Balta1701

I mean, yes? The best team in the league said screw it and added him to get even better.

It is possible there will be another spike soon but this isn’t seasonality. The first one was it getting out of control at the start because no one was testing for it or preparing for it until it was way too late thanks to Trump. The second -that could be described as seasonal, it was schools being open, people traveling for the holidays, people getting back to bars and restaurants indoors once the summer weather ended. If there is another spike next month, it’s because the B.1.1.7 variant will be taking over as the dominant version going around. If it spreads so much more easily that what we are doing for containment right now to slow the original is ineffective against that variant, it could do so. Right now there are probably about 10,000 cases a day of that variant, give or take a factor of 2, and it is doubling every 10 days or so, so a March surge is possible. But in terms of deaths, hopefully we are getting close to having a large fraction of the elderly and hugely at risk vaccinated, which will limit deaths to some extent if there is another surge, and the more at risk people who are vaccinated the less any surge will be. Effectively, right now the vaccination campaign is racing against the B117 to see which one wins the race to April. I do not know whether the vaccination program will be able to avoid another spike in 2 months, I just want my shot. Please.

3 of those guys you control for what, 1 year, and one has 6 years of control? As long as your team has no major salary constraints, fine give up the years of control. We have none right? No one has complained about that recently?

If he’s in the bullpen this year the odds are he never leaves. How much do you pay for an extra year of a reliever? 7/$20 guaranteed? $10 m option in year 7 maybe?

Collins improves while sitting on the bench 75% of the time because he will regularly be learning how to handle a big league staff and how to prepare as a big league catcher, including bullpen work and pre/postgame work, and at this point in his career that is a major thing he needs to learn. Perhaps the major thing that will determine if he is useful long term or not.

Lynn too.

Fangraphs vs B-R. He’s been under 3 three times in his career on FG, under 2 twice, including both 2018 and 2019 in FG. No surprise at all FG would project him to do what he did 2 of the last 3 years.

They have a long period of roster building and development ahead of them. Coaching is no longer losing them most of their games, talent is.

For reference, I literally bought Disney+ for the first time this week.

Expensive player, team way over the cap, roster is a mess, player showed willingness to come to a release agreement.

Don’t those clauses usually get reported when a guy signs? Lucroy has a couple obvious paths to the majors with this team, and if he’s ever called up he’ll have to pass through waivers to go back down. I don’t even know if one would be necessary for him.

I think they're saying that if either Collins or Grandal get hurt they need to have someone actually able to catch at a big league level, and I'd expect that to almost certainly happen at some point.

Well he only put up 2.6 fWAR, so any February 2020 projections were fairly accurate on the total number. They may have slightly missed on how exactly Abreu got there...

He’s got 2 years of control left, so if they can harness some upside to him, he’s movable for a better return at this years trade deadline or maybe next offseason if the league isn’t shut down. Or, they would have the money to keep him if they wanted now that Gordon’s contract is over.

Springer was a perfect fit for this team and the exact kind of player the White Sox should have been targeting at the end of a rebuild. Serious playoff experience, in fact one of the best performers in recent playoff history (perhaps with some assistance). Would be an excellent defender in RF, and could cover CF adequately if Robert were injured. Calling him a CF as though it's a knock on him, wtf? His contract wound up comparable to what we would have guessed it would be 2-3 years ago, so there's no big sticker shock. While he's right handed, he also has hit righties better than lefties the last 2 seasons, so he'd be a perfect fit early in this lineup as it would almost be a trap against a team bringing in a righty against the lineup.

Vegas will take these projections into account when setting lines but they don't translate directly. Right now, Vegas betting lines have the White Sox as a narrow favorite over the Twins to win the AL Central. https://www.oddsshark.com/mlb/odds/futures

PECOTA has repeatedly overrated the Angels now, for one. They have the Angels ahead of us, and did so last year too.

If there's one thing I might consider taking from this PECOTA that is really important, it is to not underestimate the Twins and the Cleveland Baseball Club. The White Sox certainly have some potential for error in their projection, every team does, and you can justify why you think that at the end of the season. But it's interesting that Cleveland sold off Lindor and they have basically the same 2021 projection without him that they had in 2020 with him.

God thinks this team sucks? uh-oh.

No, that projection was 80-82. My personal favorite was when I spent days arguing why their 78-84 projection for the 2015 White Sox had to be wrong.

Fwiw, all these measurements were taken well before Sunday. However, you may feel free to speculate as to the effects of holding a large, public gathering and celebration in Tampa, including potentially lots of interstate travel, when Florida is already lighting up with this extremely transmissible variant.

PECOTA record projections are out today. White Sox mean of simulated records is 83-79, good for 3rd in the AL Central. Tampa Bay takes second Wild Card, Toronto and Cleveland also finish ahead of white Sox. There’s a handy little chart of probability of finishes if anyone can excerpt it. Dodgers projection of 102.9 wins is about the highest PECOTA has ever popped out. https://www.baseballprospectus.com/standings/

Newly-submitted paper on the B.1.1.7 variant: Key points: Incidence of the variant is present in >30 states at present. Probably in others, just not enough sequencing done. Multiple introductions of the variant occurred as of November 2020. By the end of January, 4.2% of the tested samples were this variant, up by more than a factor of 4 over the month. Incidence of this variant is doubling approximately every 10 days, at the same time that cases of the earlier virus are dropping nationwide. At the current pace, this variant will take over as the dominant one circulating in the US by mid-March, and it will continue expanding rapidly unless additional control steps are taken. There is a large cluster already developing in Florida. California is also showing up as noteworthy, but not as much as Florida. Georgia starting to show up as well. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.06.21251159v1