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shame on anyone who spends money on this organization next year, this is insulting

They had 20% of the list last year and he’s worse now than when he was with the Sox. Does Garfein think shortstop and third base don’t need fixing? Left field is solid? There are too many holes on this team. They are not getting filled.

Good teams can lose their best RH hitter and barely skip a beat. Congrats to the Rangers for doing a rebuild the right way and convincing a HOF manager to join them in their journey. Reinsdorf should be ashamed of how he operates things. Every year he is proven again to be a farce of an owner.

Guys with 2 WS MVP trophies: Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax, Reggie Jackson, Corey Seager.

Now that he's won a World Series in an odd-numbered year, yes.

There were a ton of misses with the rebuild, but la Russa over bochy really sent things downhill. He's the best manager of the past 50 years and it's not close.

Dane Dunning and Marcus Semien are World Series champions. Let that set in.

I know but I think it's kinda both sides needing each other. I don't know that it will work, but kinda feels like a Love Island episode where someones about to be eliminated because they've alienated a bunch of people, only to find someone just broke up and equally kinda sucks.

RF: Michael Conforto (0.7) / Gavin Sheets (-1.4) + 2.1 2B: Whit Merrifield (0.8) / Elvis Andrus (0.6) + 0.2 C : Austin Hedges (-0.1) / Yasmani Grandal (-0.7) + 0.6 SP: Lucas Giolito (-1.2) / Lucas Giolito (2.8) - 1.6 SP: Jack Flaherty (-0.5) / Mike Clevinger (2.2) -1.7 So basically, we would be LOSING 0.4 WAR with these 5 signings depending on how you hash it out.

However they get to that point, recognizing that "they can't actually contend next year" is actually the right conclusion. If that leaves their 5th or 6th starter spots open for Eder or other guys who are probably all going to suck but who can get tryouts, sure go for it. Just don't say "Eder can be our 4th starter" and "I'm going to trade Quero for Perez because we gotta get that leadership to contend this year" at the same time.

Kim Ng hasn’t been a GM for 122 years. She’s been a GM in the era of 40% off teams making the playoffs. It’s not that impressive. And the Sox are an overall embarrassment of a team historically, especially for a major market. Using their futility to counter the above paragraph isn’t fooling anyone.

I want it on record, unless I'm wrong then everyone forget it, I am intrigued by Eder still. Big guys take a lot longer to put it together command wise sometimes, and command and stuff taking a step back later in a coming-off-injury year is totally normal. The concern for me is health - can he even get enough reps to find the pieces. I still think there's a lot more to complain about than him and while I wish we still had burger, Eder is a lottery ticket I think cashes more than not and his upside is exciting.

Let's be real, this team doesn't win with Bochy either. The roster was too damn flawed.

He wasn't actually good until 2019. He was pretty mediocre for the A's until Ron Washington taught him how to defense. Then he learned that elevating and pulling the ball = homers and he's been pretty good ever since.

Congrats to the Rangers. Good to see them win it all.

Good for Marcus Semien.

Marcus Semien. Where have I heard that name before?

The Womens' College Basketball Championship was pretty epic, though. Much more compelling than this World Series.

That’s a long way of saying “swamp balls”.

A few things of note: 1. Vote for Jacob! See the player in front with the Sox uni and amazing flow? That's our guy Jacob Burke, and if you have a minute, you can vote for him to make the Fall Stars game 😊 The game is Sunday, and the link to vote is here: https://www.mlb.com/arizona-fall-league/fall-stars-game/final-2-vote 2. Montgomery interview Colson Montgomery sat down for an interview with MLB Pipeline: They talked about his time in AFL, the Seager comps, and his confidence about sticking at short (though he said the Sox can stick him at 3B, RF, or wherever, and he's down if it gets wins). Maybe most interestingly, he confirmed that he's a Bledsoe guy (like Burger, Brent Rooker, Ryan Noda, Brandon Lowe) and iPitch fan. Like LRJ, he says he doesn't like to overdo it with too much data ("hitting is hard enough"). He also confirmed that he's swinging more aggressively by design to test some things out against AFL pitching, hence the uncharacteristic BB/K numbers. Interview starts about ~22 minutes into the episode. 3. Dominguez in DR Johan Dominguez pitched in LIDOM yesterday. He went 3IP, 1ER, 3H, 2BB, 1K. The run was a little unlucky, scored on a single and steal followed by two flyouts that both advanced the runner. He's at 6IP, 1ER total through 2 outings.

