chitownsportsfan

Baseball is both fine and broken. It is a regional sport and always will be. It is more similar to CFB than the NFL. Depending on who you root for you will have a very different experience.

meh.

Position player wise, it will be hard to be worse, even assuming we don't make any other big signings or deals. Pitching wise? We'll be awful, but not so much more that some improved defense won't offset part of it.

Ya, and the best case scenario is we bounce back enough to be a decent (so like 80 wins) but not good team and are able to flip some guys to start competing against in 2025. I'm not going to be watching many games, but at this point in the offseason at least Getz seems to have realized what has to be done.

He's just a flip candidate, nothing more, nothing less. For our purposes this year, that's fine.

the problem with moncada is a bad back. when he does this for the rest of his career before retiring at 32 people will get it.

He has a porn star name.

Somewhere RV chuckles quietly to himself.

The moves are fine, needed, and will move the franchise forward on the long and hard road of building (again) a core of guys you can rely on to sustain success. I just wish the franchise realized that the few remaining fans are almost all die hards and you don't have to try and sell this as a retool. Just admit failure and move on.

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.