Balta1701

Well first of all, he's not hitting a reasonable number of doubles and triples so far, he's hitting epically few doubles and triples and I include that in power. He spent this season pounding the ball into the ground, his groundball to flyball rate was genuinely bad and that's the biggest reason why he had so few doubles and triples, he had a worse groundball ratio than anyone in the big leagues. I cannot rule out that this was the fault of his wrist injury, but that's a legitimate worry, that number of ground balls would make him a genuinely weak hitter once he got to a level where the fielders are decent and where the pitchers will have the stuff to strike him out more. Secondly, if he's only hitting a "decent number of doubles and triples" while being a really good fielder, then he's not going to be a good enough player for me to want to move Moncada unless I'm giving up on Moncada completely, and that'd be my answer to the question posed in this thread. Maybe he breaks out next year, maybe it was all the wrist, maybe he will light up AA this year, but right now he looks like a guy with a long way to go, he looks like a guy who if he gets called up we'll be wondering what is wrong with our scouting. If this were my franchise, I wouldn't care a lick about what his draft status was or why that requires me to move him fast, his numbers in A ball this year were such that I would be putting him in A ball to start next season and he would have to prove to me that he's ready to move up before he reaches AA.

Hopefully he has.

I don't know, but at the very least if I was in the GM role I would have spent October having meetings with my coaching, scouting, and training staff, and asking them about this problem and coming up with plans for what we are going to do different next year to make sure it's a fluke.

This is exactly what I expect the White Sox to do, and I do expect the White Sox to race him up to the big leagues by 2020 and then be baffled about why he's hitting a punchless .250 and has to be dropped to the back of their order and then we start talking about how we have to replace him with a free agent in order to compete, because that's what the White Sox have trained me to expect them to do.

I can't ignore the injuries though. Out of the top 10 guys on the Futuresox list coming into this year, 5 of them missed substantial time or the whole season, and some are out next year, then Eloy missed some time and Hansen struggled on top of that. I don't think that we can just assume that has to be a fluke...and the organization absolutley should not be. If an injury rate like that happens next year, we won't have a system left.

I'm always more conservative about where I think guys should start than this organization, and yes, Madrigal had an injury this year, but Madrigal's stats in the minors currently are the stats of a guy who will need several years down there in order to develop a power stroke. I'm not just talking about home runs, I'm talking about driving the ball for doubles or even singles - he wasn't doing that at all with our organization this year, he was putting the ball on the ground. I can absolutely see a setup where Madrigal starts back in A ball next year and is on a path where late 2021 is reasonable for him, and that wouldn't be anything going terribly wrong, that would be him having to work on a specific part of his game that involves physical development. If that was an injury thing then next year he'll look very different to start the year, and then we can start talking about this as an actual problem. If he needs time in the weight room and time to change his swing before we start seeing extra base hits from him, then that could be a multi-year program.

Not unless every one of those guys breaks out and a lot of other things go right. Go look at that 2020 roster - if Kopech is a 4th or 5th starter and Cease is a rookie, you need Giolito and Lopez to be the caliber of #1 and #2 top of the rotation starters or your rotation is weak. Your bullpen is weak because it's so young, at best it's inconsistent. Your offense is ok, maybe even good, but certainly not great. You need the bullpen to develop rapidly, the rotation to develop rapidly, and some real breakouts out of Moncada and the catchers before you can even talk about being on the page with the big guys. We are not in the era where an 84 win team is a competitive roster any more. Go look at these Red Sox, Astros, Dodgers. These are incredible teams. You aren't competitive with them until your team is "incredible".

In the last 28 innings of this series the 2 teams have combined to score 5 runs.

I probably walked past this guy while he was waiting in line for a Trump event a couple years ago, one happened on Campus. Waiting for the list of the deceased as our former neighbors and landlord both went there.

https://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2018/10/27/heavy-police-presence-near-synagogue-in-squirrel-hill/ press reports say the guy said “all Jews must die” as he started shooting. Also shot some cops when they arrived. I lived a block and a half from here for 2 years.

