WestEddy

You seem to be implying that the White Sox' drafts were stellar. Let's look at 2nd rounders 2016 - Alec Hansen - brought along slowly, something snapped at AA and he couldn't throw strikes anymore. 2017 - Gavin Sheets - never developed power. Played out of position in bigs. 2018 - Steele Walker. Progressing nicely, traded to Texas for Nomar Mazara. 2019 - Matt Thompson. Walked too many people. Cubs couldn't fix him, either. 2020 - Jared Kelley. Walk rates too high. 2021 - Wes Kath. Never developed his hit tool. Which of these guys are can't miss major leaguers that Chris Getz personally messed up?

Chris Getz was hired in October 2016. Since then, the White Sox have drafted in the top 10 three times. 2016 - Zach Collins taken at 10. He had a known hitch in his swing, and the pick was panned. That was a notoriously shallow draft. 2017 - Jake Burger at 11. Tore his Achilles tendon twice. 2018 - Nick Madrigal at 4. Spent one full season in the minors. He hit .300 for the White Sox before being traded for being injured too often. 2019 - Andrew Vaughn at 3. He had 245 PAs in minor league ball before being promoted to the bigs. 2020 - Garret Crochet at 11. Skipped the minors. 2021 - Colson Montgomery at 22. Was a top 20 in the game prospect before injuries at AA. Still top 50. 2022 - Noah Schultz at 26. Top 20 in the game prospect. I'm not sure what you're arguing, here. You're not even correct with your assertions about Chris Getz' tenure. Eloy, Yoan, Giolito, Lopez, Cease, Kopech all were promoted to the bigs. Are you saying that Cease wasn't developed?

Maybe they'll want Julks back, too.

Old friend alert

None of this makes any sense, but I think that's the purpose. I hope one day you find peace with being relieved of your position, Rick.

Analytics, pitching and hitting tech labs, nutrition and sleep study - none of that was as advanceded as it is now. The Sox were on more of an even playing field, then. You're not really refuting anything. Surely, you're not claiming that the White Sox have been state-of-the-art in all areas of development for the last decade?

Player development is entry level. Always has been. Yes, after 9 years of FO experience, he was promoted to GM.

Again, if they refused to update themselves, even into the same century, with the appropriate resources, I'm not sure what kind of baseball player whisperer you secretly dreamed of Chris Getz being.

That can't possibly be true!! Because everybody in the front office is so incompetent that they can't even speak; they roll around on the floor and make whale noises. This isn't even being a "Chris Getz fan". I'm sorry, but not even being able to entertain the possibility that the current GM may have been frustrated in his job by the previous bosses belies some deeper problem. It's common knowledge that any area you can think of, the White Sox were behind the rest of the league. So I'm not sure why it's unacceptable to suggest that without any of the tools and updated methods that other teams used to evaluate and develop players, Chris Getz was doomed from the get-go.

And it amazes me that people actually believe that a lower, entry level hire would make that decision for an entire organization. Maybe Getz was trying to modernize development, and got stiff-armed every step of the way. Weird that the first thing he did when made GM was start modernizing development. Almost as if it had been a burning goal of his for a while.

Like Joseph Reinsdorf and Larry King's kids? Or maybe KW and Haber bum rushed the war room and told them to draft Zack Collins instead of ... I don't know. Will Smith or Sean Murphy? And this pre-supposes that you truly believe that Nick Madrigal and Zack Collins would be on HOF tracks had they been developed properly.

No. It changed because the VP telling him they didn't need all that was fired, and the new GM told him they did. I'm not sure how that registers as "far fetched" for you.

And this seems to imply that Jerry Reinsdorf spared no expense to modernize player development under Getz, bringing in state-of-the-art everything, Paddy and Hostetler bringing in the best prospects in the game, and Getz just sat on his thumb.

How is it a failure when they didn't get a regular stream of top talent to develop? It's kind of telling that Hahn/KW moved Hostetler out of his position, and Paddy allegedly sat in limbo for a year before his firing. Again, either Getz is a master at passing blame and getting others fired, or he didn't have what he needed to do his job. One requires a big leap to pretend, the other is pretty logical.

