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They were substantially better than the White Sox last year. They played 16 rookies last year, so they have a decent chance of being even better and way deeper this year. Their system is top 5 in baseball so even if people get hurt they have serious depth to call up and use for trades. They’re weak spots last year - power in the middle of the lineup, catcher - they have improved at those in free agency. They lost no one of importance to them in Free Agency. They have one of the best managers in baseball. They now have playoff experience also. If you go position by position, Cleveland is as good or better than the White Sox on paper across the whole roster. A couple might be narrow wins for the White Sox , but on paper that’s it. The White Sox had a negative run differential last year so the White Sox might not even be as good as their .500 record from last year. The White Sox lost their second best player and second best pitcher to free agency. The guys they added in free agency are just trying to make up for what they’ve lost, and they still need others to improve just to make up that ground. The White Sox have a bad system particularly at the upper levels, so it is difficult for them to fill in for injured players with callups or trades. There is a scenario where the White Sox are better, where literally all the problems the last 2 years were LaRussa related and they are super lucky with health this year. Grifol almost certainly would win manager of the year in this case. On paper this is Clearly Cleveland’s division. Someone has to seriously overperform to catch them. It can happen, but very few people outside of Sox fans and no projection systems are going to pick the White Sox this year.

Please be the white Sox getting put up for sale.

The White Sox fan motto should be: "Hope for the best...expect the worst."

This was the year that I felt my perception of the team shift significantly, from "exciting championship window/this is our time/rebuild is over/can they get it done" to "oh, this is just KW-era White Sox business as usual now/pre-rebuild constant shuffling and retooling and hoping that everything breaks right every year." I've been a really negative poster the past couple years, and I apologize for that, but they way this "contention window" has been handled, to me, is the most damning evidence I've seen in my life that this ownership/management group is simply not capable of competing in the current MLB metagame. It isn't about Reinsdorf being "cheap" -- it's totally reasonable to flex into and out of the upper third in spending for a team of the Sox market power -- it's about him (and/or his invincible hand-picked braintrust) being utterly incompetent in evaluating the types of investments to make. Time and time again, they've chosen to allocate their resources into the most risky, short-term, and low-upside types of talent acquisitions that are available (veteran relievers, high floor/no-upside corner players/stars with polarizing evaluations around the league, pitching-heavy prospect pools) while seemingly every other team has figured out a better playbook (prioritizing depth, developing average payers while paying for stars, bat-heavy drafting strategy, diversified international spending). The type of strategic knowledge that they lack has been obviously and readily available for many years at this point, and even the most rudimentary competitive analysis would reveal it. It's almost unbelievable that they are continuing to invest actual money in this type of strategy. I was a strident supporter of "the rebuild," because it gave the team chance for a sorely needed clean slate. They filled that clean slate with the same dumb s%*# it had before. I will always root for this laundry/these players to pull it together and give me another 2005, but I will not be fooled again that real change will occur as long as this group remains in charge.

I remember going to the first TB series in April after a Sox win (think they were 6-3 at the time) and thinking to myself, "Ok, maybe this actually is a good team", promptly followed by that losing streak and the excuses of "it's cold/it's early/injuries/etc ". Thankfully the minors kept me distracted from the clown show that was the ML club. Seeing the individual progress down there and making my first trip to the affiliates was memorable in an otherwise trainwreck of a baseball season.

So the old man is going to come to ST and watch a couple games. Give him a pencil and a piece of notebook paper and let him think he’s doing something. While this whole thing is silly, it seems harmless.

Or sprinting??

Well, I would be looking forward to the possibility of winning baseball. If Sox could be five over .500 in April and do that again in May 2023, it'd help me a lot. Unfortunately I'm very close to giving up on baseball. As readers of my posts know I am disenchanted with baseball right now. I won't go thru all the reasons but baseball is not fun anymore. My main beef is there are now two games within a game, both two hours long. The starting pitcher's game which lasts 4 to 5 innings. Then the parade of relievers game. To have a good team u need to win both games within a game. Sox aren't equipped to win both halves consistently. But what am I looking forward to? Last year it was following Jose's at bats more than the team. Too many injuries for my tastes. Frankly if this board didn't exist I'd probably stop following baseball completely. I still have my MLB subscription and still watched my share of innings (usually 7 til 9) a year ago. But right now I can honestly say I hate baseball. Hope I get over it.

As we prepare to tell 2022 to go pack a f&%$ing lunch, let’s look back at this year in White Sox baseball and Soxtalk for any random thoughts about the year. I am not a great prognosticator by any stretch, but I remember speaking with my brother and nephews rather early in the season and saying “I think this year’s team is just a .500 ballclub. I could be wrong but it seems like that is all they are.” I hoped for them to turn it around and they seemed to for a short amount of time when Cairo took over but then they fell flat on their collective faces again. As for Soxtalk, I want to thank everyone here for helping me get through this lot in life that is being a White Sox fan. I am never going to stop being one, so it is great to have a place to commiserate, learn from some very knowledgeable fans, and just to laugh. Any general 2022 thoughts from y’all?? Happy New Year. I hope for everyone here, and their families, that it a very healthy and prosperous 2023.

