Balta1701

The other real effect for him was a major dropoff in his exit velocity, which is absolutely key for a hitter of his profile. He has to be hitting the ball as hard as he can all the time. If he isn’t doing that, then he’s not going to be that useful.

I don’t have enough confidence in this team to think that it’s a good idea to be signing 4 year deals for mid-level corner OFs. A 1 year deal will probably get a worse player, but the odds of it affecting the 2025 team poorly are limited.

It’s baseball so stranger things have worked out, but if we have an outfield of Sheets, Payton, and Leury for a game I don’t want to hear how astonishing it is.

But let’s face it, on paper their resumes are not slam dunks. They don’t meet the standards Rick Hahn himself set out at the beginning of October. They could easily be excellent, they have said some of the right things, but they could just as easily be more of the same, although they can’t possibly be worse. I’m not going to get too excited or down on them myself either, but I’m not going to be all that surprised when people are more down on them than me.

I feel like we know the end result of this plan, it’s posts in mid April about how no one could have foreseen our outfield being a disaster like this.

If you want him off The roster you have to buy out his contract or take a worse one back. Remember though, if they got rid of him, they’d immediately be looking for another backup to replace him. Maybe getting him away from the Menechino philosophy will help.

Assuming they let Engel go, who is the backup OF to start the season in this setup? Leury?

While that is true, it is also true that the White Sox in general have earned an extremely healthy dose of skepticism. At the very least, give some space to people who say that they aren’t hating these guys yet but they want to see results rapidly.

And yet, the White Sox aren’t rebuilding their front office and they’re hiring guys from the Royals where they refused to give in to analytical changes. If y’all wanted to give me reasons to think that they’re saying the right things in public so that they don’t have to actually do anything different behind the scenes, you’re succeeding.

I am skeptical at the notion that either Menechino or Steverson came into their interview and said they want a one size fits all approach of hitting the ball on the ground the other way (although with this GM I can’t be sure that wouldn’t get them the job), but from Avisail Garcia to Eloy Jimenez that’s what we got. Count me as skeptical until I see it, especially since the same guys had to do the hiring.

Only threw 70 pitches. This is one where I think the new school “always go for the matchup” backfires. He’d be hated on if it didn’t work, but at the same time, Alvarez was going to figure that guy out eventually. He was seeing him every game.

There’s your problem with having a reliever face a guy 4 or 5 times in a series.

A quick check says that Torres has an arbitration projection of $9.8 million next year. If there is not a substantial payroll boost, that leaves you $12 million to spend the rest of the offseason to cover OF and Pitching.

Oh I totally agree. That’s the one position where we have enough depth to say heck with it, go with what we have. It would be nice to have enough money to go for Turner there, but it’s just not practical. There’s a good chance we get enough from some combination of kids, and if we don’t, that is unlikely to make or break the season.

I think people need to be more careful with Andrus. He was amazing for the White Sox and there’s nothing in his profile that suggests he will ever have another 2 month stretch like that, let alone a full season.

Elvis Andrus is very likely to be a downgrade from Josh Harrison if he were to be kept.

At the very least it has to be balanced. If Tim Anderson is really good at making contact and going the other way, let him keep doing that. But guys like Eloy, Vaughn, big strong slow guys, they should not be trying to go the other way on the ground very often. They cannot make careers out of beating throws to first or running on the base paths.

Although he wasn’t the full hitting coach, the overall Royals launch angle the last 2 years has been 12.8 degrees; very consistent year to year and in the middle of the pack. The White Sox have had one of the lowest launch angles in baseball consistently over the entire statcast era and across two hitting coaches, so this is a statistic I hope to see change.

Fixed, thank you. Think I have it now, $21 million matches this years payrolll.

AJ Pollock has a player option for $13 million, not a team option. He would have to decline it, the team does not get to choose this. If he declines it, he gets $5 million. As he is unlikely to make more than $8 million on the free agent market, he seems likely to pick it up unless he is ready to retire or really wants out of Chicago.

Jose Abreu 18 Lance Lynn 18.5 Yasmani Grandal 18.25 AJ Pollock 11.5 Yoan Moncada 13 Liam Hendriks 13 Kendall Graveman 8 Lucas Giolito 7.45 Eloy Jimenez 6.5 Joe Kelly 7 Leury Garcia 5.5 Josh Harrison 4 Johnny Cueto 3.2 Vincent Velaszquez 3 Reynaldo Lopez 2.625 Aaron Bummer 2.5 Adam Engel 2 Jake Diekman 1.23 Dylan Cease 0.75 Jose Ruiz 0.72 Andrew Vaughn 0.715 Gavin Sheets 0.671 Jimmy Lambert 0.48 Davis Martin 0.2 Romy Gonzalez 0.188 Elvis Andrus 0.184 Carlos Perez 0.069 Mark Payton 0.053 Tim Anderson 9.5 Luis Robert 6 Kyle Crick 1.25 Michael Kopech 0.73 Garret Crochet 0.715 Jonathan Stiever 0.7 Danny Mendick 0.67 Seby Zabala 0.44 Dallas Keuchel 18 Reese McGuire 0.468 Ryan Burr 0.187 Yermin Mercedes 0.15 Matt Foster 0.539 Tanner Banks 0.503 Jake Burger 0.396 Haseley 0.1 Lenyn Sosa 0.065 Nicholas Padilla 0.7 Bennett Sousa 0.28 Anderson Severino 0.076 190.754 Signign bonuses: Pollock: $3 million Abreu: $1.68 Million Moncada: $800k Hendriks: $333k Jimenez: $833k If you count those as part of the 2022 payroll to get up to looking like $197 million, then this must be added to the 2023 payroll: Mondada: $800k Hendriks $333K Jimenez $833K (an extra just under $2 million)

