Balta1701

The "Where's our Liriano" meme dates back to 2006 when the Twins, who already had Santana, unveiled Liriano - a lefty with absolutely dominant pure stuff who succeeded right out of the gate. At the time, our starting pitchers were struggling, so watching the Twins come up with something like that just seemed unfair. 5 years later, the White Sox unveiled a lefty who was perhaps more dominant with his raw stuff -"There's our Liriano" - and we kept ours healthy for 6 years, we just couldn't do a darn thing with him.

We had him and wasted the best years with him on 4th place teams, until we had to give up and trade him.

Is he still counting Kopech as part of the system? Having a system with Cease and Eloy ranked that lowly is one thing, but if he's still counting Kopech that's just nonsense.

yup

and now's about when the Patriots will go get a small lead.

Maroon 5 was appropriately bland for the game so far.

We literally signed for one of his winter workout partners and traded for another one.

"And hope that Bryce Harper does not yet know how to read a calendar, such that he does not realize there are no 3 hour outdoor games played in Chicago in January. Because the person who wrote this piece does not understand that concept."

This is one of the harshest basketball burns I have ever seen. Ouuuuuuch.

Irving and Durant as FA, Davis by trade with everything other than their 2019 pick, Zion as the # 1 pick? That’s...gonna win Durant another ring.

Dafuq?

The one thing I gotta say is - they really didn't "sell high" on him. You can find a comparable reliever to Colome on the free agent market right now. Jared Hughes signed for $2.25 million this week, Colome is getting $7.5 million or whatever, and their numbers are pretty similar the last several years. There's other gambles signing for tiny sums right now also if we want someone with a better track record coming off a bad year, all for far less than Colome is getting. Maybe the org is absolutely in love with Colome as you note, but compared to comparable free agents that's still a $5 million premium this year for the guy they're in love with before you count the player they sent out. The white sox "Sold" on Narvaez, they certainly didn't sell high on him. And fine, maybe he never does become anything of value, but as I said, I'd rather have had the cheap lottery ticket than the expensive one.

I think it's safe to say that when you look at most of the deals the White Sox have done this offseason, they have slightly overpaid for pretty much everyone. But, for the most part it doesn't hugely bother me that they did because they got guys who fill specific roles, and since I don't think they're competitive I can't be that mad that the $15 million wasn't better spent. There's still just one deal that stands out where we did something different and that's the one that worries me. Nova - yeah he's more expensive than what guys are getting on the FA market, but we didn't give up anything of importance to get him and he fills a role we needed to fill. You could have signed Miley and someone else for his money, but then you wouldn't have the confidence in his innings, and let's face it we can't be that mad about spending more money to not bring Shields back. Herrera - there are probably cheaper options still on the FA market, but he does have more closing experience than most of them, so if it's an extra couple million overall it's not a big loss. If he's bad he's bad, if he's good then he's tradeable. Jay and Alonso - clear overpays based on production, but they're here because the Machado thread is on page 550 something. Gave up Call for Yonder, but even if he somehow has a miracle breakout year he wouldn't have done that in our system as there are other guys who will get the OF playing time. Annoying, wastes a few million dollars, should really annoy anyone who thought we could compete next year, but if it gives Machado reason to tolerate here for a year or two while we wait for guys to come up...acceptable. McCann - a little more expensive than necessary, but has had good years in the past. Maybe a little waste of money, but once smith was lost (maybe another mistake there), like it or not the role had to be filled.. The one that still bugs me is Narvaez for Colome. He's not only more expensive than the comparable guys on the FA market, we gave up a player to get him. Had we waited, we coulda saved money, still had Narvaez, and found comparable relievers as FA. Maybe someone in this org is screaming that they love Colome, but this seems like the only one that could come back to hurt us. All the other ones we gave up money alone. This one, we gave up a player with multiple years of control remaining who already proved he could hit. Maybe he'll never improve on defense and we won't mind this, maybe he wouldn't have improved with us and I should be taking shots with the coaching staff, maybe all Narvaez should be thought of is as a lottery ticket, but with his offensive performance last year at the least he's a lottery ticket with a couple numbers already correct. If Seattle's either more patient than us or better at coaching defense than us, there's a chance we gave up a decent or even really good catcher and in a couple years we'll need to fill that position. That last one is the one that is different than all the others. I wouldn't mind that Colome is more expensive than comparable FAs, if we didn't have to give up a player who at least has a decent shot of being a good big league player.

