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From Rosenthal One of the reasons I was extremely positive on the first teardown and was hopeful for Hahn, is that our timing was extremely good compared to say, the Tigers. We moved our players first at a time when a handful of the most competitive teams all had top ten farms (Red Sox, Cubs, Astros, Dodgers), and on top of that it was an arms race with very few impact arms found via FA (2017 offseason maybe Ivan Nova was the best pitcher signed, maybe i'm missing something. Charlie Morton to Braves maybe) Well - the pitching is better this year but the position player market is atrocious. The Brewers, an org able to be consistently competitive despite making $50 a year, see this and are able to think "huh maybe we should take advantage" The White Sox very well could crush this market unloading Robert. There's nobody truly like him and he's cheap. I don't even want them to, but I'm not sure there will be an opportunity quite like it again. OTOH, we have Chris Getz as our sole decision maker and he hired a very affable man for pro scouting. So we don't know.

What I've learned is that people on this board want someone that just repeats their own thoughts back to them. They will hate the next announcer as soon as they do something like ask a question to their color commentator, use silence, dont' use silence, or any number of rules that this board has established.

Bummer, the Comas pitching transition seemed to be going well.

I'm not sure I buy the scarcity argument leading to higher prices. He won't get Judge money just because he's he's the top FA. Teams are pretty disciplined now. But he's still incredibly valuable. When healthy he's clearly an elite player and only by being injured at the worst time is he available.

One org is talking super serious about how they mean business about improving defense and another just hired Ron Washington.

They were in a much better position because they aren't a lemonade stand. We are still in a terrible position because we are a lemonade stand.

One thing I'm not sure of anymore is the idea of razing everything to the ground. You can point to the Rangers and say "see, that's what we shoulda done", etc. But we now know that if we ship out moncada and Robert and Eloy and clear the decks, we aren't going to get a semien or turner or seager. So it's just going back to the well of hoping that you hit extraordinarily well on some prospects because you also can't draft an extra top 150 player every draft like a small market team.

truly the worst.

I think i'd rather listen to Hahn talk than Boras, tbh. Close call but I would

I can't even imagine what package would be like. If you aren't the Orioles, Brewers...Rays I'm not sure I'd be open to it.

Right, and one of the things I"ve come to believe is it is actually really hard to get the right value back for control on star players. I would bet that when the Padres trade Soto, we find that the return is not 2-3x what they paid in the first place, but isn't that what value that control should come with? The case for trading Robert is market timing, but the cases against are just 4 years is a long time. 4 years ago was 2019, the white sox ascent hadn't even happened yet. But if he's still a great player in 2 years, you'll get a very similar haul, OR you'll say "wow this team is close let's add around him"

I feel like people are forgetting when we were so happy about Hahn saying the team was mired in mediocrity. Gotta actually show something.

all of 2023 was a greater PR disaster than the White Flag trade.

While some part of this defense stuff you could point to, as Getz, and say "Not my fault we drafted a bunch of first baseman, screwed up FA, and needed their bats so bad we had to play them in the outfield and everywhere else", But the other part of this is the same trick we saw with Hahn, where to fix defense it was always getting a better defensive player as if it is purely an innate skill. So if we want to improve on defense at SS, bring in Paul DeJong and ship out Anderson. But Paul DeJong was an unlikely shortstop due to his height, yet came up thru an org that is purely amazing at teaching defense. Had Tim Anderson been a cardinal...I have beliefs that he'd be a much better defender today. So it is unknown why he could not bring up prospects like Sosa and Gonzalez and Madrigal and have us be like "wow they are very good at defense" and instead say "wow they are terrible but maybe they can hit". He has coaches that are set to help with this...but why was it so bad under Getz. Big part of hahns failure is he could not pay for the all around great players, and swapped out one dimensional players for a different dimension. WHile other smaller market teams were better at just helping improve them to be more multi-dimensional.

He was with the Yankees for 6 years.

I mean none of it matters. There is no reason you can’t see what Popeye can do. Lopez will be lucky to get a major league deal.

I mean if he can actually fix one of the chronic problems this team has had I’ll be intrigued.

Chris Getz in November: “I don’t like this team” Chris Getz in December, after trading for Salvador Perez and signing Whit Merrifield: ?

Yankees, dodgers, guardians…seems fine

It made me laugh as well

Sorry, I know many don't subscribe to BP, but I just guffawed at this Title + Subhed "Did not help Groundball hitters as many assumed" https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/86540/moonshot-shift-ban-lefties/?mc_cid=6afc646009&mc_eid=80ba8974c0 And then I laughed at our extremely right-handed, groundball hitting lineup we threw out last year. But now we have Grady Sizemore!

oh I was seeing way higher numbers for Jung Hoo Lee

I think Derozan + Caruso gets you biggest return. The rumors around Lavine during the Lillard trades was bulls were not getting good returns.

I think some of the Billy Donovan hate is unfounded. There is just some reality here where they put together a team of a bunch of ball dominant players who aren't great playmakers together on offense. If Zach and Coby and Pat sat on the 3 point line and just hit 3s, and if DeRozan and Vuc hit them when they were open, it would work better. But they all need to take turns. Meanwhile defensively he's turned them into a pretty strong team. It's the team mix that absolutely sucks. Steve Kerr doesn't turn this into a contender. Trade Zach, Trade Demar + Caruso. Start over. It doesn't work.