bmags

I don't want to make anything a hard and fast rule, I just want them to take a balanced view of things. We had a top heavy system thanks to Hostetler drafting 0 high schoolers. Then Shirley takes over and gets 35 less draft picks in his first year. They go Crochet and Kelly and basically punt the last 3 picks. Crochet is obviously a good pick, he made the bigs. But you basically added 1 guy all year. The next year they go big on Kath and Macdougal with big bonuses that brings them only 4 BA300 guys (Montgomery, Kath, Burke, Macdougal) During the same time, our INTL group brings in classes headlined by Vera and Cespedes (2020) and Colas and Hernandez. Some really nice talent there that also is more developed and contributes. But they were also pretty small. 2020-21 badler writeup for the sox has 7 names. That compared to the other teams in the signing tracker put them 27th out of 30th in total signings reported. 2021-22 badler writeup for sox has 6 names. Compared to the signing tracker that put them (in quantity) at 28th out of 30th. They do sign more than that amount, but they are so low profile they are tough to know what to make of it as they sign throughout the year. Now, either of these would be fine if sox should an ability to turn B-/C+ free agents and get more out of them to build out their roster. But they don't do that. Given the constraints, either we keep telling Paddy to keep big game hunting, or we tell Shirley to spread his resources more evenly.

There is more to scouting than just the draft, but also, Laumann drafted a handful of stars behind questionable depth. That's kinda what Shirley aimed for in 2020/1.

Basically this, by the time the official period "begins" the reality is most teams have already signed 95% of their classes. But recently it has felt like when january goes around we'll see the sox with about 2 guys signed around 60% of their budget and 1-2 other small signings. Some get announced later, but throughout the year maybe some guy expatriates and we are the only team with budget, but other years we just see a bunch of guys show up in DSL that were signed throughout the year that snuck under the cracks. Now Jose Rodriguez was one of those guys. I think Paddy's moves would be fine if Shirley wasn't at the same time having drafts like 20 and 21 that blew their budgets on the first two picks and then grabbed a bunch of 10k college seniors. Our depth is too thin for both to operate similarly.

I don't really care if we are in the top ten signings here, I just want bigger classes. This holding back 1/3rd of your budget to sign during the season is too conservative. We need more out of Paddy who has brought in some nice talent. Because he was successful...he needs to scale it up and deliver more. We have too shallow a base in draft picks and inept scouting to source enough talent to be top tier. Need Paddy to deliver more than the rest.

I have maybe become more Emo...but I still mostly like what I did here but also would like to do a bigger shakeup and trade away Tim Anderson and sign Dansby Swanson. Dansby is a bad free agent to target because his 6 war value is driven by an Adam Eaton like defensive year, and he's no offensive star. So you pay a ton for a 3 WAR player...and yet so much of this team has this "My faults are okay and I can play however I want" attitude. Tim Anderson is a better player than Swanson and cheaper, but his defensive warts have never improved and his lack of power just seems like it won't age well into his 30s. If we ran out an infield of Moncada, Swanson, Torres, Vaughn it feels like a much more cohesive one. Torres was okay at 2b, and fully on board with if Romy/Sosa can play defense you play them.

"You guys are coasting in your jobs and it needs to stop" Says Rick Hahn, 10 year GM with 2 winning seasons under his belt

Yes I'm fine with Beltran being punished, I think it's silly the rest weren't. And I think people mad the rest weren't kind of want Beltran to be extra super punished just to re-enforce how bad it was. If anything the episode makes John Coppolella's ban for life just so insane to me. Granted he was likely caught red handed in a way Luhnow wasn't, but it seems excessive given some of the extremely gross cheating things that have happened recently to ban for life a practice that was you know, bad but also...not that out of operating procedure for quite a few teams.

I know I'm insane for saying this but I actually felt a little better yesterday despite it being horrendous to look at. These games will happen with teams that have bad talent, but I actually thought Fields looked better but the team was just completely deficient. And as optimistic as I was about this team, it really would be better served with as high a pick as possible. Do you guys think the Giants rebuild was helped at all this year by having two top ten picks while the Bears had to treat two picks in the 40s as franchise saviors to will Fields to success? If Fields can look like a guy that is doing the right things but has s%*# talent, then you can really load up next year with a top ten pick and $100 mill. The unfortunate thing is how screwed WR looks. You pretty much have to earmark round 1 as a WR. And I like most of those guys, obviously Njigba but I like Boutte and Addison too. And if you do still like fields, there are 3 QBs in the top ten and can get an Eagles like boost to your rebuild by trading down to 12. It all just goes to the Bears took Fields at an extremely weird point of a franchise trajectory. You don't really see QBs taken like that at the clear end of an era, where you really can't even take advantage of the contract because you already spent it all on past their prime talent. It's not like Poles couldn't have chosen to build around fields, getting hard not to wish instead of our DBs we just had chosen Pickens/Pierce and Jurgens and gone after a Mike McDaniels or Kevin O'Connell. But at some point, it really will be nice to have a clean slate of resources, which we have been throwing to the future for 5 years now.

Yeah, sure would be nice if leatherwood could swing to LG soon, but I think he had mono so that may be tough. Other side of that, if he was a competent RT, because I still think Borom could be a really good guard and i'm not impressed with him as tackle.

I don't know if anyone else emailed Brooks Boyer back in 2020 about the TLR hire, but boy are they fun to look back on a day like today.

This is so embarrassing. Never forget when Nightengale went on white sox talk and dismissed TLR potentially not being able to start 2021 Spring Training on time due to legal issues around his DWI arrest and compared it to David Ross not being able to start spring training the previous year due to the flu. It was exactly the same thing.

We are trying to retrofit a new organizational philosophy from essentially the bottom up with this manager and I would imagine anyone who is actually good at hiring coaches who can teach from multiple sources of information would look at this organizational set-up and say no thanks. Meanwhile, I'm sure we'll get someone smart enough to say "yes you have to use analytics" at a press conference.

It is extremely funny to me that Rick Hahn looks at the success of the astros and thinks “ their success is due to their superior managers” and has zero interest in implementing the rest. Their system was too reliant on holding people accountable to the goals and direction set by their front office.

I agree. ugh and so ridiculous to punish him for actions as a player just because he was retired. All the other active players? No problemo.

He won 5 pennants. Everything, from post season to revenue is easier for an owner at JRs time in history. Add that he was given a division of small money owners in declining markets. He wasn’t competing with the 20s or 60s Yankees.