Jake

I'd go Benintendi, Bregman, Turner, Swanson, Urias

Rodon has 5 more years left

I was at OSU. My first broad thought a day later is that if the initial emergency calls from students had realized the only gunshot came from the police officer, then this story wouldn't have had much reach outside of Columbus. The prospect of an "active shooter"—which was the story for several hours—is far more newsworthy than a guy who drove his car at some people and then managed a few swings with a kitchen knife before getting shot down. The havoc experienced on campus is largely from having had to spend a couple hours on lockdown thinking there was a gunman running around. To the extent this man was a terrorist, he sure was a rotten one. There's no doubt that he intended to hurt people, but from what I can tell he must have either not planned much at all or was in such a deranged state that he failed to have a plan that would kill anybody. I've seen a Facebook post attributed to him which is a semi-coherent rant about mistreatment of Muslims, though he seems oddly focused on Burma, a place where he does not appear to have familial connections and the US is hardly involved. He makes mention of wanting the US to quit fighting ISIS (he refers to ISIS by an Arabic alias) by reaching some kind of diplomatic agreement. I've yet to hear from any of his acquaintances about how well-connected he was in Columbus, on campus, etc. The Somali Student Association at OSU says he never participated in their group and was unknown to them. Current indications are that the fire alarm having gone off was purely coincidental. I've heard some on campus say that everyone who was forced to evacuate due to the fire alarm had already headed back inside. The student newspaper published something on him a couple months ago, as previously mentioned. I do want to clarify, though, that the piece was in the style of "Humans of New York" in which they approach people on campus and ask them to make a short statement about themselves, which the newspaper prints verbatim with no additional introduction or commentary. The attacker complained in the piece that he didn't know where any on-campus prayer rooms were and that he worried about attracting negative attention with his prayers in public. He also said that he is sympathetic to the fears people have because of what he calls unfair portrayals in the media. The entire thing was probably 150 words long. Columbus has the second-largest Somali-born population in the US after Minneapolis. I read recently that there are around 50,000 native Somalians, some of whom are refugees and others who immigrated via more conventional routes, in Columbus. I see them around town often and haven't had any remarkable interactions. I've chatted with a few at work who were very gregarious and friendly while others who I have passed in the store were speaking another language and may not have been comfortable talking in English. In other words, they are sufficiently large to be diverse in terms of how assimilated they are, how financially secure they are, and so on. The community has been established long enough that there are a lot of people the attacker's age who spent virtually their entire lives in the US, attending the grade schools and so on. My general impression is that Somalians in Columbus are not terribly impoverished as many of them run businesses and are never shabbily clothed or anything like that. I do know from my work that there is a lot of untreated mental illness in the Somalian community due to social stigmas and the sometimes horrific experiences that led some to become refugees. With that said, there have been some frictions. There have been numerous incidents in which native-born people have gotten into road rage incidents with Somali immigrants and I vaguely recall an incident in which a Somali driver killed some pedestrians—by incompetence, not malice. Earlier this year, a Ghananian man stabbed 4 people (none died) at a "multicultural" restaurant (it explicitly appealed to Muslims, Jews, and Christians) and said ISIS had inspired him. In Columbus, most people believed the stabber to be Somalian due to his appearance and some errant reporting when it first happened. There has been some jostling in local politics in which the city government has faced accusations of not providing city resources, like bus routes, to the parts of town where Somalians and other minority communities live in greater numbers. I wouldn't call these really big stories, though, and I rarely hear them discussed in the local news or around town. Anyway, there's some context. I'm interesting in hearing more details about the attack and the attacker in the coming days.

Let's not forget the Sox could very well say they won't deal with the Cubs as a negotiation tactic.

What I don't understand is why the players would have risked anything over the international draft. I'm also disappointed that ownership doesn't seem to have any ideas for how to give something to the players other than the QO system, which affects vanishingly few of them.

I would suspect that if the sitting POTUS worked to arrange a business deal like this while in office, it would be seen as very dubious ethically if not an outright abuse of power.

QUOTE (Two-Gun Pete @ Nov 9, 2016 -> 08:52 AM) Yeah, Im comfortable calling this guy a "non-prospect" at this point. Yes, i get how young he is, but that simply does not matter. Any player who strikes out @ a ~30% clip in the low minors will never ever amount to anything. This last draft (and more importantly, it's focus on OBP) should at long last show the org & it's fans what should be the most important tool of any position player, except for catchers. As Adolfo divides his time between being injured and striking out, I fail to see any chance for him to make The Show. I agree that a sky-high strikeout rate is a huge cause for concern and normally to me means the player should not be promoted, but let us not forget that Kris Bryant of all people struck out at a 29% clip in AAA and just slightly less in A and AA, both at a much later age and with more high-level experience. He then struck out 31% as a MLB rookie. In our system, the rare example of a player who came in the system with major strikeout problems who eventually ironed them out is Trayce Thompson.

I'm confused about the circumstances. Are they there for winter league? Are they guys who played stateside in the summer? I'm assuming most/all live in DR, but it sounds like they were with the club.

A lot of people are willing to make some amount of sacrifice to the bottom line if they know they can get stability and favorable work conditions. We don't necessarily know how much of a sacrifice Frazier is willing to make (or what he thinks the "true value" he'd be giving a discount from is) nor do we know just how much he sees the White Sox as a place that he'd love to be rather than trying something new.

