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From an article written when he was made interim manager of the Angels:

I dispute the premise that the reason the majority of Sox prospects have failed is that they were rushed. Yes, most prospects have failed. And, yes, many of them were rushed, but hitting in the majors has gotten increasingly hard and the Sox have not been good at developing players after their ascension. If, for instance, Eloy, Moncada, and Robert were rushed, you’d expect their initial time in the majors to be a disaster. But after brief adjustment periods, they all thrived. Then, over time, the league adjusted and they did not keep up. That points to problems in the major league staff, information, preparation, etc. Even Beckham had initial success. Now, I suppose you could argue that you have to wait for a prospect to struggle in the minors, adjust, and then they will be ready. But that can easily be disproved by hundreds of players who never struggled in the minors and then excelled in the majors Trout, Soto, etc etc. going further back, the Sox rushed a bunch of guys who were later successful. Harold Baines had no business being in mlb when he was called up. Robin Ventura hit .270 with 2 HR in AA and was the opening day 3b the next year. It’s possible all of those Sox prospects ho busted just weren’t good enough and would have busted whenever they were brought up. Or the Sox are not very good at helping their players once they get to the majors. Either way, I doubt a month in Charlotte is going to matter that much to Colson one way or the other.

Right, and many teams are run well enough where they can absorb those mistakes and still be successful. Meanwhile, because the Sox have been bad at almost everything, they have way less margin for error. They don’t have other strengths to fall back on, and it’s nobody’s fault but their own.

His opinion is I don't know anything and neither do you and that your conclusions lack any substance based on that lack of knowledge . He wishes he could have the confidence to believe he's as smart without knowledge as you think you are. You flex more than anyone here and constantly accuse others of it or resort to the old bad parenting /bully routine of aww did the big meanie hurt your feelings when you got nothing else .

Cotton Candy grapes are worth trying.

This team is so far away I don't know if a 28 year old with 1 productive season and serious hit tool questions is worth prioritizing in a trade. I'd rather roll the dice on a 45/50 FV prospect than Outman, personally.

I'm secretly Chris Getz, and I am not paying him.

But winning 55 games isn’t that hard. In all honesty, Getz should probably be fired if he can’t get us there next year. As I have stated before, a team full of replacement players should theoretically win 48 games. We need 7 to 10 fWAR total from our entire roster to have a solid chance of achieving that mark. Yes, that’s a 14 game improvement, but we underperformed our Pythagorean by 7 games last year. We also have a lot more players that project to be above replacement level than we did last year. Tauchman & Slater are older, boring, low ceiling players, but could easily represent four win improvement over the disaster that was RF for us last year. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to hype up 55 wins, but I don’t believe you have to be an optimist to see a normal really bad team vs. the worst in baseball history. But yes, I fully agree with you, I want to talk about the kids. The dumpster dives serve a purpose, but untimely don’t change the long-term trajectory. Hopefully once games start we’ll have some better topics to discuss, whether good or bad.

One of the lessons of the last decade it would be nice if the White Sox would learn it would be to quit rushing guys as a make up for horrible player development.

Barely a Boomer myself

By bonus amount he fell in the top 20 from BA. Was number 33 on Pipeline's list.

Have they actually used their allotment this year or nearly so, or is there a large amount remaining again?

The Sox need to treat the minors like a factory instead of a warehouse. The players come out of the factory when they’re ready - not when someone puts in a 2-day delivery order.

The White Sox are likely pretty locked into Marco Paddy’s signing class for January 15 at this point. Players have had agreements for years at this point. Best case scenario at this point would be a team signing Sasaki and reneging on some deals. Then maybe the Sox could potentially break some agreements or use their signing money to grab players who are now left without deals. Alejandro Cruz is getting $2 million from Sox. No other deals have been reported at this point. Leaves them around $4.2 million available.

Guilty as charged...well, almost. Merry Christmas!!!

this is a good idiom, I will be fitting my rose-tinted glasses with jaundiced lenses. Merry Christmas, Sox fans.

What's a White Sox free agent signing? Only Boomers remember those.