We need to expand to 32 teams, cut the regular season to 154 games, and make it like the NCAA Match Madness. Every team is in. Four 8 team brackets. Move the finals from site to site like the Super Bowl.

Cause they are?

I dismiss this rumor. If it were remotely true you would hear Bernstein and Holmes all over this.

f*** Rick Hahn and the 2022 horse he rode in on.

The Engel drop and the 6 run collapse against Cleveland are two of the worst losses of the last decade. F*ck 2022. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and I’m optimistic about our chances in 2023. Cheers, fellas.

I miss Alex and Ursula Snelius, our Lithuanian, $64M IL Lottery winners, HR sponsors. May they rest in Peace.

Yes Eminor nailed it. I've been super critical of the Reinsdorf regime . I temper that with optimism each spring because "hope springs eternal" and all that good stuff to prevent myself from being angry or sad about the Sox. I never felt like I was broken but rather just accepted that this is what being a Sox fan under Reindorf is. It wasn't any better under any previous owners in my life . While I am privately optimistic my posts are hyper critical because we've seen so many examples of how JR operates and we conveniently forget most of it when things are looking up. Now is an example of a temporary up time. Clevinger, Benintendi, new coaches all saying the right things. Hoping for best seasons from a lot of guys and Grifol the miracle worker all in the name of continuing to dangle the carrot but hoping our hunger will make us forget how bad they truly are again. Hell I'm still holding out hope that they do something about 4th OFer and figure out a way to find more power while not sacrificing defense. These little slap hitting types and waiting for Robert, Eloy and Vaughn's best seasons and pumping the hype on the new coaches is a huge fucking carrot if I ever saw one.

The trouble with this logic is that, except for 2005, the Sox have done terrible in the playoffs. Time after time they got their hats handed to them. It would be nice to see them win one playoff series or at least be competitive.

Leury was used too much and played too much. If paid and used appropriately his name would never be mentioned except to be a good guy to have around.

You don’t think Colas earned his promotion?

Somehow, this is all the fault of the Village of Bedford Park. I’m certain of it.

Einhorn : Finkel Tray : Reinsdorf

Couldn't agree more with all of this. Leury is the longest tenured player currently and we should be rooting for him to be on a winner. Forcing him into an everyday role made him wear the hole in the lineup and shoulder the scorn from the fan base. Not fair to him.

So Jerry...when are you going to spend that money that was hoarded during the lean rebuild years? We were promised.

No human alive has personally witnessed two White Sox World Series Championships, less than 3,200 are still alive who were born before November 1917. Miami Marlins Founded 1993 World Series Championships: Two (1997 & 2003) The Sox have averaged 4.7 more wins per season under the Rick Hahn GM era (70.0 vs. 65.3). Miami won one playoff series (1-1) to Hahn’s zero (0-2).

Jerry you son of a b**** I knew it was you!

" It’s the sure and certain knowledge that not only does the team not care about us like we care about the team if you think differently, you are a dew-eyed romantic...We see the team as a way to transform our hopes, our emotional investment, our literal financial investment," Your perceived financial investment consists of a couple of Polish and a dozen beers or so a year. Transform your hopes? Please. life is so much more than watching a few baseball games each year. If you are indeed older, you would understand that. "Ah, but they know how we conceive the team. It’s where we’ve made friends, where we’ve gone with our families more times than we can count, where on occasion we stand as one with a rising yell in our throats as a ball traces an arc in the night sky, ready to high-five strangers and jump like lunatics. It’s fun. It’s what we care about. It’s part of who we are." Oh come on. "So I don’t know where this anger is going to go. It’s very possible that it starts another cycle of lower attendance, Jerry using that to slash payroll, and so on, on and on, our endless Kali yuga, hoping to stumble into something lucky, waiting for it to all end. " OK, you are angry so just say you will no longer attend because the WSox are "slashing payroll" like extending Luis Robert, Eloy Jiminez, signing FA Liam Hendriks , Grandal, and more recently Bennintendi for 75 Million dollars and assembling one of the best rotations and bullpens in the league. Like maintaining the financial strength of the franchise to make sure that they stay on the South side for the next generations of Sox fans. It's not all about you. Grow the F up and quit whining.

A replacement level player is by definition 0 WAR per season. Leury has played 10 seasons (wow). That means, on average, he is a 0.3 WAR per season player. He is, effectively, on average, within error of a replacement level player for his career. That's a guy who, overall, you should have a decent chance of replacing with comparable production midseason by picking a guy up on waivers. Overall, no, that is not good enough for a role player. From 2017-2021, a 5 (ok 4.5) year stretch, he put up 5.8 WAR. That...is acceptable for a role player. It's not Chris Taylor who is an excellent utility player, it's not an average starter on a medium team ~(2 WAR per year). But for a backup, playing part time, getting some value out of being able to play at difficult positions, that's a tolerable role player. That isn't a guy who should be batting 2nd or 3rd on anything other than a 55 win team. That isn't a guy who should be batting 3rd while your recent #3 draft pick bats 7th. That isn't a guy who is so important you can't afford to put him on the IL when he's banged up. That isn't a guy who you need to get in the lineup every day because he's so important that he needs at bats to get out of his slump.

