Balta1701

We traded Marcus Semien, Chris Bassitt, and Josh Phegley for 1 year of Jeff Samardzija. If you want a pitcher of Bassitt’s caliber, you will have to give up something of significant value for him.

Yes.

They will try to push him past 120 but we saw last year with both Kopech and Rodon that the body sometimes says “nope”.

No. That’s a jump of more than 75 innings. That’s very aggressive.

Then in that case, they should consider selling some of those low level minor league pieces or guys who are blocked to create some starting pitching depth. This is the unfortunate result of their choices to push guys like Kopech and Crochet to the bullpen and their other scouting misses, that’s the price to pay.

First of all, Sale went from 140ish to 140ish to 71 to 192, counting college and the gulf coast league. Second of all, after he made that jump, he had elbow trouble serious enough that the white Sox announced he was permanently going to the bullpen. It took him swearing at KW to stay in the rotation. Not only do we want to avoid that near miss injury, “fighting with management is ok” is a lesson we wish we could take back.

You’re 100% right here, there’s what 4 scheduled double headers now? That did make pitching depth doubly important.

Don’t come telling me “no one could have seen this coming” when two of those starters are down at the same time if nothing is added.

I don’t have any guesses about what the white Sox will actually do other than “Kimbrel is worthless”, but there is some additional pitching likely needed. I checked a few months ago and all of the teams that won playoff series were going 7 or 8 starters deep over the season and especially in the playoffs. For the White Sox, imagine Lambert or Stiever starting against the Astros and Lopez getting 2 starts?

Freeman is getting a lot of hype for Yankees, Braves, and Dodgers. Might be the first name to move.

Whoever your rooting interest is, that IU game hurt the other bubble teams. Indiana loses that game and they're essentially out, with Michigan in. Now, Indiana's probably in, and Michigan is iffy.

They'll be hitting the FA market in Fields's year 3 pretty heavily. The trick is to get him to break out by then and to have a few other successful draft picks around him.

His defensive metrics look across the board bad in 2019/2020. I just checked Fangraphs and over 2019-2020 they peg him as the worst LF in baseball. His DRS and Statcast numbers those years were comparably bad, I just don't know how to sort multiple years on those pages. His metrics were terrible until 2021.

I figured you'd catch on the $20 million suggestion pretty easily. And anyway, Kimbrel is still not worth $16 million this year.

Hmph, while Fangraphs and UZR didn't like his defense, both Statcast and DRS agree that he was an average OF last year and notably better than in previous years. Interesting.

That would mean spending about $23-25 million (depending on how money for the $50 million prearb pool is counted which I still don't know).

All he has to do is add a $20 million/year deal and he's exactly the same distance from the tax.

It's also going to be interesting to have fewer division games when head to head records will be the first tiebreaker for the division/wild card. Series against your division and league leaders will count a lot more.

He already was close to it.

They have enough money under the tax to win a bidding war for Conforto right now. The new CBA was flexible enough on that.

He agreed with Boston I believe.

You gotta fill a couple of them from the draft this year and next. That’s all there is to it.

That’s an intelligent move for the Bears. What does Mack’s dead cap look like? That has to pile up a bunch right?

He was the 3rd overall pick because he was as good of a college bat as there was that year and spent more than one season demolishing college pitching. How exactly you fit that into a 2nd round pick I'm not sure.