Balta1701

I'd be surprised if that's all.

If the Astros have George Springer play another game for them this season after the play he was just taken out on, they should consider themselves ridiculously lucky. Multiple fingers bent the wrong way on a head first slide. I mean, maybe it won't be as bad as it looked, but that looked like it could have shredded half his hand.

Were the White Sox rebuilding in 2013, 2015, and 2016?

I'm ok with this.

Who cares who moved eaton to RF he was fine there, the real trick that we somehow pulled of was keeping Eaton healthy for 3 seasons.

This is the kind of comment I was waiting to hear with Rodon since 2015. This is what I wanted to hear about him more than anything else other than "his changeup is now the best in the big leagues". He's been getting by on dominant stuff for his entire career so far. Now he might be learning how to pitch. That's what we needed to make him deadly.

That is not what I said, I said he would still snap out of it and wasn't a .500 OPS player, but he's also not a .850 OPS player any more either, he's getting gradually worse against fastballs every season. And the one this game is the first time I've seen him turn around a fastball this entire hot streak.

I'm absolutely incredulous that anyone could have the 4 year run Rick Hahn had as GM from 2013-2016 and still have a job and I will absolutely stand by the statement that those are the worst 4 years we will ever see from any GM ever, as you've seen above. What he has done since then has been impressive but it does not absolve him of the previous run until there is a complete and successful turnaround. When people ask how I rank his performance, which is what started this conversation, I'm going to reply that we will never see a GM have that bad of a 4 year run again because every other GM in the league would have been fired multiple times and burned in effigy by the end, and until proven otherwise that should color our opinion of his tenure. And that...is how we got here :).

You'd give them until 2022, a full 6 seasons of a rebuild, before you evaluate its quality? We ought to be seeing dramatic progress well before then. That's what thin ice and a ticking clock should mean. If we're talking about anything other than Rick Hahn's remarkable rebuilding success and the multiple years of pennant races by the time 2022 rolls around, then that means my fears were well founded.

Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright, The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light; And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout, But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Madrigal has struck out.

The trades are good on paper, I believe that is obvious. December 2016 was only the 2nd time I thought Rick Hahn handled his franchise correctly, the other being before 2014 where they acquired some assets intelligently in what should have been the start of a 3-ish year rebuilding program. As I said above, the Quintana deal really is impressive because Rick played poker, held his cards, and waited for another team to blink. However, as of right now we have 0 solid big league players from them (ok fine maybe 1 Moncada as a 3 WAR player). Until they actually have a record of these guys becoming strong big leaguers, we have no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt and many reasons to be skeptical. Those players are being fed into the same development system that has failed us so far, with many of the same actors there. The GM who extended Robin Ventura after the worst coached season I've ever seen now has a head coach who won't sit Anderson even though his knee hurts enough that he's getting thrown out at the plate because he can't run fast enough. The same GM who pulled the trigger on Fulmer and then called him up from AA to save his failing bullpen in 2016 when he had an ERA of 5+ is still making draft picks. In a development I didn't expect, we have a huge rash of minor league injuries this year - is that a one season thing, or is there another systematic problem we haven't addressed yet? Are we systematically acquiring players who have injury risks that we're not evaluating properly? Are we making sure these guys are conditioned appropriately in the minors prior to the start of the season? If we see guys with incorrect techniques, are we actually correcting them or are we treating them like Marcus Semien and telling them they're on their own, possibly contributing to the rash of injuries in the process? If the same people who established a 4 year record of awful decision making are still making decisions, there could be other awful moves that they've made that would not show up as failures yet. I don't know how many metaphors I can give on this. They should be on the thinnest ice in history. The clock should be ticking. The ice hasn't cracked yet and the alarm hasn't gone off yet, but no, until I see the big league roster actually break out as is happening right now with the Phillies and Braves, they have earned no trust from me. They should have been fired, tarred, and feathered after 2016, but nothing I can do to make that happen. If I am going to turn around from that point of view and trust them, they have to prove it. I will grant them time based on the quality of those trades...but that time has limits, and I'm going to sit around being nervous and imagining all the other things that they could have screwed up, as you see above.

