WestEddy

Attacking? LOL. Calm down, already. Nobody attacked anybody. I've been very nice, and make sure to let everyone know that I want them to criticize Reinsdorf, Getz and the White Sox. If you want to call 2024 Hot Garbage, I invite you to. Going forward, I disagree. Simple as that. Need a band-aid? Davis Martin made 10 starts and racked up 0.9 bWAR. Sean Burke made 3 and racked up the same 0.9 bWAR. They weren't the problem. Jonathan Cannon made some adjustments and turned out to be a pretty reliable starter.

Reinsdorf sure didn't help Allen get into the Hall. Is that what you're implying? Or, am I inferring that correctly?

They are investing today. Because they still literally have over a hundred pitchers in their minor league system. A bullpen arm isn't a luxury item. It's like they sold one share of soy futures out of their vast portfolio to buy a car to get to work. Still invested in the future, obtaining a necessity to conduct business in the present.

And we've already had this clarification conversation. If I say a guy like Mason Adams is a legitimate starting pitching prospect, I'm not saying, "Dude, he's super-legit" like he's a sure fire all-star. I'm saying that the team is bringing him along with an eye on getting him major league starter innings. If the Sox pick up, say, Phillip Humber and stow him at AAA, nobody plans for him to be developed into a big league rotational starter, anymore. So, Riley Gowens, or Aldrin Batista have a clear path to big league starter innings if they keep developing. They're legitimate pitching prospects. In the case of Shane Drohan, if the guy wasn't injured, for sure he would have gotten starts before Thorpe, and definitely before Keller and Kuhl. Drohan was mentioned as a rotation option when he was drafted. I don't know if that was bad scouting, or Getz not doing his due diligence, but it happened. I said the Sox had 15 legitimate starting prospects across 4 levels, you asked who, and I listed out about 19-20 guys, including Drohan. I've explained this to you twice, now, and you know it. 2025 - okay, strong is probably the wrong word. Then stable. Sean Burke has been noted in a couple "just missed the top 100" lists. He's a guy. He'll get a chance to start. Davis Martin and Jon Cannon will start games, and will most probably cover 5 innings of those starts. Maybe 6. That will be better than most of the Sox' first month or two of starting pitching in 2024. This, in turn, will keep the bullpen from being taxed like they were in 2024, removing that "excuse".

I think you meant to say that they sold one asset for another asset (and necessity, really) they felt could deliver a quick bump.

Hot garbage? Maybe we just use words differently. You don't think a pitcher having success in the minors is a "pitching prospect" unless he's ranked top 50 in the game, basically. And a guy who has shown he can throw consistent quality starts in the bigs is "Hot garbage". See, you and others can keep declaring every player is garbage, and when that player actually does well, or brings back a good player in trade, nobody cares that you were wrong. I say the word "lockdown" in a heated back and forth once, and that might as well be my screen name. Being negative is a low risk proposition. I guess that's why so many just blurt out negative things. Being slightly negative with a sunny disposition, like I am, gets you branded a kook.

Right. One can either buy a Lotto ticket for a 2029 drawing, or you can get a job, and start drawing a paycheck in 2 weeks. It's also a thing to shore up the bullpen using a teenager who's 5 years away, then trade him for another teenager who's 5 years away, or maybe even a shortstop who's 2 years away.

Bryce

An 18-year-old pitcher who will spend the summer in the complex league won't be of help at the big league level for 5 years. I'm glad you agree the Sox have a decent farm system. We do have a glut of pitching. There's no problem trading an A-ball reliever for bullpen depth. I'm sorry you don't think so.

The rotation should be more settled on OD than last year, with 5 strong starters. Last year, Soroka, Flexen and Nastrini were not major league ready. 5 of Perez, Cannon, Martin, Burke, Thorpe, Wilson, Shane Smith, Nobody said that roster problems are a thing of the past. You even just argued with me when I said starting pitching in the minors is facing a bit of a logjam (roster problems) at some levels. What is it with you guys, and the word "excuse"? To say that they made bad roster decisions isn't an excuse. The words "reason" and "excuse" aren't interchangeable. Learn them, okay? I don't care what you believe. (I can feel you and Tony rising up to now argue that I care...) If Bannister and Katz can't teach a new pitch to a 30 year old reliever who has already experienced some success in the big leagues, then there's no point to anything.

