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Crochet’s a bad example. The league adjusted to his slider after like 5 starts last year and he started to get hit. He then worked with both Katz and Bannister to change his arsenal, including adding a cutter to work both sides of the plate and took off again. When it comes to pitch shapes and developing attack plans for pitchers, coaching does matter. That’s why pitching labs aren’t just a radar gun and a box of balls.

Yup. I've stopped posting on here because constant doomerism & negativity isn't good for anyone. But what's the point of getting emotionally invested in any of the Sox current prospects if you know they'll be gone in 4-5 years if they become stars.

Common sense prevails once again. Crochet admitted to being a 1 pitch pitcher last year headed into camp . You can do that sometimes as a reliever but not as a starter. It's amazing to me that any Sox fan who is always in here should know so little about a player he's taking a stance on. Players constantly are working to improve there game and the smart one take advantage of their coaches. Noah Schultz just said things about Bannister that were extremely complimentary yet that poster would have us believe he's being disingenuous or a liar.

Statcast needs the Hawkeye camera/tracking system, so if the ST park doesn't have them installed then there's no data. This is actually a big jump in availability from last year, since the fall league parks got Hawkeye this season for testing the challenge system (the ABS stuff also uses it). That leaves a bunch of Grapefruit League squads at the bottom now (though obviously the orgs can still take initiative to install it and there are teams there where it's weird that they haven't yet). Since the White Sox much discussed new focus on tech/analytics investment includes Hawkeye for all of the Sox affiliates too, I'm very much looking forward to more minor league Statcast data this season. Schultz spin rates and Wolkow exit velo data 🔜 👀

Absolutely. Lunch breaks I walked on most any day that wasn't snowy. Also that's the area where south loop parking was cheapest. But I am glad to see you failed your own test on knowing the 78.

Oh thank god you kind, kind soul.

Speaking of pitch data, Bannister is teasing what him and Katz have been cooking in the lab:

I wrote about some college options for the Sox and I’m waiting on bonus pools: https://www.futuresox.net/2025/02/19/white-sox-2025-mlb-draft-notebook-2-0/

Added bonus for the nerds, the vast majority of games will have Statcast too.

https://www.mlb.com/news/white-sox-2025-spring-training-broadcast-schedule Saturday, February 22 at Cubs: ESPN Chicago Monday, February 24 vs. Texas: CHSN and ESPN Chicago Wednesday, February 26 vs. San Diego: CHSN Thursday, February 27 vs. Cleveland: CHSN Sunday, March 2 at Dodgers: ESPN Chicago and whitesox.com Monday, March 3 vs. Athletics: ESPN Chicago and whitesox.com Friday, March 7 vs. Cubs: CHSN and ESPN Chicago Saturday, March 8 vs. Dodgers: ESPN Chicago and whitesox.com Friday, March 14 vs. Cincinnati: ESPN Chicago and whitesox.com Saturday, March 15 vs. Colorado: ESPN Chicago and whitesox.com Sunday, March 16 vs. Colorado (Spring Breakout Game): CHSN Saturday, March 22 vs. Seattle: ESPN Chicago and whitesox.com Sunday, March 23 vs. Arizona: CHSN and ESPN Chicago Monday, March 24 vs. Athletics: CHSN

I worked in the financial district for 15 years, and walked that area all of the time. You?

At some point you need to plant your flag with a staff. Doesn’t mean all five have to stay for their entire career but you gotta have someone be the ace/1/leader, and some guys that stay past their arb days. There aren’t many teams that are able to stay competitive with a constantly changing starting staff, unless they have a really damn good offense to help them out. And even then, those teams tend to run into a buzz saw in the playoffs I just don’t agree with their idea that pitching is something to use up and dispose of as soon as you need to invest more into it

I interpret those comments more as “we’re going to try to be Cleveland.”

Not signing pitchers to long terms deal isn't a huge deal for me, as I think you should ride them in their early years and then let them leave. You just constantly need guys to take their place when the time comes. I'm more interested in making any positional guys who become very good stick around. First we have to make a few of them become very good.

A player will give credit to his coaches all the time, even when the coaches suck. That’s just called being a good and PC teammate. Regarding your second paragraph, no, I don’t assume success considering the Sox poor track record. But that sure was a funny way to frame it.

Banninster openly acknowledging they have no chance to keep elite talents like Crochet or Cease long-term is pretty bleak.

Buona is far superior now.

Honestly the Sox are lucky to have him both as a lifelong fan And a writer, and I hope some other offer doesn’t land in his lap to take him away(although I would be happy for him advancing his career)

I'm assuming I last a little longer than JR and a competitive budget is realized along with a stronger structure under a new owner. But you never know, JR could outlast me . 😂

Max it's never been easy to be a Sox fan.But if it ever turns out that the Sox can become a consistently good team on par with teams that do good work with big data and players development I'd be thrilled about it. It's not like there's been Sox lifers among the players recently. That era came and went along with the arrival of Free Agency many years ago. Most fans following the team now were born in the era of Free Agents. If with a new owner they operate more like Tampa Bay and less like the Sox typified by the Reinsdorf Disinformation Era , I ,for one , would be happy to root for anyone who plays hard on winning teams.

