Balta1701

I would reply that we were pretty adamant about not trying development. Anything that remotely resembled a developmental prospect was traded away. Draft picks were given up. Little to nothing happened internationally. Minor leaguers that went to other teams wound up producing amazement over how little coaching the guys had received.

After seeing how stop gap guys and short term guys and guys who are passed their prime and on their final contract worked out for the White Sox over and over and over, I pretty much have no interest in doing that. I consider that to be a losing strategy. We have a talent loaded system right now, we should only have a handful of positions that we can't cover from our own organization by 2020. Fill 1 or 2 of those positions with monsters, and the rest falls into place. This is one of those "learn from your mistakes" arguments.

I know we also heard this before, but we heard it for a reason - it was true. One of the motivations behind the "all in" gambles in 2015 and 2016 was that this team has huge potential for revenue growth through more ad sales, more ticket sales, and maybe a ticket price increase if there is ever more than a skeleton crew around the ballpark. The 2015 and 2016 seasons seemed motivated, at least in part, by the idea that if this team could win the wild card, the additional revenue from ticket and ad sales would help pay to improve the team in subsequent years. It will not cover all of Harper's deal, but a few thousand extra ticket sales a game by adding one of those stars to a young and upcoming roster that finally gets back over .500 in 2019 is another potential feature to consider.

It's a shame how poorly run that franchise has been the last few years. He should be the talk of the playoffs every year even if viewers miss him for the west coast. Ditto Saturday and Sunday games.

I for one don't think of Rodon as a top of the rotation starter right now, so getting Giolito into a #2 spot would be really quite nice to me.

I would have expected him in July...before he got hurt. A setback of a month would push him back a month.

As one certain poster in this thread will tell you....how dare you bring race into things! They just arbitrarily don't like certain counties and prefer other ones.

He also had a 1.086 OPS in Birmingham when he was called up. Jimenez is currently at .800 this season.

Yesterday was his highest average velocity of the season and was back to the 93 he was hanging out at last year.

It won't be long before he forces his way to AAA. It won't be long after that until he forces his way to the big leagues.

You say to look at how long the Cubs and Astros took, when projecting for 2019 I also say to look what happened in the years before those teams won their titles. In 2015, the Astros, with a rookie George Springer, were a wild card team. They missed the playoffs the next year, but then won 100+ in 2017 and their world series. In 2015, the Cubs had many of their guys up - Bryant was in AAA for the first 2 weeks for service time reasons, Schwarber didn't appear until the end of the year, but the pieces were mostly there. That Cubs team won 96 games, the wild card, and was "Daniel Murphy collected all 6 infinity stones" away from the World Series. Next year, the White Sox should have the bulk of round 1 up. The 3 pitchers we had who needed a year to struggle are getting their year to struggle, and we're starting to see some good signs from some of them - we saw this with Danks and Floyd in our last actual competitive team, they struggled their way through 2007 and then were key contributors to a wild card in 2008. Moncada is getting his year to struggle. Come next year, those players should be ready to take steps forward...and on top of that, Kopech and Jiminez are arriving. By next year, we should be where the Braves are sitting now - maybe not the best team in the division, but making noise. I don't know that Machado is the right guy, we'll see how this season plays out. If Garcia comes back from the DL and is awful, the OF could be a bigger need. The bullpen needs help badly. But in 2015, the Cubs signed Lester because he fit their needs, and he was a key player in 2016. If we don't pay Garcia next year, then the White Sox will have a payroll commitment in this offseason under $40 million. They could target Harper and Kimbrel and potentially still keep their payroll under $100 million. In my eyes, they have 2 offseasons to hit the FA market; 2019 and 2020. 2019 is a strong class with huge names, we should be in that and trying to land one of them. With continued revenue growth from shared revenues, and maybe actually a slight bump in interest in a nonawful team, we should be in position to have 1 more splash possible in 2020 if we want. In 2021 Moncada, Giolito, and Lopez all will be in their first year arb eligible years, and I think we all expect Moncada to break the record for 1st year arbitration salary until Jiminez and Kopech break it again in 2022. For Free Agency, hit the ground this offseason and try to land 2-ish targets. If you land 1, then you have one more shot the next offseason. And for where the team should be...with the roster we have right now we should be solid next year. We may not win the wild card, but we should at least be legitimately in the conversation. Maybe Rodon spends another year on the DL and Miguel Gonzalez isn't good enough to get us there, I can deal with those kind of excuses, but we darn well ought to be substantially better than 2015 and 2016 next year. We should look like a team on the way.

