bmags

This only comes after saying that going through moncada and the pitchers has made him temper expectations, but he is older than acuna/etc so he may not have same struggles.

He was only tempering expectations on Jimenez rookie season.

Thanks!

So just something to listen to, good breakdown of the sox from a more national perspective. Sox starts last third of episode, I want to say at the hour mark. https://blogs.fangraphs.com/effectively-wild-episode-1348-season-preview-series-indians-and-white-sox/ It is pretty depressing but a good high level view of how difficult a place in the rebuild we are in. At one point Fegan basically says "this is about as critical as I can be while being a beat writer" (this is a paraphrase).

So here's the thing for me. I've been pretty conservative in being worried about Collins moving positions as I have found projections of defensive liabilities to often be way overblown and less informative than hitting and other tools. My stance was that I'd only start to be worried that literally nobody outside the sox org feels he can be a catcher when the white sox start to move him off catcher. So sure, it's just part time for playing time with both on roster. But if they were really still prioritizing his defensive development, I'd just have him DH on seby days, have him work with a coordinator calling game plan in the dugout while on defense, and give him drills on drills on those days. Instead he'll be focusing on being a 1b and maybe that will help in a different way, but I'm skeptical.

Ever since the 4 OT game he’s been awful

This comes after a BA chat where Kyle Glaser said he has not come across anyone in baseball not in the white Sox org who thinks Collins can be a catcher.

Will be interesting. That recent ty Cobb bio showed how crazy it is where myths established in the era of more modern media could stick as fact for generations later. Basically if a movie or whatever was put out in the fifties or later with a bunch of tropes about a pre video time period that became the statement of record.

There’s things like trackman though that do modernize it. In the wrong hands though...

Is this true? Though production is hard to measure, I would imagine they value the type of athleticism and other spare-like metrics that you need to draft high school or international to get because college gets so picked over before they start. With HS you are judging them on where they are going to be if you develop them, which as I’ve said, is great because you are challenging them with tougher competition as they are improving both physically and mentally. I am not against college players but the focus on them means you miss out on players with high upside.

I think more than anything, how they’ve handled 2nd round/1st round comp picks has been my largest gripe. But regardless, there was huge importance on getting these draft picks right. The difference between 11 and 17 in a draft isn’t huge. But the rebuild just looks so different if you draft Kirilloff and not Collins. Or Kieboom and not Burdi.

Thanks that makes sense.

Sucks, looks like if bears gambled they could have had him. I don’t blame them for ensuring they got a guy they liked but personally not crazy about Skrine.

I tuned out after that, lotta like people are doing well. Name a player, they are doing well. Then he mentioned ADolfo would start season on opening day as DH and I listened.

Okay, kind of a big if. This wasn't a 17 year old kid, he's a 22 year old mass of a man in one of the best hitting parks we had who in 437 at bats had less home runs than Laz Rivera had in 225. He was 8th in homers despite being second in at bats. He had only 4 more doubles than Luis Gonzalez in 200 more at bats. He's not a center fielder. He only has a route to the big leagues with power. You have guys like Brandon Belt in the mlb, but he had 23 home runs across three levels in his first year.

The sox want us to be very impressed that they scout players when they are young, as opposed to every other organization.

If y'all want news, Micker Adolfo will start the year as a DH it sounds like on time.

RH is on. Spring training has been incredible. Very positive one.

No the good results are real and the bad results are fake.

I don't really care about spring training Giolito. It has proven to be a false indicator before.

That was a nice one and I missed it because I was staring at Welington Castillo's splits page garitall

That's giving them more credit than I was thinking. Castillo is much much better against righties than mccann and only a wee bit better against lefties so my guess is they were going to bat castillo basically exclusively against righties.

I didn't call them good platoons!

Darby went for 1 year 8.5 mill back to the eagles, which is admittedly a bit more than I thought he'd get considering he may be a tough call to start season on short term IR.

These are never interesting but it has felt more than ever like the manager, boyer, etc sound defeated knowing they are pushing trash.