ThirdGen

Two playoff game wins over the last two seasons for the Padres. The exact same number as the White Sox. And the Padres followed up that mighty 2-1 series win against the Cards with a 79 win season. If the Sox drop to 79 wins, or even 89 wins for that matter, I'll be right there with you on the fire Hahn bandwagon. And remember the time Preller won the offseason by signing Machado- huge 70 wins that year. And remember when everyone said the Padres won the offseason before 2015-74 wins that year.

Take a look at Cashman over the last decade. Remarkable considering his resources. No results for Preller, GM since 2014. Dipoto, since 2015 has yet to see the post season. Chernoff and Hazen haven't accomplished much, and don't seem close. Levine has won less playoff games than Hahn, but had a good offseason this year. Elias is in a rebuild that seems stalled. Cherington was stupid enough to take the Pirates job, enough said there. Schmidt hasn't been around long enough to really judge, but he has done some weird ass things since he started, Rockies are decent but no where near where the Sox are now. I'm sure some of the GM's that have been hired in the last couple of years will fail, but too early to judge. I'd say the Epstein/Hoyer rebuild was on the same trajectory as the Sox are on now. If the Sox don't win a Series obviously they didn't achieve what they did, but still Epstein/Hoyer definitely failed to deliver the multiple championships everyone said they would when Epstein move over from Boston.

That should also be the O/U in total K's September and October.

Take a look at the 2021 Braves outfield.

That's kind of my point- regardless of how we feel about Hahn, sending emails to marketing and communications guys demanding a change in GM is insane. They don't have the authority to make those calls, any more than they had the ability to stop the PR hit from the TLR hiring. Opening day is two weeks off. The trade deadline is four months off. If he doesn't fill the SP and LH RF issues, and it causes the Sox to crash and burn again in the playoffs or regular season, judge Hahn then. But don't fire him two weeks into spring training because Sox fans need instant gratification. There are probably 25 teams I wouldn't trade the team Hahn has built from the ground up for at this point, and I can only name one team that doesn't have at least one legitimate hole or question mark in the starting lineup, bullpen or rotation at this point.

Does anyone have Hahn's email address? I would like to send him an email demanding Reifert and Boyer's terminations. Makes about as much sense as the OP.

Website not updated yet but Sox home opener 4/12 will have a 3:10 pm start not 6:10 as currently listed.

Multiple reasons for this, none of which are solvable in my opinion. A weak players' union in the NFL has allowed the teams to force a level of payroll and revenue parity that the MLBPA would never allow, as it also holds down salaries. A schedule that has 10% of the games, forcing football fans who want to see more than 17 games per year to watch other games. Gambling, football is a fun easy sport to bet on. Bet the spread, square pools, confidence pools whatever, even people who don't follow football closely can put a little money and have fun watching a game they normally wouldn't care about. I know people do bet on MLB but not in a way that is approachable by casual fans.

I'm with you on that. While the strike is annoying, I've never understood the logic behind: 1. I really enjoy watching baseball. 2. The owners and players are taking this away from me for some relatively short period of time because they are greedy jerks. 3. I'm going to punish them by permanently not doing something I enjoy. Most people will be back. Everyone involved knows it. And the ones that loudly proclaim boycotts are usually the ones that didn't really get into it in the first place.

I never even noticed Rosenthal's article until I read this about his firing. In general, I always felt that MLB's various in house media did a good job covering MLB objectively, including its warts. Bad news about player behavior, team issue etc seemed to be reported there as much as they were elsewhere. I understand that he was technically an employee of MLB and technically it is a bad idea to speakly bad publicly about the CEO. But this is different. Most companies don't hire reporters to cover their companies and set up media companies to enable that. MLB makes a load of money off its media. If MLB network, MLB.com etc is truly just a paid advertisement for MLB, as it now seems, then screw them. I'll get my MLB news elsewhere, from sources not under the thumb of Manfred. Plenty available. I've suspected Manfred is horrible. Firing Rosenthal, one of the premier baseball reporters, confirms that.

