chitownsportsfan

They are risking nothing. That's why you buy a sports franchise. You're guaranteed to bank. It's a legal cartel. As for your 2nd point, there isn't a single part of another team spending money to win that makes me enjoy baseball less -- the Sox, sure? But the sport as a whole, hell no. There's no defending JR.

You got screen play rights? I'm sold.

It was quite exhilarating. And he remains perhaps the best FA signing of all time in Chicago. He put up 8.6 bWAR in two seasons, including one in which he led the league in OPS+ and hit a billion bombs with runners on. It would be similar to signing Judge today.

Great day for baseball. Bad day for the Sox.

Just do the opposite of what we do then.

damn my mild joke was rejected quicker than a sox qualifying offer.

This is a classic OOTP strategy and works pretty well, at least in the game. Overpay on AAV for a bunch of short term contract and if it doesn't work you just blow it up as nobody is on the hook for that long. The Sox of course would never entertain an AAV on Ohtani (for example) of 80 million in order to entice him on a short term deal. Guys do occasionally except a "prove it" deal but I don't think Chicago has ever done one.

Yea, I don't think they care about being competitive either. They care about the illusion of it, but not actually putting together a team that can win 82 or so games in order to satisfy some measure of "competitive". If they were trying to be competitive they would be adding 30 million in payroll and wouldn't be trying to trade Cease. They are trying to cut payroll and do some half assed "rebuild" that has like a .1% chance of working while paying lip service to "competitive".

We're stealth tanking. While loudly cutting payroll. Welcome to our new reality. Same as the old reality really, just more depressing on the obvious face.

the knife:

he's white and hits 10 HR a year. He's perfect for the role.

I punched in "white sox player" into Dall-E and it spit out 270/300/380 and a picture of this guy.

He's not likely to be a star, but he is def likely to be a useful pitcher. Lefty, control issues, but plenty of swing and miss, and in today's MLB if he can pitch 5 innings more often than not he's a starter.

Ah, thank you. Makes sense.

It says they have to be on the 26 man. But can they assign a guy to AAA and just lose the MLB roster spot? Is their some "active" designation a player can get in addition to simply being on the roster?

See this isn't clear, it sounds like reading the rules that they could just "forfeit" carrying 26 guys at the big league level and assign him to AAA after or during or around or whatever the 90 days he was active on the MLB roster. I'd imagine this would be frowned upon by literally everybody and the Sox would never do it, but it would be interesting in a "tank" year.

That's the short of it. There's some exceptions and I'd love to see a club assign a guy to the minors and just lose the 26th man spot while avoiding the rule.

Good pickup. He'll be a decent reliever at worst.

Growing up I loved Wilson Alvarez, coming up and pitching the wild no hitter as a kid was just magical. He never really did much of note in his career after that, but I still loved him. On the World Series team it was Torpedo Boat Uribe he was so fun to watch as a SS, strongest arm I've seen on the Sox. Recent years nobody really comes to mind too much. I kinda have a soft spot for Reylo for some reason.

The WAR chart says that 5 is basically the same as 10, but that 1-3 are valuable, by quite a bit more. We got the worst possible outcome really given the new rules.

We get bent over on the strike, bent over on the new lotto, bent over on international academies, we should just rename the team the corn holes.

Ad lib it. Plenty of choices.

So we get fucked. Perfect.

I know how he left might have turned some fans but I still love Mags and I'm glad he found a home in Detroit and had a legendary moment.

Mike Caruso. The great white hope, and hype.