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I love how facing an offseason where Josh Naylor is a north star that will be talked about ad nauseum, fans are given a choice to live in an alternate reality where we went after impactful players, and are instead like "No thanks, I'll stick with Naylor chief"

I’m sorry but you need to read the card he gave.

It’s crazy, there is like no pitcher under 30

I was thinking of a scenario around the giving season, I'm not sure what holidays Ishbia celebrates, he hands Getz an envelope with $160 million in it and it also has a coupon that says "good for 1 player". So we aren't talkin Kyle Tucker, but we are talkin most of the other free agents, I guess. I gotta say I don't have a great feel there. Who would you be most excited to add to our extremely bad team? For me it's Schwarber. He'd almost certainly become obsolete because he joined specifically our team, but to have a no doubt lefty power hitter to add to Colson would be sweet relief after the last few years. Most interesting thing to me was not wanting to block out our infield and let our young guys play out. So then you have a stretch where you probably would not have enough for Bellinger, and so it's mostly others like Alonso that I'd like. Until you get to pitchers, which bore the hell out of me. But I guess re-signing Dylan Cease would be great, you know, really stick it to the padres when we roll out Cease and Steven Wilson in the same game. They'd be so pissed lol.

Vikings still being good with Carson Wentz deserves more credit I unno

Edge in the morning, edge in the evening, corner at supper time.

bummer how just small things could change everything. Imagine had we drafted Konnor Griffin, putting us with the #1 overall prospect, a likely #1 overall pick targeting one of the top college SS in years, and Colson having just shown the power that can survive at 3b. I'd be feeling pretty cool about that offense in just 2 years. But instead it's Colson, a wild card pitcher, and hopefully Roch.

Gonna go with a D The Good: - Some long term starters showed up The Bad: - I know we are supposed to ignore previous years, but with it being the 3rd straight 100 loss season we didn't even have pieces left to trade, so no exciting deadline piece added. - Bullpen still bad and looks like they'll have to pay to improve it - Still too full of tweeners who aren't great at defense but not good enough hitters to put on corners - Very middling year on the farm

I think I'd say the reason I'd be especially skeptical that Getz will work is for the White Sox to work he'll need to be uniquely good at getting B/C level free agents to be successful and even the Dodgers struggle on that on a year to year basis. But the sox don't have a choice unless this is the greatest drafting and developing team in the league. And I'm skeptical.

I do wish the players union would admit that anti-tanking efforts were a failure and baseball could admit that just absolutely creating a cyclone of rules that uniquely screws 2-3 fanbases (not franchises!) is stupid but fortunately for them those fanbases have been so whittled down nobody gives a s%*# about them and baseball can talk about moving them to smaller locations where they can hand them cost-controlled goodies.

The one good thing about pitchers is they can randomly just find it. But, obviously given Konnor Griffin, it's going to be hard to accept a college pitchers long winding road to competence.

It's funny the split, but worthwhile to do because we have quite a few different players in the second half. But for me it's funny because the point of this post is actually a bit in free fall. Walk rate post ASB has been much lower - in part due to Colson's poor walk rate, Meidroth not walking as much and being injured, and Vargas injuries. By end of sept would be funny if we were at same spot. But, second half saw strike out rate go WAY down while power went way UP. That's worthwhile.

Not that good so far for hagen

This has been just a legitimately good stretch of baseball. The Sox deserve their flowers, I was worried when we had the losing streak it was going to fall apart. But THAT was the blip, not the winning! Great second half, great job to our young hitters and good job to Venable for figuring out how to make pitching staff work enough game to game.

One thing I love about Colson is I feel like we had like a decade post 2015 Royals of “actually doubles and contact are good! I want a guy that gets on base by any means possible” and even with Vaughn this idea that gap power was the best part of Konerko. but no, actually home runs are what’s awesome. Hitting the s%*# out of the ball is awesome. Colson I feel has brought back our love of power, which was only lost by not seeing it for so long.

yeah I imagine that'll be tough to come back from in time for a pitcher.

And yes. Long term I think they can, but come on

This kills me. You can’t have 4 top 60 picks and it make zero difference. Hopefully turner can make one

But, regardless of whether they can put the whole offense together, main point was 3 years at the absolute bottom of walk percentage was horrific. It's nice to see it move into the top half in one year and not just settling for being 25th or something.

After how bad they have been even signing marginal free agents that'd be released by June, I think Tauchman is a good step if only to believe that when we get better they will be able to supplement correctly.

he is a defensive whisperer that made marcus semien a good defender.

Sadly in July it looked like a beautiful combo.

We know offensively we've been better in the second half. How it has been done has been reassuring to me that we are scouting and have a better young core. Offensively, I'm sure we are aware that post ASB we have been an actual very good offense. That has helped us be a .500 team in the second half despite a very bad pitching staff. But there is one area I appreciate because even if you isolate our no-good offense of April and May showed immediate, genuine progress. Team BB%+: In 2022, our 81-81 team had a BB%+ of 80, which is 20% below league average and also last in the league. In 2023, our team BB%+ was 75, which is both 25% below league average but also last in the league. That was a 100 loss team obviously. In 2024, our team BB%+ was 83, which is 17% below average and amazingly just 29th in the league. While 2022 could be passable because we struck out less, and did so with league average power, by the time that we get to 2024 we are striking out more, walking less, and when we do hit it, it's for grounders. In 2025, our BB%+ is 102, which is 2% above average and 11th in the league. Our K% is 100, so we are just average in strikeouts (17th in league). What makes our offense still relatively tepid is the power. So this is, finally, a real reversal into a trend that was just extremely stuck. Much of that was players, but we had a lot of differentplayers during that 3 year stretch. This year, the MLB vets we got were able to provide actual bases not just generated by hits, but so was our talent from the farm coming up and not being embarrassing in their approach. What makes me genuinely even happier is if you isolate it to just April and May of 2025, when our offense was bad, we had a 107 BB%+ which was good for 11th overall in the league. They struck out MUCH more early, and had zero power. So even if you say we are buoyed by a hot stretch, this pattern has seemed genuinely durable across some different groups of players. A funny part is - hey wait Colson isn't necessarily an amazing part of this - ... Well post July 4th, with our loss of a few vet hitters and rise of Colson and younger bats, our Walk rate does go down to 96 and 20th in league, but our K rate is actually 90 - so we strike out 10% less than the rest of the MLB. We actually have the 5th lowest K%+ since Colson came up. But our power IMPROVED. pre Colson our Power ISO+ was 73, now it is 106 post Colson. So BBs went down, Ks went way down, and power went way up. But most importantly, we stopped this 3 year long trend of being bottom of the league in BB%+. In 2021, when we had good offense, we were second in league in BB%+ at 114 (thanks Grandal). We have more work to do to be the best team in baseball, but this is the kind of real progress I like to see. Shows across the board better execution in scouting, coaching, and players.

sure would be sweet if ron washington got fired and we could hire him for Sosa.

Week 1s are often fools gold or fools...coal, but sure feels like if you could choose one team that could not afford to look atrocious it was the dolphins. Tua looks broken in a way that derek carr suddenly looked broken. And that team is built around a QB that can get out the ball as fast as Tua used to - their offensive line sucks. Jets looked much better than I thought and steelers didn't look scary. So just another ho hum 10 win steelers team that somehow still wins so many games they look ass in.