While I do see some value in Narvaez, and I disagree with the notion expressed above that a guy who is poor at his framing one year cannot ever learn to become better at that skill, I also see that we have Castillo and Smith under contract this year to give us 2 catchers, and we have Zavala and Collins in the pipeline less than a year away. Those 2 should be the starting catching tandem in 2020. Castillo's contract ends and Smith is replaceable as a backup or tradeable as a backup, but Narvaez should have built some solid trade value. In part time and growing roles he was worth 1.5 fWAR in 2017 and 2.1 fWAR in 2018. He should be able to play more time if a team wanted him to, and a little defensive work could make him a really strong catcher overall. For example, if the Rockies did a trade like that and went out and signed a mid-rotation pitcher, someone like Lynn....they would immediately be better than they were last year.

When you say "either Gonzalez, Rutherford, or Adolfo" are you saying 1 of the 3 or 2 of the 3? I would probably do Rodon + 1 of those for him also, but not 2. However, I'm not sure that fits the Reds needs though...unless they could unlock Rodon in a way we can't and turn him into an ace instead of a middling middle of the order Middle pitcher, doesn't acquiring him create the same problem of a pitcher in arbitration who might hit FA at exactly the time they're improving?

He's got 3 years of arbitration eligibility remaining and even though he wasn't that good this year, he was still an above-replacement type pitcher who threw a lot of innings. We'd have to give up something at least useful for him. I certainly wouldn't want to lose an actual prospect for him, but you could talk me into creative ideas like something involving Yolmer or something involving Narvaez? I think Narvaez could be actually interesting for them, they have some young catchers but their backstop position was incredibly weak this year.

I still hate how the default move is always pull the starter now the second they have any trouble and I hope it continues to bite the dodgers in the behind.

The guy behind the plate for the AJ "Ball in the dirt"

If...If...If...If...we are healthier.

I'm note 100% sure how to assess without MLB marketing data. Right now baseball is a secondary sport, which means that it's always going to look small compared to football and it's always going to feel like there isn't the same interest, but that could easily be buried in the fact that football really and truly is bigger. But, if 10% of the population are really big fans, and another 20% pay attention every now and then, it would still have a solid community and it would still look weak compared to football. Plus...football has its own issues for kids in the next decade or two, baseball isn't killing them at the same rate.

I'm trying not to remember the last few basketball seasons either. 2016-2017 was Butler trade, 2017-2018 was Portis breaking Mirotic's face. It all blends together when the Warriors rigged it all anyway.

Uh, do you mean 2 years ago or are you aiming this at someone like Mirotic?

I believe players can start declaring for free agency at 9:00 am the morning after the World Series, I don't know of any long exclusive rights period in this sport, am I wrong?

Especially in the modern era, it's also in part about the season ticket sales. When people are buying playoff tickets for 2005, they get sold a season ticket package for 2006 and that boosts the 2006 season ticket sales and 2006 attendance. In 2000 attendance jumped from 1.3 mil in The Kids Can Play year to 1.9 mil the next year, and then even though 2001 was the David Wells Disaster embarrassment, attendance still stayed up at 1.7. When people are buying playoff tickets in 1993, they sell them season tickets for that great 1994...oh yeah. 2008 somewhat broke this trend, but that's also because they were coming down off the huge peak from 2005 and that slope was bigger.

Ok, you started in 1983 so I did the math starting in 1983. In 1983 there were 4 teams in the playoffs, in 1994 there were 0, in 1995 that ballooned to 8, and it went to 10 in 2012. Since 1983, therefore, there have been 250 playoff spots available. I totaled up the number of teams that played in each season - counting the 2 expansions to figure out, on average, how many years would each franchise go between a playoff appearance if everything was random. On average, right now there are 10 spots and 30 teams, so if everything was random right now each team would make the playoffs 1x every 3 years. Pushing that back in time, I find that over the time period starting in 1983, average performance overall would be just under 1 in 4. The average franchise playing over that full time period would have 8.789 playoff appearances in the stretch from 1983 to 2018.

I don't think that Girardi would be the sort who would actually forget us. He could have said holding out for the Cubs and no one would have blamed him. That language seems to specifically include the White Sox. Maybe there was something lost in the paraphrasing, but that seems to be the opposite meaning.

That the White Sox FO is dumb enough to give up on a player they haven't seen does not mean that other teams will be.