The likelihood of hamstring injury recurrence increases following hamstring injury or surgery according to medical articles I have read. Assuming that is the case, a hitter needs a strong base to complete a powerful swing. Eloy hasn't had that in a long time. He is probably toast as far as being an MLB hitter. Those who repeat memes about players of color being inherently lazy, unmotivated, greedy, etc, are not well informed or are ill-informed, imo. I had the pleasure of meeting Eloy and thought he was a great kid. I wish him the best.

Does any thread dealing with White Sox free agent signings count?

I would admit there's no guarantees in either case. Beckham honestly I thought was handled well, minor league pitching could not get him out. Eloy was kept down longer than he should have been and that didn't help him. With too many of the White Sox's hitters, we can see the results of poor coaching in the minors combined with rushing them. Moncada wasn't ready. Robert never learned to be coachable. Anderson was rushed. Vaughn was rushed. Madrigal was rushed. In multiple cases, the bad habits stayed with them, or at the best there was a year+ of them struggling when they could have been working in the minors. Some of them needed better techniques, some of them needed to mature, some both. A month in the minors might not matter to Colson if he's ready to come up. BUT IF HE ISN'T READY, if last year's problems linger, then bringing him up and having things go terrible for him could break him. That's the thing I want to avoid.

With Nightengale delivering praise and the details of the assignment about a guy whose track record doesn’t necessarily point to massive prior successes in those areas, the initial suspicion is more along the lines of “Did Tony La Russa’s shadow government just hire the manager it wanted?” https://soxmachine.com/2024/12/christmas-eve-notes-nevin-in-eloy-gone/

Mariners went 20 years without a playoff appearance, while the Angels won a ring in that same span. M's ownership is cheap AF and continually makes cost cutting moves that make the team worse. Angels ownership at least spends money. They spend in the dumbest way possible, but they spend. Angel's fans at least got to watch two of the best players on the planet play every day while their FO tried to spend their way to winning. There are much worse positions to be in as a fan base. A's fans just had their team ripped away from them, and Sox fans suffered through the worst season in modern baseball history. Both of those trump never winning with Trout and Ohtani IMO.

Don’t think that’s happening anymore unless they deal Marsh or Castellanos I guess

Parting shots and mostly cheap ones. Give it up already.

Which you regularly do.

That’s great. Show me you can do it at Charlotte for 6 weeks. Just like the competition is inconsistent in the AFL, it’s inconsistent in the spring and we all know this. Dead arm periods mid March for pitchers, guys working on specific techniques, guys who will be at home on the couch in June pitching the 8th inning. Go out, play everyday, and show me that you’re back to a solid player at Charlotte when everyone is trying to win or at least look good to get called Up themselves. None of this should be unreasonable, we’ve just gotten used to our GM being an idiot so “of course we have to call a guy up immediately” doesn’t sound as crazy as it is.

Lol I hate prejudging hires like this because I don't know how it going to work out. You could've just stopped there but then you envision a dream scenario of ineptitude. Then if that seems unfair ... No not at all even if you're struggling with why you would post something so unfair. Are you just going with the en vogue flow ? Has he been compared to Grifol yet ?

I hope you have a well paying diplomatic job. I'm glad you can separate the past from the present without looking at things through jaundiced lenses. It's a shame you have to quantify differences between bad and historically bad teams as not optimistic as if seeing some signs of life after 2024 is so terrible. There is so much lost in translation and so much bitterness that most do not want to bother doing what you just did while gently criticizing " the drive by , hit and run" style posting. I just was exchanging holiday greetings with a women Sox fan friend who does not follow them as closely as we do. I brought up the Crochet trade which to a casual fan looks bad. I told her well we'll need a few years to see how it goes . Hopefully they can start improving this year but even a 15 game improvement is still 106 losses. Basically her responses were Nooooo. I don't want more years of this s%*#. You're making it worse by telling me these things. I was like sorry I didn't do it. She laughed and said OK I guess. I'm not used to it being that easy.

