Balta1701

I did spend some time going through the stats on his huge 2021 dropoff. McNeil has an excellent K-rate, but a generally low exit velocity. He doesn't hit the ball hard, but he makes contact. Compared to 2020 his walk rate did drop off somewhat, but his K-rate didn't spike and there was basically no real drop in his exit velocity compared to 2019, and his exit velocity was higher in 2021 than in 2020. What I do see is that there's a big change in the way he's hitting in 2021. There's a big dropoff in him pulling the ball and a big increase in him going the other way. There's a drop in hard contact and an increase in medium and soft contact. There was a career high in ground ball rate. His BABIP went from being .340 in his first 3 seasons to .280 in 2021 - was that bad luck, or was that the poor quality of his contact? It's a little hard to believe his BABIP stayed above .330 all 3 of his first 3 years and 1000 PAs by luck. Perhaps a little bit unlucky in 2021, but the dropoff in BABIP fits with the dropoff in his contact quality. He also went from a 15% HR/FB rate in 2019 to a 6.5% rate in 2021 - but its hard to see a high HR rate as sustainable with his generally fairly weak contact. One thing that does stand out, going along with the drop in pulling the ball, increase in groundball rate, and drop in HR rate, is that his launch angle has noticeably dropped. Now here's one final problem - since Statcast started recording, the White Sox have had as low of a launch angle as any team in the league, bottom 5 in the league 6 times and bottom 10 in the other season. So, you've got a guy struggling badly in 2021 when he's going the other way, hitting the ball on the ground, and not elevating like he did beforehand. For whatever reason, the White Sox are really bad at launch angle, so if a low launch angle and not pulling the ball are big parts of why he was terrible in 2021, do we think the White Sox can fix that? Or is this a guy who is a particularly bad fit for the White Sox since his success was associated with a higher launch angle and that's a weak spot for the White Sox?

I would totally believe that Hahn was convinced that the Phillies would do Kimbrel for Segura as soon as they saw how much other relievers were going for, was then really surprised when the Phillies signed Knebel, said "The trade market hasn't started moving yet" as a public version of it, and is saying they "nearly added a starting second baseman" when he is telling people in the organization what happened.

I can't say the Mets wouldn't, but you have the Mets taking on something like $8 million, which they'll pay a 42% tax on if the previous CBA rules are still close to standing.

They never put in a call to say they were interested.

Heyman outlined from Boras on the record what every single team that was interested told him, and the White Sox never contacted him about Semien. They had zero interest in him.

Obviously I’m on record as saying Kimbrel is worthless with this contract, but the Mets are a specific problem. Under the old CBA, there is a big penalty for being $40 million over the luxury tax. The Mets are past that line. I know it doesn’t make sense for them but let’s imagine a Kimbrel for McNeil deal. Because of the penalties, they pay $22 million for Kimbrel. That is pricey. They could do something like sending Cano or McCann back, but the White Sox only have $13 million in space before they hit the luxury tax line under the old CBA, so if the White Sox want to address their other needs, taking back money is an issue for them too. Obviously some of this may change if there’s a CBA, but good chance the rules don’t change much in year 1, and hell if a judge reimposes the old CBA as in 1995 nothing would change. So there’s some really big penalties in play here.

The worry - over the next CBA, fixing the economics of baseball, even partially, is worth at least $5 billion to the players, possibly even more. Keeping the current broken setup is worth $5 billion or more to the owners. This season - is worth roughly $5 billion to the players and owners each. It costs them as much to cave as it does to sit out the whole season. That’s a setup where both sides are likely to hold fast, they’re fighting over amounts of money comparable to an entire season.

This is a guy who was a 3 rWAR player as a rookie in 18 in 63 games, a 5 rWAR player in 2019, a 1.5 rWAR player in the short 2020 (would scale up to about 4.5 over a full season). If he’s that kind of player, then he’s not Leury Garcia, he’s Chris Taylor. He’s a starter who happens to be good enough that you can move him around to multiple positions if someone else is getting rest or pinch hit for. You want him in your lineup every day. Leury Garcia is a bench player who is acceptable at multiple positions without hurting you. You want him available on the bench when you need him, but not playing every day. Of course the big worry is that he was a 1.4 rWAR player in 2021. That’s Leury Garcia performance, that’s the kind of guy you have to replace at the deadline. But, you’re paying a price for him that reflects how good he was in those first three years, with a premium for multiple years of control remaining, and a little discount for his down ‘21, so you can’t afford for him to be that bad again if you trade for him.

