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Don’t know anything about this, but I had to miss some work when I got my reduction.

Still crazy to me how the Sox haven’t done a single thing the last month to provide depth if Hendriks is out for the year and/or Clevinger never pitches here. It’s sickening how little they care about contending. Based on how this offseason went, I wish they blew up the whole thing.

The Sox won 81 games last year despite the following: They were managed by a corpse who's decisions more often than not seemed like he was actually trying to put the team in a position to lose. He also set a precedent that hustling was not important. Luis Robert recorded 2 RBI and 0 HR after July 14th - yes 2 friggin RBI - despite appearing in 25 games. Missed 64 total games, but played 25 with 1 hand. Robert basically missed the entire 2nd half of the season. Tim Anderson missed 83 games, although wasn't himself even after returning from the May groin injury. Yoan Moncada missed 58 games, and when he played, he posted a wRC+ of 76, a significant drop from 120 in 2021, and WELL below his career average of 108, which includes the awful 2022. Eloy Jimenez missed 78 games. While he did post a strong wRC+ when he played, he still missed half the season, although expecting Eloy to play more than 120 games is fools good. Yasmani Grandal was -0.4 fWAR and 68 wRC+ player after posting 3.6 fWAR and 158 wRC+ in 2021. Chances are Grandal didn't completely forget how to hit a baseball at 33 years old. We now know he was dealing with significant injuries all season. I don't have high hopes for Grandal finding the fountain of youth in 2023, but I think it'd be very difficult for him not to improve on his 2022 in a time share. The Sox spent the vast majority of the season playing two first basemen in the OF leaving them with easily the worst OF defense in the game. This turned a 113 wRC+ effort from Andrew Vaughn into a negative fWAR player. The days of Vaughn being anything more than an emergency OF are over. Lynn, Kopech and Giolito all missed starts, with Lynn and Kopech missing significant time. Bummer missed significant time. Basically, nearly everything that could have gone wrong, did go wrong in 2022. Despite all of that going wrong, the Sox still were as close as 3 games back in mid September. I can understanding looking at this group and being discouraged. We lost a franchise pillar in Jose Abreu, which sucks. But in doing so improved the OF defense immensely which was, in my opinion, the biggest team need along with getting more left handed. While we didn't get as left handed as I would have liked, adding Benintendi and Colas will balance the lineup a great deal, especially if Moncada and Yaz bounce back, even modestly. This offseason sucked. Jerry is the worst. Hahn appears to be puzzled, and handcuffed. The Clevinger thing is terrible. Lots of bad. But this this squad still has a boatload of talent, and the division still isn't good. The Twins have hardly improved on a team that finished 3 games behind the Sox. The Guardians are the Guardians, and frankly were bad for most of the season before getting hot at the right time. I think all three of those clubs will finish above .500 and we'll have an entertaining 3 team race all season. I would be really shocked to see things go as poorly for The Sox in 23 and they did in 22. I have this team winning 88 games, and I think 90+ is in the cards if their best players can stay healthy enough play 130+ games. I, for one, cannot wait for April for some White Sox baseball. I think this club will surprise, and I think Grifol will be the freshest of fresh air for the boys.

We will learn a lot about the Sox this season. It's funny because despite my ultra-pessimism lately, I can still picture the season going one of a couple of ways. I have said it before, but it bears repeating, this is the first normal spring training since 2019. There is no COVID limitations or interruptions, there is no lock out or strike, For the first time in years players can operate normally in the post season time with work outs and training, and working with White Sox officials directly and in person, instead of virtually, or not at all. It is also the first year post Tony, and I really feel like that will make a difference all by itself. Look I have no idea what to expect out of this new staff, exactly, but I have to imagine at the very least they will get the baseball rules down, and most other basics. That also it worth something. The other side is this team has zero depth and a real injury history. Can some of that be fixed with proper off seasons? Maybe? Who knows.

thought this was about eye contacts. Dailies are expensive.

and they lost their best hitter and second best starter, haven't replaced any of them but they're going to be better. Ok

Think how small it must be.

25 million a year is not enough of a penis enlargement?

Under, easiest money you could get.

sounds a little high to me. we'll run out of starting pitchers around June.

I purposefully didn't post the thread earlier just to see if anyone else had enough excitement or interest to do so. Nice work this off season squad. The interest in this squad is DOA.

https://www.wsiforumstoo.com/74118-the-state-of-the-sox I spoke with six sources for the story all connected in a professional way to the franchise

Just like Leury.

