Balta1701

How on Earth do you think the 2005 to 2006 Tigers did that? They came off a full rebuild. They won 43 games in 2003. The #2 draft pick they got for that was a key part of the 2006 rotation - he's pitching tonight. Starting in 1995, here are the Tigers win totals: 60 53 79 65 69 79 66 55 43 72 71 95 They were below .500 for 11 seasons before that breakout. I sure as hell hope we're not stuck in a rebuild for that long. That long period of losing helped them come up with the talent to put out a strong rotation in 2006. That period of losing helped them have enough talent to trade for Miguel Cabrera a couple seasons later.

That things could have happened at some point in the past when teams operated differently does not mean it could have happened now. They could have done slightly better and come up with a few more wins had their FA spending not been average, but not enough to take 76 and 78 win teams and push them up to the level where anything would have mattered. Spend more and congrats, you have Victor Martinez's deal. Just look at the end results for the other teams that spent more than us, the red flags are all over the place.

Signing a starting pitcher is a terrible idea until Rodon is tradeable. Until we know for sure that one of them has flopped or has been moved, then right now our 2020 starting rotation should be Rodon, Lopez, Giolito, Cease, and Kopech. They're already in our system, they're already under our control, and we've put a ton of work into all of them. We might throw our hands up and say that Giolito just can't cut it, but we won't be doing that until the end of this year at the very earliest. Signing a $20 million+ free agent like Corbin or Kershaw would just block the assets we already have, and if some of them do develop well that will remove the need for the big money guy. We need pitchers on 1 year deals and nothing else. Others might make the same argument about the bullpen at this point, that adding in an elite closer when we're sitting on 5-6 power bullpen arms in the minors is a terrible idea for now. I'm less confident in our bullpen arms, but I would also say that I'd much rather give a chance to the guys we have to develop them than spend big money on that role right now as well. We have a ton of depth at these positions, now we need to keep working to develop them into something before we cast them aside with a big money acquisition in their way.

I didn't have time to reply to this yesterday but I want to because I think this continues to be the most important thing for people to understand about how we got where we are right now - there was no possible way for the White Sox to construct a winning team around those guys. It wasn't making the wrong moves, it was 100% impossible to get to a winning team from where they sat at the start of 2014, when they had all 3 of those players + Abreu. This franchise won 63 games in 2013, and deserved to. They were awful. They were a clown show on the field, no one developed, their theme music that year should have been the benny hill theme, they were the least focused team I can remember watching, and they had coaching as bad as the White Sox have had since the years of Terry Boom Boom. In 2014 things did improve. They signed Abreu for 1b, Sale was a little healthier, and they added Eaton to the OF, but the organization around them was basically bereft of talent. There were a couple guys like Bassitt, Semien, Garcia who at least had some talent, but they were poorly coached in the minors (if at all) and they'd need years to turn into quality big leaguers. They won 73 games that year and that was a fair summary of their talent. The org did have one thing available - their payroll post 2015 was about $60 million. So, they decided to trade the measley scraps they had, call up Rodon when he should have been in the minors, and raise their payroll up to $125 million, declaring they could compete. But, the problem remained - they still had jack squat in terms of talent in the organization, so they didn't have enough to trade to fill in holes...and they completely misunderstood the free agent market. They wound up with 78 wins...which is exactly where they should have wound up. Look at the teams that spent more money than the White Sox that offseason. Boston went big with Sandoval and Ramirez. Without calling out the person, our biggest debate that season was me versus another guy here over whether or not to sign Victor Martinez to DH and we wound up with LaRoche. There was a thread here about signing James Shields and another about Chase Headley. These contracts were TERRIBLE. If you played the free agent market that offseason expecting to win, you were a sucker. That is the norm, not the exception - you cannot win by the free agent market. If you go through the top 20 free agents that offseason, the guys you would have been ok signing are Scherzer, Lester, Nelson Cruz, David Robertson, and Andrew Miller. You can imagine a universe where our org somehow signed specifically only those guys and that was enough to win the Central, but that's not how it works, you can't use hindsight to say that "These deals worked, if we signed only these guys we would have won". If we'd spent more money at DH, we'd have wound up with Victor Martinez and that contract was worse than LaRoche. If we'd decided to spend more money on pitching rather than trading for Samardzija, we'd probably have wound up with James Sheilds and that contract was the worst for 2 different teams. This wasn't just us - the Red Sox did terrible on the free agent market, the Yankees had to move Headley's contract, the Padres signed Shields. There was NO WAY to turn that team competitive by 2015. They did not have the resources to trade and the free agent market was a disaster that no one can win. Teams that scout better than us completely flopped. You didn't say it exactly this way, but there was no way that "making the right moves" would have made us competitive in 2015, it could not happen unless you could look into the future and figure out which FAs would flop, which we can't do. 2016 was the exact same story. We were this close to signing Alex Gordon, so far in his contract he's put up a .665 OPS in exchange for $48 million. That'd have been a great buy! The Cubs spent a heckuva lot more than that on an outfielder and wound up with Heyward. The one OF contract that has been decent is Upton, but that's 1 outfielder out of 4 big ones that offseason who isn't a complete flop. The Free Agent market simply cannot make up the amount of ground we needed to make up, not without time travel. That team spent $60 million in new salary after 2014, mostly on the free agent market, and improved by 5 wins up to a peak of 78, which is a totally fair and reasonable number to improve for that amount of free agent spending. That's all you can do on the free agent market even if you're really good at scouting - the Astros are better and smarter than our franchise and even then they spent money on Beltran last year which didn't give them anything but "leadership". I thought myself for a long time that, had we continued in 2015 and 2016 on the path of 2014, where we tried to make incremental improvements and maybe find some talent in discarded pieces (Justin Smoak would have been a great addition if we didn't clog our DH spot), then by 2017 or 2018 we might have had something around Sale, Quintana and Eaton, but here's the one place I have to use a bit of hindsight - I would have been wrong in that, because Eaton and Quintana have absolutely collapsed the last 2 seasons on health and performance. It isn't just that they left the White Sox either, Quintana was struggling in 2017 while still with the White Sox. Throw in Abreu's inconsistency and the holes are even bigger. Even if we'd have been making the right moves, those guys would have fallen apart, and that would have left us still being a crappy team far behind a really dominant native american stereotype franchise. Even if they'd have been doing everything right, they'd have been mired below .500 after those guys fell apart. The only way to take that team after 2013 and turn it into something of value was a full, multi-year, bottom of the league finishing rebuild. That's it. This team could not have put together a winner in the past 5 years. They started off with about the worst talent franchise-wide in all of MLB, with minor leagues that were poorly coached and utterly barren. They had 3 or 4 good players (one of them great) at the big league level, and that's it. Throwing every resource they had in and doing everything right and having better coaches they might have gotten to .500, but this franchise simply did not have enough talent in it to make up ground against really good Royals and Native American Stereotype teams. It could not be done. Trying to do so set us back years, but the lack of talent in this organization was so dramatic that a full rebuild was inevitable.