Said this elsewhere, obviously neither of Kopech and Cease are options. So for this org, that basically leaves Crochet as the starting point? Im not sure how much beyond him you have to go. Down year in 21, but really good the 2 previous years. Cheap, but whether he has 2 years of control or 3 is a major CBA negotiating point. Maybe Crochet plus Lopez on the low end and Crochet plus Vera on the high end?

Weird timing on running this? Wonder what is behind that? Anyway, they say they want pitching, and clearly the White Sox can’t afford to move Cease or Kopech, so Crochet as a key piece? Maybe with one of the top pieces from the system added since this guy has so much control?

I wouldn’t rank the Bulls nearly as bad as the others. They had about 2 decades of arrogant, bad leadership, but Reinsdorf giving up control to a younger one has definitely changed something fundamental about that team. It is certainly possible to fix fundamental problems like the ones that franchise dealt with. I don’t know how good they will be in the end, but I think it will now be many years before I again have to think about the Bulls trading a good player for a draft pick before he hits free agency.

It also means being in the bottom group requires you to be extraordinarily bad. the Bears are.

Then that means there isn’t 1/3 of the league that can do that either. It’s basically one team.

The NFL thread is an interesting place for this take, as the NFL is a league where all the time we see teams come out of seemingly no where to make the playoffs and even win championships. Philadelphia won a super bowl. They have since replaced their coach and QB. Were their executives a failure? Atlanta was basically 1 play from winning a Super Bowl, since then they've fired their coach and struggled. Are their execs failures? Denver lost a super bowl with an elite offense then won the next one with an elite defense, but they've fallen apart since then, did Elway get stupider? Can they be regular failures and still put together teams that good? I went back through the last 13 super bowls (26 teams) and found that it looks like 17 different teams have made an appearance in that time frame. Aside from New England/Brady being a cheat code/actually smarter and better than everyone else, it instead seems to me that there are a pool of about 2/3 of the teams in the NFL that are ok, that could genuinely compete in a normal year, sometimes those teams take a step back to rebuild or find a new QB, but then they're back a few years later and eventually have a big enough season to make a Super Bowl. Then, there's about 1/3 of the league that is regularly bad - Jacksonville, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Las Vegas, the Jets, the Washingtonians, I'm sure you could add a few others. Those teams make the playoffs like once every 5 or 6 years, and are constantly changing coaches, failing on high draft picks, etc. For those teams, it genuinely starts with ownership - culture issues like DC or Jacksonville, consistently bad hires like Cleveland and Detroit.

Pretty much yeah, you just have to be allowed into the club.

Yes. Leury Garcia is no liner underpaid but he was in the first 5 years of his career. Lucas Giolito is SEVERELY underpaid. Yoan Moncada is so underpaid that I’m on record repeatedly saying he should have fired his agent. Tim Anderson is underpaid. Do you believe Luis Robert is only going to generate $6 million in value for the White Sox next year? He might generate that in jersey sales alone. All of these guys have their value suppressed because of a rule that says 6.8 years is a magic number and after you play that long it becomes a free market, but beforehand you have to deal on their terms. Why is 6.8 a magic number? Couldn’t it be 5.37476 years? Or 2.14375 years? In the NFL and NBA it’s 4-5 years, do you believe those teams can’t compete? The Bulls are bankrupted by that?

The owners have raised prices on fans by a billion dollars a year over the last ten years in money that isn’t going to the players. Why are you ok with price increases for their pocketbooks?

Basic economics. In a competitive market, if I overcharge, a competitor will appear who begins to eat up market share. But if there’s a barrier to entry, whether it’s Facebook owning every social media app so people don’t need a new one or baseball where it doesn’t matter how much money I have I can’t just found a competitive league, prices are not set by competition with any competition. Prices are instead set by what someone will pay. That sets up a limited monopoly. In this setup, my costs only matter if I am going bankrupt paying them. It doesn’t matter if my labor cost is 40% or 60%, that doesn’t change the way I price my product because if I raise my prices, no competition undercuts me. In this case, the price is always determined by what maximizes revenue, and the only way labor costs factor in is if they are so high that my business folds. Note that no baseball teams closed when players received a 33% larger share of profits on average.

The Players’ share of revenue has declined substantially over the past 10 years. Has this meant raises for all those other people? Big price drops at the ballpark? I can think of one other place that money could go.

It’s much more naive to think that the owners could have raised their prices during the last CBA to make more money and didn’t out of the kindness of their hearts.

I do like the addition of “immediately”.