Your case for the under is like 3 times as long as your case for the over. Just saying.

Everybody cites "81 wins" as if it's the definitive and precise mathematical measure of team quality, but let's face it -- there are different ways to get to 81 wins. They were 5 games over and very much in the race going into that September Cleveland series, and frankly took their foot off the gas for several weeks once they lost that first Cleveland series game in a heartbreaker. They were in free-fall for a while after they realized they were out of it. They were probably an 85-win team that fell to .500. A meaningless and negligible difference, really, but then so is the difference between 81 and 83.5. 83.5 seems reasonable. As a sidenote, I love threads like this where neutral, outside reality creeps in to the Soxtalk doom chamber for a moment. The cognitive dissonance can be fascinating to watch. I swear, we could be heading into the ALCS next year and somebody would post that "the people celebrating the ALCS are missing the real point, which is that Rick Hahn failed to sign Zach Wheeler in the 2019 offseason and..."

Wow what a quality thread

You can't just look at offense. Abreu is undoubtedly a better offensive player than Benintendi, but you need to look at the whole picture. The domino effect improved our outfield defense by A LOT.

Is that a mini Vienna sausage in your pocket or are happy to see me?

This is why I just can’t be as doom and gloom as 98% of this board is. Don’t get me wrong, the front office has royal F’ed a lot of things up…but at the core there is still a lot of really good talent in this organization. Things aren’t as bleak as most would lead you to believe. No denying depth is an issue tho.

If true, he really should be in a Sox uniform.

It’s true but the budget fluctuates from year to year depending on attendance and other factors. And the owner wasted the last two years on Tony La Russa

Bet the freakin house on the under.

Especially since Hahn, at the Benintendi press conference, said they weren't a finished product. Since that quote, which is now a month old, they have acquired 0 MLB players

That was not a positive read.

This thread is longer than . . . Yeah too easy

I think you are missing our point. Wins don’t matter in assessing how good a pitcher performed. But people were claiming that the TEAM wouldn’t have won as many games without the great performance of Cueto, and that simply isn’t true. You said that we “can’t say Cueto didn’t pitch well”, and you’re absolutely right. He pitched great.

Cueto was great for the Sox after they got him for basiscally nothing because no one wanted to sign him. SP wins don't matter that much. Its not a SP fault if he goes 7 strong and hte team doesn't score any runs for him or the pen blows it. But teams wins certainly matter. Sox went 11-14 in the games Cueto started. That is a fact. Yes he gave them a chance to win more often than not, but the reality is the team didn't win more often than not in the games he start. I do believe that Mike Clevinger (if he pitches for Sox) or Davis Martin or AJ Alexy or some combination thereof could probably rival a .440 winning percentage across 25 starts. No, its not mostly Cueto's fault the team didn't perform well in his starts, but replacing a pitcher who a .500 team won less than 50% of his starts should not be that hard. I wish Johnny Cueto well, but I look forward to him being terrible in 2023 like he was for the lionshare of the last half decade so he stops getting brought up here 25x a day.

injury prone team, lost their best hitter without a proper replacement, 75-80 wins max. pitching won't carry them all year

“I was in the pool!!!”

Cueto started 25 games last year, and we only won 11 of those games. Yes, he was a fantastic surprise last year, but we didn't win that many of the games he started. If I was the starting pitcher for all 25 of those game, the Sox would have ended with 70 wins. If somebody like Davis Martin started all 25 of those game, the team win/loss results probably aren't much different than what Cueto did.

Thank you. I always see the "everything went wrong last year and they still won 81 games" line, but I couldn't disagree with it more. Had Cueto and Andrus not shown up and played like it was 2011, last year's team probably wins more like 72 games. Elvis Andrus was a 7.5 fWAR/162 player for the White Sox last year. Things like that don't happen in a year where "everything goes wrong," and the true worst case scenario for this team is accordingly much lower than 81 wins

Yes, all everyone on this site has done all offseason is avoid that conversation.

Sure but if you had asked me which was more likely to happen, it was Leury by a country mile.

Granted we're only 33 days into 2023, but this is the post of the year so far. I'll add one thing: You mentioned that Robert basically missed the second half of the year, but it was actually WORSE than that. He was hurting the team, and the Sox would have likely been better off if he was actually just out the entire second half.