The Brewers didn't start completely from scratch in part because they had Braun, but other than him they have entirely turned over their roster since their previous playoff team in 2011, and it took them 6 seasons of missing the playoffs before they were able to put together a run from the moment where they lost Fielder, Greinke, etc. They didn't get awful, but it sure took them a long time. I don't disagree with you that the White Sox put themselves into a far worse position than those teams thanks to their foolish, idiotic, dumb moves between 2013 and 2016 that set the franchise back by half a decade.

They were absolutely rebuilding pieces. That's the point, Greg hates rebuilding and tanking, teams never should have done that, but somehow you should just be a successful good team like the 2000s white sox. So pieces like that, the guys we traded for and the guys we drafted with those picks, those are the guys he hates. These guys were guys traded for and given chances on a rebuilding team. That's how they built that team, and they were at least competitive for most of the 00's.

There has also been talk that they though he was organizing an opposition group of some sort. But honestly, it seems like if there was a trigger, it's that they thought they'd get away with it with no major consequences.

However...the money the White Sox have still remaining can be traded, so we may not be able to sign a player who is signing this year, but we can trade that money to a team that wants to make him a better offer.

Fine, you're right. The 1999 White Sox were not a rebuilding year. Please explain this to me in more detail, because I can't figure out how that makes any sense at all.

I don't know if it's right, but the way they'll convince themselves to get around the logic of your statement is to say that Abreu is a good guy to have around the young players and that it's good to have that sort of veteran leadership even if he isn't a long-term option. The fact that there isn't really an obvious 1b waiting in the wings right now will probably be a second part of that decision.

And yes, he was a rebuilding move, but rebuilding is awful so we can't like him. That's Greg's clear point, rebuilding is awful so we must hate anything that came from rebuilding. That 2005 team can't have had anything to do with rebuilding, analytics, or anything else we don't like now, because they must be constantly held up to be perfect.

As long as you can tell me that Paul Konerko was unimportant to that team and you hated him on that team, then you're fine. Paul Konerko was acquired by trading Mike Cameron, a more developed starting Center Fielder, to the Reds in exchange for a blocked 3b that the White Sox shifted to 1b. That set the team back a couple years, they had to start developing a player from scratch. Hell, that guy hit .234 with only 18 home runs in 2003, what a waste of time. So like you said, Paul Konerko is awful and you hated him on the White Sox, you think that acquiring him was a terrible decision and you wish the White Sox never did things like that.

