Balta1701

The Cubs also got 7.4 fWAR out of him. His baseball-reference numbers were worse than this, but giving up more long-term as a premium for getting better right now when your team just won a World Series is sorta the expectation in those deals.

The problem is that we’ve had multiple “In Getz and Bannister and Barfield we trust” moves already this season. Why was it ok to give up on Thompson? Why was it ok to give up on Mena? Well Barfield knows the Arizona system and they’re getting rid of guys they don’t like, in Barfield and Bannister we trust. The return from the Padres seemed light, and the biggest piece only just made AA, but in Barfield and Bannister we trust. Barfield said he’s looking forward to working with Kopech and getting him right. In Barfield we trust? We are making moves that people can’t justify other than by saying the new leadership team we brought in will make things work, but here’s a first strike against them. Why should I trust their evaluation on Mena if they couldn’t make progress with Kopech after saying they could?

I would rather fill the roster spot with someone who actually has the ability to be tradeable. No one is trading for either of those guys, you will be wasting innings on them and wasting roster spots on them when they will provide you nothing long-term. Pillar and Maldonado have a better chance of being traded than those guys do.

I mean, did we get what we wanted out of the Quintana deal even remotely? A couple decent years of Cease and basically a bust in Eloy? But, even with that, had they not traded Cease don't they likely end up with 20+, and that's with 1 guy about to have his options turned down at the end of the year.

What we do know is that Barfield I believe was specifically on record with how this was a guy he was going to work with and wanted to fix.

I mean, "put all the prospects in the bullpen" was also very much a Rick Hahn thing too.

Cease is probably going to put up ~7 over the next 2 years right? With a ceiling higher than that? Getting 15 out of these guys when we have added 22 years of control total seems a little low. If one guy is an all star caliber player then he's putting up 4-5 WAR in a year, if two guys are average starters they're putting up 2.5-3 rWAR per year. Are you just counting "Excess WAR" beyond what is paid for? If I'm counting total over their entire time with the White Sox I'd have to hope we could pull off 20+.

If he comes out as a reliever, picks up an extra few mph, and gets comfortable by the deadline, perhaps he could still be movable by then? I can't get bent out of shape about this with how he's looked in the spring, it looks like nothing has changed.

I will never stop thinking that the biggest mistake the White Sox made with this player was failing to put him in AAA for 2021. Give him as many innings as he can take, let him build is arm up post surgery, let him get innings so that he can recover the consistency and control he was starting to develop in mid-2018, and maybe avoid the mental pressures of being tossed back into the big leagues after what was clearly a stressful 2020 for him.

You're looking at lots of guys who are pretty far out in the future, which means that the White Sox have absorbed lots of risk in terms of development and injury coming back for a guy who has been an elite starter for at least a period in his career. Let's say either one guy who is really really good, like all-star level good at their position + a minor contributor (backup or a reliever), or two guys who are at least quality starting players for the team, around 27-28.

Sigh. With how last year went and how this offseason went, you can't even justify this by saying "If he's good maybe we can move him at the trade deadline."

I would like to go back in time to pre-2023 and tell people here at Soxtalk that the only pitcher in the 2023 White Sox rotation who will make a start for them in 2024 is likely to be Touki Toussaint.

I'm surprised they didn't give him a chance to start in April, but hell why not, he's not showing anything positive in the spring either and that might as well count for something.

We started a Fire Chris Getz thread on the day he was announced I believe. It's probably on page 2 of Pale Hose Talk because it's regularly bumped. It will probably be bumped pretty regularly this year. The development of the players he has acquired will determine whether it finally falls back a few pages in 2025 or it challenges the Cease thread in length by 2026.

Who was in charge of pitching development for the last 7 years? It seems like they've divided up the job differently now so that means blame will get shifted differently, but there is plenty of blame to go around. Had the White Sox regularly been churning out positive contributors for the last 7 years they wouldn't be in the mess they're in now. Or hell, practically any contributors at this point.

If they bring up Thorpe in September and he's awesome, people will absolutely be giving Bannister credit for this. Same thing with basically any pitcher currently in the system.