They aren't "walking away" with $100 million; they did not pay a penny in dividends. The profit was retained by the team (Liberty) which caused the value of the team to increase. That's how team values increase, not by dumping cash on owners every year. The Braves also have over $700 million in debt. I would guess that debt contains covenants limiting how much cash, if any, can be paid as dividends. That debt by the way increased from the prior year.

You are assuming they pull all the profits out (dividends) every year and have a cash call whenever they don't make money. That's why I mention we don't know all the ins and outs of cash, and dividends are reinvested. But I seriously doubt that is the case- typically partnerships like this retain the profits, which is why the value increases so quickly. Sports franchises aren't known for their liquidity, just because the value increases doesn't mean cash increases, and cash is needed to pay dividends. Investors know they won't see their return until the team is sold (or their portion) but they will be buried in cash when that happens. Owning a sports franchise is a vanity investment. No one does it to expect annual cash flow personally, it's done for the many perks of ownership, and yes, a shitload of money on the way out.

Using a S&P 500 return calculator on the internet, based on $20,000,000 being invested in 1980, all dividends reinvested: "If you invested $20000000 in the S&P 500 at the beginning of 1980, you would have about $2,335,058,166.69 at the beginning of 2021, assuming you reinvested all dividends. This is a return on investment of 11,575.29%, or 12.10% per year." We obviously don't know all the ins and outs of money over the years and there were real estate transactions during the ballpark move that may have created some cash, but assuming that turning 30 million into 1.65 billion over 40 years is some ridiculous return is wrong. They could have dropped the money into the market, put no thought or effort into it and had $700,000,000 more today. And the investment would have had liquidity and anonymity.

Hawks actual player transactions when viewed in a vacuum were actually respectable. Its Hawk's actual management of the day to day operations that was disastrous. This article written during that period is pretty damning of the decision to replace Hemond with Hawk. There's Nothing Major League About White Sox Circus - The Washington Post

My understanding was that JR wasn't planning on firing Hemond but wasn't happy with the state of the organization. Hawk, completely on his own, drew up his vision of the organization that was completely out of the box and presented it out of the blue to JR. JR liked it and hired him to implement it.

I would be willing to bet that if there is a salary floor in the next contract it will be phased in slowly and probably not even be in force this season. Assuming the CBA negotiations bump up against or into spring training there is no reasonable way to implement in 2022.

Coincidentally just received an email from the Sox confirming no Soxfest for 2022.

I doubt it. They usually start promoting in August/September. The McCormick Place calendar doesn't have anything listed for this. Not sure how they would pull this off with Covid protocols.

They made no attempt to have a team in 2019, before Covid even existed. They made no attempt to have a team in 2020. It's not like they planned on a 2020 season and it was cancelled. The team is defunct. Cleveland didn't fail to do a Google search before they took the name. They did the search and realized the team was defunct. They have no players, no schedule, no ticket sales, nothing. But for an old website, they don't exist. They advertise "learn to skate sessions" for interested 2022 players. This is a rec club, not a professional team.

If you look at the roller derby team's website it appears the last existence of an actual team was in summer 2018. No attempt to recruit a team, post a schedule, post any news, whatever in the second half of 2018, all of 2019, all of 2020, first half of 2021. On the day after the Indians announced their name change, they posted a recruiting note for a 2022 team. Looks like a defunct team is attempting to resurrect solely to grab a check.

Could have been worse. The Reds had the best record in baseball and didn't make the playoffs. Assume MLB will never do this again.

The only issue here is deciding the size of the check the baseball Guardians will be writing to the roller derby Guardians. They knew this would happen all along.

Hope he gets in. Prior to inclusion of his NY Cuban stats he was listed as a .298 lifetime hitter, now he is listed as .299. In retrospect it is a shame he did the Veeck publicity stunts in 76 and 80. Take away the 1 for 10 in those games and he would now be listed as a lifetime .300 hitter after inclusion of the NY Cuban numbers. Not a big difference I know, but still kind of a big difference.

I heard they are letting LaRussa decide who gets their refund first. You may need to wait a while!

Credit has been issued to my CC in full, shows as "PENDING" on my on line card statement so I assume it was credited yesterday or today.