GreenSox

Cantu's everythign we don't need: poor defensive corner infielder; slow; good power but low OBP. Exactly what we're trying to move away from.

QUOTE (quickman @ Dec 6, 2008 -> 11:25 PM) why would we go after another shortstop? In addition we are suppose to get younger and trim payroll. We will not be signing furcal. For whatever reason people think we are actually trying to load up to win it all this year. We are not, call it what you want but this is the start of rebuilding. Furcal is a good player who meets a real need without having to give up talent. We don't know when Beckham will be ready, but we'll figure things out when he is. Any Furcal scenario has a relatively short contract - 2 or 3 years. I do agree that it's unlikely that we'll sign him. But Williams is going to make some unexpected moe before this is all oer. On the other hand, trading for Brian Roberts WOULD be loading up to win this year. That's giving up talent for a rent. And this particular rent has an inflated price.

If Cabrera accepts arbitration, that's fine - we'll just trade him. We won't get a ton, but we should get a nice prospect. A team like the Dodgers would probably prefer to give us a prospect for a year of Cabrera than to give up 2 draft choices for him (of course we'd lose the choices by trading him). That may even be something Beane would do - he wants a SS and tried to sign Furcal - trade for him for 1 year of Cabrera the draft choices next year when the market may be better. A 3 year contract would be great with Furcal. If Beckham is ready before then, we'll work it out.

Swisher is the 2nd to best CF on the team. Anderson is the best. Take your pick.

Owens needs to stay in AAA. He can't hit and he can't field and he has scant little potential to hit. Guillen's man-love for players who hit like he did is absolutely ridiculous. Erstad last year "a .400 hitter" because he swung at everything and could make his outs wherever Ozzie told him to - just like Ozzie did as a player; Owens this year over 3 superior candidates (Ramirez, Anderson, Quinten). Uribe - anothter Ozzie-style hitter, but with more power. Meanwhile, legitimate talent wallows in AAA or in Ozzie's doghouse. Here's a suggestion to young players: forget taking pitches and drawing walks. Swing at everything and emulate Ozzie and Walker as hitters as best you can, and you'll have a better shot.

So Ozzie is going to bench Quentin or Anderson for Ramirez, but he won't dream of benching Uribe or even Anderson. This is worse than his BS last year. The Sox finally have some offensive talent, but Ozzie insists on playing his woodchoppers.

One of the jobs of a manager is to deal with different personalities, even with difficult ones at times. You aren't always surrounded by yes men. Ozzie's answer to a difficult young player is to throw him off the team. Ozzie's so easy to get along with himself. At this point, some of the blame has to go to Williams; he knows Ozzie stubbornly wants speed atop the lineup; nevertheless, he never got Ozzie a good speedy leadoff man. It's no suprise that Ozzie will play an inferior talent like Owens simply to get that speed...look what he did with Erstad last year. Williams has to step in and take these bad hitters away from him.

Anderson has had a great spring and has a lot more talent than Owens. Anderson is an outstanding center fielder and Owens is a bad center fielder. But it doesn't matter - Owens plays Ozzie-style and in the land of Oz, that's all that counts. Anderson had a good spring last year - but with a talent like Erstad, he sat and then went to AAA. A lot of this is on Williams. He gave Ozzie a big extension, he knows Ozzie's preferences, so he needs to get some GOOD Ozzie-style players.

Ellis can't hit. The Sox don't need yet another bad offensive player.

You trade for Inge, you're stuck with his high salary for severl years. Crede's a lot easier to move.

QUOTE(WHITESOXRANDY @ Feb 7, 2008 -> 11:00 AM) Crisp is young. Crisp can hit and hit from both sides. He can play all 3 OF positions and has a good arm and he can run and he's not too expensive.Crispt can't hit a lick. Crisp's OBPs the last 2 years are .317 and .330. And he checked in with c.8 homers. . And people want to trade serious talent for him? If we want him - Uribe for Crisp. Trade our excess mediocre veteran for theirs (we sure don't need lugo).

If we acquire Crisp, then the sox are just reacting, and not acting from a plan. Use our prospects to acquire 2 LF, when we need a CF. And if Swisher moves to 1B, what is already a really high price for a hitter of Swisher's level has now skyrocketed if that production is at 1B and not CF. And then, of course, we would have traded talent to get Quinten, who is now a bench player. Together, it makes no sense, and smells of reacting, instead of acting from a plan. BTW we have a bad hitting good fielding CF (better fielder than Crisp) right now. Why do we want another? Swisher can lead off - he's superb at getting on base. Chone Figgins is in his contract year. Please don't trade talent for a hitter in his contract year.

If we wanted Crisp, we shouldn't have traded for Quentin. But we did, so that's that. Can't keep throwing more resources at essentially the same thing. Crisp brings nothing above average other than defense, and I think the Sox made their position on CF defense known when they benched the best defensive CF the team's had in a decade for Rob Mack and then for Erstad.

QUOTE(knightni @ Jan 30, 2008 -> 06:26 PM) Uribe, Richar and Danks for Brian Roberts I wouldn't trade Danks straight up for roider Roberts. Danks is damn good - he's not fully developed yet, but there's a really good chance he will be soon.

If we trade Konerko, I would hope we get some young players. 34 year old career middle relievers (geeze), rents of Figgns, head case pitchers like Santana....good gracious, I hope we can do better than that.

