Balta1701

If he can hit his weight that's a pretty good plan...putting him behind a solid catcher in the bigs for 1.5 seasons also gives him time to continue working on defense and on handling a pitching staff.

Are we getting really bad rumors regarding the White Sox and Dodgers or is Andrew Friedman just not that good at dealing with Rick Hahn?

As of now yes, but only barely and not 2 "10 year" guys. Their next 2 top 10 picks will also make that difficult. I'm not sure how it would work if they extended Lauri before the season started in 2020.

After this year's title I'm not so sure.

When you said "refused to sell out for a star" i actually thought you meant AD since the Celtics could have put together a better offer than the Lakers but they decided not to.

I'm not sure that I'd say the Celts "Refused to sell out for a star" when they traded for Irving and signed Hayward, things just didn't go as planned with those guys.

"Recovered" needs to be in quotes because his stuff was still down from 2015-2016 in 2017 and 2018 when he was dealing with and coming back from the shoulder injury. In 2018 his fastball velocity was down 1 mph from where he was in 2015-2016 and the pitch was substantially less effective.

Basically the White Sox have until right around the start of December to offer him arbitration next year. If they choose not to offer him arbitration, he becomes a free agent and he is removed from the White Sox's 40 man roster, costing the team nothing. If he is offered arbitration, he continues to hold a 40 man roster spot (regardless of injury status) and they will have to either come to a contract agreement by mid-January or present cases to an arbitrator, which the White Sox almost never do. Salaries almost never go down in arbitration (I can't say I know the last time it happened league wide) so if he's making about $5 million this year, offering him arbitration would guarantee him about $5.5 million or so, maybe $6 million, something like that, next season.

I don't believe the White Sox would do this, but I'm done with him. He's a free agent after next year even if things went well. I'd rather take the money we'd spend on him and sign one more reliever or a swingman who can be ready to start the year rather than waiting on a rehabbing starter.

Yes, if he could continue his current numbers for 3 years that would be solid performance from the DH spot and worth roughly $10-12 million per year. But, his stats have declined considerably over the past 3 years. He's hovered in 2018/2019 but that's way down from 2017, including in important categories like hitting the fastball that players get worse at with time. Is it a good guess that age hit him hard between 30 and 32 but he'll hold roughly steady between 32 and 35?

I see no problem with a team having a 5 man rotation, 9 man lineup including DH and 1b, 7 man bullpen, 1 backup catcher, and 3 other bench players. As long as your bench players can cover a couple positions, that's a normal lineup construction.

Not being serious, rather treating unserious posts by an unserious poster as they should be treated.

Would Wilson Ramos be a good comp here? Had a bad 2017 but was a 2018 All Star, hit free agency at age 31, a little bit better than McCann defensively in 2018, got 2/$19 from the Mets.

But you deny the falloff in people's numbers at that age. Ironically, Jose Abreu is a guy that from an outside perspective you might think has really bad intangibles. His career won-loss record is terrible, he's been on multiple teams that underperformed even when they said "We think we'll be right there at the end." For a guy who says "just win baby" you should want guys who lose that many games gone, but then no one ever said you'd be consistent.

With his performance in AAA there was no reason why they couldn't wait until May of the following year, his numbers in AAA were average, he struggled with an injury (wrist?) and hi game had some obvious flaws (hitting from the right side was bad, too many Ks) that he still has been working on to this point. If you went strictly on a basis of "calling guys up when their numbers say they have earned their callup", Moncada would not have been called up in 2017 and Eloy would have been called up in 2018, and we did the opposite.

Yeah but if you can keep Eloy down in AAA for Service time then you can keep Madrigal there for service time.

Like it or not, even the Cubs were willing to keep Kris Bryant in the minors for 2 weeks during a season where they won 96 games and were an ungodly performance from Daniel Murphy away from the world series.

If it wasn't for service time issues I'd say bring him up by the end of July assuming he continues at a similar pace for the next 3 weeks.

His timing is clearly back and there's no way that these A-ball pitchers are going to challenge him, so yeah I'd prefer 2 months in AA to see what he can do also.

That was my guess. Could see it being less.

I don't know how anyone looks at the last free agency period in the NBA and thinks that its fans prefer dynasties to competitive balance. I certainly don't.

One important part of the trick now - even if some of the guys who come up struggle, a big difference between let's say Melky Cabrera in 2015 spending 2.5 months unable to hit a ball more than 150 feet until he magically found something that allowed him to hit the ball farther again and the worst case scenario for Madrigal - the guys coming up won't be paid $13 million for the privilege.

Worth noting, his K rate over his last 40 games is 27.8%, and it's going down in his more recent games again. 23.8% since June 1.

I don't know how to find xBABIP, but this is a useful read.

You mean like 1b for Vaughn and DH for Reed?