It would be mixed and also dependent on the return. He's been one of the best pitchers in the league and in franchise history, so it's never easy to see that kind of player go...you can end up waiting decades to get another one. With that said, he has never been a player that is super charismatic and of course his actions late last season only made the personal connection weaker. Buehrle wasn't nearly as good of a pitcher but WS or not it was much harder to see him go.

Lawrie is the type of player that a rebuilding team signs to see if he can pick up value and be traded. Seems weird to cut him unless there's something about his injuries that suggests the few million he'll earn will certainly be squandered

The Sox when most of us were kids had Frank Thomas, a very rare type of player that made it easy to love the team regardless of wins and losses. I really think it's that simple. If you have charismatic teams that compete, it's easy to be a fan. But even when you don't, having a guy like Frank Thomas makes it easy. The Big Hurt wasn't a media darling, didn't have great things to say in interviews, but was a fabulous player and person and his at bats were appointment TV.

Worth considering the possibility that somebody else will be assuming the responsibilities normally given to the person with this job title

Are we sure that it isn't the case that Renteria really wanted to keep Cooper around? I'd have to think if Cooper went on the open market, almost any team with even mild dissatisfaction with their pitching coaches would be eager to snatch him up.

The remarkable health of our pitchers over the past 10+ years—which is quantifiable, not just my feelings—has to be attributed in part to Don Cooper. This is especially true when you consider the terrible rash of pitcher injuries we had just before he took over, a time when Herm Schneider was in our employ

I like when people talk about this two-headed leadership team like you can't do it any other way besides having one guy in charge. But it begs the question why it is that such an arrangement hasn't blown up in the face of the Cubs?

I think Robin was a competent manager and someone our organization can be proud of. Firing him is fine—when the front office thinks the team is good four years in a row and in none of those years you make it, then you have to change something...and front offices tend not to fire themselves. I saw an article talking about how there was a high level of optimism as the Sox had added David Robertson, Melky Cabrera, Zach Duke, Todd Frazier, Brett Lawrie, Mat Latos, Alex Avila, Dioner Navarro, and Jimmy Rollins over the course of two seasons and how Robin will be associated with the subsequent disappointment. Some of those players are competent and were nice additions, but I'd be pretty upset if my job depended on those players helping my team rise from the ashes. I hope Renteria will be a better manager, but our problem has continued to be a lack of depth and good players. I thank Robin for not being a distraction, having some dignity, and clearly being a White Sox man through and through.

I think Robin was a perfectly fine manager, but I'm not sure they could manage the PR aspect of keeping him around. Sometimes it's worth making a change just so that you've changed something. Who knows, maybe Renteria is a superb manager.

Worth mentioning the "kid" is older than Lawrie

The thing about Guaranteed Rate is that it's not a super old company and the thing they do isn't the kind of thing a bunch of people are shopping for all the time. A pretty big portion of the people who are even homeowners probably bought the house before Guaranteed Rate was founded

I still think the Frazier deal was a good one in that it made sense at the time and hasn't been an unmitigated failure at this point. It's fully within the realm of possibility that he contributes to a winning Sox team next year and/or gets traded for more than we gave up for him next year.

Given that Shields has seen his velocity drop over the past few years, it might make sense to cut back his workload since it isn't exactly important that we get innings out of him.

I would rather hold to account the person who agreed to the Samardzija trade than the person who chose to sign Melky. Who gives a s*** about the Melky signing? The worst case is that we wouldn't have spent the money or that we would have spent it on someone worse. The way the >$10M/year FA signings have been lately around MLB tells me that was a near-harmless move. Having Melky on the team has made us more ready to win than most alternatives. But Samardzija only worked in theory if the team was good that year, which seemed unlikely at the time to me and some others. Even if you were optimistic, it was still a risky move since you were betting on all the things that can go wrong in a single season. Worse, of course, was that the player acquired wasn't even very good. The good Samardzija, who lives in many Chicagoans' imaginations and memories, wouldn't have made the team a winner but would have at least provided some cover for the logic of the move itself. Instead we traded at least one MLB regular who was cheap and under control for a long time (along with a potential backup C and solid starting pitching depth) for a guy who pitched like ass for a year and left us with just a draft pick, though we can at least be thankful for that.

The way I see it is that the front office is always highly collaborative. There is usually a single person—typically, but not always, the GM—who leads the front office and makes the final call and when quick decisions are necessary, the leader makes them perhaps without consultation of others. But there are many people who have a lot of input. Your GM will not make many good draft picks or international signings without good scouting advice. Once the advice is there, the GM has to sift through it, make risk calculations, etc. But even then, there are other members of the front office like the assistant GM who will play a role in the weighing of risks and benefits. Lots of teams seem to have a "money man" who will play a large role in deciding whether a move is financially prudent. The GM gets the glory and the blame, but both glory and blame may in many cases be an organizational rather than individual failure. Another thing about collaborative work like this is that some try to work towards consensus. Not always in the sense that the final decision is the one each individual would make if he or she were in charge, but that everyone involved contributed and doesn't outright oppose the final decision. So my question has been whether the big picture decisions for the White Sox are really being decided in much of a different way than before Hahn and Kenny were promoted. Beforehand, Hahn could have pushed against Kenny and/or Reinsdorf at times but it wouldn't have been news to anyone because who cares what Assistant GM thinks. But if the decisionmaking structure is unchanged but the people in it have new titles, does it now matter? Of course, maybe the structure has changed and Hahn has much more of a say than in the past. He certainly is taking on some tasks that Kenny did previously, but it's unknown to us if those are really the major decisions or not.

Our current prospect strategy would put Adams as our opening day starter next year