Let me look up every contender of all time for you

It's worth celebrating because there's playoff revenue and our favorite team is now in contention to win a Championship however unlikely you view that. If you go back the last 11 World Series the AL Central has been in 4 of them while the East has been in 3. SO always a joke doesn't apply. Doesn't matter how many time the Yankees ousted the Twins because the Yankees didn't get to the World Series either. You can't tell the players it's not worth celebrating when they're all dancing around the clubhouse drinking champagne. They work hard for a goal like that. Plus if they do win the central a lot of things went right and maybe they are btter than we expected and the other teams got some bad luck. False hope is one thing but expecting disaster once in the playoffs depends entirely on what went right with us or wrong with the other teams during the season.

Not to mention getting rid of the home run statue 😭

I'm fine with Leury starting ~80 games around the diamond.

Except for the younger generation, it absolutely is. It's fascinating to talk to kids about how they consume sports. I had breakfast this week with family and my cousin, who is 7, is a fan of basically every AL East team as they live outside of Boston. His favorite team right now is the Blue Jays because of Vlad and Bo Bichette. He watches the game recaps on YouTube every morning. I've got two cousins on the other side of my family who are 10 and 12 and they root for Golden State, the Mavs, and the Suns because of Steph, Luka and Devin Booker. And I've heard that from multiple parents, that with kids having access to YouTube at an early age, they aren't "trapped" by just having to root for the team in the city they live in. They like watching stars, like they watching fun, entertaining games. And maybe that's the way to do it. Additionally, one of the main reasons why the Cubs and Braves became incredibly popular was their accessibility. People across the country could consume those teams on WGN and TBS. In 2022, you can basically consume everything you want from your phone. As time goes on, teams are going to have to not only produce winners, but players people want to see. A team like the White Sox has relied on fans like us being "born into" Sox fandom and knowing they have their hooks locked in, but I don't think that's going to continue with new generations of fans.

Can you imagine if a car company said “we’ll make good cars once people start buying them”?

I really don’t know why people would think this is even a remote possibility. Chicago is the 3rd largest market in the country. The AL will not abandon it

If you're only interested in triumphant projections about the White Sox then you probably should skip all projection threads this year.

Oh I don’t think anyone is penciling them in. A lot has to go right but they do have a bunch of talent. They absolutely can win the division. I don’t know that they’ll be considered favorites to do so though. There are better teams than them for sure. The best team in baseball finishes with the best record after 162. The winner of the tournament wins the World Series though. This year, the best team won the title. Philadelphia got there though. Atlanta won it in 2021. It happens. Get into the playoffs, variance sets in, professional athletes get hot and anything can happen because it’s such a small sample.

Stop what? And what’s so funny?

Nah man. If the Sox were in the AL East, I wouldn’t consider them contenders. They are in the Central though. Win the division, make the playoffs and anything can happen.

So Longenhagen goes by Future Value. I just think a 50 FV reliever isn’t the same thing as a 50 FV outfielder. He does

It’s not the losses that are aggravating enough to lose patience with following the team. I can live with endless failures of execution. But I can’t watch endless intentional brain dead philosophical stupidity.

Join me on the dark side and start streaming NPB lol. It’s all new, no previous loyalties, you get to let your fandom develop organically, and then there’s tons of history to mine. They’re twenty years behind MLB in terms of strategy, so you get to see lots of burning and slashing like people keep saying they want over here again. The talent range is twice as wide as MLB, so the superstars are extremely exciting. The worst players, though, still find a way to be useful by focusing on one thing like defense or contact at the plate. There are less than ten significant free agents every year and they all sign by thanksgiving. High end prospects see top team action often the very next season (draft occurs after the regular season). The only thing is you have to watch all the games on recorded delay and you can’t understand a god damn word anyone is saying.

If the White Sox are AL Central contenders, they’re also World Series contenders. It’s the nature of the sport. Win the division, get into the tournament and see what happens.

What window?

What

Still pisses me off that the Sox tanked a whole season only to draft Madrigal. Who in thier right minds would ever draft a college player with a top 5 pick that can barely hit the ball 400 feet during batting practice? The guy is also one of the worst baserunners I have ever seen. Whoever scouted and signed off on the Madrigal pick hopefully is no longer employed by the White Sox.

Does anyone know anything about the “Reinsdorf joking about his team sucking while getting an award at the winter meetings” part of this? That claim was news to me.

While the Sox couldn't "afford" Senga's interpreter, this one is believable.

The Padres gave It a shot for Judge. Machado has his opt out after next season which , unless he gets hurt, he will opt out. He will easily be able to beat the 5 and $150 million that will be left on the deal. Sox were worried about year 8. Clowns.