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Re-watching Ted Lasso with my better half in the evenings and I said to her the other day "boy, these Richmond fans really love their club no matter what" and my wife commented "kinda like you and the White Sox" to which I responded "Not any more, I hate them." I then proceeded to check in at Soxtalk.

You were literally suggesting we commit $80M+ to Santander plus give up the top pick of the 2nd round and $500k in international slot because of how bad you viewed the OF market next year. Sounds like with any form of rebound, Robert should be an incredibly value trade chip a year from now.

Until they prove to me the finances aren’t bad, I will still believe the franchise is in a horrible financial state.

It’s all so pathetic

Trades don't exist in the abstract, Jimmy. If you are targeting prospects on a specific team you also have to have an appreciation of who you are dealing with and their interests and issues and look at things from their perspective and craft your proposals around that. Cincinnati has budget constraints and if we don't go into the negotiation taking that into account, then were not a serious organization. If we were halfway competent, we would eat the WHOLE 2025 salary if it meant enhancing the return. Our fucking payroll is abysmally low. If you can get Arroyo plus some other good piece too (Petty?) if you eat it all, then eat it all. Our payroll is in the 60s so who gives a f*** if we eat it? Jerry will make a killing with any payroll south of 100 and prolly even south of 150. Get your damn SS already.

This would prompt me to wait and trade him at the deadline.

Keep my name out of your posts. Argue your bs on your own

Honestly I think Getz just spamming the "im p****" meme at other GMs might get the best deals.

Yeah in these legal hypotheticals, you can also go completely to the opposite side and say since she wasn't found guilty of libel/slander, she obvious didn't lie because she was never found guilty of it. That's not accurate either though. Not being able to prove something happened with a confidence level that is high enough to work for what MLB was looking for, doesn't mean it didn't happen, they are innocent, exonerated, or anything else. It just means they didn't mean MLB's threshold for assigning a penalty. That's it. Especially since it seems like the most likely scenario is that they didn't get cooperation out a witness who had a disincentive to make sure that this guy never worked again.

That Cease trade really sucked

I will quote my favorite phrase... those who don't learn from their history are doomed to repeat it. But sure, let's pretend this never happened and everything is fine.

And throw in both Montys, just to get them to take our money.

And if Jerry is really that hard up for cash, the decision to trade him before the season might not be a baseball decision alone but one made just to move the contract off the books.

Ah fun. I guess we could also mention the Cease and Quintana deals as risk/reward payoffs, but Captain Panic operations aren't a big surprise.

The point is, people could say that about Moncada last year (or year before). He got hurt and missed most of/pretty close to the full season. Harold literally copied exactly what the poster he quoted said, but swapped the names.

I don't think a good first half moves the meter much. The league is telling them what they think of him and the risk of him getting injured again and bringing back nothing is too great.

White Sox system will be top 5 everywhere else.

I don't think the White Sox should be eating any $$. He makes $15 million this year. It's perfectly reasonable.

Your attempts to get others to engage in arguments on your behalf sucks ass.

Wrong brother. This is Emilio Estevez.

Thorpe not eligible for this list and he was the centerpiece. Honestly, there is still time for that trade to pay off, but they need one sure fire contributor out of it and it can’t just be Iriarte as a setup guy. Either Thorpe has to come back healthy with a bit more velocity than we saw and make his fastball less hittable or Iriarte has to correct his fastball shape and get his K rate back in check or Zavala has to fix his swing / approach and be a dude who can make some contract and impact a baseball.

I would 100% take Crawford right now. Sounds like The Phillies wouldn’t do it, but if they had some balls and actually want to beat the Dodgers in the post season they should swing for the fences with a Robert trade.

That's good news, here I was worried we'd be asking for "bottom prospects".

Good news is that you never have to worry about it because I won't tell him what he wants to hear for the job.

Yeah you'd be a much better GM under JR 😂

The only way out for them is to sell, or completely change how they operate. None of which seems likely. Jerry has driven this franchise into the ground and they have no one to blame but themselves. Ignoring those hard realities accomplishes nothing.

$85M across 30 teams pales in comparison to the ass kicking they’re taking by airing CHSN OTA and not having deals in place with the #1 streaming live tv provider YouTube Tv or comcast, etc. I’m very curious to see how this has impacted the bottom line but I bet it ain’t pretty.

I think the lack of local TV deal provided meaningful revenue is also hurting. I’m actually surprised it’s not being brought up more often.

There is zero chance we are that hard up for cash with a $60 payroll. Don’t get me wrong, I get the feeling Jerry is going cheaper than usual to offset any losses he incurred last year, but zero reason to believe he’d have to move additional salary to get there. If they are desperate to move Robert, it’s because they’re worried he won’t return much come July. I don’t buy that either, but it’s at least theoretically possible.