Things being missed: The minimum salary is $720,000, not $700,000. This totals an extra $120k for the players listed. Only 24 players are included. This is an extra $1.44 million not being counted, although that can be shifted to other guys if someone is signed. $1 million in deferred money to Abreu. $197 million is the payroll last year - if you are counting things like Moncada's signing bonus, Pollock's signing bonus as part of last year's salary. Or, alternatively, it looks that high if you count guys like Romy as receiving a full year's salary, when they only receive a portion of the years' salary. If you total up everyone that they spent big league money on, it comes out around $190 million without the signing bonuses.

If the MLBTradeRumors arbitration numbers are correct, the White Sox are at $172-$173 million. Spotrac agrees with this number, assuming they let Engel go. Their payroll last year was about $195 million. If they don't increase their payroll, and they spend $14 million on Conforto, they'd have about $8 million left for a pitcher, give or take exact arbitration numbers. A $15 million pitcher means they need to boost their payroll up over $200 million.

All right, I've been wanting to do this for a while and it's Friday afternoon. Let's make an assumption and do some math here - imagine that the White Sox had no injuries, and that their list of guys had full seasons. What happens if I scale up everyone's WAR up to 150 games for the starters, 33-34 starts for the starters, and 60-70 appearances for the relievers (70 for Hendriks, 60 for the non closers). War Actual WAR healthy Luis Robert 2.1 5.0 Eloy Jimenez 1.7 3.0 Tim Anderson 2.0 3.8 Yoan Moncada 0.9 1.3 AJ Pollock 0.5 0.6 Yasmani Grandal -0.4 -0.6 Andrew Vaughn -0.4 -0.5 Leury Garcia -1.1 -1.2 Danny Mendick 0.8 2.0 Lance Lynn 1.9 3.0 Lucas Giolito 1.8 2.0 Michael Kopech 1.0 1.2 Joe Kelly 0.5 0.7 Aaron Bummer 0.3 0.6 Liam Hendriks 1.6 2.0 13.2 22.9 Ok, I even did something realistic here. Robert was a 3 WAR player before the wrist injury, they made him a 2 WAR player by playing him through an injury very, very stupidly. Had they not done that he would have been a 3 WAR player, and he was on pace to be a 5 WAR player, so that one is a little more of an estimate than some. Kopech, on the other hand, I gave him a little more for injury, but he wasn't conditioned to pitch 200 innings so going any higher than that isn't really fair. I was also a little optimistic with Mendick, as you can't really project him up to 600 PAs when he was a backup, but a 2 win season is pretty good for im. That's 9.7 WAR. How terrible! If the White Sox got all that back, surely they would catch the Guardians, right? Well, there's one thing we haven't counted. The replacements the White Sox had for some of these guys were literal saviors. Here's actual WAR from Fangraphs for guys who stepped in for replacement starts and/or only got onto the roster because of injuries. Elvis Andrus 2 Seby Zavala 1.9 Johnny Cueto 2.4 Jimmy Lambert 0.3 Davis Martin 0.6 7.2 If we're going straight off of "What were they doing this year", the guys they brought in made up a ton of their performance. Frankly, Andrus outproduced what Anderson would have done during that short stint, Zavala was the most effective catcher on the Sox this year, and Cueto cleared Keuchel off their roster and kept Velasquez out of the rotation, which was a substantial upgrade. Based solely on what they were doing this year, the White Sox lost 9.7 WAR, but they got 7.2 WAR back from their replacements. That is...not a lot of loss to injury compared to a 10 game difference. But, there's one other version of this. What if injuries were the reason that Moncada, Grandal, Giolito, and Lynn were so ineffective? Lynn was a 4.2 WAR player in 2021, Moncada was a 4 WAR player, Giolito was a 4.1 WAR player. That's an extra 1.2 WAR for Lynn, 2.1 WAR for Giolito, 2.7 WAR for Moncada, and of course, 4.2 WAR for Grandal. THAT last line is the difference maker - how do you count that? That's an extra 10 WAR if you could get those guys back to what they were beforehand, but they were mostly already present. If all of those guys were 100% as effective as they were previously, and all their other guys stay healthy, that's what it would take to make up the ground against Cleveland last year. What does that mean for next year? Well, if "Everything goes right", they could be up with where Cleveland was this year. But, can Grandal suddenly become a 4 WAR player again? That seems, like the most problematic part of this. Furthermore, they're also, so far, without Abreu and Cueto. That means, they need something to make up for that - Vaughn being better, Colas being better than Vaughn in the OF, Kopech being better, and adding in another OF - if all that happens, they've made up the ground against Cleveland. A few other things could be better - Robert still could be better than that, Eloy could still be better than that, Martin could be better than that, Vaughn should hopefully improve. But boy, have I had to say "a lot of stuff had to go right" over and over again. A lot of those things that were down compared to 2021 - Moncada, Giolito, Grandal, Lynn, Vaughn's lack of development - all those need to be fixed this offseason. How much of that can be fixed by a managerial swap?

Yes. It is disturbing how much of this crap there is right now.