Snopek

“Basically stay healthy” has turned into “Basically stay healthy and also everyone perform to their absolute ceiling and oh look a shooting star everyone make a wish”

Seems good if it has him touching 753 mph

15 Philip Humbers. Bring it on.

I don’t disagree with this, but it continues to be incredibly frustrating that they put all their eggs in the bounce back basket. Like, hey assholes, you know you can make internal improvements AND add more players from the outside to fill holes, right? No? You’re just gonna count on everyone staying healthy and bouncing back? Okay then.

I think of this offseason as similar to one of those Hahn in-season classic lines: Injured player returning is our big trade deadline acquisition. I feel like they’re hoping the new staff and organizational approach will help Yoan, Eloy, Robert, etc unlock their full potential, and those will essentially be viewed as their huge free agent additions. That might happen, and I do like the new approach. But in typical Sox fashion, they’re putting all their eggs in this basket and not complimenting it with more impactful additions. ‘Good enough’ is still their overall philosophy it seems.

Lol’ing at the idea of kids approaching robots for autographs.

Sure, it could happen. There’s still a lot of talent on the team, so the upside is there. And maybe the new manager and staff are able to harness all that talent and turn it into success. Realistically, though, my expectations are not very high. They have too many “if” scenarios where they’d need those outcomes to be very favorable. It’s a lot to ask and a lot to overcome, and I don’t particularly like those odds.

I suppose I was too naïve at that time to realize that what the sustained success thing actually meant was "if everything breaks our way, we will be not completely irrelevant for several years in a row."

If you operate the way the Sox do, windows are a real thing. You don't spend on premium players and you don't draft or develop talent especially well, you're not consistently fielding a competitive team year in and year out.

That's, uh, certainly one way to look at it.

If you're suggesting that adding great players to a team does not guarantee success, well, sure. So the alternative is not doing that because there's a chance it might not work out?

They say doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity, but what they don’t tell you is getting it right one of those times is the definition of a super genius front office.

Love the reactive approach of letting the first four months of the season play out first so they can see if they caught all the breaks they were hoping to.

Ayyye my random former player as username spirit animal gets a mention. For...*rereads post* ...not good reasons.

This thread rules.

Interesting poll, but I struggle with the "fully healthy" thing. What does a fully healthy TLR even look like? I don't think he was necessarily healthy when he took the job, but well enough to deal with the stress and travel of the job. Until he wasn't. Sort of a ticking time bomb thing. I feel like it all just finally caught up to him to the point where there's really no coming back from it.

I kinda feel like they're well aware that it's overdone and that's part of the bit.

Yup. There’s obviously truth to the whole “just get in and anything can happen” thing. But it’s also true that decent but not great teams generally tend to have poorer showings in the playoffs. Both are true, but it seems like there’s a tendency to treat them as mutually exclusive ideas.

Based on TLR's observational analytics, the answer was still Leury, since he was playing through injury to the point where he was struggling to swing a bat.

I would guess that the new staff is more well-versed all around in analytics and communication that they don't feel the need to dedicate a specific family friend position to that role.

For me, the Sosa/Romy thing is similar to Colas in that they can all be impact players and need the opportunity, but how long is the leash if they struggle? It seems stupidly long given that there are no fallback options. Typically, I don’t mind this approach, but for a team that is still telling people they are contenders, it seems pretty shortsighted and arrogant (aka pretty White Sox). And as others have said, the fallback options will eventually come in early August and all they’ll cost is more thinning out of a farm system that finally seems to be turning itself around. Cool stuff.

Hey now. One of these franchises is completely aimless, the other aims for second place ? Also, one of them has two World Series titles in the past 100 years.

I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Maybe they wanted a voice from outside the organization. Maybe Grifol didn’t even want the job.

The nerve of the Rangers to block Odorizzi and Dunning with better players.