2005, you mean how Mark Buehrle, Jon Garland, Paul Konerko, Joe Crede, Aaron Rowand, Carlos Lee (traded for Scott Podsednik), Miguel Olivo, Jeremy Reed (Traded for Garcia), how those guys were all developed out of the strong, top-ranked White Sox system from 2000, which famously followed a "White Flag Trade" in the middle of a season and 2 years where the team's slogan was "The Kids Can Play" (several of those kids were key contributors on said world series roster)? So basically you're all in favor of a rebuild and the greatest thing that a team can do is the "White Flag Trade" as that wound up still being key even if, down the line, it wound up contributing Cotts to that roster? Ok, great. Build the system, then you should have a 5-8 year period where the team is very good most years and can have everything go right one year. Yeah I know, banging head against a wall. The team he praised literally existed and was able to be good most years because of tanking, because of rebuilding, because of the White Flag Trade and because The Kids Can Play. He won't care, he won't pay attention, he'll repeat the exact same garbage in another thread, and I hate myself for replying.

I cannot say I'm disappointed in the least about Osuna giving up a grand slam.

Because we still are going to play these games, there are 162 games scheduled on the calendar, these games will not be forfeited, and the White Sox have currently 3 starting pitchers, one of whom already has a shoulder thing. At the very least, the White Sox are going to find 2 additional starting pitchers, and there is no sign that they think the ones in their organization are ready to do that in April, so they need 2 starting pitchers by April 1. Ideally, those starting pitchers should be: fairly cheap monetarily, extremely cheap in terms of prospects, signed to short enough contracts that they won't be in the way when Cease and Kopech are ready, and it would be especially nice if they had some upside like having been decently valuable pitchers or even an all star within the past few seasons such that there's some hope they might snap back into form and turn themselves into a strong tradeable asset by the deadline (similar to, for example, Joakim Soria).

After last season, there is literally no reason at all to extend Abreu. He was injured way too often last year and had a major, 6 week long slump. If he was on the free agent market right now, he would likely get offers worse than the amount the White Sox will pay him if they offer arbitration. Almost no contenders really need a 1b upgrade and Goldschmidt might be available cheaply for any that would. The White Sox will probably still offer him arbitration, because they probably won't want to bother with the chance of losing him next year. If the White Sox are desperate to keep him in 2020, their first and easiest way to do so is the qualifying offer, and given where his contract would fall right now, Jose should probably accept that if offered because there'd be a decent chance he'd wind up like Moustakas where no one would want to give us a 2nd round pick for him. If Jose walks then...yay at least we get a second round pick.

A couple of those guys there are reasonable excuses for - Garcia and Delmonico went backwards in no small part because they couldn't stay healthy (training staff again?). We also have the excuses for Moncada and Anderson that they were rushed to the big leagues and so they're going to still need some time to struggle. Basically, next year, we should see some improvement from those guys...and then we can say "or else".

That's a really, really high rate of relievers "panning out". We better be darn good at coaching relievers.

Their Payroll coming into next year is about $140 million. The Luxury tax line is around $200 million right now. They could conceivably add both without crossing the tax line.

If there is one thing this year that worries me a ton...it's the minor league injuries (esp. if you count Kopech). The big league roster had roughly normal health, but the minor leagues absolutely were shredded this year. If that's a fluke then ok....but if that rate of injuries continues for the next 1-2 years it will totally demolish all of the talent this org thought they had acquired. If there's any place that I actually might think of making changes, it's the strength and conditioning and training staff for the minor leagues.

Since of course you never actually bother to look, here's the average age of batters and pitchers over a two decade stretch. Literally your entire life, fewer than 1/2 the players in the big leagues have been over 30. The time it got closest was, for obvious reasons, the peak of the steroid era, because you had guys like tetrahydrogestrinone using the stuff to extend their careers. And...guess what...since 2012...the average MLB age has gone back up, not down. It was 28.9 last year, matching what it was in 2010.

This franchise literally has in its history a year where the actual slogan was "The Kids Can Play". It's a shame these analytics based teams don't share their secret of time travel. Or at least kill Hitler, rather than going back in time to create baseball marketing slogans.

That's probably not the worst thing in the world, it does leave them able to use cap space next offseason if they could get someone to take it.

"If I assert that players getting hurt is because of analytics and pretend that teams never rebuilt, then I can blame everything I dislike about baseball on analytics. It's clearly obvious that replay and umpires calling the strike zone poorly is because of analytics. I am not a crackpot."

If the D-Backs were willing to eat that much of his salary to get a decent return...there's teams that need starting pitching and are competitive right now who are better fits. Hell one of them is playing tonight and had Greinke before.