Balta1701

A summary of my anti-rants. 1. This sucks. 2. This really sucks. 3. You're right the timing is awful. It would have been great if this happened 3 weeks ago, by comparison. I can be a little open to the argument that keeping him down would avoid service time loss in the event of injury...but literally no one made that. It was keeping him down for service time when he comes up next year, to extend things in 2025, not to protect against losing service time while rehabbing injuries. Furthermore, this happening early next year could darn well have been worse - it might have saved us service time, but it could have knocked him out for most of 2020, with that happening after we had already spent money on the free agent market with the expectation of being good in 2019 and 2020. Imagine signing Machado, giving him a 3 year opt out, and then this happening in early May of next year. 4. Everyone who's struggling to find something the White Sox did wrong...if avoiding these things were easy then someone would have figured it out. The Red Sox got lucky with David Price, congratulations. Why did Jay Groome, their top prospect, not get the same arm saving treatment from their excellent medical staff? The answer is...these things happen with pitchers. Look earlier in this thread, almost every top pitching prospect has now had one this year. You do the best you can to put them on a throwing regimen, to keep their mechanics right, and if you think their mechanics are a risk maybe you trade them. Even if you do all that, you still lose some. You can't detect these things early, even sending guys for MRI scans weekly isn't going to do that. The White Sox have been as good as anyone at avoiding this particular surgery for the last 15 years...that could be luck, but you certainly can't tell me that they're putting these guys at undue risk. Hanging this on the coaching staff or the training staff and wishing we had some other team's trainers is silly. 5. Blaming this on Rick Hahn and the front office, for now at least, is still inappropriate. Literally no one on this site dislikes Rick Hahn more than me, I believe the shame of his performance should taint his children's children's children. This is a major setback and it makes it darn near impossible to compete in 2020. However, The overall situation is still the same, we have a load arriving in 2021 or so, and now we have to plan for that as that should also be the year for full strength Kopech. We may well have dramatically mis-scouted guys. The strategy of acquiring so many pitchers could darn well be fundamentally flawed, and in 2 years we may have said that trading our last assets for young pitching was the final mistake in the career of the worst GM in baseball history. Until then, we've still got to let this play out. Holding onto Chris Sale and letting him walk after 2019, having not been over .500 since 2012, would be just about as rotten as where we are right now. 6. I do think this dramatically changes what we have to do this offseason. A 3 year signing is now a stopgap, not a move to compete. We can't give out 3-year opt outs if we sign anyone big, because the first 2 seasons are now undermanned. We now have, honestly, more motivation to move Rodon. I don't think we'll get the right kind of offers for him until next year's trade deadline personally, but if the right kind of offer comes in, the White Sox now simply won't have the firepower in 2019 or 2020 to make use of Rodon, in 2020 they will be rehabbing Kopech and working Cease into the rotation hopefully and that's just not the strong rotation we will need to make a legit run when so much of our high level talent was wrapped up in starting pitching. Holding Rodon until the right offer comes in makes sense, but if such an offer appears it's time to make the move. Now we have to play for 2021 as a piece that could have been a 2020 all star will now probably pitch 100 big league innings that year if we're lucky. We should consider that when signing contracts and when making moves on other guys, we're underpowered in 2020. 7. This sucks.

I think asking a trainer to predict a guy's future injury path when he hasn't even examined the guy seems pretty nuts.

You're telling me that through hindsight you could know that 135 innings was fine and 140 innings was not.

Pushed him too hard by throwing right now 6 more innings than last year? Really?

Bah, you know darn well that these things aren't that easy to predict.

Well S***

I wouldn't go after him, but did people notice what kind of year Derek Holland had for the Giants? ERA over 6 for us last year, 3.56 for him this year. WTF?

I doubt it will matter at all in the end after the 51-49 vote, and I wasn't adult enough to hear graphic details of Clarence Thomas's sexual harassment picked apart by a bunch of white guys, but this is easily the biggest dismantling of a Supreme Court nominee I've ever seen. No wonder they slammed on the accelerator and tried to get this done before those documents were published.

I do not know what procedures were followed beforehand but they better damn well have confidence in them.

And the editorial page knows that they are trading on the credibility of everyone in that room on both sides when they decide to grant anonymity to this person.

If the NYT granted anonymity to a FBI or CIA official and then allowed them to pretend to be a free trade loving low tax Republican that would be the greatest journalistic error of my lifetime. That type of coverup of a known lie should put them out of business. Even if you don’t think much of the paper many of the people who work their consider journalism to be an important concept. If I was the food critic there and the paper allowed someone to lie as you allege, I’d resign and I’d tell everyone else there to do the same.

I can think of one important difference between Todd Frazier and Colin Kaepernick that might make it more far more profitable to turn people against the latter of those two.

IMO the "Something behind it" is Woodward's book making clear this is happening, and then the cowards in the White House who are doing it wanting to put their message out and cover their own asses more. "See we're still good Republicans, yeah this guy's a little nuts and dangerous but it's more important to cut the taxes and remove the regulations". The article literally says that.

I don't disagree with that. I would disagree with your earlier use of "First steps", because the Republican cowards in the White House and their enablers in Congress have apparently been ok with this for a good long while.

Because ESPN doesn't make enough money off Todd Frazier.

The real answer is that ESPN makes money and kept eyes and ears on their networks by making controversies out of things ARoid did during his career and that's why it was "controversial".

Considering we now have both Woodward's book and this piece saying that there is an entire group of cowards violating the law and possibly committing treason to keep the President from destroying the world, and that there are now multiple Republican senators on the record saying "Yeah that's exactly what we've heard", even if this is just one person and their staffer writing it, there's clearly a whole group of cowards involved in keeping the President from destroying the world who are at the same level.

The piece was polished enough that whoever wrote it, IMO, almost certainly had a staffer or speechwriter prepare it for them or along with them.

One important thing to remember - the New York Times wouldn't give anonymity for a column like that to someone's low level staffer if they have any credibility at all. Assuming they do...they would only grant it for a piece like that to someone at the cabinet level or higher. If I was in that chair, I wouldn't have published that without talking to the actual "Secretary of whatever" in person to verify that is what they want published.

So it would be over $18 mil to franchise him next year then? Anyway, that's the downside of the tag if there is one, all the money is guaranteed so you can't play any games with moving stuff around, you need $18 million free.

Does Mack count as a "Defensive end"? The 1 year Franchise Tag is over $17 million for that position, it's $14 mil for a linebacker. That's all guaranteed money and I think that's already a higher cap hit than the Bears have for him this year, not to mention the 2nd year.

Yes you do. Come on, you're surprised by any of this? This is a guy who has been a Republican legal advisor for 2 decades and you're surprised that there's documents of him taking strong opinions against abortion and how to make it illegal, receiving illegally obtained documents gathered to help in campaigns against Democrats, lying about all that under oath, and then just expecting to cover all that up?

If there's one thing the people working in this administration, and in this Congress with R's after their names, have repeatedly demonstrated: they're cowards. I can give no better evidence than yesterday.

Carlos Rodon's 7th start, 3.2 innings, 7 runs. He got crushed. Shame his career fell apart afterwards. (I was at that game btw, entirely ruined his career).

Stormbreaker.