone had outdoor ot attic mounted antennas for analog signals with flat 300 ohm cable, boosters, splitters etc. I have a three way splitter serving three TV locations throughout the house including one that is 50 feet from the antenna. This is the way TV should be. No subscription fee.

Lol and if it was 1972 and free agency hadn’t been invented yet and the players were decades away from having earned the leverage, through a series of labor strikes and collective bargaining, to create anything remotely like today’s limited service rights constraints and the resulting market-based competitive labor market, I would say we should keep all our good players, too! I wager we’d all like to have our cake and eat it too, if it’s an option. It’s not about Garret Crochet being good, it’s about the context in which he can only be good for two more seasons before the cost to retaining him becomes a substantial obstacle to acquiring more talent. And there’s no way to make that service matter in that two year period, so why not transfer that value to a period where it can actually make a difference? And your thing about trading for mediocre prospects is a strawman; obviously no one supports trading Crochet for bad prospects. It’s simply a reality of the game that you can’t know the future, but it shouldn’t stop from playing it altogether.

The White Sox are in a worse situation now than they were when they traded Sale. Trading Sale was the right thing to do. Yes he had 2 great years right after he was traded. Say Crochet has 2 great years the next 2 years. How does that make the White Sox contenders? Sale was great again this year, but after those first 2 years in Boston, he spent the next five seasons either ineffective or unavailable while being paid more than any White Sox has ever been paid. The Sox need to trade Crochet while his stock is high. Maybe he is great the next couple of years, but with his history, chances are he will eventually be paid a lot of money to rehab.

Caulfield, is that you?

I'm about 45 mins south of the stadium and grabbed an OTA antenna with a 65 mile range and the picture comes in great, think it cost me like $60. Probably went a bit overboard big figured i could just return it if it didn't work or the quality sucked.

Ah, yes, Chris Sale is still good, and so were some hall-of-famers. But what about James Shields? Anibal Sanchez? Tim Lincecum? Jordan Zimmermann? Barry Zito? Brandon Webb? Matt Cain? Josh Johnson? Ricky Romero? Ben Sheets? Oliver Perez? Jaret Wright? Rich Harden? Aaron Sele? Dontrelle Willis? Carlos Silva? Mike Hampton? Gil Meche? Jake Westbrook? Jeremy Bonderman? What about Erik Bedard? Ian Snell? John Maine? Brett Anderson? Jair Jurrjens? Julio Teheran? Brandon Beachy? Jorge De la Rosa? Jonathan Sanchez? Jeremy Guthrie? Matt Harvey? Justin Masterson? Whatever happened to Chad Billingsley? Mat Latos? Patrick Corbin? Andrew Cashner? Shelby Miller? Chris Tillman? Kris Medlen? Ian Kennedy? Edinson Volquez? Where did Neftali Feliz end up? Wily Peralta? Alek Menoah? Mike Clevinger? Zac Plesac? German Marquez? Noah Syndergaard? Jeremy Hellickson? Michael Pineda? Remember what a building block Chris Archer was? Reylo sucked, lol. Rodon was a free agent. So they've traded two dudes in the last 25 years you wish you had back? Would that have been enough? Or, I guess three to be fair: Fernando Tatis Jr. could make a difference for sure... except... WAIT! He was worthless PROSPECT! They traded him to GET the established star pitcher! One of them named above! You're right though, John Danks $11m/yr extension, the failure to sign Zach Wheeler, and two short-term sub-$20m contracts in the 2020's are pretty good evidence the Sox will pay top dollar for a pitcher. I'm sold! Let's see if they can ADD this offseason and turn this 121-loss ship around!

It's a win for plenty of people in the Sox organization. Let's not forget Sale was the 13th pick in the 1st round in 2020 and Crochet was 11th in 2020. Both were passed up by plenty of teams for various good reasons. The same reasons many pitchers with great arms get passed up and never make it. Let's not pretend they were so obviously great that the Sox lucked into them or didn't work with them to make them better. If it was so easy they both would have been drafted much higher. The only 2 players from the 2010 draft who are equally great are Harper, who was perhaps the most hyped player ever drafted and Manny Machado. That leaves 10 teams who passed on Sale. Crochet barely pitched at all in College because of health, performance and COVID . 10 teams passed on him too who probably regret it now , although some in his class still have a chance to become better .

Going from a single payer to dozens requires a bigger infrastructure for billing, collecting, and tracking. With the number of current posters, plus knowing some will drop, the amount necessary for the remaining posters to pay would not be sustainable.

