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I honestly have no idea what to make of the Mets. I think one thing to keep in mind is they are competing, so to some extent I 'd expect them to want ML pieces or near-ready ML pieces. I have been reading that among other things they just are stuck with the lack of defensive versatility in CF with their offensive players. We are not a tremendous fit there, they'll want an immediate upgrade and I doubt Adam Engel is their cup 'o tea. If there is a Betts sweepstakes, I expect mets to be in on it.

Or it's just a classic Jim Bowden article.

I do not want to sign Odorizzi with a QO.

Is there really though? We'll have an insurance policy for probably 50%. If he's completely injured you recoup that. He won't be an issue for luxury tax because we won't be near it. And I just don't see him being healthy but completely terrible even in year 5. Pitching isn't nearly as risky in terms of blowing up team building. The worst part about it is not being sure you are going to have it when you need it due to the high amount of injuries and variation in performance.

Epstein had some legitimately advantageous tactics that have been crushed by the latest CBAs. While I would take Friedman over Theo, I don't really hate on GMs that rightly put the pedal to the medal with a team that could win it all. You don't know that you have enough until it's all over, and you don't want to have any what-ifs at that point.

And recall that the astros were one of the highest K teams in 2016 or 2015, whenever their first playoff team was. After 2016 they shed a lot of their worst offenders and brought in more well-rounded bats (though still as quality). Here you saw them ditch jason castro and colby rasmus and replace them with beltran, mccann and reddick. Then brantley comes the next offseason. Vaughn and madrigal's approach will be welcomed, and I feel pretty confident that Jimenez will be eventually much more in line with his AAA balance. But Robert, TA, and Moncada will be high K guys and still be productive. Honestly I owe @caulfield12 as I focus on adding pitching this offseason reddick actually seems like that productive placeholder. I am just terrified he craters or gets injured the first week like our tour of 30+ outfield additions like austin jackson, jay, etc.

Dave Dombrowski's win percentage in the last decade to hahn's is a different stratosphere.

Right, and he's never really worked anywhere else. He had two years of a real job outside of the white sox, and it was on the agent side for only 2 years. This is the family he knows. He can't reach back to a world of knowledge on how things are done.

He has a lot of power, and I don't want to act like I'm poo-poo'ing a 127 wRC+ player, but the sox really need some diversity in their bats. Another high K, low walk guy is not the most ideal fit.

The behavior of JR in the 80s compared to late 90s and beyond is pretty striking. In both of his orgs he eventually seemed to get to the equilibrium of a cohesive frontoffice/ownership relationship with an us against them mentality against often coaches and players, and fans and media.

It's not any other job, and he is an executive. Everyone has context. Some CEOs have more antagonistic boards or difficult shareholders to deal with, tougher external forces. They are still the CEOs and are judged on the performance. Hahn isn't the CEO, but he's in a high enough position that this rings completely hollow. He still has plenty of leeway to improve the performance of the white sox. James Dolan is a terrible owner. But how many GMs have been in charge of the knicks that people have been like "well actually they were good it was just the owner!"

For me it's international. I am quite honestly much more upset with the 2019-20 intl class being so clearly bungled or deprioritized than screwing up last offseason. At least with player dev, though it is insane they didn't go crazy in spending on it when they decided to rebuild in 2017, it is clear they are trying to improve it to some average standard. With International, I'm not even sure if they are on that trajectory.

I get this, I do. If the sox fired Rick Hahn tomorrow and replaced him within their current structure, I'd have very little optimism that it was a new dawn. However, he still has a great deal of responsibility here, and it feels like he can only get the org to focus on one thing at a time. They spent time on drafting and trades for 2017-18, now they move hostetler over so they can focus on FA.

I think it's reasonable to say that JR does not think there is good return on a lot of the player dev investments or international spending. But that is still part of Hahns job to sell that vision to the owner. And that is a skill. The sox position themselves publicly as a team that doesn't need to be Tampa or the Oakland As or the Twins, but where they choose to spend that additional money just adds so little value. They just seem to be in denial on what kind of organization they are.

But that's not apples to apples, as Rick Hahn had two incredible boosts to his drafting compared to KW: - The 2012 CBA that gave draft budgets and removed the sox being hamstrung by being one of the only teams that followed suggested draft slots (allowing players like Porcello to go to the tigers while we drafted aaron poreda) - An average draft position of 8th overall compared to drafts often in the late teens/early 20s. That's not to defend KW, but they should be better at drafting with those two huge benefits. And the only quality we can really point to is 1st round, with that draft record benefit. His ability to find value in rounds 3-10 has been terrible. The indians get such a huge boost with a player like Shane Bieber coming up, and sox just cannot seem to find one.

I really want to complete the exercise of looking at all free agent signings of 29 other teams and their production. I agree the main thing that stuck out when I did for the sox (and soxmachine just did a better job of) was the distribution seemed so dramatic. I think part of that when you are looking at "so and so millions for so and so WAR" is to get to the 250 million part was a lot of players. edit: and one thing that I regret is using bWAR because baseball reference was jus so much easier to get to the players and transactions.

Will post a great quote from James vegan along that line: “Big signings — and certainly Machado’s and Bryce Harper’s deals — often get scrutinized for whether the production can strictly live up to the dollar value. But there’s far less discussion of the accumulated cost of mid- or low-tier signings and their potential to completely flop, from even a dollar standpoint, let alone a competitive one.“

Do you realize that two playoff teams had smaller payrolls than the white Sox did last year? Had he not been delusional and actually committed to giving the team the type of team building resources needed for teams with payroll restrictions (actually ... all teams really) he wouldn’t be in this position of questioning his usefulness. The Rays built a playoff team and number one farm system in baseball, and many of those pieces are from intl and drafts from 2013/14. Hahn had plenty of time to build an org that was strong from bottom up, but instead he went along with the cronyism of never firing anyone and let the boys who have been there forever just keep doin what they are doin.

Bears games are so impossibly boring.

Never heard of this guy but he said something good so I rate him as highly trustworthy in predictions

If people were looking at any other team they would have no problem pointing fingers at the VP of baseball operations as a major reason for the teams performance and not making excuses because the people below him may be giving him bad advice.

Then they should instead have spent their efforts convincing their boss to spend considerably more money on their player development and international programs instead of targeting free agents they were unlikely to sign.

I honestly don’t care. That he is bad at convincing his superiors of the best way to operate the things he was charged with operating is an issue, that he was so terrible at executing the acceleration was the other.

He took over prior to 2013. There is no reason it should take any team that long to make the playoffs. He was in charge in tearing down the longtime core, the one who decided to accelerate it one year later, couldn’t even get out to a winning record for two years, then had to do a bare bones rebuild.

This sentiment is wild to me. He’s responsible for the people under him and he’s been GM for 7 years!