There's another setup that could work here. If teams believe that pitchers are a greater long term risk, but they are absolutely needed in the short term, teams are willing to pay for that. Teams are also willing to pay for performance for players, but they also know there's a chance that the player could last until they're 37 or 38. So the team will toss them a few extra million in those last years, but extend the deal longer - so the AAV is lower, but the total value is higher.

It's hard to solve this without destroying any chance of a small market team competing. Guys hitting FA after elite seasons or because their performance is high woudl have destroyed any chance of the Royals or Native American Stereotypes making the playoffs, at least out of our division. Cleveland would have lost Corey Kluber back in 2014. The Royals would have lost Salvador Perez, Alex Gordon, and Kelvin Herrera in 2013. Your other one, guys being allowed FA if their arbitration n umber is too high, would ruin any motivation for teams to sign players to extensions early, because truly elite players could hit FA 1 or 2 years early. Chris Sale would have hit FA this year, Harper and Machado maybe 2 years ago.

Probably a full season lost to a lockout and a judge ordering the sides to end the lockout with no agreement a-la MLB 1994.

You want the real answer? You don't want it do you. 160+ innings nearly every year, in fact 200 last year, and would be cheaper on a 1 year contract. You don't want to hear the name. No one does. He pitched for the White Sox last year. Yeah that guy.

NBA has a salary cap and floor and guaranteed contracts.

Pitchers are 34% more likely to reach the Disabled List and make up nearly 2/3 of the number of days spent on the disabled list (meaning they're more likely to get hurt and when they get hurt they stay on the DL for longer) according to a 2010 study, so it is absolutely true that pitchers are more dangerous due to injury.

Here's someone who did the teams for 2002 and found that runs scored has R2 = 0.46 with wins and runs allowed was 0.70. So neither one of them is a great predictor overall but they're both related, with runs allowed being slightly more correlated at that time. That gets you almost to the Bill James Pythagorean Wins, of (runs scored)^2 divided by (runs scored^2 + runs allowed ^2) as quite strongly correlated with wins. Basically that's a version of "run differential", which is the thing that translates most strongly to wins.

They didn't do it in that one exercise but look above, I've linked other analyses that found it at 0.9 to 0.95.

if it comes down to it - wRC+ probably does a better job of summing up how truly valuable a hitter is compared to OPS, but the correlation between OPS and runs scored is so strong that you're almost never going to see somewhere where they are a consistent outlier between wRC+, OPS, and runs scored. It's like the difference between walking at 89.9 degrees from north and Due East - you're still going to wind up heading east. So, OPS really does do a great job of summing up a person's performance.

Interestingly, I found a thread that started where someone did the correlations on reddit and wRC+ only had a correlation coefficient with runs scored of 0.83 in one year. It looks like most years it's better than that, but over some long time periods that people tried, wOBA had a higher correlation coefficient than wRC+. I don't see anyone who did just raw OPS in that thread, but raw OPS as I showed above is approximately as good as wOBA and maybe sometimes better. So yeah, OPS has a good chance of being more tightly correlated with runs scored than wRC+.

R2=0.900 over one analyzed 5 year period. http://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~bvollmay/baseball/runs1.html Over some other periods it's as high as 0.95 and a better predictor of runs scored than wOBA. https://cybermetric.blogspot.com/2013/07/how-well-do-ops-and-woba-predict-team.html