Here’s the case for Colson breaking with the team, specific only to his offensive performance: - AA (Birmingham Barons): 27.9% - AAA (Charlotte Knights): 23.3% - AFL (Glendale Desert Dogs): 15.8% We know our staff now is focused in large part of cutting down strikeouts. If it is true that he was affected by some off the field issues, they may not be giving much weight to his AAA numbers… His AFL performance could be seen as him integrating those issues while checking some of our prerequisite boxes. With a strong spring training, they could have further confirmation and pull the trigger.

The org can't think this way but it's delusional to believe the Sox could unlock something with a guy like Lux or Outman that the Dodgers could not. Hi, Miguel Vargas.

They won’t be interested in Lux or Outman… unless the new shiny player development folk believe they can turn them both around… maximize their tools… and then have two high performing assets to trade instead of one. Fat chance.

From what I’ve been able to see so far, “numerous roles”… without any specifics given. I imagine Getz will make it clear in January when this is expected to be formally announced. How depressing is it that our franchise is in such a deplorable state that this is the most deserving topic of discussion. It’s going to be a LONG winter and a slow ass march to spring.

I’ll save other folks from having to get through the sun times wall… ” Nevin will be involved in numerous roles, including amateur scouting. The move is expected to be made official in January. It’s the latest new addition as general manager Chris Getz shakes up the Sox’ infrastructure, leadership and research and development operations. Recent additions include Venable, special assistant David Keller who is overseeing international scouting, director of hitting Ryan Fuller, bench coach Walker McKinven, assistant hitting coach Joel McKeithan and former coach and interim manager Grady Sizemore in the role of offensive coordinator.” There isn’t much more said.

I tend to agree.

I would start B. Monty in K. Napolis, and let him earn his way up to B. Ham by the end of 2025. A June arrival in 2026 would work perfectly for B. Monty. A June arrival in 2025 would work for C. Monty.

David Keller has the same innocuous title that Marco Paddy had but my interpretation is that he’s essentially the international director and Louis Silverio is running the academy. This hire for a coordinator is basically the #2 to Keller. They will coordinate between the area scouts and staff in the DR up to Keller and the front office. It’s a big job, but a necessary one.

I don't know. I believe it's been implied that Getz wants to have a foot in the Dominican, and they want to have an Asian presence. So, while they have a person in charge of international scouting, I would assume the hire being advertised on LinkedIn is for somebody to focus on Latin America.

But go look at our Steamer 600 projections for next year. The rotation is going to be worse no doubt, but the positional group should be substantially better even with no major outside additions. And for the record, I don’t buy all those projections, but it’s nice to see a bunch of guys in their mid 20’s with 1.5 to 2.0 win totals vs. the crap we were forced fed last year.

There will also be plenty of injuries and DFA's. This staff is going to go through 25-30 pitchers by the end of the year.

This

Hiring certainly isn't impactful but it'll never stop being concerning that LaRussa still has his teeth sunk in to this org and is clearly guiding some choices.

Ah, we're still the same stupid organization.

From 2015: https://www.azcentral.com/story/sports/mlb/diamondbacks/2015/09/16/diamondbacks-tony-la-russa-phil-nevin-could-hot-managerial-candidate/72343042/ Also...

This is the crazy guy no one wanted as manager, right? Really makes me wonder what qualifies him for a front office job.

Just what Venable needs, another guy who interviewed for his job looking over his shoulder

He was pretty good in 2022. I think the hamstring injuries ruined him more than anything.

Likable guy but his body is too fragile

Or they might immediately panic and shoot you.

The issue I have is it only takes a handful of weeks to claw back a full year of control. And one month in AAA doesn’t change his long-term roadmap and I personally think it would be good for him given his challenges in Charlotte last season. IMO, unless you feel he’s a serious threat to be a top two finisher in the AL Rookie of the Year race, the value trade-off is just too much.

If he can stick at SS, that helps things immensely. But I can’t comprehend for the life of me how any intelligent being would think burning a year of service time and starting him on the major league roster next season makes any sense when we are years away from being competitive. I would lose all faith in Chris Getz if he did this.