I said this in another thread - a significant increase in spending would not have completed that task. Go through the 2015 free agent market, imagine the White Sox had boosted their payroll to $200 million, and ask yourself if they could build a championship team. The guys that signed at positions the White Sox could have used wound up including people like Sandoval, Chase Headley, Russell Martin, and James Shields, many of whom were disappointments even in the first year, let alone over their full contract. We had a huge discussion here that offseason over whether we should sign Victor Martinez as the top DH on the market and he's put up about -4 fWAR over his deal (I opposed it). If you gave the White Sox a $200 million payroll that offseason, and you signed Max Sherzer, Jon Lester, David Robertson, and Nelson Cruz - literally the White Sox would have had to guess 100% right on every single one of their signings for this to happen - then they actually would have had a shot at one of the 2 wild cards, but even then in part only because that year the 2nd wild card had a low win total. Now that's playing hindsight. That's actually looking back and saying "here's guys who were actually worth their contract" and imagining that somehow we hit on all of them. That's something which can't happen. If we had boosted our payroll to $150 million, maybe we sign Headley and Martinez instead of Bonifacio and LaRoche, and we get one guy who is slightly better over at 3b, but now we're stuck with an even worse deal at DH. That's how the free agent market really works out, and that's why trying to rebuild that team via the free agent market was fundamentally flawed.

And I'm gonna hit back on the bolded and say that in my eyes, this group has absolutely earned no trust with their decision making. Hence why I'm still so frustrated over the last 5 years, I believe that the people who made decisions that I find to be terrible are still there. They absolutely nailed a tear down, but they are still the same people who put together 4th place rosters and convinced themselves they would be right there at the end. So, at the very least, I'm nervous, and as this season goes on I'm seeing more ways that this could flop, with the free agent signings as part of that.

Coming into this season I would have said yes absolutely and thought we would definitely score one of them. I'm no longer as certain. Rick keeps implying they will in his public statements...they definitely have the money to do so, but it also seems too early based on the big league ballclub, and it's not like we won't have competition for Machado who seems like the best fit of the 2 big guys. That competition will come from teams like the Dodgers, Yankees, and Phillies, who also have comparably huge resources and better ballclubs than we do. I'm more worried than I was a few months ago that the people who are saying they'll strike out could be right.

If we're at the point of putting the blame on 1 person and that being Reinsdorf due to things behind the scenes that neither of us can know but which you are presuming to be true I guess I have no ability to disagree with that because it's all supposition. However, I will note that your argument definitely supports the people at this page who say that the #1 problem with this organization is the ownership, and somehow I doubt that the people agreeing with your post will also agree the next time we have a thread that turns in that direction. In the end the result is the same. The White Sox are the worst team in baseball since Rick Hahn took over and it's not particularly close. If that's the fault of ownership, then we have the worst ownership in major league baseball. If the buck stops with the General Manager, then we have the worst General Manager in baseball. If they have such a poor working relationship that ownership does not trust the general manager's opinion of the ballclub, then we have the worst of both.