QUOTE(YASNY @ Jan 8, 2008 -> 01:14 PM) And they bailed on the idea of playing Fields in left. He can play the position. He's no Crede, but he'll be fine. Putting him in LF or 1B also decreases his value, as decent 3b are much harder to find ... and he will be a decent 3B. Look at how bad Aramis Ramirez was. It takes work and it takes time, but Fields has shown he is willing to pay the price to be good at what he does ... otherwise he never would have been a starting QB at OK State. I hear ya and that makes sense. But I'm not convinced he can handle the D. Any idea how Swisher handles CF? It seems he'll have to for that trade to make sense. CF have value - LF and 1B, as you said.....

QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Jan 8, 2008 -> 01:11 PM) I think every single point you make there is wrong. I meant the Sox played Fields in LF last year. And he's not a good fielder at 3B. But thank you for your input. We'll see what sort of a contract a mediocre hitting 3B gets.

QUOTE(YASNY @ Jan 8, 2008 -> 01:04 PM) Because we are going to need him at 3B once Crede's gone ... and he'll be gone before 2009. But he can't play the position. Crede's contract isn't going to be that big, Boras or not. Also, the Sox played Crede in LF last year, so they must have had other ideas for 3b

QUOTE(Kenny Hates Prospects @ Jan 7, 2008 -> 01:15 AM) Fields has a monster bat and will only improve his defense at third by playing regularly in the Majors. What about 1B? Why haven't the Sox worked him there? He should be able to handle first. Trade Konerko, but not for 1 year rentals of Figgins, please.

QUOTE(iamshack @ Jan 5, 2008 -> 08:55 PM) The more likely is something along the lines of Konerko for Figgins and Santana. That's Konerko in return for a flawed pitcher and for ONE YEAR of a high obp, speedy bad fielding player. If that's all he's worth, don't trade him. That's a useless trade for us. Evem worse would be to slide Swisher to 1B. W'e'd trade our 2 top pitching prospects and 3 of our top 5 for a mediocre power first baseman. It makes a highly dubious trade ridiculously bad.

$4.5 million for a shortstop says that Uribe has some value. If he doesn't, Williams shouldn't have given him $4.5 million (even if he hadn't traded for a SS the next week). While 2 SS says we may be desperate, the Orioles are in a mirror position with zero SS. They don't have a CF either.

QUOTE(R.J. @ Dec 17, 2007 -> 05:47 PM) Ok, I was a bit harsh, but I think you're being generous to the guy. I'll modify my statement: 2 of Gavin Floyd's (10) starts were "top of the rotation quality" - or what you would expect to see from your #1 or #2 starter. Sept. 5 vs, DET: 6 IP, 6 H, 1 ER, 6K, 2BB Sept. 29 @ DET: 7 IP, 6 H, 1 ER, 2K, 0BB, W So give him credit for those. A dozen of those a year and you can start talking him up as a "front of the rotation" type pitcher. But that isn't what we saw. He had a few more quality starts, but he pitched more than 6 innings once on the season, he recorded one win in 10 starts, he gave up 17 HRs in 70 innings, had a WHIP of 1.48, and had an ERA of 7.00 until the month of September. If you want to make the argument that he showed some talent and has deserved a chance to crack the starting rotation in 2008, then OK, I'm with you. But what I'm trying to point out is for our general manager to try and sell this guy as a "top of the rotation guy" is absolutely insulting to White Sox fans and it makes me sick. To imply that we might not be aggressively looking for valuable arms to put in our rotation because we have Gavin Floyd on our side is a bad excuse. I never said he was top of rotation. But he had a lot of quality appearances and his numbers are skewed because he was hit really hard in 3 games. He made 6 straight starts to end the season. with a cumulative ERA of 3.40. 5 of those starts would be deemed "effective" (6 innings, 3 or fewer runs; certainly, some on the border). And none were disasters. He also has very good "stuff". His problem is that he gives up way too many home runs, problematic with the Cell as your home field. One of the reasons that the Sox are in this mess, in my opinion, is complete lack of patience with young players and lack of development of young talent. Bad month? Sit on the bench and play the average veteran the rest of the year. People want to unload players and get prospects in here .....why? So that they are marginalized if they don't produce in a month?

QUOTE(R.J. @ Dec 17, 2007 -> 03:33 AM) We have nothing from Gavin Floyd to show us that he's even a capable 5th starter. Outside of two encouraging starts last year, he looked downright ugly. Actually 7 of his last 10 appearances were excellent. Too bad he didn't pitch more - but Ozzie was still wheeling his crappy veteran middle relievers out there in late September (just like he was having ERstad hitting in the 5 hole in late September). Gavin got off to a terrible start, getting slaughtered early - he started the 2nd game of that infamoujs double header against the Tiwns and, like everyone else, was shelled. I don't know if he's a pitcher or not. this is a good year to find out. As for the celings of these guys, I have no idea. But I thought that the point of trading for them is that they had high ceilings (Danks above McCarthy, e.g.)

QUOTE(NCsoxfan @ Dec 6, 2007 -> 08:07 AM) Let's think about this for a moment. Did KW act too quickly in trading Garland and signing Linebrink? It seems like he now only has half of his plan completed. Would he of traded Garland for an established player if he knew he would wiff on Torii and Miggy? My guess is no. If he knew these events were to unfold, would the Sox have made a decision to rebuild? Does anyone else think KW is half way into a plan that is not feasible anymore? Plan? What plan. When he pays Uribe $4.5 million and the next week trades his best trading chit for another SS, that's a pretty good clue that Williams has no plan. He's merely reacting.

Aardsma or Masset - fine. Not MacDougal. I wouldn't quite give up on him yet. Uribe just needs to go. Let Richar play and bat 9. This platooning stuff - with the great Uribe. We'll never develop a young player that way. Almost as ridiculous as platooning with the elite Erstad.