I would rather spend the season seeing what you have in some of the young bucks rather than doing this lightning in a bottle nonsense again.

If you ever heard Trestman at the end, you know what you are hearing

Point taken. But I’m looking at this from a league-wide perspective, not just from our pitiful point of view.

"Guys, Jake Eder looks so ready (dont look at his stats), dont worry we wont need any free agent signings this offseason ;)"

Not sure if any of you heard Eberflus press conference, but holy s%*# is he gone. Just fuckin quit and go, dude, this is beyond your capabilities

The name I was told went along the lines of "Comiskey Park at Wintrust Field." And I was told the same thing that there was a higher bidder that certain members of the organization withheld some info from JR.

I am definitely nervous about the Sweat trade, but that said am a bit embarrassed at how behind the strategy the national writers of the sport are. Biggs and the local writers caught on by this year. This is definitely a new thing. The trade deadline was largely a calendar item of the same significance of whatever "national hot dog day" level occasions there were. But there has definitely been a shift where teams have either gotten so good at managing the cap, along with the franchise tag just continuing to exist in CBA navigations, where FA has been void of finding significant upgrades. You can sign a "top tackle on the market" like Mike McGlinchey, but it's not clear you get an upgrade. You do pay a lot though. So if you are a team, you have two avenues of explicitly adding top talent. Draft and FA. When FA is only providing the ability to improve bad talent to average talent at a premium, you are stuck with hoping it is a good draft that supplies talent at the places you need. And that they produce right away. Because otherwise, you are Sasha from the Browns, trying only to improve via draft and getting fired before you can see the rewards. So now you have teams going to teams with FAs, who have ample ability to keep via tags or other measures, but have some incentive to let them leave via comp picks. The market has been to either match the comp pick (except it's same year, so more valuable), or more. That market hasn't really been established yet, and it's where it feels nerve wrecking since a top 2nd is valuable (it basically netted a tyreek hill), you can't use it twice, and I'm not sure Sweat is the best you could net for that. But the lens of national writers is to view football like baseball or basketball. I.e. Why not sign them in the offseason. But after being a bears fan who basically cashed that Daron Payne would be a bear, it's not a real thing. You don't know who will hit, and often it's way worse than the level of FAs, and rarely is it someone south of 30 years old. I think it shows it's not worth it to rip an NFL team down to the studs. I think our secondary is hard to judge with how bad our D line is. I think our offense was hard to judge last year with how bad our WR was. And it's too hard to fix it in one offseason. As the sox have taught me, you don't really improve replacing below average with average. You need to add elite. But adding elite players in the nfl is extremely hard to time. And now we end up trying to time better with a top 20 guy...but not an elite guy.

Im not diving into the Kim Ng good or not debate, all I am saying is if you're a fan of the Chicago White Sox you really shouldn't be scoffing at someone else's playoff appearance count.

The White Sox have been around since 1901, that's 122 years. We have made the playoffs 11 times in that 122 year span. While playoffs have slowly expanded over that time frame, there is no Sox fan that should be calling making the playoffs unimpressive.

If the White Sox signed all 5 of those players, they would be adding a whopping 1.1 bWAR to their 100 loss team. Aint no way they improve by 15 games with those guys, none.

They improve 15 games, they win 76. That;s a good year for Rick Hahn, but really no one else.

Yeah and who's the closer?

Also, I feel like Bochy wanted to use him there.

See Jose Paniagua disaster game against Minny...

Semien and Seager might say otherwise 😳

Not hot enough.

I don't think that's totally fair. I definitely like the non-chauvinistic atmosphere of this board that doesn't unfairly diminish a woman's accomplishments; at the same time I think fans are exaggerating about how "she's the one that got away." Being more qualified than Getz and having a longer resume isn't in and of itself an accomplishment. The Marlins also barely snuck into a Wild Card spot and were quickly eliminated, that was the only winning season under her leadership. Of course, it's a major step forward for the sport that she earned that job and performed it well, and I really hope it inspires teams to consider more women for executive roles and inspires girls to realize their potential; but again, those Marlins teams kinda sucked. They pretty much sucked this year too, it's just that anything looks better than the dumpster fire that was the 2023 White Sox. All this is to say, I don't actually think it matters that much who the 'top dog' is, what matters is the quality of the support staff. You can hire all these brilliant middle managers, but what's the point if they have no employees to manage? Is Reinsdorf going to pay salaries and benefits to 100 more scouts, coaches and analysts? Those people might unionize, that's the "risk" of hiring staff. I'd also speculate at Ng's academic background for the same reason as Hahn, these eggheads have been brainwashed into the mantra that "lean" organizations are the best option, that you only need 1 or 2 Ivy League types and the few technicians are just yokels who carry out orders. My belief is that these execs actually agree with Jerry about how to run a business and their ego is stroked by having outsized success on a shoestring budget that they can credit entirely to themselves. The only people who actually care about winning is fans.

