Balta1701

Do you believe that Dylan Cease was a better pitcher in 2021 than in 2022?

Is an ERA of 8.07 a “badly broken” pitcher?

Cease had an 8.07 ERA in August. Games in August count too!

“My pitching coach can fix this badly broken pitcher” continues to be a vexing argument for paying a high price for a player.

Naw, but neither of them would have helped a contender.

Cease’s ERA in the 2nd half was 4.96.

Cease’s value could absolutely be higher in 6 months, if he is back to something like his 2022 form. This is only true if he has a rotten first half again.

It’s one of those things teams used to do more often but now really doesn’t make sense. If the Mariners, for example, were enamored with the Orioles prospects, they could move Gilbert for a big return since he has more control than Cease. No reason to involve the White Sox at all if they wanted the Os prospects.

How many teams have too many pitching prospects? How many teams look at their pitching staffs and think “oh these two prospects are blocked that means they’re movable”?

Sigh. No, he wasn't. He was in 2022, but that's been the only year where this was true.

Ok I've figured out that we're talking about Robert now. I'd be open to listening on Robert. But as you've noted, there's some problems with him. 1. His price should be enormous. 4 years of control for a guy in his mid 20s who made the all star team last year should bring back more than most teams in MLB can possibly afford. Literally, without exaggeration, you have to be talking about minimum 4 highly ranked prospects, or maybe 3 of them where there are 2 top 20 guys included. That knocks out the majority of the league - the White Sox literally wouldn't' be able to trade for him because they don't have enough in their entire system. 2. The few teams that do have that much need to be a match for him. They can't be overloaded on outfielders already, because if they have a CF already, Robert would have less value to them. 3. As you noted, there's an injury worry here. He's had one very good season and several injury riddled ones. There is a benefit to teams in making sure that he can actually start regularly repeating his 2023 season. Robert's value is likely to go down if he's held compared to what it should be with this amount of control, but his price is so high that it's hard to fathom why any team would risk paying it. Maybe this changes by the trade deadline as a couple other teams watch their prospects develop, especially if he makes a 2nd straight all star game and has a healthy first half.

Ah, I read that as still talking about Cease. My bad.

FWIW, I think the opposite. He's actually leading all MLB in starts over the last 3 seasons. That's as durable as you can possibly find, the guy simply hasn't been hurt. The risk on him is much more performance, he has been more inconsistent than he should be given his talent and that's the only reason he hasn't brought a haul back already.

…coughs…

Everyone told me Omar was useless and would never learn to catch so there was no problem dumping him. They went for the old reliable veterans, first McCann which was surprisingly good, then Grandal. What happened? Omar developed into a better catcher when he got to teams that worked with him and became a really useful piece. The Brewers got multiple years of a cheap, positive catcher out of it. The White Sox got stuck with a huge contract for a catcher on his last legs, this happened because they weren’t willing to actually develop the guy they had. Same story over and over. Hahn needed his mediocre vets, Getz needs his mediocre vetz. Can’t ever take the time and effort to develop the guys we have, that would be hard work, who is supposed to do that? Our minor league development coordinator? Naw, the last guy slept through his job for years, we don’t do stuff like playing and developing our own guys it interrupts our naps.

"Nobody should be losing sleep over Omar Narvaez being blocked or losing MLB at bats." - the whole site in 2019. 3 years later - "How did we wind up with a $17 million a year -1 WAR 35 year old catcher", if only there was something we could have done to prevent this. It's a shame no one could have possibly avoided this."

Lee first got to AAA in 2021, spent all of 2022 and 2023 in AAA aside from short stints in the big leagues, has played nearly 200 games at AAA and has 841 plate appearances there. Maybe if he gets 1200 PAs and 300 games at AAA he might be ready then? In terms of being around some seasoned vets in Spring Training, he was with the Astros the last 2 years. The Astros catcher the last 2 years, the seasoned vet he got to be around was..."Martin Maldonado". Gosh it's a shame he couldn't learn anything from that seasoned vet the last 2 offseasons, maybe 3rd time is a charm? I literally can't come up with a better example of how dumb this concept is, "Gosh he needs to be around some vets to learn from them, maybe we should put him with exactly the same vet he was with the last two years and see if something magically different happens". Seriously, if you're not going to play Lee this year, just release him. You're better off with the open roster spot for a releiver somewhere. He has 1 option left, if he stays buried at AAA this year there's no way they're going to give him a big league roster spot next year. May as well churn the spot and see if someone else sticks.

Um, no. There is nothing about this that makes me smile. In any way.

Ironically, the last time we played this exact game of totaling up all the potentially bad money they spent, it was 2019, and it included a couple of veteran catchers because they decided they had no confidence in the catchers they had. One of them worked out great, for the money, but they got nothing out of him because they didn't have much control and didn't trade him before he was a FA. Eventually, the fact that they didn't develop any youth at that position and dumped the young catcher they had led directly to Grandal's deal, so even though they wound up with one of those catchers being an all star, in the end it all backfired on them and cost them $80 million+.

How much of this is these guys coasting on their reputation as veterans? I doubt it was true, but even if literally everyone on the Astros hated Maldonado last year, no one was going to whisper a thing because Dusty loved him. Every pitcher HAD to learn to throw to Maldonado, because it didn't matter if Diaz was on pace for 90 home runs over the year he was getting benched in the playoffs because Dusty said so. No one on the Royals is going to say a bad word about getting benched for Naperville Nicky because the manager and GM will support their veteran.

Except...those were mostly the same pitchers he was dealing with the previous year, at least one of the new ones had a better than league average CS rate, and their other catcher, Yainer Diaz, threw out 15/50 baserunners. Read this again because I like it. Yainer Diaz threw out 15/50 base stealers. Martin Maldonado threw out 14/100 base stealers. In 1/2 as many chances, Diaz threw out more baserunners than Maldonado.

Do you realize who our manager is? The only way they're off the roster is through the IL.

As long as we have a 100% success rate on developing prospects this works fine.

Well, his "Throwing" was ok in terms of some stats, but his 14% of runners thrown out was worse than Grandal. He has nothing elite he did in terms of throwing, and things are trending the wrong way compared to the rest of his career. He was bad there for a reason.

No, they're blocking young players now. Note how no one complained about Stassi being picked up, it was reasonable to have 1 veteran who plays maybe 1/3 or 1/2 the time to go along with a young catcher acquired last year in a trade. Even if the young catcher isn't good right now, maybe that catcher picks up some things with a year+ of experience, and the guy you're paying to go along with him is making under $1 million. This move is the one that has us annoyed, because now the young catcher gets buried in the minors, now there are two crappy veteran catchers who will eat up all of the available big league innings, none of the young catchers get any big league experience where they might even be able to learn enough to be backups, and we drop $5 million on top of that. $4 million of that didn't need to be spent at all, and there's a vesting option thrown in that the guy probably has a good chance to hit if he's healthy. Oh, and not to mention how they could have just kept Zavala last season - thanks Chris. This is classic White Sox behavior. Wastes a little money - "Oh it's fine they have money to spend, that never comes back to haunt us." Blocks players or gives up on them "oh it's fine that guy isn't going to turn into anything anyway, that never comes back to haunt us". Hahn did this at the catcher's spot repeatedly, and it wound up eventually turning into a money pit.