caulfield12

Except it's actually Coffey.

Montgomery still cooling off...he's going to need at least another month at High A before they consider moving him to BIRM. Also, W-S 16-31. Braden was just hit by a pitch and pulled from the game...anyone watching? Precautionary? .277/.878 OPS

https://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/article/heres-why-rockies-free-fall-is-worse-than-historically-bad-2024-white-sox-191542801.html&ved=2ahUKEwjJirXyuMeNAxW-JkQIHZldL0AQvOMEKAB6BAgWEAE&usg=AOvVaw2Zi4kl8_DBuOG0yNAGangy Grifol was a dark cloud over the White Sox. Even before the losing, there was a disconnect between him, his players and the media. His firing last August after going 28-89 that season was addition by subtraction. It also opened up the path for the hiring of new manager Will Venable, considered around baseball to be one of the bright young minds in the sport. General manager Chris Getz is the running mate to help steer the ship of the rebuild. ..... The White Sox were openly in a rebuild last season. After inheriting the reins of a beaten-down organization, Getz began a long, grueling process to turn the team's roster over and inject talent back into an organization that needed more of it. On a team with several strong veterans, Getz moved them for prospect capital. The traded players included Tommy Pham, Tanner Banks, Michael Kopech, Erick Fedde, Eloy Jiménez and Paul DeJong. The trading continued in the offseason as the White Sox dealt All-Star Garrett Crochet to the Boston Red Sox for a huge prospect haul.

So you agree or disagree with Ptac about making Taylor the annointed closer of the future?

Well let's all fucking pick on Kimbrel Graveman Kelly and Bummer instead. Because nobody in the entire SoxTalk world will defend them, right? I mean we've already dragged 60-75% of the 2000-2003 roster through the mud for the past three years...as if they just magically appeared on the Sox roster out of thin air and absolutely nobody was responsible for bringing on board such players of poor or flawed character. Might as well give Hahn another executive of the year award for signing Robertson while we're at it. That wasn't such a bad move compared to Melky and LaRoche after all. Plus I didn't fucking change the point. I wrote Tommy John cancer health in the first post...sure the White Sox probably even took out an insurance policy so they recovered 60% of the value for the last year anyway. I didn't write that Liam Hendriks performed poorly at any point. He was exactly what an elite closer was in that generation of pitchers...87.5-90% or something like that save conversion success rate who blew up spectacularly from time to time. The point is that the overall return on investment for spending all that money on the bullpen didn't turn out so great. I didn't think that was even a controversial opinion that was debatable. Instead of talking about our current bullpen problems...you want to make emotional/sentimental arguments when major league GM's can't ever afford to think in those terms.

Feels a little bit like the Giolito case....where he had to completely change his mechanics, basically reinventing himself as a result of the changeup compensating for lower FB velo with better spin rates and extension. Balta would simply say Spider Tak.

Or Keith Foulke...or Bobby Jenks...or Sergio Santos, sure, why not? That's where 75% of closers come from. Grant Taylor would join a long long long list of guys deemed not durable enough to start long-term....without encountering major health problems eg. mechanical issues leading to physical breakdowns. Fwiw Oppor and McDougal would be two more worthy candidates.

I wrote exactly what happened to him in my first post. So your argument is that it was a good investment? Let's imagine he didn't get hurt. You can have your three years at 6.35 fWAR produced. $8.5 million per fWAR is the ratio you end up with...which is pretty close to in line for fair market value for FA fWAR...especially for a closer. So would JR look back on it as the correct decision regardless of what happened in reality or a mistake or neither? The point wasn't even about Hendriks per se, but the cumulative impact of spending tens of millions on a bullpen with extremely disappointing ROI across a handful of players.

But they've blown almost twenty leads this season. Their overall record should be much closer to the Angels than Rockies by pythagorean. Plus...when the entire team starts to not believe they can win close and tight games, it makes the manager's job that much harder.

$54 million for 4.2 fWAR and they're still paying on that contract...which continues to make a pretty compelling case for why JR won't run that risk again, along with how much they paid Kimbrel Kelly Graveman and Bummer.

