bmags

it was .354 in August, OBP wise he was actually fine since his return until this month which has been terrible in the calendar of Sept again.

I mean, the phillies and padres haven't exactly been poster children of a rebuild. The year we are having now was basically the same thing that they went through last year. Same with phils. Philly still might not make the playoffs, and Padres are gonna be, what...a 90 win team.

You'd think I'd get tired of analyzing Hahn and KWs failures but it's been 12 years of very little exciting baseball so this is our world series.

I think the big shift in white sox fortunes was the edge that KW had over other GMs was he had great pro scouting for players that still had something left in the tank and had just been injured or down years. I think what would be attributed to the increase in Fastball velocity has led to a faster decline of veterans. KW really relied on FA plug-ins and guys being pushed out by new talent. He also took advantage of those "blocked" by vets (CQ, to a much, much lower extent D'angelo Jimenez). I think that wouldn't happen now, as the teams would instead deal the vet and take the younger player. But, of course it could all just be that hahn was worse at it. There was still players like DJ Lemaheiu nabbed by yanks. There was still players like Zobrist. There was still players like Daniel Murphy with Nats. There was still Nelson Cruz. Older, 2nd contract players made some big impacts still. Hahn being a ineffectual in drafting and Intl meant he had to hit in FA, and instead he brought us: Jeff keppinger Melky Cabrera Jimmy Rollins Cody Asche Edwin Encarnacion Jon Jay Adam LaRoche He bought low on Brett Lawrie, Nomar Mazara, Yonder Alonso, sorry I have to stop this is too painful.

How much have you seen him play in the minor leagues?

I didn't read the thread after the OP so maybe that was brought up and, if so, sorry.

The other thing in KWs favor here is the CBAs post-Kenny were much more favorable to a JR-led team. JR loves cost-certainty above all else. KW's drafts were hamstrung to the suggested slot while the teams around had no such problem. The international system got much more formal. Both should have helped, and honestly it is hard to tell if drafting got better under Hahn or if draft positioning did. Now...it's absolutely inexcusable what KW did with international. The sox were coming off a decade where they found Carlos Lee and Ordonez. But again you can see where JR sucks. I'm sure he saw the success of Alexei, Iguchi, Takatsu and was like "oh we're spending $4 million on teenagers when we could just get real ball players" and that led into the Hahn era. The great irony of Hahn is definitely going to be how his org probably signed the most WAR out of international of any team with Abreu, Tatis, and Robert during the 2000s, but even then I'm sure Braves will top it. The team the sox should be.

Nobody Care!

Sox already embarrassed themselves in first inning.

I do enjoy the lucy football thing of watching other teams try to get rid of players in their 30s that are about to fall off and Hahn keeps swooping in thinking he has value only to see them retire promptly after falling off a cliff with the sox. But sox fans do the same, and now want Elvis Andrus.

rewarding Andrus for his play really is how you end up paying Leury Garcia 3 yrs 15 million.

I think I've said this before, but I find it kinda funny that one of our big worry with TLR was his hard ass managing wouldn't vibe with the team. We thought we were getting Tony the hard on discipline dad for a young, lively team. Instead we got Tony the Grandpa, who was there to tell em everythings all right and was there to push up all the kids, even Leury. (I realize not every hard-edged dad has a much softer relationship with grandkids but it is a common enough trope that it stuck out to me). Now we kinda want a hardass again after seeing how if you give this group of guys an inch to relax they take a mile. I do honestly feel bad for Renteria. He was not good, but that 2020 team was running on fumes from the bizarre year, and Hahn had already tapped out all its pitching at year 0 of the rebuild. Anyway, I find it hard to care about the managers. The best ones right now are those that are part of running their part of an organization-wide philosophy. We are going to try to go back to the all-star manager days. It will fail. It's all or nothing to fix this. They all have to go. Otherwise we just have to hope to get lucky (and that is possible, the team is still relatively talented).

I honestly think your criticism is sort of like hearing "run the touchdown play" though. What did we say all offseason? Get fields comfortable, give him roll outs, on the move. Not the "our passing game is our run game" timing throws as the key part of the offense. Despite giving fields plenty of favorable throwing situations he keeps failing in those. I don't see the solution being quick timing plays which has been his biggest struggle prior to that. It really is on him at this point. Cooper Rush looked 100x more competent.

I will say the reason we can’t just emulate the guardians is they get an extra 1st rounder and extra million on intl to spend than the Sox every year. Thats why I think people circling the braves have the right idea.

I don't think there is a team in baseball that would have had a bigger win improvement if you stuck a 40 HR hitter on it than the white sox.

