bmags

I'm way better. He tried to make his agency something it wasn't. I'm positioning the white sox to be their best selves because I love them and accept them.

It's a mission statement.

We are in a familiar cycle. At the end of a season, falling short, a sober Hahn sits in front of microphones and coldly addresses how they must address the clubs faults in order to compete with the best teams. Their weaknesses always tend to be the things most expensive to acquire, and so they go around the offseason saying "hello mr. all-around-power-hitting-lefty, here is our amazing market level contract for you" and then telling every mid-level employee and contract lawyer near them how aggressive they are and smart they are and then their jaw drops when mr. all-around-power-hitting-lefty leaves with another team. But since we are an older, wiser, mature group of posters now we know that you can't force your life partner (in this case, our white sox) to be someone they are not. They won't be a forward-looking, disciplined, well rounded organization no matter how hard we pine. But they are a damn good team. And if they want to win a world series with just first baseman and relief pitchers, then I am going to love and support them. And god damn it, White Sox. Be who you are, and go and sign Nick Castellanos. This team is so good, and you are right, you only need Right Handed fat players if you also have Luis Robert. So go be the white soxiest team that can white sox. Thank you for reading my vafan post. (the actual white sox move is Gavin Sheets in RF, we know this is happening, this is the bargaining phase)

guys lets talk about how good that bullpen is though

I don't think we had any ins on Vlad Jr or Acuna.

Yes

Man some of these AL teams are loading up. Sox should try to sign at least 2-3 more bullpen arms to counter.

Crazy how Mark Shapiro can still build up a strong farm system despite not getting extra picks but Rick Hahn has only ever managed being in the 25-30 range when only reliant on his draft picks.

Hahn's budget management reminds me of when I was young and in my first few jobs where all my money from raises just went into taking more taxis instead of the bus.

I remember when all of our dream budgets pre-2020 had sox maxing out at 160 and every one of those was better than whta Hahn put together. It is embarrassing how high our payroll is with this much talent still on their early arb years, with how little additional impact players were added. GM is another one of those jobs where I guess you don't get better at it with experience, clearly. Free agency is as big of a black hole for Hahn as it ever was.

I think people must be thinking "oh the sox will try to improve their team"

I’m glad the bears aren’t the jaguars but I hope we aren’t going to trot out the 2017 bears

I am excited to have Joe Kelly though. He was in near all my 2022 mock-ups. Watching bullpen pitcher after bullpen pitcher of ours (except bummer) try to blow fastballs by the Astros and fail, only to watch joe Kelly the next day put in two innings when a LAD starter struggled vs braves and shut them down with all offspeed stuff cemented that. When we are in the playoffs, we now have a bullpen pitcher who won’t piss down his leg trying to find the strike zone when we need them most. Plus he’s hilarious.

Exactly, and a “we’re gonna let the market come to us” attitude that always exclusively netted them overpaying for marginal starters (but much less than if they paid real money to actual upgrades)

So it turns out Rick Hahn learned absolutely nothing from the last time he was adding talent to a team. Just a brutal approach to the offseason. Absolutely brutal. I like Vazquez as minor league depth though

Do y’all like Anibal Sanchez cause I feel like that’s where we are headed

Very annoying how much draft capital and other assets sox spent in 2017-2019 for relief pitcher profiles, only to be using SO much of their position player savings on the bullpen. Sox are pound wise and penny foolish and it drives me nuts.

I fucking love Joe Kelly. Insanely bad offseason so far though. Even if they sign Conforto their planning looks like shit. But sitting in the stands in October last year, Kelly was the number one guy I wanted to get for the bullpen.

At least it wasn’t Villar but paying for 1 WAR players definitely has a 2015-16 white sox feel to it.

I think it’s probably underrated how it’s only been like 8 hours and they didn’t know when it would happen ANd even if there was tampering there was a chance for agents that a higher CBT would bring new teams in mix. Not surprised it wasn’t like the NFL day one. I do expect it to be active today, that’d be weird if not.

I’d be surprised if Goldman was traded, fully expect he’s cut. Just hard to commit to a guy who was mulling not coming back last year. Would be a disaster to trade for him the he retire

I mean in October you push. But I think it helps to just look at Dylan Ceases workload. Dylan was great and available all year, leading to 32 starts, but just about 160 IP which is what a 5 IP target looks like. So if Kopech is looking great and durable and making all of his starts by July, it would help if he suddenly had some 10 day stints to get his starts down. So 30 starts gets you 150 IP, that’s the dream scenario where he is just available all year, and you aren’t even managing workload that much. That’s 80 IP over last year and if you have a deep playoff run you push everyone but even then that puts his ceiling closer to 100 inning increase, which again isn’t ideal but also isn’t as crazy as this thread made it sound. A whole lotta pitchers just did that year over year from 2020 to 2021, including Cease. Kopech is different since he hasn’t proven it before and I think it’s likely he has a dead arm period and we are looking closer to 25-28 starts with a 130-140 IP season organically. But that’s also just a pretty typical baseball pitcher nowadays.

What a bizarre response.

I guess I’m saying the dead cap space is “eating” it as they have to realize all of the guaranteed money that would have been spread out. Isnt all Mack’s deal base salary now? It’s a much easier contract on the chargers than it was on the Bears. I hoped that would make it less of an issue, but yeah not many teams with $20 mil in space for one guy.

You guys are weird with the Tony will burn the arms out stuff. No sox pitcher pitched over 180 IP last year. Sure felt like Lynn pitched a lot. Lynn pitched 158 IP. hopefully with 2020 in mirror those guys can pitch more. But for Kopech he is likely going to be a 5 IP guy unless he’s super efficient in a game. And that is very manageable.