Then take a look at what actually happened. You say that there was a strong defense to trying to continue remaining competitive in 2013-2016. First and foremost, by 2015 I strongly disagreed with that at the time, and by 2016 I took a break from this site after I got tired of people being angry at me for saying that it wasn't going to work. So if you're talking hindsight, you're talking to the wrong person. Here's a key line you say above: This is the absolute summation of 2015 and 2016. Their thought process was entirely wrong and they lacked the ability to execute on it. They believed they could vault a 72 win team in 2014 into a competitive roster through trades from a weak system and free agent signings. This model will not work for the White Sox. It only works for a team that weak if you can hit on every free agent acquisition and have them actually overperform - if they paid fair market value, the $60 million they spent in the 2015 offseason would still have left them a below .500 team. The idea that they could take a low 70s win team and turn it around overnight was fundamentally flawed and frankly impossible. And you want evidence of that? Take a look at the end results, 4th place, 4th place, 4th place. They tried the absolute best they could, they made moves that you folks thought were good, and that was the end result...BECAUSE THEIR THOUGHT PROCESS WAS ENTIRELY WRONG. A team built on a foundation of low level free agent signings is going to be a 4th place team, that's where they belonged. You say that they should have continued with their strong rotation - by 2016 that strong rotation involved Mat Latos, signed for $3 million, as one of their 5 starters. That rotation had 2 strong pitchers in it, and that was it. It was not a strong rotation, it was an average rotation with a strong front half and a back half of Latos and Danks. Yes, the Sale, Eaton, and Quintana trades are done well on paper. As of right now that's the only reason why you can see me saying that it's ok to give Rick Hahn and company time to see how these deals work out. The Quintana one is, to my eyes, easily the most impressive, because that's the one where there was some gamesmanship and waiting on offers involved. But now I want to see results. There should be a ticking clock behind them right now. It isn't going to ring this year...but the ticking should be getting louder day by day. Rick Hahn has the fewest wins in baseball since he became general manager. They are so far behind every other team in baseball that they could have kept Sale, Eaton, Robertson, and Quintana, and there's a good chance they'd still have that title. Teams above him, including the Phillies, started from a similarly weak foundation, with more bad contracts, and now they are competitive. Because Rick Hahn's thought process was entirely wrong, the White Sox sacrificed the latter part of the 2010s for 2015 and 2016, with a thought process that was guaranteed to fail. It only seemed reasonable if the people making decisions failed to understand that there is risk involved in free agent signings and that free agent signings are not guaranteed to overperform. Rick having the fewest wins in major league baseball since taking over is not an accident, it is a direct result of the "very good balance of aggressiveness and forward-thinking responsible behavior" you credit them with. The 3, minimum, fireable offenses, were believing the 2015 patchwork team would work, believing the 2016 patchwork team would work, and the pre-2016 trade deadline scrambling that brought us the Shields deal. Completely misunderstanding the 2013 team is a 4th one. They did exactly what you said, they executed a thought process that would not work, and they did a poor job of it.

JFC

Put Sanchez there for a couple days and rest the guy. His numbers are plummeting, he's got a .570 OPS the last 28 days. If his knees are part of the reason then REST HIS KNEES for a few days.

He still does all sorts of TV spots down here. He's hawking air conditioners and Kroger carries his line of Nolan Ryan beef. The ballparks even use that brand name in their burgers.

That's clearly a wise decision. We need him out there to stay in this pennant race.

After seeing how things have gone this year, I don't quite draw the line at 2019, although it would be really nice to see some improvement from those guys you list. Young players can struggle for a couple years and still break out (see Carlos Rodon let's hope?), so I will give one more pass next offseason, but things need to be turning positive by 2020 because otherwise that will mean multiple guys are actually busting and things aren't getting better. By 2021 we should be talking about a legit world series contender. That's somewhat disappointing already to me, because that's a year behind what it looked like we should be at last year to me, but I will give that one last pass since player development does take time.

I believe I've heard Robin say that when you can see him slow up half way to the mound he realized what he was doing and there was an "oh no" moment.

I think more than half the teams in the big leagues would have fired him after the 2013 debacle of saying they were competitive and then losing 99 games (see: the Diamondbacks firing Dave Stewart if you're thinking this is harsh for a guy who just got hired). At the end of the 2015 season, 27 or 28 franchises, maybe more would have fired him after failing to be competitive twice in seasons he said they would compete (I don't know which one of them wouldn't have but someone probably would foul this up). He deserved to be fired again after flailing before the 2016 trade deadline and doing dramatic damage to the future of the franchise in the process - I'm up to 29 teams in MLB who would have fired him by then. All 29 other teams would have then fired him again at the end of the 2016 season. So, almost every team in baseball would have fired Rick Hahn at least 3 times and the majority would have fired him 4 times. To this day I think the most fair evaluation of Rick Hahn came out of the mouth of Rick Hahn. In 2015, when he chose to do nothing at the trade deadline and the White Sox had actually gone on a winning streak, he personally set the standard. He said "If we keep playing like this we'll be right there at the end". I think that was a totally fair way to evaluate Rick Hahn - if he was right and they were right there at the end then fine he gets another shot. He made moves consistent with that statement, holding onto players he should have moved and sold. They were no where close at the end. That was the standard he set, his job should have been based on it.