Dunn's signing elicited an ejaculation of happiness in Sox fandom. He was the obvious trade acquisition that should have happened in 2010, but didn't. He was the stat-head darling, the 3 true outcomes dream. He was going to save the franchise until he didn't. LaRoche and Encarnacion were reactions to missing out on all the big pieces of that off-season.

It's normal to fire the person in charge and promote from within. The massive failure in development stems from being behind the rest of the league in infrastructure, analytics, tech and current methods. The appearance of Getz fixing these areas as soon as he was in charge either outs Getz as a truly Machiavellian character, failing in order to blame his bosses and get them fired, or somebody who tried to update these things, but regularly turned down. Getz was not a "good" hire. But you're grasping when you try to blame every failure of the last 2 decades on him just because he was part of the front office.

It did. He kept his job for a full year. I'd guess Reinsdorf said to let his contract run out, but I couldn't imagine Getz not giving him any guidelines to see if he could be refocused. Hostetler worked under Hahn, and Hahn replaced him. Getz inherited Shirley, and kept him. This seems to not align with your argument. It feels like you're being purposefully obtuse to pretend to not understand that it's normal in an organization for the head of an area to be fired, a person under them to get promoted, and for that person to reevaluate all of their peers.

You don't know that, yet. And "the best GM in the sport" seems to have missed the part about acquiring top rotational starters. Getz could very well go down the same path, hugging prospects, and trying to stock every position from within. But he's not there, yet.

Especially since any outside takes I read say that Getz is doing the hard work, and will be fine.

In retrospect, we were missing one half of the acquisition engine on the international side. Paddy is out. We may not do better, but I think it would be hard to do worse than zero. Shirley seems to be better at the draft than Hostetler was. Also, a big factor in bad 1st round drafts seems to have left with Haber, KW and Hahn leaving, not barging into the war room to hijack the 1st round pick. KW also seems to have been a major factor in the dysfunction of the organization, what with clubhouse spies, friction with the managers and GM, getting into media feuds with players, etc. There also used to be a hesitance to invest in development. KW would trade guys before they got too old to be a bust. At least now, Getz is trying to get the people in place to develop the players we draft. So, the entire organization may not be in a better place, but it is in a different place. Previous rebuilds failing have no influence on this current rebuild.

Okay, so no rebuild will ever work again. Conversely, your plan of signing 5 middling free agents won't work, either, because free agents have always failed upon coming to the Sox. Therefore, the Sox will continue to set the record for losses until they hit 162 sometime in the early 2030s, then never win another game again. Cannon and Thorpe can throw strikes, and have had limited success at the ML level. There's also a good chance they're still both pitching in 5 years.

Dude looks like one of those people being freed from a Syrian prison.

For a fleeting second, I pictured two guys sitting in a golf cart together, texting each other.

In addition to a rollback on sanctions of Cristian Mena mentions, I'm willing to concede and ratchet down my description of the Fedde trade as a "debacle" in exchange for the recognition of Riley Gowens as a legitimate starting pitching prospect.

I think a lot of last spring training's moves (and the first few months) can be chalked up to "in over his head" and/or hubris. But I also think they are somewhat linked to the subsequent house-cleaning of scouting. Getz inherited a horrible team, then got his budget cut. Getz scrambled, and regardless of how he was hired, I want to see how he builds this team. He's learning on the job. He slowed the Crochet talks down nicely to get what he wanted. That's a clear step up from the Fedde/Kopech debacle. Colas - I just remember TA7 or Elvis catching a throw from Colas, and just standing at 2B, glaring into the OF at an obviously wrong choice. Colas did that a lot, and then gets into it with other OFs over coverage, or whatnot. Sure, I'd like to see a good 3 months of the guy, but he seems relatively uncoachable, and would make a nice pairing with Benintendi as the "prospect to cover a year's salary" in a salary dump. I'll wait and see how pro-scouting 2.0 does with his next round of perifferal trades.