35thstreetswarm

This is one of those double-take moments in the season where I reevaluate my expectations of this team yet again. Who are these guys? This is the kind of performance you see from good teams. Like…good teams.

I am curious about Schultz's profile as someone who didn't follow him all that closely. How much of his hype is tied to his height (and the impact that imposing height has on delivery and perception of his pitches) vs. stuff? I know he's giant, but it doesn't seem to translate into elite velocity, at least right now...what was it that made him that made him so highly rated? Genuine question.

Wow…even weirder!

Why are we talking about fathers? This thread got weird fast

Me too. The crowd had the low ambient moaning tone I normally associate with a Cubs playoff game collapse

Another potential slump thwarted. Really love this team.

As of today the assembled Crochet return would also beat Crochet in a fight.

...because Garrett Crochet was an established starting pitcher actively playing in the MLB who was traded for then-minor league prospects who had to both graduate and start, you know, becoming good. Montgomery didn't even debut until well into this season. You'd kind of expect the WAR calculation to tilt in favor of the MLB player in the early years, wouldn't you? With three MLB-caliber players on the White Sox that WAR scale is obviously going to tilt heavily in Sox favor in the coming years...hell, the coming months, unless two or three of our MLB players are hurt.

These young kids and their…jazz

I don't think you understand. He is wealthy so you are not allowed to dislike him. His wealth is proof that he is uniquely imbued with God's grace.

The 2020 White Sox, the "green shoots" version of that core, were 3rd in MLB in home runs. But again, I'm not down on this team at all -- I love the core and think it has a good chance to stick. And unlike the last flameout core we have a healthier wave of prospects on their way to fill whatever holes are created by injury, regression, the cheapness of an owner who might not be anxious to give Japanese Judge a record-destroying contract, etc. But those holes can open up quick, and I think we mentally lock guys into decade-long starting spots at our peril. (Not really, since what we as fans think and expect doesn't have any real-world stakes, but you know what I mean.) It's why it's so important to draft well, stockpile prospects, and not make rash moves for flashes-in-the-pan.

The new murderers' row is a bit of an overstatement. I'm overjoyed with the way things are trending for the Sox much earlier than I expected, but almost anybody on this list could go poof. This reminds me of when we used to just list out the names Moncada, Eloy, Abreu, Robert, Anderson...and Andrew Vaughn will be coming up, too! And Madrigal! We're already winning the division with this young core, just imagine when they all mature a couple more years! When Kopech is our ace! We all know what happened with that, but honestly that "murderers' row" was more plausible at the time than the one making up a team a few games over .500. I'm not ready to declare the likes of Chase Meidroth or Kyle Teel to be mainstays for years to come just yet. Wow, I sound like a real wet blanket! But I'm feeling a little whipsawed by the sudden turn to uncritical projections of a core that hasn't proven it can sustain success, and best-case projections for draft prospects who haven't proven anything yet. Am I on the right message board? I'm still a White Sox fan after all.

It is. But it does remind me of a good sports trivia question that is very friendly to present to the casual fan: what are the only two days of the year guaranteed not to have games played by any of the Big Four U.S. professional sports? (The day before and the day after the MLB All-Star game.) Sounds easy in this context but stumps people when presented out of nowhere. Good for road trips.

Not only that, there are only 9 positions on the field. We drafted something like 20 players! Where will they all play? Did these people not take math?

This nicely encapsulates most of the pro-Emerson stuff I've been reading (though most are not willing to state it so clearly.)

This team beat the two best teams in baseball in regular season series, so are obviously a World Series contender. But then again they got swept at home in a regular season series, so they obviously suck and should sell the team off for parts. They contain multitudes

We have a new Chief Panican

Yes - I really feel like Cholowsky is getting penalized for (in addition to prospect fatigue) all the "high floor" talk swirling around him. To state the obvious: a high floor is not an inherently bad thing. In fact, it's a good thing. "High floor" has acquired a negative connotation because they're often associated with a low ceiling -- a trade-off. But they don't have to be, and I haven't seen a lot of convincing evidence that Cholowsky has a low ceiling - most of the analysis I've read suggests a really high, Tulo-type ceiling. (Having a sophomore season that's slightly less awesome than freshman is not convincing to me in this respect.) And the "higher ceiling" analysis I've read on Emerson mostly seems to boil down to a generic preference for the almost unlimited unknowns associated with prep prospects with basically no high-level track record. This line of analysis favors the top prep prospect over the top college prospect essentially every time. Roch seems like a high-ceiling prospect who also happens to have a high floor, i.e. the kind of sure-thing prospect you can only get at the very top of the draft.

Pretty well sums it up. Or: Roch! Roch! Roch! Roch! Roch! Roch! Roch! Roch! Roch! Emerson...(orange you glad I didn't say Roch)

"The 2005 White Sox lost the best player in franchise history for the season. How are they going to replace that?" 😄

That's terrible as I was really counting on spending a lot of my future free time and money hanging around a slag heap in Indiana outside gametime

I'm definitely starting to adjust expectations upwards from "I think this team can be fun and watchable this season, and that's way more than I expected," which is where I was during May. This season has been such a great reminder of three principles that baseball reinforces over and over (but nonetheless don't seem to make any better as a prognosticator): 1) baseball is weird; 2) progress and regression are not linear; and 3) it's hard for pretty much everybody--fans, media--to recognize and react to an emerging phenomenon in real time rather than falling into the trap of replaying past seasons in their heads and expecting future results to match. These are why I really hate the common offseason analysis of starting with last year's season as a baseline and adding or subtracting based on personnel moves. In that analysis, "this is basically a 60-win team plus Murakami -- even if he's great he doesn't get you to more than 6-7 wins, so this is at best a 70-win team." Every season is a unique animal with wide ranges of progress/regression for individual players, intangibles, team cohesion, etc. at play. That's the beauty of watching the season actually play out. Basically: "that's why they play the games."

The Cubs season continues to be extremely entertaining. https://www.bleachernation.com/cubs/2026/06/10/cubs-miserable-season/

We don't know that yet at all. June 10, 2021 the White Sox were 14 games over .500 and firing on all cylinders. They were coming off a playoff appearance and headed for a division championship. People were wearing Hahn t-shirts at the Rate. The debate was whether the WS window extended to 2024 or 2025, not fretting over the batting champ's imminent nosedive out of baseball. Take a time machine back five years and there was at least as much excitement around the team as there is now. I obviously hope this rebuild goes better, and that the current crop doesn't flame out like the last one did (it would be pretty hard to flame out harder), but there's a lot of hindsight bias floating around Sox fandom these days.