The World Series with its lowest ratings ever nobody knows it's even on and they just extended Manfred for like 5 more years lmao

thought when I saw he walked it off it was a homer, but still a pretty sweet, deep hit with the CF playing in.

It's been 25 days since the last White Sox loss. That hasn't happened since April 2023.

She certainly knows more about baseball than you ever will. Just saying…

so we are an organization that went from one of the Worst GMs in baseball and one of the worst in team history to a guy who clearly wasn’t qualified for the job and was hired without a competitive interview because he couldn’t possibly look like he deserves the job if he had to interview… And average would be a problem? Do you realize what a monstrous upgrade average front office performance would be?

The only guy who should truly care about ratings for the MLB playoffs is Phil in accounting, because it's his job to. Literally no one else should care about MLB playoff ratings. Go ahead and care about NBA playoff ratings, they matter for the sport a lot. The playoffs are 2 months, that's 25% of the length of the entire season, and TV revenue from that makes up a big percentage of league revenues. Baseball's playoffs are one month long, so they're 1/6 of the regular season. They are a far lower percentage of total league revenues, they have much less to do with the health of the league overall. They're nice, but they don't determine the health of the league. What we see instead - take a look at the Phillies attendance. In 2018, their attendance was down at 2.15 million. It jumped to 2.7 million in 2019 when they signed Harper, but it was down to 2.27 million in 2022. In 2023, their attendance was 3.05 million, an increase of 800,000 tickets in 1 year. That's for making the World Series, not winning it. Our experience with the 2005 White Sox shows that these attendance boosts from winning last for years, you could be talking about 4 or 5 million extra ticket sales for a team from making one world series altogether, that's what the White Sox saw and they fell apart after winning their title. The Phillies will probably draw 3 million+ again next year, and the following year, and even if they have to rebuild, they'll still draw 2.8 million, then 2.7 million, and it will only decline slowly. On top of just the ticket sales themselves, ratings for the local broadcasts will go up which puts money directly into the pockets of many of these franchises, parking revenues go up, concession sales go up, and ad sales in the park go up. This is where the real money is for baseball, it's in their long regular season. Bringing in smaller markets and putting them in the World Series is VERY GOOD for baseball even if the ratings are low. In 2022, Arizona sold 1.6 million tickets, Texas sold 2 million. In 2023 just by being competitive, Arizona sold 1.96 million, Texas sold 2.5 million. I will give you a strong bet that those will go up again for both franchises next year. This is big money for the local markets. Their ad sales rates will go up, their ticket prices will go up, Texas might sell 3 million tickets next year. Furthermore, there are long term benefits. Arizona will be filled with Corbin Carroll jerseys for years. Kids who are 6 years old are going to become fans of the Arizona Diamondbacks and want to get Carroll's autograph. Dallas will start being filled with Garcia jerseys. These benefits will last for years. Ballparks also hold 2 to 2.5 times the number of fans that NBA games hold. Baseball makes its money on the long regular season. It's why they developed their own streaming platform, which was one of the first sports streaming platforms and which earned them like $3 billion when it was sold. They're even able to do things like the TBS, Fox, and now Apple TV contracts for extra money during the regular season because they have so many games. It is a good thing for baseball to have a Boston New York ALCS every now and then, because it's great TV, it gets those markets involved, and it has some crossover effect. But it is also a great thing for baseball to have a lowly rated World Series because the Diamondbacks and the Rangers are in it, or the Phillies and Astros, or the Marlins and Royals. Having these small market teams make the World Series reduces the ratings at the time, but it massively boosts the revenue of the local franchises and it does so in a way that lasts for years and helps create lifelong fans of those teams.

Having moved to Phoenix 2.5 years ago, it's very easy to cheer on a team like the Dbacks. My old team does not develop players to get them ready for big games like Arizona does. Yin and yang. The white Sox frankly need to be launched into the sun. This world series should be a stark reminder to those fucking morons what could have been. Go Dbacks!