Balta1701

Well, at least this year I can’t say that they’re just lying to drive ticket sales.

So...what does this say about they front office that they kept Cooper on for this long...and then said that he was doing such an awful job that a new pitching coach will turn this whole staff into a championship rotation in a few months now that he’s gone?

One I've said before - ARod and Bonds, for example, were athletic freaks before they were drafted. Can you 100% guarantee to me that they never juiced at that point? ARod was on stuff by his 8th big league season.

Coming into last season, the White Sox's payroll was estimated at $126 million for a full season. https://wtop.com/sports/2020/05/2020-baseball-projected-payrolls-list/ As of now, the 2021 White Sox payroll is $120 million. https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/chicago-white-sox/payroll/

Then just pay the man. Only 1 of these teams has Pujols's contract in the way. 1 year, $10 million would not have been a bad contract for the White Sox.

I’m ok with not going into panic mode yet, but I think a meltdown becomes fairly reasonable if they don’t sign Wainright. Who else is left? We played this game with Mat Latos and Hector Noesi before.

I mean, Jose Quintana. That's literally why I just assumed they were going to sign him, the match to our needs was completely obvious.

That's fine. I get that. But it doesn't answer the question of where we're going to get quality big league innings this year.

Even if he does, the last 3 years he's pitched 124, 141, and 58 innings. Not exactly his fault last year, but that doesn't change the conditioning on his arm. Are you confident in him giving you 200 innings next year and continuing to be effective into the playoffs?

And this year, the risk may well be greater than in an average year, given that literally everyone in the rotation will have to do a dramatic jump in innings next year.

Then they should have been smarter about their additions, because they wound up taking a quite large risk by leaving a gaping hole. There were 3 clear needs coming into this offseason. Pitching depth, bullpen depth, and RF. While they added a mid to front of the rotation pitcher, they also subtracted from their depth in the process, leaving "pitching depth" as an ongoing, major issue. They then signed the top closer on the market - a great move in principle, one I supported...but between the two moves, they spent $23 million or so. If they have a hard financial limit, those moves were done at the cost of failing to fill one of their biggest needs with an adequate player. The upgrade from Dunning to Lynn isn't necessarily a great one if it puts Lopez in the rotation and he is as bad as last year. Hopefully we're concerned for nothing, but it seems like they can't trade Madrigal now as there's no backup plan if they move him. So do they have enough left to fill innings in the rotation?

So he basically got the qualifying option as a contract, and if he's worth it, Torotno can offer him a qualifying option again next year (if such a thing exists)?

So who was pushing to have Encarnacion and Mazara stay in the lineup every day when they clearly should not have been? If you're trying to do some crazy stuff to see how it works, bench those guys, play Engel and McCann every day for a week, and see how that goes.

Narrator: "They did not."

I think the Sox were at a true low in the last 2 weeks of the season. Their pitching staff was really hurting. Robert was in a bad slump. Their manager was giving away games unnecessarily. They wouldn't pull guys out of the lineup who should have been. Had the season continued, I think there's some important things likely to happen. Abreu and possibly Anderson were likely to cool off. Robert was likely to break out of his slump, we saw some hints of that right at the end with that monster HR in the playoffs. Giolito would probably keep doing what he did. Keuchel might have cooled off a little. The real trick was going to be those back 3 starters. Cease was really struggling. Lopez was a disaster. Dunning was ok but the org showed very little confidence in him. Rodon was better off on waivers. If those back 3 starters remained that bad, then their record was going to get worse from that point. Covering for them was straining the bullpen, and that would have started hurting their numbers. But, all 3 of them have some ability to be better. Had they just "leveled off" and put up tolerable but not awful starts, then the White Sox could readily have surged forward again.

I don't know if this will have actually happened, but it has been discussed apparently.

This seems like an extra-long timescale for him, that would be like 17 months after surgery. Did he have a setback?

Football has shown you don’t get sued because of it, not that it’s a sound public health choice. That means in areas where public health authorities are being listened to, you will get different rules from areas where they aren’t.

I'm worried that the answer is "Neither, $30 million was our limit". I spent 3 months expecting there was a 100% chance they would sign Quintana.

Like the deal or not, I'd say go for the pitcher.

If they're unwilling to spend the money on the FA pitchers who are left then its their own fault for not having spent it earlier on someone they would have liked more. Vaughn taking over the DH spot on April 15 is a far lower risk than Lopez starting the season as the 5th starter, with Kopech as the only legit depth for the first month if someone gets hurt.

Keep in mind there's a big risk right now that deaths won't plummet nearly as fast as we want. If the British variant of this virus, B.1.1.7, is both 50% more transmissable and actually more deadly, then having it spread easier and kill more people could very readily push the wrong direction, at least in March and April. Both of those factors have been proposed - almost everyone seems to believe the British one is much easier to transmit, and it has been proposed to be more deadly although that paper is more recent and has not yet been as fully accepted.