Balta1701

30 ballparks seen from space.

"Some people move on. But not us. Not us."

First time ever on Opening day that the 1-2 finishers in the previous years' Cy Young award races have matched up against each other, in both leagues.

$5 a day for a coffee is absolutely nothing, but I don't know why I can't afford my rent this month. Penny-wise, pound-foolish.

Rather than waste my time with the legalese because RH doesn't give you anything in those statements...let's just default to "The money will be spent". Some of it was, on replacing Kevan Smith with James McCann. And yes, saying "You can't use multiply repeated quotes from the executive VP of baseball operations" is also another jug of water to carry for them.

Carrying that amount of water seems rather painful.

You can't waste $2 million here, $3 million there, $6 million there, and then complain about having no money to keep your next core together in 5+ years. That's why this looks extra bad. As many have pointed out, without counting Abreu, they added $44 million in payroll this year and did so with few improvements to the team and even downgrades at some positions. If you're going to penny pinch when it matters, then every other cent you spent deserves extra focus, and if $2 million was wasted because "We didn't want to hold 4 catchers on our 40 man roster", the wasted money deserves to be questioned.

You can't complain (loudly) about your 2028 payroll in 2019 while you waste $2.5 million in 2019. Straightforward statement, 100% following their own words.

While that is probably true, they also thought that avoiding guaranteed expenses 9 years out is a priority, and that still makes the extra wasted $2 million look particularly bad. If they're that concerned about expenses so long in the future then they can't act that irresponsibly now. This set of moves looks far worse when you follow their own standard.

Now I wanna see where Madrigal gets moved to...

Were there no other people worth dropping from the 40 man roster at the time?

I have found watching this thread to be intriguing when I also noted that PECOTA said that both the Mariners and Royals are projected to be better than the White Sox. I don't know what to make of that projection yet.

That's also a great argument for why having several million in international money uncommitted at this point is a terrible idea and a pathetic move for the FO. Because if you have $5 million to spend and you've had 2 years to plan for it, you should have 5-10 players queued up to spend that money on. You've had all the time in the world. You don't have to land the top guy, you can spread the money around, but the absolute worst possible thing you could ever do, by far the stupidest thing you could do, is have the money sitting there uncommitted, maybe possibly waiting for a guy who will probably sign with the Orioles first, acting like it isn't a big deal if you don't spend the money. (BTW it's equally dumb for the Orioles to have their funds sitting there uncommitted this year).

Back in 2016 I described those moves (Shields trade, Fulmer callup) as the actions of a GM desperate to save his job. It made sense if you imagine that was the mental state of the GM at the time - maybe it's a 1/1000 shot of working, but who cares if I destroy the team in 2017 because if I don't save this roster I'm going to be fired. At the time it looked like didn't care how much damage they did in future years in those deals and were willing to try anything at the time. Of course, I didn't consider at the time that maybe the GM was just dumb enough to not scout the guys he was trading/trading for at all, and now I have to consider that possibility too.

I know you didn't say it explicitly, but your post came right after people trying to figure out where it was they had heard "maybe he was hurt", and it's sequences like that one which lead directly to that long-running but likely incorrect notion being the thing they remember, so I'm in correcting mode.

This statement is all true, but worth stressing that none of it means he was hurt. The Front Office insisted that their 2016 team was competitive, and as that team came crumbling down from a hot start they made moves they shouldn't have. It was just a terrible scouting job by the FO to both take on so much of his contract and also include a player in return that they'd never seen in person. Whether they had all of the data you cited and ignored it out of desperation to save their 2016 roster, or they didn't have it - well you can figure out which of those you think is more likely, I dunno.

So you're saying he'll be a Moncada for a couple years despite being younger than Moncada?

I think it was actually quite different from this. While they did have an alternate medical file on Shields from the one they sent us, unlike with Pomeranz they weren't actually covering up anything major. Everyone saw how badly Shields sucked once he got to Chicago and once the Pomeranz thing came out people said "oh Shields must have been hurt too", but the dude pitched out the whole season and was regularly healthy for us. He was just getting old.

I very much disagree with this concept, for several reasons. I think that players are much more likely to develop bad habits and to have those bad habits become insidious if they are rushed upwards - they start trying to fix things because they're overmatched, and the fixes wind up making things worse because sometimes you go against Chris Sale and there's nothing at all you can do. I think that's where Moncada got last year, things just kept going downhill for him no matter what he tried. That one also likely applies I also think that rushing players to the big leagues removes any opportunity they have to work on things experimentally because they can't lose games while testing out a changeup - that's the Rodon scenario. For some players, I'm sure it does work, but I think there's a really high risk.

I don't think it's just Beckham, I think the White Sox also have in the past pushed people upwards when their performance shows they would likely have benefited from extra minor league time. Moncada is a prime example of that, from the current roster I'll also count Anderson, Fulmer, Rodon, Yolmer, and that's just from the big league roster, without counting guys they traded away. I don't complain if they do it with a guy like Eloy once he proves he's simply better than a level, but every one of the guys I just listed was called up for a reason other than "They're dominating AAA". To be fair, I would hate calling up Tatis if I were a Padres fan, even if they had a nearly complete extension.

I just checked and couldn't find this in any of the first 5 articles - does he have one of those clauses where if he isn't called up by a certain date he must be released?

ty

Obviously taking Jay's spot for an IL trip right?

Maybe for some people but not for the poster I was replying to. He proves that all the time.

1 start, not 2, before the trade, but the rest is roughly correct. His ERA had jumped from 3 to 4 in one start after giving up 10 runs in 2 innings and the owner called him out personally for being unprepared and for his team struggling. After the public statement from the owner it became obvious the team was going to have to trade him. There were rumors about the Tigers also being interested as their pitching staff was breaking also.