Balta1701

I'd go with he was doing his meetings and felt a little light headed and told someone once he got inside and they did a test or two and switched into caution mode.

The White Sox's leadoff hitter has a .299 OBP this year and .292 over the last 3 years. He is 7 for his last 25, but otherwise that's that.

If it was, having him seemingly doing normal meetings yesterday then springing this out of nowhere is still rather weird.

How much of that description applied to Renteria?

Well first of all the site is about to go offline so figured it was worth checking that. But also this last 10 game stretch did make a difference. Before now it was playing .600 or .650 ball to make it. That was tough but shouldn’t have been insane for this roster. A .750 stretch being required - even great teams can’t maintain that pace for long. This week it went from plausible to implausible.

I have been demanding tarring and feathering since 2016. I am excited to see more people realizing this is necessary.

Cleveland still on pace for 87 wins and would have the tiebreaker with CHW so 88 wins would be minimum. 33 games left. To get to 88 wins they have to go 25-8 the rest of the way. That’s a .758 winning required.

It depends on whether there are arbitration offers given to Ruiz, Foster. Guarantees for Hendriks, Graveman, Kelly, Bummer, Diekman are $38.25 million. Lopez is arb-2 this season at $2.65 million. Arb 3 maybe $4 million? Ruiz, Foster might be $1 million each if kept? Crochet, Banks, Martin, Lambert - any of them would be $700k. so maybe $43.5 million with Lambert and Ruiz out there?

Is this page offline yet?

"Injuries to Aaron Bummer and Danny Mendick were key factors in derailing this season. I don't know how any team can expect to come back from such catastrophic losses as those, there was nothing we can do." -The white sox FO arguing for their contract extensions.

More than that...I would bet you that some of the White Sox hitters actually believe this if they're spouting it...and that means they're adjusting to the wrong things. A good hitting coach wouldn't just adjust, they'd acquire correct data and help the hitters to understand that they're missing the real trend. Oh a couple balls got caught up in the wind earlier this season? Yeah but here's 8 examples of fly balls to RF that were helped by the conditions on dates x, y, and z for other teams. Here's the video, look what these guys did. We can take advantage of that same set of conditions by doing this on a normal day and changing our approach only when teh temperature drops below 50 degrees. But then...you need to have someone processing that data to be able to point to the examples that didn't get stuck in the players' minds. An analytically minded department, one might say. And then a coach who understands that kind of data exists and is willing and able to use it.

We wound up discussing this in three threads so the posts are scattered, but I see no evidence that supports this contention in the available public statistics. Rather, RF at the Rate is the most homer friendly area in MLB this season. This claim is the opposite of what the data shows.

How about from a proprietary "machine learning" based system aimed at the gambling community? https://swishanalytics.com/mlb/mlb-park-factors I don't have full details on the underlying algorithm on this one, but nothing stands out about RF being unusually unfriendly - rather the reverse. I can't break out the White Sox vs. their opponents, but Statcast thinks that RF at the Rate is where everyone should be wanting to hit the ball this year. For lefties, the Rate is the most HR friendly park in baseball in 2022. and for completeness here's righties. Still HR friendly, but not as much as for lefties.

I put this in the other thread, but statistically this doesn't stand up to a hint of scrutiny either.

While waiting on hold for a call, here's park factors around the league this year. Guaranteed Rate Field is still a homer friendly park overall. In 2019-2021 it was a top 3 homer Friendly park so it's down a bit from there relative to the league, but the 22% extra home runs this year is actually higher than the 10% extra home runs observed in the shortened 2020 season. In 2018, the park was actually a negative in terms of home runs. In almost every other year, the park plays slightly below average for all types of hits other than home runs, is a really bad place for triples, and plays about average in terms of runs scored. There is no obvious change in the park factor this year beyond what has been observed over the past 5 years aside from the decrease around the league. While there may have been a decrease in HR, the White Sox park is comparatively as homer friendly as it has been every year relative to the league. This, by the way, took less than 10 minutes with the publicly available data sets to check. It's a shame the White Sox don't employ anyone who can do such things.

For those who would like a link...

One of the parts of the video in this thread that really struck me was the opening - PECOTA is generally conservative in projecting wins, the top teams almost always outperform PECOTA because of it. PECOTA had this White Sox roster as a 92 win roster this season. While I thought that was still optimistic (I had high 80s in no small part because of who the manager was), this is a roster that should have performed way better than this, regardless of every single flaw you mentioned. The difference between the computers and the actual results is telling us that some of these dropoffs are unique and unlikely, which means that it should be possible to turn them around the other way if you fix whatever it was that caused the difference between talent level and actual performance.

Jerry, because a new owner will eventually clean the other ones out. Frankly I have no idea how the other 2 would stay employed for more than 24 hours without Jerry.

I continue to believe the owner will try to stay the course, but I also think it is possible that a serious collapse in their ticket and ad sale numbers associated with missing the playoffs may leave them no other choice but to offer up something to the fanbase bigger than a new hitting coach. My guess continues to be that the chairman fires his GM and retains his chosen coach.

I believe MLB's owners realize they have several problems, but the largest ones are Oakland and Tampa Bay. They know those have to be dealt with. Tampa Bay I would guess that they hope a new stadium can deal with that but Tampa Bay is stuck in a long deal at their current spot, and Oakland is coming to a head right now in terms of getting a stadium plan together or moving (https://bleacherreport.com/articles/10042606-mlbs-rob-manfred-athletics-new-oakland-stadium-deal-needs-to-happen-now). Beyond that, MLB owners would really, really like to be able to expand the league. Why? Because they'll get a billion dollar expansion fee from any ownership group they let into the club. The last thing MLB wants to have happen is a legacy team like the White Sox who are profitable and in a big market suddenly be unable to support themselves and move as a consequence. Why? Because if the White Sox were to move to Portland...the league could not get an expansion franchise in Portland.

Royals record against the White Sox: 9-7 (.563 winning) Royals record against teams that aren’t the White Sox: 41-70. (.369 winning). Royals currently have 6th worst record in baseball overall. Without the White Sox, they would have the second worst record.

The whole organization has absolutely been hesitant to fire people in the past: Robin Ventura got a contract extension after a 63 win season and somehow survived finishing 2015 in 4th place despite his GM spending $50 million in the offseason and insisting they would “be right there at the end”. He was only allowed to retire at the end of ‘16, not fired. Rick Hahn survived failures in ‘13, ‘15, and ‘16 without being fired. People were genuinely surprised when they removed Renteria after 2020 because it was a well justified move but something the white Sox didn’t seem likely to do. Little did we know….

Roughly speaking, if you were to trade Vaughn, I think right now he could be the key guy in returning a #2 starter with ~2 years of arbitration control remaining, or alternatively I think he could bring back a pitching prospect who would fit somewhere in the White Sox's top 5 prospects if you preferred that sort of move. Maybe one of the Brewers' starters actually works here, both Woodruff and Burnes have 2 years of control remaining and the Brewers haven't gotten much out of 1b this year so getting a 1b who can produce and has 4 years of control remaining gives them a financial incentive to give up a good player.

There’s a handful of places I’d have been harsher but otherwise this struck me as a very accurate and well informed set of takes. Correctly identified a lot of the issues, noted Hahn’s role, ID’d LaRussa as the elephant in the room in terms of the sloppiness.