JoeC

That's a lot of campfire milkshakes.

All signs seem to be pointing upward for Burke, which is nice to see. I wonder if the write-ups / rankings took his new repertoire into account.

That's why I'd be interested to see retrospectives written on these rankings. Like, 10 years later, who was right?

By definition of some, all of them. Because that’s what defines a fan, apparently.

Sometimes “support” means tough love, which means not giving them a free pass by continuing to give them money. It’s like the f***-up rich kid who keeps getting bailed out by their rich parents. At some point, they’ve got to learn that your money comes with some set of expectations.

To quote Emily Gilmore in the Gilmore Girls... "When a woman gives birth to a crack baby, you do not buy her a puppy"

I don’t disagree.

It's almost like there should be a way for players to play competitive games in some league other than the big leagues so that they can improve their baseball skills. I wonder if anyone has thought about that. </sarc>

Is there any sort of publication / study / blog / etc that looks at historical "top prospects" rankings and retroactively grades them?

Would you choose a minor league stadium playing for a major league team, or major league stadium playing for a minor league team?

Yeah, but it would take a lot more money than that for a guy like him to want to sign with a team like the White Sox. There's probably some variation of "I would never belong to a club that would have someone like me as a member" in there, but I can't think of it.

We don't want to sell low.

What I would love to see is to get to a point where we can be a top-10 farm system year in and year out. The only time we get to see a top-10 farm system is when we sell off our big league assets. It doesn't have to be that way, and I am hoping Getz's organizational plan has that in mind.

Also, the fact that we're debating if our beloved team is a national laughingstock probably means that our beloved team is a national laughingstock.

See - I read that and I fail to see the difference between your "C" and my option "B." In both cases, the Sox couldn't see that they were bad. In either event, I don't think it changes my assertion that the Sox made themselves laughingstocks without the misfortune of bad luck.

Sorry for the long posts - in front of a physical keyboard instead of a damn phone, and I actually have a little bit of time to myself. Boredom + stress + shitty White Sox team + access to keyboard = long posts from me, apparently.

To clarify, the 2024 Sox were like a rudderless ship who drifted into the path of an oncoming storm, whereas anyone who was paying attention would have said "uh - guys? we should probably have a way to steer this ship, and has anyone checked the weather forecast lately?" Sure, it's "luck" that you drift into the storm, but the point is that the Sox have done so many things to shoot themselves in the foot that the bad "luck" of a linear 5~6 win subtraction kicks you outside of a standard distribution curve and wayyyy out beyond the bell curve. The Sox, with no misfortune, would have lost 100+ last year, in a year that the team tried to sell the public as being part of a quick turnaround, "not a rebuild," etc. So it's either: a) The Sox lied to us and knew they were going to be bad but tried to sell us otherwise to defend their decisions. This is funny, because nobody who'd been paying attention at all believed their bullshit. or b) The Sox believed that the team was going to be good. This is funny because... well... they were bad, and everyone who'd been paying attention knew it. Thus, in conclusion, the White Sox absolutely are, were, and would have been laughingstock regardless of their "luck" or "misfortune," and they are, in fact, laughingstocks because of the decisions they've made, and the manner in which they've made the decisions.

I mean, the team was going to be a laughingstock regardless of the misfortunes they suffered last year. From the second they hired Tony La Russa, all of the credibility and momentum and gusto that went into "multiple parades" territory went all out the window. The confidence in the team that it had built up was suddenly flipped upside down, from an outsider's perspective, and a pretty sizeable consensus of the non-Sox world was puzzled (at its most generous) by the hiring. The Hahn rebuild had good momentum going into the 2020-2021 offseason, then Jerry Jerryed it up by getting involved and doing it "his" way by hiring TLR. Fast forward to the tail end of the failed rebuild, and they fire Hahn and KW. Everyone's thinking "OK - this is the chance the Sox turn it around," then.... they promote Getz without a legitimate GM search, and the hiring is sold to us as someone who will lead a quick turnaround. In reality, it just showed that the Sox refuse to get out of their own way and will sit and try to slam the revolving door shut over and over again. The national media has called bullshit on this since day 1. Leaving aside my belief that "luck" in the case of the 2024 White Sox was as much "luck" as a rudderless ship helplessly drifting into a storm, the process that went into the 2024 White Sox, including the hype at the tail end of the pre-2020 rebuild, as well as the comedy of executive-level errors and missteps that followed, firmly planted the Sox into "laughingstock" territory that absolutely deserves mockery.

Collect enough straws, and you can build a raft. maybe.

Yep.... and the "top 3 farm system" needs to restock and double down on player development funding and strategy to continually restock the top end of the farm without having to tear it down. Look at what teams like Cleveland and Tampa do.

Petty sure it also applies to the other 28 teams.

You can say ". . . to restock our farm system and compete in 3 years," and it would be completely valid. Sucking is a side effect of having to rebuild - not the primary objective.

It’s the way he said it. “Anyone who thinks we can catch Cleveland is crazy” is literally insulting your fans.

Or he could have said literally a whole lot of emptiness like “we have a lot of work ahead of us, and we’re leaving all options on the table. All we ask our guys to do is to work hard and play together as a team through thick and thin, and we’ll see how to best address our long term outlook.” Pretty much any canned statement that didn’t try to put a completely incredibly positive spin on it, really, would have at least told me “hey - they’re not trying to bullshit us, at least.”

To me, it’s a matter of insulting our intelligence. We all saw the same thing, but they tried to tell us it was a quick turnaround, we’re not wasting a year, etc. Again, it’s a matter of showing the fans that you live in the same reality as they do. I personally don’t like being lied to (option A), and I don’t like to follow teams who are so detached from reality that they can’t even figure out that they’re on the precipice of another 100+ loss season (option B). Either way, it stinks. The only way out of it would have been to own up to the situation from the start rather than trying to bullshit us.