Which is all expected. I'm not saying, "Hmmm, we have 29 guys for 20 spots. We better trade 9 of them." It's not radical to say that some guys are probably going to start at a level below what their development calls for just because of a logjam.

Great, now the Dodgers are going to start signing everybody's GMs.

Well, whatever happened last year, between a bad starting rotation to begin with that just ate up the bullpen early, a bad manager, some bad roster decisions in camp, misreading how to augment what their pitchers had to throw, communication with pitchers who had a bad back, one would expect them to have ironed that out this time around.

I guess I just don't have the ability to separate out people asking a question in earnest and just setting me up to take the piss out of me.

The entire Booser/Fajardo conversation has been that Getz is betting he gets back more in value for Booser than Fajardo was worth coming out of Dominican rookie ball. And he'll get 4 months of bullpen coverage. We all understand that, and you don't need to belabor what, in fact, has been the whole crux of the Booser conversation all along. I'd be shocked if you called any Getz acquisition mediocre.

Nope. You're playing word games. You guys ask me a question, and I'll give you a full, good faith answer. I thought this board was a little more jokey when I amped up last winter. But apparently, me being light about the bullpen and "Nicky .300" really hurt some people. Here's a list of pitchers who could very well be vying for spots in the AAA rotation: Iriarte, Nastrini, Eder, W. Gonzalez, Ky Bush, Mason Adams, Justin Dunn, and Thorpe will probably rehab there. That's 8 starters. AA: Schultz, Tyler Schweitzer, Gowens, Juan Carella That's only 4, but maybe they get Adams back until the logjam at AAA clears. Some of the guys behind them will be pushing quickly. High-A: Hagen Smith, Grant Taylor, Tanner McDougal, Shane Murphy, Lucas Gordon, Tommy Vail, Aldrin Batista, Seth Keener, John Bockenstedt 9 guys. Some of these guys, like Bockenstedt might be bounced out or to the bullpen. But already, they're backing up. Batista is borderline AA. Hagen Smith will move quickly. There might be lingering injuries, but you see the jam forming. Low-A: Jake Peppers, Ricardo Brizuela, Carlton Perkins, Justin Sinibaldi You also have Christian Oppor, Mathias LaCombe, Blake Larson, Maximo Martinez. There's a couple more I'm not recognizing because of bad numbers, but they have stuff, and Getz still wants them. Some guys here will argue that we only really have 2-1/2 pitching prospects in the system. Schultz, Hagen Smith and Grant Taylor. But there's a whole slew of these guys who are actual prospects that need to throw innings every 5. I just listed 29 guys for 20-24 rotation spots. No, they're not all sexy, and some will be an easy call to toss in the bullpen. But you read and listen to the same stuff I do. To pretend that you don't know any of this is silly. We have a glut of pitching, and we'll be adding to it in this year's draft. So anybody thinking I'm "full of it" is just being argumentative.

We were both wrong. Your implication was that none of these players deserved major league innings because they all sucked, which you could tell, and they would never attain the numbers of a couple years ago. A small bunch of these guys actually did. You even mocked the notion that Fedde's experience in Korea was indicative of anything, that he was a bum, also. The "depth" he tried to create last year was in rehabbing closers and set-up guys. I thought that was an interesting idea, but it didn't work. I'm guessing timelines with deadlines, or maybe even players even forced the issue to get back on the FA market and not participate in the slaughter that was the 2024 bullpen. I don't think Getz "nailed" it this off-season. I've already said that he's assembling a group that can hit the ground running, instead of carrying 6 guys coming off of surgeries. He is also starting the year with at least 5 healthy starting pitchers who have has at least some little success in their current form. He started last year with 2 question marks in Crochet and Fedde, 2 rehab cases in Soroka and Flexen, and then a hodge podge of AAAA maybes in Nastrini, Clevenger, Shuster, Chad Kuhl, Woodbridge, etc. If the bullpen is exactly the same, they won't have as much put on them early.