I genuinely think that while this was a poor future financial decision, this was probably a pretty awesome and memorable summer

Because I tend to look at everything through (first) a stock market/investing lens, and secondarily, societal/sports/White Sox, etc. I've already learned a HARD lesson here investing in Alibaba (sold 200 Berkshire Hathaway B shares, brilliant) and bought (BABA) when it was down from $340 into the $230's/$240's, Baidu, JD, Ten Cent, etc. Sold it this past summer at around $105-110, so that was not one of my best investing moments. Obviously both China and the US are investing billions into this emerging industry, you have Apple (dramatically struggling now over here now, just like Tesla), Meta/FB, Google/Alphabet, Huawei, all the big players involved in both countries....OpenAI potentially for sale (to Musk for around $100 billion?), the overhanging TikTok resolution that's supposed to come in the next 45-50 days or so. To be honest, I decided it was much better to shield myself from individual stock volatility and dumb "gut decisions" and just keep most money across an array of mutual funds...basically sold all the individual stocks. My dad used to be a big believer in gold as a hedge, but I personally prefer autograph collecting (mostly presidents/celebrities) and have another $50-75,000 worth of baseball cards from the 1950's through the early 90's...and then started getting interested again recently, tried to corner the market on O'Neil Cruz rookie cards, lol. I bought a bunch of Ohtani, Sasaki and Murakama cards directly from Japan, as well. Worst/dumbest baseball card mistake was selling a mint 1968 Nolan Ryan rookie card in the early 90's so I could spend the summer traveling and playing baseball instead of working, lol. The pride of my collection is 2 PSA certified Roberto Clemente autographs and most of his cards from the 50's and 60's, including his rookie card in VG condition. Sold my 1949 Brooklyn Dodgers' autographed ball as well because nowhere to store my stuff in US anymore.

Chinese innovation…I won’t touch on that but they seem to be doing good work. Still, I don’t think the Sox are buying a supercomputer. Wouldn’t need it for baseball, it probably wouldn’t actually be computationally challenging, I could’ve left that out. NVIDIA is screwed because all they focus on is video games. Apple is improving in this field, I don’t know how their stock reacted to the nvidia drop. Interesting post, I think you might’ve combined two.

If you buy some of the claims of DeepSeek (they are alleged) to have run their models off of OpenAI/ChatGPT....then the energy usage, water/electricity consumption and need for high end chips (Nvidia) just fell by a factor of 75-90%. That will make the analytical models developed by the Cardinals/Astros over a decade ago look like child's play. Is commercial real estate even viable anymore, long-term? I guess you're referring more to the "ballpark cities" trend of construction around newly-constructed sports stadiums, with the inclusion of retail, condos, restaurants, entertainment zones, bars/clubs/pubs and casinos.

I think if a team fell in their laps suburban dwellers would jump on the bandwagon. But it can't be a team that loses 120 games. That s%*# doesn't sell anywhere.

I may have missed something, I'll double check before Saturday. Of the 33 games looks like we have: 20 - Video available 10 - Radio/audio only 3 - No broadcast options

The documentary on Netflix about the basketball aspect of last year’s Olympics is good as well

If the assumption is that the people who are creating this data are too stupid to understand it, that's a place I can't go.

Pretty much anything between the river to the north, 18th to the south, the lake to the east and the Ryan/Kennedy to the west was within my range depending on what my day looked like. A mile out, and a mile back is like a half hour walk at a decent pace. It wasn't the only place I went, but I definitely went.

Aw, glad to see you care.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt35669835/ I highly recommend everyone watch the documentary “We beat the Dream Team” on MAX. It’s about the college practice team that was brought in to scrimmage the dream team, it consisted of Chris Weber Bobby Hurley Anfernee Hardaway Grant hill Allen Houston Eric Montross Jamal mashburn Rodney rogers it’s a quick documentary but it’s pretty funny and until Coach K gums it up at the end, it’s really a fun doc.

In 1976 I was taking a 400 level course at UK and we had to do a paper for it. I decided to do it on the role of the sports broadcaster. That Christmas break when I was home I was able to get time with Harry Caray, Chet Coppock, Johnny Morris and Vince Lloyd. For Lloyd I went down to the WGN studios to meet him. He was very nice and gave me more time than was originally scheduled for. One of the stories he told me as we were talking was the time to spoke to P.K. Wrigley before a Cub game down on the field. He said he asked Wrigley (not for airing) 'why can't the Cubs win?' Wrigley's answer according to Lloyd was certainly interesting. Lloyd said, that Wrigley told him, 'we're not interested in winning, we're interest in entertaining...'

Bears raising season ticket prices 10%. They definitely deserve more of my money.

