Balta1701

As usual I will go for this in reply - are you sure that after this season, with Engel’s injury issues, with them seemingly believing Escobar had an issue that didn’t occur, with all the other injuries this team had…that the training staff deserves this confidence?

Didn’t spot this posted anywhere.

This team is more expensive and significantly worse today than they were at the end of the season. This is a tough performance to replace without spending considerably more.

Well first of all, they didn’t actually deal for him. Our team did. You complimented our pro scouts for it and then seem pretty down on the teams that didn’t. But even with that - how are the Dodgers and Rays catchers behind the plate? The White Sox were near the top of the league in wild pitches, the Dodgers were near the bottom. Rays were 11th, Cubs were 15th, with about 30% fewer WP. So for that scouting detail, blocking his breaking ball, it was far less of a concern for the Dodgers, but was a major one for the White Sox. That is a specific detail that our pro scouts could have identified and did not. Why not?

Funny I don’t bring up the Tepera deal when your literal excuse is “oh I was only referring to certain deals”? Come on man. And seriously, why am I called out for not seeing that Kimbrel will collapse while the pro scouts are deserving of compliments? If someone wants to pay me to do that for a living, then you could blame me, but you won’t do that with the people who are paid to evaluate that stuff.

Which deal should I look at to see them having scouted well in advance, the Kimbrel one or the Hernandez one? With the Kimbrel deal, one of the things we noted in August was a reluctance to use his breaking ball ahead in the count and at least once he gave up a game trying to throw a not overpowering high fastball. Why? Because if runners got on base the catchers couldn’t block his curve ball. While I didn’t think of that beforehand and realize it at the time of the trade, that was absolutely something one of these well qualified baseball people should have asked - can our catchers work with this guy? It wasn’t his only problem, but it’s going to be there next spring too if Kimbrel isn’t traded. And on Hernandez, some people in the trade thread noted that all his numbers were down across the board this year except his power, so for him to not be terrible he needed to keep hitting home runs, pretty much spelling out exactly why he would break. Seemingly no scout got that either. If you throw in whatever decision was made to not get Escobar who did perform well, these scouts performed about as well as me at the deadline. That’s alarming.

Leury Garcia is a free agent.

Are those very smart baseball people the same ones who acquired him in the first place?

Dude you have to read that rant before this. Keith Law is not a smart baseball person, only Williams and Hahn’s people are. You aren’t allowed to use the opinion of anyone else.

Other note- one of the ways to see Kimbrel as movable would be if there were a minimum payroll established for all teams in the next CBA, as teams would take that contract on since it’s only 1 year and he could be a guy worth more at the deadline. But, between talk of Oakland doing a sell off and the Reds giving away Miley’s affordable deal, so far it doesn’t look like organizations are expecting that.

well there is this, I don’t know how much it mattered. But “he suddenly was very hittable and you can’t tell us why” isn’t the strong defense you seem to think, rather that’s a reason to be cautious about him.

Fwiw, counting the guys on the roster who will have to go through some sort of arbitration process and assuming that works like the last CBA, this puts the current 2022 White Sox payroll over $150 million.

Only a handful of bodies can go with the level of effort required to get modern hitters out and throw 175 innings year after year. That is the pitching response to the improvement in training and hitting technique- throw harder and throw stuff with more intense breaks on it. If a guy gives you 150 elite innings in this setting, you should be happy about it. It’s the GMs job to have backup plans and depth so that inevitable IL trips don’t break your team. You just save the $350 million contracts for the handful of guys who can throw 175 yearly.

…what odds are you giving on this bet?

The White Sox always try to swing for the fences in some offseason deal right? Lowe.

Where are y’all getting his buyout at $2 million? You are the second person to say that today and both B-R and Spotrac show it as $1 million? https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/chicago-white-sox/craig-kimbrel-7233/

Casually throwing in elongated lockout ending just as games start being canceled.

I would take the under on that.

Since no one else looked it up, 2.9 fWAR last season for Miley. That…would have been useful to the White Sox next year at that price.

I wonder if the White Sox got above or below a .707 OPS out of their right fielders after the deadline? Anyway, rather than assigning blame here, the question I pose is - are we ok with Engel and Vaughn being the main OF backups next year? Or Romy as the main IF backup? Because when you come to me in July saying “no one could possibly have predicted two of our starters would get hurt at the same position”, I will have the same response as last year.

Nope but I was definitely up for beating the Yankees deal for Gallo.

If there's a lesson while comparing the Sox and Braves that we might want to think about for the offseason, it's the importance of depth. The White Sox, as you note here, said "Engel and Hamilton are good enough" - Hamilton didn't make the postseason roster and Engel was pulled in game 2 to try to generate offense. Had the White Sox had an available OF option, perhaps he's on the roster instead of Vaughn, and if they're trying to generate offense, they pinch hit that OF option for Engel rather than Cesar, and now they have an OF out there instead of Leury. The Braves likely never thought "I'm trading for a world series MVP", but instead they thought "Acuna's hurt, we flat out need outfielders, we're going to take chances on these guys who don't cost much." Maybe "Eloy and Robert coming back from injury and a banged-up Engel and an exhausted Vaughn" just wasn't enough, and some of that "cover your bases" thinking would have been a big benefit for the White Sox.

Eyeballing it, it seems like a lot of the guys you listed for the white sox as "2 pitch" guys have percentages that wind up at like 90. Rodon is 87. Lopez is 92. Kopech is 94. Crochet is 92. Bummer is 92. The guys you are listing as having a third pitch seem to throw it 10-14% of the time. Is that a really big difference?