Balta1701

Those numbers show that they absolutely can spend money. The problem is not that they can't spend around a bad contract, it's that they have done such a terrible job of finding and developing young talent that they can't win games when they have guys with bad contracts, because the LaRoche is starting at 1b and Micah Johnson is their starting 2b, for example. Because they can't develop anything internally, and the ones they were on the verge of developing they traded away, they were left in a position where they had no real way to work around the bad contracts they did sign. The Cubs can afford a Heyward out in the OF for a couple years because they had Bryant and Baez having good years in the infield.

The White Sox had the 8th highest opening day payroll in MLB as recently as 2013. They had the 5th highest opening day payroll as recently as 2011.

Yes, if this deal turns out well he gets credit for it. What is done with that deal? Can we build a team around that deal? If not, can we trade him for something useful before he hits free agency? What is the return on that deal like? Those questions...sound suspiciously like a repeat of what happened over the last few years with 3 other players.

And when 1 or 2 things go wrong in 2020 and a couple additional people struggle, we'll say that 2020 became another tank year and 2021 should be better. But we will never, ever, ever evaluate the quality of the people making those decisions, nor do we ask why things are behind schedule.

Um, no? He was a starter for 2.5 years and outperformed any 3 year stretch you want to pick for Rodon. For Rodon to be worth the kind of return Samardzija brought, he needs to have an excellent first half, better than what we've seen so far.

Yeah but the Cubs also had Samardzija work out of the bullpen for >2 seasons and that's where some of the team control went, that suppresses his numbers even more than Rodon's injury. Samardzija had accumulated 8 fWAR in the 2.5 seasons prior to the trade. Rodon has put up that 6.8 in the equivalent of 3 full seasons. Teams will pay more for extra control but he's a clearly worse pitcher so far.

HIs record is absolutely not as good as Jeff Samardzija's. In the 2.5 seasons prior to his trade, Samardzija was a 2.7 fWAR pitcher, a 3 fWAR pitcher, and midseason he was on path to a 4.5 fWAR season. Rodon had one 2.8 fWAR season but that was 3 years ago, since then his injury prevented him from being worth anything. He hasn't matched Samardzija's reliability and he hasn't matched Samardzija's peak (which was right when he was traded). Rodon would need to put up a sub-3 ERA in >100 innings in the first half of this year to be anywhere close to that value - he wouldn't have the reliabilty of Jeff S at that point, but he'd also have another year of control.

They should not be tanking this year, that's the problem. When we finished the trades in 2017, it seemed like 2019 was too ambitious to be competitive, but with the amount of talent we should have coming up we should have been at least making progress, and in 2020 we should have really been dangerous. Maybe not a playoff team in 2019, but at least having things clearly going the right way, because a number of guys should be up and having success. Even last offseason we were saying "2018 should be the low point". Being on pace to lose 95 games in 2020 means that the first attempt at rebuilding, the first round of talent, has completely flopped and utterly failed. That's a debacle on par with 2015-2016.

We're 30th out of 30 franchises in wins since Hahn took over, so literally you couldn't do worse.

I think the clearest deals from last year that would be comparable to a Keuchel deal are either the Hamels deal to the Cubs or the Happ deal to the Yankees. The Cubs basically didn't give up anyone from their top 20 in their move, although Hamels was admittedly struggling. The Yankees gave up their #12 overall prospect in one ranking list that I found and a 25 year old who might be comparable to Rondon. At the time of the deal, Happ had an ERA around 4, which you'd hope that Keuchel might outpitch, but your salary price listed for Keuchel would also be almost 2x as high, so I think those moves are pretty comparable. If Keuchel is his normal self, you get a guy who is somewhere around 15-25 in our next rankings. If he struggles a little bit, you get guys who are outside our top 30. The price is a 2nd round pick plus at least $10 million, but it does make us feel a little better. Strategically it's not awful, and it's not like the chairman can't afford it, but if I had confidence that our front office was competent I'd call it a poor move because in that case I'd say you'd be better off with the 2nd round pick and the extra $10 million to spend.

The years you've chosen are interesting and instructive, and they aren't the same. For the Cubs in 2013, it looks like they had only 1 player on the roster who would be a difference-maker 2 years later, that's Rizzo. They acquired Arrieta midseason, he only pitched 50 innings for them. They didn't have any other pieces of their strong starting rotation present, and still had 1 or 2 older pieces like Samardzija that they hadn't yet moved away. That team won 66 games. In 2014, a number of their pieces had arrived. Arrieta, Hamels, Hendricks, Baez, Soler all made appearances. Not everyone was a difference-maker, Baez was young and bad, and they had other stuff on the way (Bryant), but importantly - they were seeing positive signs from several of those guys and it led to a 7 game improvement. Things were starting to look up. The White Sox are like the 2014 Cubs in 1 way - a lot of the young guys they're relying on are now here and called up. They're not all here, but for the Cubs, they were legitimately seeing progress. If we're like the 2014 Cubs, we should be seeing progress. If we're like the 2013 Cubs, then we have a handful of scraps that we'll eventually need to trade, and we will need to basically replace everything on the roster before we're in place to do any damage. So the question is - are the guys who are here trending upwards?