The state of Illinois and Chicago from a financial and tax perspective certainly is relevant and will become increasingly more so in the coming years following demographic trends of blue staters leaving for states like AZ TX and FL, to name just three. Ask Melody Hobson if she thinks it is something to be considered...who is going to finance a new stadium for the White Sox privately, for example, in the future??? Reinsdorf owning basically the biggest share of NBCSports Chicago isn't the Top 3-5 broadcasting deal in all of sports anymore... essentially, the AL Central Division opponents in the long/er term will get bigger slices of the pie, the equivalent of revenue sharing. This year, the impact of those missed Bally/Sinclair payments/defaults might be more impactful as everyone adjusts financially, but the Sox are basically treading water and falling backwards on payroll from 7th to 12th due to spending increases by other teams as well as inflationary pressure in mega deals.

Illinois is bleeding population as well cable subscribers. If they don't make the playoffs in the next two years and there's no new stadium and/or Chicagoland relocation...it's going take coin flip luck they get an ownership group that can ever challenge the Cubs like the Angels got in Moreno and Mets got in Cohen in those markets with multiple teams. It will look a lot more like the A's situation...minus the almost complete desperation/exasperation. IMO Milwaukee, Minnesota, Cleveland, St. Louis and the Cubs all have better ownership groups...certainly front office teams.

2. Illinois "For the Illinoisans leaving the state, the choice came down to moving for a new job (31%), family (30%), retirement (24%) and a new lifestyle (22%). This marked almost a decade of straight losses for Illinois, with residents looking for more affordable living. Interestingly, nearly 52% of those who left the state in 2022 earned more than $150,000 a year. Considering Illinois “offers” one of the highest combined local and state tax rates — and the second-highest property taxes — in the country, it’s unsurprising high earners are eager to set up shop elsewhere." https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/off-beaten-track-searching-better-140000055.html

Looks like the Twins are going to be much more isolated from damage on this than CLE, DET, KC. See second half of previous article. Very complicated situation playing out, though. The assumption is that a decade down the road, when baseball’s distribution model is rewritten, that model will leave its franchises worth more, not less... ..... Some are suggesting that MLB would like to use the Diamond collapse as a pretext to take greater control of local broadcast rights and mitigate those disparities (between small and large market clubs). An unpackaged bankruptcy could allow all 14 MLB teams to abrogate deals with Diamond, though the Twins won’t need a court’s help, because their deal is currently up. Unmentioned in all this is the fate of Diamond’s NBA/NHL broadcasts, with those seasons ongoing at the likely point of bankruptcy. There exists the possibility that those leagues could team up with MLB on a new broadcast platform or broadcast partner. Whatever happens, deals are now far more likely to be cut nationally because leagues realize they have a lot more leverage when negotiating for dozens of clubs instead of letting a local team negotiate for one. MLB recently hired ex-DSG executive Billy Chambers to a new role, specifically to manage local broadcast, telegraphing its intentions.

The buyer was Sinclair Broadcast Group, the second largest local TV station owner in the country, mainly known for controversies related to how those stations cover news. (Sinclair also owns cable’s Tennis Channel among other properties.) Sinclair transacted the $10.6 billion Fox Sports purchase with over $8 billion in debt. So disabuse yourself of the idea this financial crisis is about cord-cutting, a corporate parent that doesn’t “get” sports, or MLB’s archaic broadcast blackout maps. It’s about over-leverage, pure and simple. $8.2 billion of it, to be precise. (In case you were wondering, Sinclair sunk $1.5 billion of its cash into Diamond Sports Group (DSG), so it will not walk away from this whole.) Wait, so you’re saying Bally’s isn’t in trouble? No, never said that, but it’s not a basket case. In 2021 and for the parts of 2022 for which financials are available, Diamond Sports had gross profits in excess of $400 million. Meaning it’s not a distressed business when stripped of all that debt. Additionally, it’s continuing to sign market-rate renewals with sports franchises all over the country. Sports Business Journal reported this week that DSG just signed a rights deal with the NHL’s Tampa Bay Lightning and the NBA’s LA Clippers, New Orleans Pelicans, and Indiana Pacers. Additionally, according to Ben Clemens of the respected baseball website Fangraphs, as recently as 2021 DSG signed the Milwaukee Brewers, Kansas City Royals, and Miami Marlins to multi-year rights deals all worth north of $40 million a year, which are “in-line” with rights fees signed by Fox and other RSNs a half-decade ago. If the sky is falling for the value of these rights, it’s not evident. That said, the RSN business is “significantly challenged,” said one sports executive I spoke to who didn’t want to be named. RSNs are almost exclusively distributed on cable and satellite TV and cord-cutting is a trend that is only growing. https://tcbmag.com/the-bally-sports-mess-explained/