I guess I'm just nervous at the idea that like a manager is going to walk in and fix it all. I think we probably make the playoffs if Cairo was manager from the start, but by the thinnest of margins. I think we see with the phillies, padres, that disappointing teams can become happy success stories. But they kept pushing forward and feels like Sox are going to have an off season of mostly stepping back and then saying "look new manager".

at least KWs reclamation projects worked every once in a while. What's Hahn's excuse?

The Broncos had 330 yards just passing on the seahawks, over 430 yards of offense in that game. They were bad vs. houston and bad vs. 49ers, who have a very good defense. Their run defense looks bad but their pass defense so far looks pretty good. The colts actually had receivers in that game.

This isn’t excusing anything but nothing from the past three weeks would lead me to believe the Texans defense is actually bad. From the first three weeks it looks like the bears have faced three good defenses.

wow sorry. that was too long.

I get all this and it's all true, but let's focus just on the stuff Hahn should reasonably control in his position - the scouting, player dev and analytics part of the org. By the end of 2016, the sox decided for a rebuild. Probably would have been a good time to retool the organization in that end. To 'modernize' (Rick Hahn decided to start modernizing 3 years into his tenure apparently), he entrusted Nick Hostetler to run the amateur scouting. He entrusted Chris Getz to run Player Dev. Analytics he just decided to use vendors basically. Those guys were already in their position. Getz took over in the midst of a revolution of player development technologies and techniques. He has done admirably imo in trying to keep up with it. But, I don't know, if I was serious about winning I may have tried to go after some of those who had natively ushered in this revolution, not a guy who spent a year in player dev in the famously old school Dayton Moore org. We've certainly been better in player dev - considering hahn set-up this rebuild with a bunch of high variance guys, Getz did get them to the big leagues and got big performances out of Giolito and Cease. He was an improvement over the white sox, but is he running a top ten unit in baseball? I say no. I think, in contrast to Hahn, that the sox should try to be the best at things. Hostetler took over for Laumann, who run the draft during a more difficult era for sox drafting, and did struggle to create depth. Laumann (2007-2015) during his tenure drafted one of the best pitchers of the decade (sale), a cy young candidate (rodon), a multiple time all star shortstop (TA), a top 5 mvp finisher and multi-time all star (Semien). His failure was drafting players that sometimes washed out before the majors. Hostetlers expert plan was to get more players that would wash out in the majors. Despite always having a full set of picks, and some of the highest draft positions the sox have ever consistently had, we are leaving his draft years of 2016-2019 with a sub-20 home run hitting first baseman possible starter. But that's not fair since he also got us some fringe serviceable relievers. But we have heard he also "modernized" the unit so that's cool. Last we heard hostetler moved to the mlb scouting side to help us with free agency. We've been as good there. And in international, Paddy has certainly found us some talent, finally seeing some depth accumulate on the position player side, highlighted by Jose Rodriguez, Lenyn Sosa, Oscar Colas and more. However, for some reason we have been signing incredibly small classes, led by the single most infuriating class, 2019 group. This was the group we thought would be huge since for 3 years we were under penalty, so what other class would we work on? Well, we signed Yolbert Sanchez, a slap hitting 22 year old for $2.5 million. For that amount, you can get slap hitting defensive players in the big leagues, but we got em for that sweet deal. He's currently slap hitting up a storm in AAA. His defense does look pretty sweet though. So all of the above is just horrible. Contrast it with how a very similar GM in DiPoto pivoted Seattle to be very tech forward in player dev, and revamped scouting. They arrived as a competitive team still harboring a top 5 farm, which allowed them to get a Luis Castillo. By the time sox arrived, the cupboard was bare. We had to trade mlb assets to get a closer, then a pitcher. Subsequently, the pitching we had in AAA and AA was worse then you'd find in the SEC on a friday.

Jerry would be so upset he had to spend more on the draft.

Tua looked different though, more like a Davis Mills type before this. He was often throwing 30+ times. And it's just hard to see Fields throw 30 times if they tried, because in his pass heavy drives it's something like 2 passes and 1 run because he'll have been sacked once, one incomplete and one run. To me tua was just "uninspiring", a guy who was a bit more like mitch in that he wouldn't punch it deep. To go back and elaborate on the me not being that mad at the run heavy approach. To me it's more damning on what we're learning from Fields, because the bears are largely keeping in him favorable passing situations and he looks like this. Like yeah when it's 3rd and 16 and he's trying to force it, bad. When it's 2nd and 6 and he immediately drops his eyes and tries to run around... His numbers are still more like rookie Lamar Jackson except he is not rushing for 100 yards a game.

I’d vote them owners

Yep. Being held hostage as fans.