I would say that it still seems too early to fire anyone for the poor start to this season, but a 10 game stretch is enough where you might want to start making changes around the periphery to give more playing time to people who are performing and to give guys who are struggling an opportunity to fix things. Palka in AAA and a shot for Cordell doesn't seem unreasonable right now, but as you note that does only a little bit to help the pitching staff. Right now with the pitching staff, all that is really practical is to improve the defense a little bit and hope, and then reevaluate once we've seen them for a few months. There are no real better options than that, we have to give the guys we acquired so far every possible chance to turn into something of value.

I think the outright, blatant dishonesty and disrespect showed by the top brass towards its fans this offseason needs to be on this list somewhere. Lying to our faces and then calling us stupid for believing the lie just because the lie would have been a good baseball move.

Just checking the box score after a job interview and Lopey’s Line.

H Christ really?

Also worth noting - they started their rebuild after 3 additional losing seasons, including a season where they won 63 games, so they should also have had a chance to stock up on talent before they started the official rebuild.

Everyone at the Cell used to boo fans that do that, because it’s a north side thing. i guess the people who understood that tradition have given up on this franchise also.

None, none whatsoever of those teams started off with the advantage of 3 players to trade from your somehow garbage organization that the White Sox started off with. That was like 3 drafts worth of big league quality talent gifted to us as a head start. That should start mattering, well, now, if it ever is going to.

Apparently the Yankees lead the league with 124 hits at >110 mph exit velocity. 2nd, with 73, are the White Sox.

Rick Hahn spent top 10 draft picks in 2014 and 2015 on starting pitching, in his 3 biggest rebuilding trades he brought back 5 high level starting pitchers, and he's traded for others and drafted others outside the first round who you hope might be able to give depth and fill in the back of a rotation at some point. Acquiring starting pitching (and acquiring relievers) was the biggest part of his rebuild plan. It is simply impossible to "Sign or trade" for enough starting pitching to make up for that part of the plan not working. Like it or not, your starting pitching the next few years will go as far as Kopech, Rodon, Cease, Giolito, Lopez, Dunning, and a few others take you. He isn't going to be able to "improve" the starting pitching any other way than by making the talent in this organization into successful big leaguers. You might get 1 addition of good money, but seriously would this team suddenly be contending for a world series if they had signed Keuchel instead of Santana?

Out of the Sale, Eaton, and Quintana trades, the prospects coming back included 5 pitchers, 2 elite position talents, and one minor position talent (Basabe) plus filler. If we get very little out of those 5 pitching prospects, then we've basically traded away 3 all stars to hopefully generate 2? Better do some really good drafting if that's the case...

Do people really think that Seattle is all that good? Prior to the season in the "predict the first month" thread people were saying they were worse than us.

At some point, when things that seem like low-probability events keep happening, you have to say "Wait a second, maybe our understanding of the likelihood was wrong". If we thought all of these guys were "universally lauded as great pieces" and they all systematically blow up, then somehow the way the franchise determined that they were great pieces has a systematic flaw in it. One possibility is that it is just way, way tougher to project pitching than we think...and as a consequence, trying to base a rebuild on acquiring pitching prospects is a terrible idea. Basing the rebuild on a huge load of pitching prospects is to the letter what Rick Hahn did. It could be that basic - pitching prospects look nice, but acquiring a bunch of them could remain a path that doesn't work. It could also be that we are just doing a terrible job in developing them, and that the fault lies somewhere with the hires of the organization. That is another potential possibility. Finally, it could be that while those players were "universally lauded", the reason they were available is that internally teams had decided they were much riskier and that's why they were available in the first place. In that case, our organization was fooled by the "Universal lauding" and did not do effective homework on them. Note that all of these would land blame at the same desk.

1. A whole lot of people talked themselves into the notion that this team was ready to make a giant leap this season, and could have competed with the major addition we talked about. Those people are now being hit with the idea that the pitching staff isn't anywhere near making the leap they hoped it would, and that the guys they hoped could be valuable stop-gaps (including Santana) aren't doing that. So I think you're getting reactions from those people. 2. The White Sox spent $44 million in new money this offseason and it seems to have made no difference. That's also frustrating, there was a pretty large expenditure over the offseason and had they not spent that money, you could have written that exact same post without changing a word. So, what was the point of all those moves? Are we ok with just lighting that money on fire? They literally cried poor this offseason. That continues to be a source of frustration.