Lol, what a take that is. Cueto and Elvis were great. No doubt about that. But I will take immensely talented players in their prime (like TA, Robert, Eloy, Moncada) being healthy and playing up to their potential than over the hill players doing well in SSS. I will gladly take health of the Sox core in 2023 over betting Cueto and Elvis could recreate their 2022 magic, or in the case of Elvis, like 1 month of magic. Without looking, I seem to recall him being pretty terrible last couple weeks of the season (i think he had like an 0-25 stretched)....it really was just a really hot couple weeks for him after coming over. In any event, I guess we'll see what happens.

Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Except: -They picked up Johnny Cueto off the scrap heap and found their second best pitcher of the season. The only reason he was even available when he was signed was the lockout. Had Lance Lynn not gotten hurt, they never sign Cueto - who outperformed everyone other than Cease in their rotation. They had a replacement for Keuchel because of this. -They picked up Elvis Andrus off the scrap heap and got 2 months of darn near MVP performance from him. He was a notable upgrade over Tim Anderson for those 2 months, they got better because Anderson got hurt. We will probably never see that kind of upgrade from a midseason veteran put on waivers again in our lifetimes. -Seby Zavala, per innings played, was one of the most effective catchers in baseball. Effective offensively, avoided some of the defensive issues that plagued him in 2021. This combined with McGuire turned the White Sox' -The guys they brought in off the scrap heap were so effective that it basically offset almost all of the losses to injury (except for the stupidity with Robert's wrist). Had they been the healthiest team in baseball, they're basically the same team in the end, because of how effective these guys were. -They weren't all that banged up anyway compared to the rest of the league. For example, "the White Sox had 3 pitchers hit the IL" compared to "Detroit's entire opening day starting rotation was on the IL when we faced them for a 3 game series. Ponder what the White Sox's losing streak would look like if they lost all 5 starters for a month. -Their competition was weaker than expected, particularly Detroit because of how banged up they were. 19 games against that banged up Detroit team. They outscored Detroit 100-59 on the season. -They outperformed their run differential the whole season. Say what you want about ineffective management, this is generally a sign of luck that can't be easily repeated. -Their bullpen performed extremely well in close games. Their record in 1 run games was top 5 in baseball, tied with Cleveland for that performance. This was notably better than their performance in the same type of games in 2021 and will be particularly difficult to repeat now that Hendriks is out for the year.

Mired in mediocrity.

I would have thought this pre-hendriks/clevinger but those were pretty big hits. I think I'm higher on our near available position player depth than most, but still terrified of our pitching depth. Agree with others that it's such a miss not to add a Justus Sheffield. I think he's probably bad but he is younger than these 34 year old AA pitchers we've been putting in AAA.

I’m not predicting 90 losses, but I think they will be closer to 90 losses than 90 wins. Too many question marks and too many holes, with next to no depth, near ready prospects, or available funds to add. Banking on perfect health and spectacular bounce back from everyone feels like a recipe for failure.

The very first game is on ESPN.

As a player of both games, I’m enjoying the show and the differences they have been mixing in.

And she'll like it too....unless it goes wrong.

Even though Hahn sucks and didn't do a damn thing this off season, I still have a feeling this team surprises us. I'd easily take the over, by more than a few games too. It will be interesting to looks back on this thread months from now and see who was right.

Pound the over

Call me a fool but I would have kept Jhonny and Elvis and found a couple more like them. Someone needs to work with Yo and recover his left side stroke. We need playahs.

I’m holding out hope Hahn is hiding a trick up his sleeve and pulls off a trade to improve the major league roster. Foolish I know, but maybe a trade is more likely when teams have otherwise settled their rosters. Someone pointed out the plethora of 6th starter options the Padres have, maybe they would be more apt to unload one during spring training after they get a fresh look at them, for example

Have to go under here. They didn't improve an 81 win team and instead are hoping for major bounce backs and health from multiple players. Very disappointing off-season.

Pitching is way too thin to take the over, particularly when our top two hitters are prone to go down for half a season. One of our starting pitchers and one of Eloy or Robert are injured this team could easily lose ninety plus games. If the four top starters pitch 30 games and those two play 140 games they could win some games but no way I’m taking that bet

Seems about right but I’d lean towards the over myself.

It's Davis Martin, damnit. I know you get a woody over every Padre move, but at least get the Sox names right!!!