Balta1701

Apparently you should read it closely a few more times.

The above sure sounds like you're ripping Thompson to me. And yes, it is rather weird and frankly bizarre that you look at 27 innings of a guy at Kannapolis in 2021 and think "See he can get his walk rate down" and then say that a guy who had 84 innings with a comparable walk rate in 2022 at Winston-Salem is a guy who has "lost all prospect momentum".

So you're ripping Thompson for not being good at AA, and your support for Horn is 27 good innings at A-ball. Yet you don't see any distinction here.

Except of course that lefty also can't throw strikes.

We're in a thread on Grifol. I will trust him when he has earned it. His behavior last year gives me deep skepticism about his willingness to correctly make use of his young guys. If he has a crappy veteran and uses that as an excuse to mistreat a young guy....again...it will create anger about the presence of the veteran as well as anger about him. And I think I'm pretty clearly expecting this to happen - hell, they already blocked Korey Lee because they needed veteran leadership around their other young catcher on the roster, Max Stassi.

You're talking about a 0.5 fWAR player, basically. That performance is tolerable, it's acceptable given the money, it's understandable for where the White Sox are in April of 2024. It's not really tradeable for anything of value, so maybe still a little more money than we should have spent on this guy. My question then is - why is he playing a full season? Is he playing a full season because Colson isn't ready, or because Colson is getting benched for him in the 2nd half because they have to play their Vetz?

Having been elsewhere around the league, the US Cellular Field Ballpark experience really doesn't measure up to other spots. Some of that is the neighborhood and lack of things to do around the park. Some of that is the lack of walkable options or good transit options. A good amount of that is the park structure, the upper deck is legitimately still not pleasant, even if chopping 10 rows away from it helped somewhat. There is nothing visually that interesting about it, it's too cookie cutter. This is absolutely a factor in how it draws.

"Well even the best teams have guys there to play different roles. Great teams have guys who are there to play great defense, to be great on the base paths. We have guys in our lineup who we are counting on to generate offense, we have other guys who we're counting on for defense or to work with the pitching staff. If we're counting on guys for defense, we expect them to do their best with the bats, and the other guys will be knocking them in."

The bigger problem is when he acts on this stuff. When he says they can hit just fine in the spring, then in August he insists that they need to get their at bats because we're trying to win games.

With the notable differences that one of them was already on the 40 man roster and one of them wasn't, and one of them could be transitioned to the bullpen to try things out and one of them...already was there.

You are better off saying nothing than saying something obviously untrue. Give a meaningless word salad, its fine, just don't lie to our faces.

No, "GOOD" left handed relievers are a commodity. We have several left handed relievers right now, they're just not "Good" left handed relievers. Tanner Banks has better minor league numbers than Horn, but he's not a commodity.

I guarantee you that Christian Mena is not pushing Thompson anywhere right now. They also don't have roster spots to fart around with Horn either.

This is precisely how they wound up having to pay mediocre vets $17 million per year. They gave away so many pieces to cover needs that by the end they had more needs than they could fill. Here Getz is not trying to find guys he can turn into a 23 year old starter, he’s giving away those 23 year olds to fill the 23rd and 24th slots on his roster. It is the exact opposite of what you’re saying. Getz is doing this because he thinks he knows these guys better than everyone else. Maybe that’s true and he has gotten two guys worth more than others think. Maybe he’s unloading Hahn’s trash and taking what he can get for them. That’s all plausible, but forgive me until I wait for evidence that these guys are massively smarter when they’re acquiring players who have little power or who walk the world. And yes, eventually this blows up in your face. These are the types of moves the Twins should be making to fill holes in the back side of their roster and maybe push them up to 92 wins rather than 89. These are not moves that prep for Trades. For the white Sox to get back more than they gave up in these two young pitchers, the guys who came back will need to be so good that the White Sox won’t want to trade them. Getz is paying over market value right now. If it works it is to his credit. If it doesn’t I hope we’ve learned enough not to discount it with “oh we didn’t give up that much.”

Did you miss something in the copying or was his control so poor they didn’t score it?

Jerry Reinsdorf has worked super hard to make sure people have this reaction. He’s been threatening to move the team literally my whole life, and I’m not supposed to get tired of the threat?

Stockpiling AAA nothings while hoping they become something is fine when those guys cost zero, or when they cost an Aaron Bummer that they want to get rid of anyway. The problem is - if this guy turns out to be tolerable, puts up an ERA in the mid 4s in the big leagues next year, is he going to bring back anything worth more than a strong arm, struggling guy from AA who is on the lower end of some team's prospect list? Unless he turns out really darn good, which would be surprising from his minor league numbers, the best you might hope to get back is...approximately a Matthew Thompson level wild card. If you're signing guys or bringing in NRIs to fill these spots, that's fine, I get that. I think they've been a little reckless with money this offseason (Maldonado), but that's at least understandable. If one of them turns into something valuable, maybe you can trade one of them for some A-ball player. But when you're giving the A-ball player up, and at the same time losing a 40 man spot that could do exactly what you say you want to do, be filled by a AAA+ nothing gotten for free, you're doing it backwards. You are hoping that, if they're lucky, they might be able to get back what they just gave up for this guy. Big deal? Probably not, unlikely to have given up the next Max Scherzer once again, but a decent red flag. You've outlined the correct plan, trying to bring in talent/wild cards using AAA+ guys, and this deal is the opposite of that plan - giving up talent/wild cards to bring in a AAA+ guy.

1 walk, 11 K's for that offense today.

Honestly, no, because they have so many NRIs who could fill this roster spot that this just replaces one guy who is likely bad with another guy who looks bad.

Thompson's K rate at Birmingham last year: 9.8 K/9. Horn's K rate last year at Iowa: 10 K/9. Yes, this is another of those trades that is, on its own, unlikely to backfire. It is unlikely that this specific pitcher will break out next year, just like the last one with Arizona. However, it is once again a low reward trade from the White Sox perspective. If you do that type of trade over and over and over again, you get low rewards overall, but eventually the odds start stacking together and it turns out that you get a trade that does in fact implode. It's unlikely to be any specific trade, but when it happens .... boom. That is how it went with Hahn and Williams - "it's ok to give these guys up, they never come back to hurt us", until they did. With the White Sox's current situation, adding another low reward guy to the 40 man roster is just bizarre. the hope is that Getz is just cleaning out guys he doesn't like for whatever reason, but even then why are you adding a guy to the already packed 40 man roster when you signed so many NRIs who could fill those slots?

What supports this?

This team has a ton of youngsters?

Oh come on.

You're right, most people would throw out Tanner Banks and Peralta as detritus that could be cut when some AAA name passes through waivers. Banks also has significantly better minor league numbers than Bailey Horn. He's 26 already, has a similar AAA K-rate to Banks, but a walk rate nearly twice as high. Most people would add Bailey Horn pretty quickly to the list of "Detritus that could be cut when some AAA name passes through waivers". Which is, frankly, what he's likely to be pretty quick.

That also doesn't count Crochet, but who knows exactly how they will be using him.