One key to Jonathon Long’s success (Cubs' #13 prospect, Long Beach State, 1B/DH)? He hits the ball extremely hard. He is second among all Triple-A hitters (with at least 100 batted balls) with a 58.9 percent hard-hit rate and third with a 93.4 mph average exit velocity. Among Major Leaguers, only the Dodgers' Shohei Ohtani and the Pirates' Oneil Cruz have a better hard-hit rate. While the 23-year-old isn't particularly tall at 5-foot-11, he has plenty of strength and bat speed to produce plus raw power from the right side. The California native flexed that power last season when he led the farm system with an .888 OPS and slugged 23 home runs between three levels. Long’s bat speed really emerged in the Arizona Fall League, where he hit multiple balls over 110 mph and ranked second on the circuit with six homers in 18 games. He’s only built on that loud contact in 2025. “This year he is putting up the best exit velocities of his career by a pretty substantial margin,” Kanzler said. “The second best was in [High-A] South Bend in the first half of the year last year. He is definitely impacting the baseball better than he ever has, including in college with metal bats. So this is a great thing to see.” mlb.com

https://athlonsports.com/mlb/new-york-yankees/ex-mlb-gm-calls-yankees-the-favorite-for-next-japanese-star Also expected to sign Bo Bichette for 3B...although with Muretaka Murakami missing most of the season so far for Hanshin, the odds that he might not post until the following off-season are increasing by the day. OFC, that's also the "off season of colluded silence" where many teams perhaps won't be making any FA offers until the labor dispute is somehow settled first.

You're still not going to get anything but some salary relief...

RP: Scott Barlow, Kyle Finnegan, Chad Green, Hunter Harvey, Raisel Iglesias, Luke Jackson, Kenley Jansen, Tommy Kahnle, Jose Leclerc, Chris Martin, Shelby Miller, Emilio Pagán, Ryan Pressly, Tyler Rogers, Jordan Romano, Paul Sewald, Ryne Stanek, Luke Weaver, Kirby Yates Good luck with that list of FA's.

Rockies 173 rs 346 ra 9-45 .166667 winning percentage 27-135 pace 2024 White Sox 15-39 6 games off the pace

https://www.si.com/mlb/longtime-dodgers-utilityman-joins-angels-after-release Chris Taylor to LAA Seems the Angels are attempting to copy Chris Getz...but still are managing to win a decent percentage of their games.

Not to mention Lynn Graveman and Kelly each turned out to be clubhouse cancers...

Shane Smith has the second best BAA on change-ups of any pitcher in MLB, barely over .100. Jalen Beeks, a reliever is first (that's for 30+ innings pitched, for qualified pitchers, Smith should be first).

Those sound like famous last words when it comes to the White Sox and injuries. Almost like the kiss of death. I can't remember the last time that we ended up with "positive" news on the pitching injury front this season.

Well, they hardly got much of a return on investment in Hendriks (health/TJS/cancer), Kimbrel (which led to Pollock with led to Benintendi signing), Graveman, Kelly, Bummer, etc. At one point in 2021-2022, they had the most expensive bullpen in MLB history, in fact.

Apple also in talks for Sunday Night Baseball package https://www.sportsmediawatch.com/2025/05/youtube-disney-exec-lawsuit-apple-nbc-mlb-espn-uefa-volleyball-mark-packer/ Apple is engaged in “extensive” talks with Major League Baseball about acquiring ESPN’s rights package, according to John Ourand of Puck. Apple joins NBC Sports — whose interest was reported by the WSJ earlier this week — as well as other streamers: Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube. It is unlikely Apple would be willing to pay the $550 million annual rights fee ESPN is paying, but the Ourand report implied that Apple is offering more than NBC. Any deal would be a short-term agreement, with all of MLB’s national rights (Fox and WBD) coming up for renewal after the 2028 season.

The ONLY reason Slater was targeted was because Ryan Fuller was his hitting coach at the end of the 2024 season with the Orioles...and made the recommendation based on how he performed at that time (compared to first four months of last season).

Nobody's going to trade for Vaughn unless JR kicks in another $2+ million on this year's contract. Otherwise, you wait for him to be DFA'ed and pick him up for the minimum.

If you're Hays, coming from two playoff appearances with the Orioles, why would you sign with the White Sox over the Reds unless you received 25-30% more money? He probably wanted to play for a HoF manager, compared to a first-timer. And the Reds, at least in 2023, looked like one of the up and coming teams in all of MLB, with lots of exciting/dynamic young players. And Hays is a MUCH better fit for LF than RF, fwiw (that damned Benintendi albatross contract keeps getting in the way, as well). Remember how poor somebody like AJ Pollock reacted to being on the White Sox, after the LAD? He took a pay CUT to go to Seattle instead, where his career basically ended...instead of coming back to Chicago to play on one of the worst teams in baseball.

Schweitzer's stuff isn't good enough for the bullpen...right? Other than longman/swing-man/garbage innings in blowouts...