Seriously, I don't want you to buy into Chris Getz. I've already said that. Please don't buy into Chris Getz. You can convey that by making actual arguments, not doing drive-by "I'm laughing at you and your posts" nonsense.

Yes, those are player names. You pretty much called all those guys bums as soon as they were acquired, and hooted when I called that a shutdown bullpen. You laughed at the notion of Tim Hill realizing his ceiling from a couple years back, and voila, he did just that with the Yankees. Why don't you pull up your posts from then so we can both laugh at your lack of foresight together? And BTW, pretty much all those guys are still bouncing around the league, which tells me that other organizations see some potential in them. Funny, huh?

It is not ridiculous, for all the reasons I have given you. People here claim that 121 losses is fan-killing. (Auto-fill wanted to put in "fantastic".) If it is, then Getz needs to take care of an area that bled losses last year. He seems to feel he's doing that. Good for him, I'll wait to see if it works.

I don't see the problem in "trading" a guy who fell off the table because of an injury he wouldn't acknowledge (Wilson claimed his back injury wasn't what was affecting his bad numbers) for somebody he thinks has more potential. And if Wilson clears waivers, all the better. I'll repeat Dick Allen's line in that you're not being clever. This is a typical, end of the roster move that all teams make. It doesn't reflect on anybody except yourself when you pretend it has deeper meaning, and yet another example of how Getz sucks at his job.

That wasn't intended to be clever. The losses seem to matter to you. Getz is assembling bullpen depth that he didn't last year so that the bullpen isn't a sieve. I don't really think setting the loss record was a "plan". You guys keep bringing up picking no higher than 10th like there's some correct strategic planning that should have happened around that pick. They pick first in rounds 2-20. They picked first in the Rule 5 draft. They have first priority on waiver claims through opening day. The losses do bother me, and I have expressed that from time to time. There's a whole list of roster moves, trades, signings and such that I didn't like, and voiced it when they happened. I don't need to keep doing that on a daily basis, and express anger over them. It's done.

The Fletcher trade wasn't "catastrophic" either. Yes, Getz has to start winning some of these inconsequential trades, but they hardly rise to the level of catastrophic. The jury's still out on Vargas. I've admitted that Getz got spun around and hoodwinked on the Fedde trade, which he can't allow to happen anymore. Chicago White Sox dude summed it up nicely that JR chose familiarity over experience, so there's going to be some growing pains. Additionally, we have no idea what info he was getting from a scouting department that he eventually cleaned out at the end of the year. People went on and on about Matt Thompson and Cristian Mena, like they were building blocks. They weren't. Mena was interesting, Thompson is a real estate salesman just waiting for his current career to finish up.

You really need to get beyond your Logan's Run complex. I would hope that Booser and Gilbert aren't around on August 1. Booser is a live lefty arm who has value, much more if they tweak him and he becomes even better than he was last year. I don't care who remembers what. Memorable names really isn't the goal here, is it? Creating value and bringing back prospects is. I'm not sure how it's "wise" to not talk about baseball players on a baseball forum.

I pretty much responded to your post, point by point. You don't want the Sox expending talent they control to shore up the major league bullpen. You say they already have what they're acquiring, and that more is available on the market for cheap. I believe they signed the guys they were interested in, and traded for guys who were DFAed that interested them. I don't see an actual question in your comment, so I'm not sure what else to respond to. I'm sorry my style of writing offends you. It seems to be an actual sticking point, where if I reference something I've been beaten over the head with, you become so distracted, you can't even follow a conversation. Now, I guess you'll get distracted by that sentence, and accuse me of whining about the environment here. All to avoid the simple question of whether losses matter or not. If they do, then Getz needs to shore up the major league bullpen. If they don't, then I'll be glad to never hear about 121 losses again. If both wins and development matter, then good for you, Getz is already multitasking that, some of which requires trading from depth to fill.