Fulmer was still on the MLB.com top 100 list in early 2017, I checked. He was brought up by Rick Hahn in 2016 from AA because Hahn needed someone to save his bullpen. Moncada spent most of a year in AAA. He was called up because Frazier was traded, and showed by 2018 that this was an aggressive promotion since he hadn't figured out how to handle the strike zone. Lopez spent several years in the White Sox's minors and couldn't figure out how to have success until he was moved to the bullpen. Eloy spent so long in the White Sox minor league system that he wrote an article saying "I'm Ready" for the Players Tribune. Kopech spent 1.5 seasons in the White Sox minor leagues prior to his callup. The White Sox absolutely had plenty of time to put these guys in position for success. It's not all Getz, Hahn absolutely screwed with these guys, but this is a bloody ton of talent - to get so little long term success out of them is an indictment of the entire development system.

I agree it's unfair to pin it all on Getz. Most of that, frankly, I pin on Hahn, who was awful. However, it is a blatant, obvious, consistent, and undeniable record of developmental failure. This record would absolutely have meant that no other team in MLB would hire him for the same position, let alone promoted him. At the very least, there is reason for skepticism until proven otherwise, and this record should follow him around for the next few years. If the White Sox in 2027 have a 70 win big league team and a bottom 15 system, the previous failures at development would definitely be a relevant part of his record and would justify tossing him overboard. If multiple guys break out and this team is back to 88 wins, then the more recent success would be more important than the previous failures.

Chris Getz took over as director of White Sox player development in 2017 according to his Wikipedia page. At the time, the White Sox had the #1 system in baseball, including up to 10 top-100 prospects as per the mid-2017 MLB.com rankings. That was then supplemented by top 5 draft picks in 2018 and 2019 and a top 15 pick in 2020, as well as all of the other draft rounds. This should have been an absolutely enormous batch of talent to develop. We look back at guys like Kopech, Eloy, Moncada, Lopez, Fuller, Rutherford, Collins with skepticism now, but a big portion of that is that they did not develop as well as guys ranked this highly should.

Yes, Dylan Cease had a down year last year and this significantly affected his value as he looks like a very inconsistent pitcher. The question is what drove that downturn last year and whether it is fixable - there was a velocity drop, his slider was hit much harder with the velocity drop, but he still had dominant stuff available, multiple metrics tracked that and people here were stressing that the whole offseason as they tried to justify true top returns for him. If people believed that, then there's a very strong case for holding him and expecting him to be substantially better in 2024 because the stuff was there to produce a much more valuable pitcher at the deadline.

Wheeler signed an extension last week. An additional $126 million over the 3 year period 25-27. He will not be a free agent, your list is out of date. https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/zack-wheeler-extension-phillies-ace-agrees-to-three-year-126-million-deal-ahead-of-free-agency/

But you can say that about how many of the other NRIs the White Sox have already? Is Wilson a vastly better pitcher than them? Maybe, his contact numbers are good, but that's also small sample sizes in Petco park, with a high walk rate. This is a narrow improvement over the other options on paper. If BABIP isn't his friend this year then he's a non-tender candidate next offseason rather than a flip candidate at the deadline.

Santos had a better walk rate and a .337 BABIP. Santos was also quite a bit better at keeping the ball in the ballpark. Pretty distinct pitchers.

Flexen had an ERA over 6 last year, Soroka's success was prior to 2 achilles surgeries, and Fedde was in a different country last year. There's potential here, but the last MLB season for each of those three guys together adds up to -2.1 rWAR. It could absolutely wind up better than this, but it could wind up the worst rotation we've ever seen.

Signing veterans that waste money in rebuilding years and shortly thereafter complaining about payroll limits is definitely a White Sox thing. But again, we'll see, I'm not going to guess what they will do next offseason, too many variables. Attendance is going to be a disaster this season. Their needs next offseason are a big function of how effective their coaches and development are this year, with health on top of that. Definitely possible to see them cutting payroll further, signing more vetz, and having a $90 million payroll next year just as much as it is to see this being their payroll low.