I "self-servingly" ? No, I don't have a personal interest in this . lol. The 78 site was/is trash, which is why it has never been developed since it was at the bottom of a river bed and trash heap 100 years ago. The Boeing example you cite doesn't pertain here because the U of I relocated to another site in Chicago. There must have been other considerations at play in that move given the loss of money involved. I would like to know what they were. Have you driven by or around the "78" site and perhaps got out of your car to look at it? I suspect that some who cast opinions here are entirely unfamiliar with that thing. Same goes for Bridgeport around Soxpark which some appear to be unfamiliar with. Hell, I bet several posters here seldom if ever attend a WSox game but they have all kinds of opinions about the stadium and the area.

Amazon cut back HUGE on their building projects all at once. They had plans to build tons of warehouses all over the country. In my hometown alone they had paid to move a parcel of land from county to city, change zoning, acquire land, and such. Then they decided to end almost all of that all at once. This was in the same time frame and a part of the same cuts. In fact Amazon went from getting to headquarters funded in both DC and NYC, to deciding only to do one in DC. When it comes to higher ed, funding has come WAY down since COVID, and might be disappearing entirely, or at the very least, getting cut way back if the current President gets his way. In my lifetime there has been probably a half of a dozen different "world's tallest building" projects which were supposed to happen in Chicago, including one out by LSD which had a gigantic hole put into the ground, and then the funding just died and it stayed exactly that, a gigantic hole in the ground. Block 37 sat empty for decades, despite a million different proposals and projects getting off to various amounts of progress. There were dozens of proposals over the years for new Bears and/or White Sox stadiums, both in the last few years, but mainly over the previous decades in their crumbling old stadiums. I know you self-servingly want to accuse all of the people here as being involved in some vast conspiracy, in which Jerry as some moronic dupe in real estate will never cease to amuse me, but business conditions change major projects all of the time. The same dollars that brought Boeing from Seattle to Chicago, are about to build them a whole new headquarters in Denver. If you pay even a minimal amount attention to this kind of stuff over the course of time, this isn't a huge surprise.

No way...the agents will advise them to wait for FA once they make it to arbitration since the White Sox will likely expect hometown discounts again. The only way is if the team's at least halfway competitive again.

Well, the irony is that Hahn managed to extend most of the Sox young players that were expected to become stars. The problem was that they didn’t all become stars due to injuries or other factors, or perhaps they just weren’t that good to begin with. However, per Getz’s recent comments, it sounds like the Sox won’t be using Hahn’s strategy of locking up young players until they truly prove themselves to be high quality players. But if you wait until young players prove themselves to be really good, are they still going to sign team-friendly extensions at that point or just wait until they hit free agency?

Until further notice or JR's demise...we are the defacto farm or feeder team for the rest of baseball. Used to be the Pirates or Marlins.

When the player himself credits his coaches it is a crazy argument.There's a fine line between success and failure at the top level of any sport. Body and mind must blend perfectly and can only do so in the right atmosphere of coach and player cooperation. I don't see you being so understanding of Getz failures or the Sox inability to draft and develop so it would only follow that since they have a bad history that the present has to be equally ineffectual. More false equivalencies.

We're just going to have wait on the great Thorpe debate but I don't even know what you are postulating here. This is true of any pitcher who might pitching with a sore body part in his arm. It's hard enough to be consistently good to MLB hitters early in your career and then add injury. Why we act like he should be considered a finished product already is kind of strange.He was a phenomally good pitcher in the minors before the Sox got him and after and in his 1st 3 starts. We act like he was a mystery until there was a book on him .It's 2025 not 1945 there's plenty of video and scouting reports on pitch mix and location to lefties and righties that can be easily obtained and coaches to game plan with the hitters . Yes movement and velocity matter but movement, deception and command of a decent number of pitches matters just as much. No one who is injured can do anything as well in any field that requires motion. You cannot effectively fake your way through pain especially at the top of your chosen sport that requires accuracy .

Just finished listening to the Soxmachine podcast. It’s a really good listen.

To flip them at the deadline for reliever prospects that will later be flipped for our boy Cash Considerations. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.

I will allow Thorpe to change my mind if he can be successful, but that would make him a unicorn in today's game. These are the same circular arguments we had last year. Instead of berating others as ridiculous, why don't you just acknowledge the valid concern that his fastball just isn't up to par in MLB in 2025.

It’s not even revisionist theory. It’s simply people who didn’t like Thorpe at the time of the Cease trade grasping at straws to confirm their pre-conceived notions. They love highlighting the last couple major league starts he got beat up (likely while injured) but ignore his extensive track record of minor league success. I can totally get being concerned that Thorpe’s margin of error will be thin because his fastball is a fringe offering, but the immediate need to a write a player over a small sample size (again, while likely injured) is just absurd.

this thread doesn't deserve 7 pages. honestly , it doesn't deserve 7 responses.

Yep. If you are in the west burbs, try Johnnie’s Beef sometime as well.

Fegan’s not just a talented writer, he’s a good listen as well. Good sense of humour.

And here's a link to the article being referenced. There's a paywall, but you can sign up for like, $2 a month and get access. It's definitely worth it. White Sox seek a more perfect union