Balta1701

I think the market inefficiency on relievers is always going to be what it has been - finding starters who have stuff but who hit limits in the upper minors or big leagues and converting them to relievers.

You could have literally included John Q Fakename in your list of reasons why you’re aren’t concerned about the bullpen and I’d totally have believed he was a real person.

After all, no teams tank in the NBA thanks to their salary cap.

I don’t care one bit about any of this. Promote guys and call them up when they deserve it. We just spent 10 years with a GM who would find any reason possible to bring people up or leave them down other than how they were actually performing. If a guy earns a call up, call them up. Nastrini and Eder are guys we’d like to see make progress and earn a call up, but if they struggle or get hurt, don’t call them up just to save the bullpen or to meet some artificial deadline. Montgomery was injured last year and struggled in his AA stint. If he doesn’t tear up the minors, take your time, he doesn’t have to come up. Ramos outperformed Monty last year, if he does that again bring him up to AAA and then see if he earns a call up. Quero is probably two years away if we’re being honest, take our time with him. Actually make these as baseball decisions. It’s the one thing Hahn basically never did.

Yasmani Grandal made the playoffs 7 years in a row, we should have signed him.

If they were truly a ".500 team" like the poster I replied to suggested, I'd imagine they'd convince themselves not to sell guys.

What are the odds that everyone breaks out? That no one gets hurt (including Soroka and Kopech), and that things go well for everyone? People were predicting that for the roster last year, that everyone would be excellent and break out, and that might have been enough to get them back into competing for a weak AL Central. That was with a stronger roster than this one, and we saw how it went.

He's making $3.25 million this year. That's less than Lopez or Maldonado, so that's not unreasonable money to risk on seeing if he could be any better this year. Taking that up to $5-6 million in arbitration year 2, if he performs the same as last year, would be questionable at best. The out, for him, would be non-tendering him at the end of the season, if as you say he doesn't hit this year.

It still seems unlikely to me that Grifol isn't here in 2025. Just in general - let's say that the White Sox win 55 games in 2024. Do we fire the manager over the lack of performance? Naw, the team wasn't very good and we knew that. How do you give a guy an evaluation that is negative enough to fire them when you can't really use wins and losses? If they win 68 games, they over performed! What a credit to the manager that must have been. I suppose that they might have to do so just from fan frustration, but that hasn't made them do things in the past. The only obvious way I've got where Grifol might be replaced is LaRussa wants to come back.

At least right now it seems like the Royals, Tigers, Guardians, and Twins could all be in a pretty tight race, within a few games of .500 this year. Things probably fall apart for one of them, but that doesn't seem like an awful guess right now does it? The only team in this division that looks hopeless in 2024 is the White Sox. If you told me the 4th place team had 77 wins and the 1st place team had 85 wins, that seems believable to me?

You’re right but Hahn had to Hahn. But conveniently, the team has yet to move to American Samoa and conver their roster to cricket, so a guy who needs innings can, during 2024, throw innings.

Best case scenario, with returns from a few more trades like Cease and Fedde, this team will have some guys who can step in and a fair amount of money to spend next offseason. They don’t look anything like a World Series champ, but getting close to .500 and being back to 4th place in the AL central is feasible. More realistically, that probably involves too many things going right. They don’t have a lot of talent in the organization and their development staff has yet to give us any reason for confidence. Especially with Grifol probably still managing in 2025, my guess is it looks a lot like 2023 - they make some signings, think they’re better than they are, and then disappoint. That is my standing prediction for 2026-2027 as well.

How exactly does a guy who hasn’t yet made his big league debut in Nastrini have a $7.5 million 2025 salary? I think this is an error but Rick Hahn was the GM for a long time so…

Thats why they should follow a plan to get him those innings.

Montgomery had injury problems last year and hit .218 in 218 at bats at AA. Bringing him up late in the season not because he blows away the minors but because we have roster room and want the press coverage is exactly how Rick Hahn handled his guys.

Quero should almost certainly be no where near the big leagues this year, and several of those guys (Ramos, Montgomery, Cannon, Bush) it would certainly be Rick Hahn type decision making to pencil them in as coming up to the big leagues in August when they haven’t played more than 1/2 a year at AA and few of them were successful there early.

‘Twas a trade.

Got a little confused as espn only shows 1 K through 2 for Cease, guess that’s just the wording.

Apparently you should read it closely a few more times.

The above sure sounds like you're ripping Thompson to me. And yes, it is rather weird and frankly bizarre that you look at 27 innings of a guy at Kannapolis in 2021 and think "See he can get his walk rate down" and then say that a guy who had 84 innings with a comparable walk rate in 2022 at Winston-Salem is a guy who has "lost all prospect momentum".

So you're ripping Thompson for not being good at AA, and your support for Horn is 27 good innings at A-ball. Yet you don't see any distinction here.

Except of course that lefty also can't throw strikes.

We're in a thread on Grifol. I will trust him when he has earned it. His behavior last year gives me deep skepticism about his willingness to correctly make use of his young guys. If he has a crappy veteran and uses that as an excuse to mistreat a young guy....again...it will create anger about the presence of the veteran as well as anger about him. And I think I'm pretty clearly expecting this to happen - hell, they already blocked Korey Lee because they needed veteran leadership around their other young catcher on the roster, Max Stassi.

You're talking about a 0.5 fWAR player, basically. That performance is tolerable, it's acceptable given the money, it's understandable for where the White Sox are in April of 2024. It's not really tradeable for anything of value, so maybe still a little more money than we should have spent on this guy. My question then is - why is he playing a full season? Is he playing a full season because Colson isn't ready, or because Colson is getting benched for him in the 2nd half because they have to play their Vetz?

Having been elsewhere around the league, the US Cellular Field Ballpark experience really doesn't measure up to other spots. Some of that is the neighborhood and lack of things to do around the park. Some of that is the lack of walkable options or good transit options. A good amount of that is the park structure, the upper deck is legitimately still not pleasant, even if chopping 10 rows away from it helped somewhat. There is nothing visually that interesting about it, it's too cookie cutter. This is absolutely a factor in how it draws.