Balta1701

No, you should check your math. Had they gone 7-6 against the White Sox, they would have finished .500. A normal average white Sox team and most of the AL Central is more average. If the White Sox went 12-1 against them, they would have finished 75-87.

The Royals were 86-76 last year. They were 12-1 against the White Sox. Without their games against the White Sox, they were 74-75. So they were definitely under .500 without the White Sox. Had the White Sox not been the worst team in recent baseball history, the Royals are a .500 team. While I want to admire them for the fact that they actually got better by spending in FA, and .500 is a big jump over their 2023 team, it is unavoidable that they were an average team that looked a lot better because one of their opponents was among the worst teams in baseball history.

Presumably he has played a role in developing some of those guys. He was passing game coordinator in 2021 and that was the year they drafted Sewell, and this is his third year as OC, so figuring out ways to make his OLine play well and look good is a part of his job. Presumably he would have been involved in drafting Gibbs and signing Montgomery and those have worked well.

This is literally a DS9 quote.

Having watched how the elite, highly paid and highly drafted RBs are affecting their teams this year, I’m not sure I’d commit a top 10 pick to Jeanty which is where he will probably go given the Bears lines, but the RBs are replaceable attitude doesn’t describe this season very well. But a quick check says that prior to cuts and extensions the Bears currently are top 5 in available cap space, so they do have multiple ways to improve next year.

What prompted these? Was there other news this morning?

I can’t help but think of one Pedro Grifol with this press conference performance.

That...was an ending.

What the Hell was it with CBS not showing the replay on the pass interference penalty to actually see if it was?

Mariano Rivera is going to break your bat for this omission.

Like how those Yankee teams had Jeter and ARod?

Regardless of the creative accounting, isn’t this really bad money for Blake Snell? Comparing Dodgers pitchers….Glasnow out pitched Snell last year according to Fangraphs, Snell will have signed his deal while about a year and a half older than Glasnow, Snell has been healthier but pretty inconsistent up through 2023, but he’s getting something like 33% more money than Glasnow. And yeah Glasbow had 1 year remaining before FA when he signed but that’s such a big money boost. This feels like spending just to spend. I wouldn’t want this deal on any other team/ If it wasn’t for one truly unique player I’d start comparing them to the mid-2000s Yankees where they blew everyone else out of the water with contracts given to guys based on reputation and then couldn’t get out of the Wild Card round.

Let’s play along with this, say Robert has another all star first half. Are teams going to be that confident in his performance and health that they will give up a strong package at the deadline? Or even next offseason? I would think any team would view him as a huge risk for the next year+, maybe longer.

The BABIP being insanely low suggests that those string of starts were dominated by luck. It’s the other peripherals that suggest he wasn’t good in general last year. It’s the age 46 Jamie Moyer level strikeout rate, the really bad walk rate, and the high fly ball rate that make me say he wasn’t a big league caliber pitcher last year. If he wasn’t super lucky but also had dominant starts, you’d say he was super lucky but looked like a big league pitcher. Last year he didn’t.

Just the hypothetical, you have a max payroll of $50 million. Would you hold him in that scenario? And yeah, serious injury seems entirely possible.

You specifically said Mayo graduating by June.

Do the Orioles have the same type of guys who could step up into the top 100? Because what was said in the post was that next summer they could be down to 1 or 0 top 100 guys because the current ones would graduate, but we didn’t get any rundown of their just-missed guys and if they could step up too.

Quero and Schultz seem very likely to graduate. Montgomery will probably either graduate or will plummet. They will only be drafting 10th, which may or may not give a top 100 prospect. That leaves Smith...who MLB.com also thinks has a decent chance of graduating. How many top 100 prospects will the White Sox have after this year? Entirely depends on trades, right?

I might very well be willing to do something like that right now. The chances of Robert having his value go to 0 are too high for a team like the White Sox to hold him.

At the end of that stretch he had a BABIP of 0.156.

yes, I think that was a weak deal, and that is better than losing Robert for nothing.

They help you more than holding onto the guy, spending $15 million on him, getting a bad performance from him, then releasing him at the end of the season. We've done that several times recently. It's how we built the sterling roster we have today.

Well there's your problem. If you could get a weak return deal, like the one the White Sox got for Cease, that's better than winding up with nothing for him.

The ones that staff members from other teams are lining up to work with Chris Getz would count.

I believe I've heard this exact same statement each of the last 2 offseasons about various people, if not more.