Balta1701

The reasons why he was out there to start the year were: 1. His bat last year was good enough to earn playing time this year. 2. He belonged at DH, but Yonder Alonso was key to our plan to convince Manny Machado to take a $50 million discount so we had to block the DH position. 3. If he hurt us out there defensively, this wasn't a year when we were going to win anyway, we can afford weak defense if it develops a useable cheap bat. The flaw is not with the White Sox failing to recognize he's crappy defensively. Rather it is at a different part of the plan.

The 2018 Boston Red Sox gave 22.86% of their payroll to Rusney Castillo, Hanley Ramirez, and Pablo Sandoval.

But Boston remains a great, great example of the issue. Would you be ok with Boston's performance in Free Agency? Remember the year the White Sox came away with LaRoche, Samardzija and Company? Boston and the White Sox were the 2 teams that supposedly won that offseason. Boston did so by signing Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez to $185 million worth of contracts. They hated those contracts. Frankly, David Price and Rick Porcello in their rotation have been ok to good, but they've struggled to live up to their contracts as well. Boston had some contracts work (JD Martinez), but free agency was a supporting role, not a driving force. You can say the same thing about most good teams. The Astros have been more effective than most other teams because of the quality of their front office, but even then they signed a washed up Carlos Beltran to DH in their world series year. The Cubs have Heyward and Edwin Jackson as their FA crap stories. Every one of these teams has gotten where they are because they've drafted and developed. They have spent some in free agency, but each time it has been a supporting role. If your team is a 95 win team on its own and it's missing a #3 starter and a right fielder that's ok, you can fill those roles in FA and if a guy busts, you're still a 95 win team. If your team is a 75 win team and you go into free agency thinking you're going to convert them into division champions, you wind up with the 2015/2016 White Sox.

That's too high of a pick to gamble like that but I can maybe buy the excuse. What I couldn't buy and what was totally unacceptable was that he continued getting playing time and even promotions ahead of more deserving players. No earthly reason why he should have gotten >1/2 a season of playing time as a 25/26 year old in BHam.

I think Abreu's pretty easy to project. Unless he gets hurt, he'll be somewhere around an .800 OPS player the rest of the year. He's been that for a couple years now. his overall numbers this year ought to be slightly better than they currently are.

Even with AV now in the system to take over 1b, there's a role for Abreu for at least next year at an appropriate price. We're too right handed, but we can deal with that for a year, and he's worth more to us than to any other team for the reason you just said.

Colome?

How about "This argument was stupid can we please stop hearing it"?

And his argument for that was that he was 16 for 16 on saves and only Colome and Hand were perfect on saves this year. Even if the rest of his argument is correct that he is a better bullpen piece than we're likely to find elsewhere, that part of the logic was terrible and that's not the only time we've heard it over the last month. And to illustrate how bad of a point it is - it fell apart today without it being his fault at all.

Thank you for understanding my frustration.

Go check the Colome trade value thread. Here's an example:

WTF? Especially his last few years when he didn't care, those teams were fundamentally rotten. IMO, a huge part of the strong performance in 2012 was that the team went from being fundamentally awful to fundamentally spectacular for 1 short season.

Not really. But if you're gonna live by "He's a perfect closer and that's all that could possibly matter for a closer!!!", you suffer by the same stat.

So that's a blown save for Colome right? i.e. we can finally stop hearing about how he must be one of the best relievers in the league because he hasn't blown a save?

Obviously so, but I would note that I can see benefits to having our RF and LH bat needs filled by a younger player from our system as Moncada and Giolito hit their arbitration years.

He hits lefty correct? A left handed hitting OF who can play the RF position is specifically one of our needs on the big league squad also.

FWIW, Sale destroyed this team in one game last year. He threw the hardest pitch he's thrown since he was in the bullpen in 2011 in that game.

Go get em AV.

Frankly, I still think this is the wrong way to look at FA. I look at the 2015-2016 and frankly 2019 classes and think that's how it normally works. Every so often you get one person who "James McCanns" it and overperforms, but for every one of them there are 3 Alonso/Dunn/LaRoches who totally underperform (acknowledging Alonso was a trade) and a couple of David Robertson types who are at least fairly paid. If you are counting on your free agents overperforming their contracts and carrying you to your title, your strategy is unlikely to succeed. It might work once, but that's almost consistently blind luck. Even the teams with good front offices have bad signings. Instead, Free Agency is the icing on the cake. If you want your team to win 95 games, your team better be a 93 win team on its own before you go out and spend your money, and if you spend $30 million you might get lucky and turn it into a 98 win team, you might win 94 games, but at least you filled some holes. Free Agency does not reshape your ballclub and if you're relying on finding an MVP candidate in free agency to turn around your club, you will fail. Get a couple of decent players next offseason, expect that 1 or 2 of your signings are going to totally bust, and then set about making sure you have your needs covered as well as you can.

Robertson was signed at Fair Market Value. He had a tiny bit of trade value as a reliever available at the trade deadline who was expensive but could fill a bullpen role, but nothing more than that. Colome and Robertson are roughly similar level performers, closers on mediocre teams or setup guys on teams with good bullpens, Robertson was just owed about $8 million more than Colome will be over the next 2 years, so Colome is more valuable than Robertson was at the time since he's a little bit cheaper.

Garcia was the top pitcher on the 2004 trade market and had a 3.20 ERA at the time he was traded.

Kahnle's value to a team like the Yankees was through the roof at the time of that deal. They were trying to get under the luxury tax for 2018, which meant they could take on money for 2017 (Robertson) but not long-term money. At the time of the deal, Kahnle had one of the highest strikeout rates in baseball, which also meant that even if control issues surfaced, if he was healthy he was likely to remain a solid pitcher. HE had one of the highest WAR amongst relievers in baseball at the time of the deal. And...he had a whopping 5 years of control remaining. That deal was basically Kahnle, a guy with 5 years of control and stats way better than Colome, for a top 75 prospect. The rest was filler.

https://www.masnsports.com/school-of-roch/2013/07/brooks-robinson-on-manny-machado-hes-as-good-as-anybody-playing-over-there.html

If a team was willing to give up a struggling but talented pitcher for Abreu or Colome I'd be interested, but aside from that, I still have zero urge to give up any talent worth anything in a trade right now. The White Sox's payroll right now is SO UNGODLY LOW next year that we may as well pretend that we're scrooge mcduck swimming in gold coins. We need a RF, a starting pitcher, and a couple bullpen pitchers (or a bullpen/swing guy) next year. We could sign the best ones of each of those positions on the market, supplement our bench, and still have a payroll below $100 million. There's no reason to give up the kinds of things we gave up in the Garcia deal - young but talented players who may or may not be good long term - when we have SO MUCH MONEY TO SPEND NEXT YEAR. If the Diamondbacks wanted to dump Greinke's salary, I would listen on that, but they're not getting anything of value back.