"It's not working to deal with you being unfairly jailed, shot, and unable to get equal paying jobs, solely because of who you are, so let's focus on something else". I know you won't check your own privilege, but I hope others can see why "oh don't worry you're just going to be occasionally shot" isn't acceptable.

I know there have been a ton of snowouts, but has he actually had an offday outside of those? Quick check seems to suggest no, today was game 28, and he had played 27 games coming into today.

When people who are minorities tell you that the overwhelming number of things they deal with are not just economic issues generally, that they are fundamental unfairness directed specific to them, and they only can get fixed if you specifically care about that (Here's one from today), and people respond "no you're wrong that's really not important but my issues are", well that's exactly the problem. That's the viewpoint we're getting in this thread. It doesn't just disagree with data, but it's also belittling the experience of those groups, and denying data for good measure.

So let's see... The Democrats need to put social issues on the back burner. Look at the Republicans pushing "fear mongering, hawkish tendencies, and racial division." We should totally just let them do that, after all, social issues are icky. There's clearly no connection between your two first paragraphs. And the tens of thousands black people who are disenfranchised by the voter ID law in state x has nothing to do with how elections go. And "The Dems need to not accept PAC Money". Great. So we're starting every race from dramatically behind on money. I'll buy "the system is broken" as a response to that and something we should try to fix...but how do we win enough races to actually make a difference by giving the other side a head start? The people who have refused PAC money haven't suddenly surged out to an incredible and unusual series of victories by stating that they haven't taken it.

Last year Rutherford struck out 73 times in 440 PAs. In his 06 season (albeit at AAA and notably I'm picking his highest K-rate), Sweeney struck out 73 times in 449 PAs. With how pitching has evolved to aim for higher K-rates...there's not a convincing bid difference in K-rate to me. Maybe 10% higher for Rutherford, so far.

you need to figure out the auto twitter embed thing. Hit a spacebar after pasting the tweet link then wait for a second for it to post, then it'll load the tweet rather than just the text.

And when the response to people saying "We have to care about social issues and need to put ourselves in the shoes of someone else if we think they're unimportant" is "How dare you suggest that my perspective needs to be checked, mine is the important one", we may just be doomed to that anyway.

Because people will do almost anything to defend white supremacy. For example, when someone called a person out for saying social issues shouldn't matter, you stepped up to defend that premise, even while claiming you weren't supporting it. The idea that anyone might have a different perspective about being shot in the street or denied the vote and we should listen to that perspective and not discount it, the idea that other people are human and should be treated that way; you turned into this: It was a great example of exactly why Donald Trump took over that party and why he won that election, because this is the issue that defines America.

We still darn well might. Not only do we have the disadvantage of a decade of voter suppression that you won't care about actively working do disenfranchise our voters, but we also have a foreign power who is going to again intervene in the election against us. That's a huge headwind even for a good candidate.

This would be hilarious if it wasn't being used to justify invading a country of 75 million.

Oh, ok, so you were only focusing on that side of the ball whereas I was combining both. I think we agree on that.

Well, that, and Russian Propaganda that was so effective that 2 years later people will still say that it was a terribly managed campaign because the Russians told them so.

No they didn't. They released claims about their actions years ago, they included nothing since the nuclear deal was signed. Your article is one of the ones who deliberately blur that line. They did this deliberately to fool people who are already willing to be fooled, the ones who think that our last war out there was great and we should do another one.