Of course the other side of the coin is that the White Sox wounds are entirely self-inflicted.

SELL THE TEAM!

They reportedly lost $28M in 2023 with a payroll about $100M more expensive than where they’re at right now. So if everything else remained the same outside of payroll they would stand to make ~$70M in 2025. BUT…they also lowered ticket prices this season, attendance will be down significantly compared to 2023, fixed costs presumably have increased slightly since then due to inflation, and presumably the tv revenue is down significantly since 2023. So, yea, I don’t know if a “huge” profit is a sure thing even with a payroll in the mid 60s.

And sadly, we could only dream of this type of return for Robert now…

Moncada's's floor is low but his ceiling is so high, I'm holding him until the deadline when everybody wants a bat. If he struggles then so be it, but I'm not selling him at his lowest point unless a team overpays right now, there's way too much talent left in him, let's see if the new coaching staff can get something out of him.

Well, once they trade Luis Robert and Andrew Benintendi, they have only pre-arb and arb salaries for 2026.

This is going to be a financially interesting season. On paper, the Sox haven't turned a profit since 2019, which is the first time in Forbes recorded history, that has ever happened. We will see what 2024 looks like when the numbers are released here towards the beginning of the season. Right now the Sox basically have zero TV revenue on the books. They have a couple of small deals in place, but no anchor deals to speak of. That is a large chunk of revenues right there. They are also about to put up their smallest attendance year year this century. They put up 1.338m through the turnstiles in 1999. They had 1.38 last year. If they go below the 1999 number, their next lower number happened in 1989 when they barely cleared a million. This will probably be a 36 year low for attendance and the lowest ever at the new ballpark. I am sure everything else attached to revenues is going to be at multi-decade lows as well once you account for parking dollars, advertising dollars, concessions, etc.

Angels haven't gotten much coverage the last 2-3 years...especially with Trout out and Ohtani crossing Orange County. Plus West Coast game start times.

It depends on who else they would put in the deal and how much they want us to eat. If they threw in another very good piece if we ate all the 2025 salary, then eat it. Our payroll is in the 60s, so I don't see the rationale of not eating money, EVEN IF we have sustained losses the last few years. A payroll anywhere south of 100m is guaranteed to generate huge profits pretty much no matter what...im not sure what dicking around over a 50m payroll vs 65m payroll will accomplish.

OK, I know I have to be late to the party with this joke, but this is honestly the first time I’ve heard of this guy.

It’s too bad Eloy didn’t sign as a starting OF somewhere.

Guess you don't have much faith that he'll have a strong , healthy 1st half. I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking that way. He's been consistently injured and may have caught whatever it was that led to the Great Demise that plagued Anderson, Jimenez, Moncada, Benintendi, and Vaughn ( not that he was actually ever any good ).

The Sox seem to view Robert as a salary dump? Awesome.

I do give credit to Getz for doing the best under the circumstances. And perhaps the rebuild will work, but it is going to take a hell of a long time. But even if the rebuild works, the team will have to spend on free agents or spend through trades. No team builds a winner on young players only. In better days, Bill Veeck did leave a corp of developing talent. Then Reinsdorf and Einhorn added proven veterans. Luzinski, Fisk, Bannister, Koosman. Now they had a ball club. The result was 99 wins in 1983. It was a team that should have won the World Series. The losing has not been a recent development. Since winning the division in 2008, this team has had almost no success. I don't have great confidence at the moment. And even if the winning eventually starts, I think this tanking is absurd. You don't have to be this bad to be good. The team should, at least, avoid losing 100 games.

I'm still hoping during spring training a team decides they're a bat short and offers something decent for him.

If Cam Collier wasn’t in the deal then no thanks.

Wilson had like a .630 OPS with disappointing defense last year. He has some work to do to win RoY.

18.) Schultz - 60 FV 33.) Colson - 55 FV 38.) Teel - 55 FV 41.) Smith - 55 FV 54.) Quero - 50 FV 92.) Braden - 50 FV

There are fans on this site who still haven't gotten over Reinsdorf's brutally honest remarks in a radio interview right after the White Flag trade in 1997. People's reactions clearly dictate that they want to hear corporate CYA double-speak.

In 1997, the Sox could not get out of their own way. That team was maddening. And after every freaking loss, a half dozen guys could only talk about trade rumors after the game, and not the game they just lost. It was a good team that was poorly managed. There were not going to catch Cleveland. They took 4 from KC in July, then couldn't string together three wins for the rest of the month. They traded Alvarez, Hernandez and Darwin. Reinsdorf gave a brutally honest interview on sports radio, and "White Flag Trade" was thrown in his face regularly until the world series victory. So, you're talking about a fanbase that has openly told the owner to never speak the truth to them. He did, and they went nuts on him. Liptak still hasn't gotten over it.