caulfield12

Name KylLe, Ray Ray and Ron883 a three-headed Ghidorah the GM kaiju.

"Some" being the operative word here..."lots" would mean starting the season with him on the OD roster and returning to first half form. But as a set-up man unless Hendricks asked to change roles to accommodate Kimbrel. Pretty unlikely.

Where did I once say the entire season that he was good? I didn't. Go back and look through every single post. I said he wasn't getting benched on that team in that moment. Did I say it was a miscarriage of justice he wasn't on the All-Star team or that he was criminally underrated like Ketel Marte? No. Ultimately, adding Frazier, who performed like Cesar Hernandez, cut time from 6-7 guys and that overkill created a lot of grumbling when they didn't manage to add a starter while LA was making the Scherzer and Turner moves to bury them.

Wow...never caught that at all. As someone who lived there for ten years in KC when the team was the absolute laughingstock of baseball (1998-2007), it was a nice story for the sport and a team without a playoff appearance in thirty years to pull off what they did without a large payroll. And they helped revolutionize modern bullpen management...a niche that worked with a limited budget but has exacerbated game lengtgs, leading to 4 1/2 hour playoff games.

Great, all the aging vets with big names. KW should just take over the reigns again with that philosophy.

I never even liked Hosmer that much, compared to Perez and Cain and watching guys like Dyson and Gore fly around the bases. They (the Royals) absolutely owned second and third base if they got on in the last 2-3 innings...as did their bullpen with three closers at the back end. The White Sox, despite lots of guys with speed (see MLB stolen base leader Hamilton) and the most expensive pen in history never managed to approximate that on either front. My only argument was that he wasn't going to be benched after the trade deadline. In reality, Prefer and Kim and the outfielders all saw the biggest reduction in playing time. They could have simply moved Myers to first, or Cronenworth, but they didn't do that as Ray ray predicted over and over and over again...simply basing his analysis on fWAR/bWAR numbers that never are going to look all that great for 1B/DH types. The fact that they threatened to trade him (and didn't) was one of the major reasons that once-tight clubhouse started to come apart, along with not adding more pitching and virtually the entire offense outside of Machado and Tatis falling apart, especially with RISP, the last 6-7 weeks.

Would you really count on a good offensive year from him if you look at that completely unpredictable stat line? It's like we are deliberately playing with fire adding him or Conforto...hoping to hit on these discounted guys when there's almost no record of the Sox being able to make the right evaluations or projections.

I don't see what the point of mocking him is when he pretty much meant the same to KC as Konerko did to the White Sox...and it's not like the Sox are in a position to be looking down on World Series-winning players. Just like St. Louis with Pujols a decade ago, mid or small market teams are better off not making emotional signings after playoff successes. Look at KC with Alex Gordon, or the Sox keeping Contreras and Konerko way too long. Btw, we almost had a deal for Alex Gordon that would have turned out to be a massive mistake with pretty much the same line of thinking that went into the Hosmer to SD, or Cain to Milwaukee. Leadership...

Let's pull up the Keuchel signing thread and see who was really jacked that we made that signing? Because he was pretty much the only option remaining on the table at that point....

Why would we give possibly give Hosmer a contract when we already had what now amounts to six 1B on the roster, if you include Collins (who was still in the picture then)...? Not to mention we actually needed Wheeler the most. And that's actually a pretty good reminder how much we have wasted at 1B/DH since 2011...you can make fun of that signing, but it wasn't much worse than the friends and family plan with washed up Machado relatives. Btw, any contract where you're actively rooting for the option year not to vest in early Year 2 is probably not all that great...certainly not at nearly $20 million per year.

Keuchel always was going to be an overpay...basically, for that one 2020 season. But he was the VERY back-end of that FA pitching market, at least in terms of the A Tier. I guess you can argue that Castellanos was almost a hitting version of that, not elite, but a very high quality hitter...obviously younger, of course.

Surely they had INTEREST, but not in that price range. We have a track record of almost never buying a FA at peak value...other than maybe Dunn and Robertson, although Cabrera, Grandal and LaRoche fit as well.

It's kind of crazy to keep adding expensive veterans to the young core... Didn't anyone learn any lessons from the Cubs, who had a budget in the $50-75 million range above and beyond the White Sox? They had to tear down, because they struck out on nearly all their big FA moves and couldn't successfully supplement the pitching staff from the minors. No doubt it's like being between a rock and a hard place, but underselling on guys like Vaughn, Jimenez and Crochet (and you can add Burger/Sheets as well if you want) is simply going to lead to another situation like the 2014-15 White Sox faced, with 4-5 really good players, but not enough quality depth surrounding them. Yes, we have a younger core, more depth and Luis Robert....but we're still realistically 2-3 players away from being at the top of the AL. Are the White Sox actually going to spend their way out of this dilemma, or be patient for one more year for those aforementioned guys as well as Kopech to develop? Because if they deal more guys (on top of the Madrigal trade) and MISS badly in analyzing all those young talents, then they're essentially looking at 2024 as the last year to keep up the window unless they are willing to spend in the $190-200+ million range in 2024. Of course, the other pressing problem is the expiring shelf life of those five aging, 30 something high-priced veterans is RAPIDLY approaching.

Cloverfield? I'm neutral on this one. If was 2003~2008 or 2010 Ozzie, that's one thing, but I'm just not sure he can keep his foot out of his mouth and not get fired for something that has nothing to do with baseball at some point.

No, I was reading the post above, which was a post about not having Eloy and Vaughn together in the same outfield and jumped ahead to the conclusion they were advocating a Vaughn trade without reading closely enough. At any rate, Burger doesn't yet have enough value to get back two major league quality players in one move...unless someone's scouting him carefully enough in the minors to STILL project him as an above average MLB 3B and not merely a 1B/DH. Error totals in the minors only paint 1/4th of the picture, at best...but it's usually more in A ball compared to AA/AAA due to inferior playing surfaces and field maintenance.

You can’t trade a Top 5 draft pick for that return when you can easily find it in FA…

Only Ron883…so he can boot out Abreu, only to have him put together one last MVP season for another organization.

As long as he doesn't exchange "homophobic" pleasantries writing in the dirt with Beckham again...well, that one was all on Gordo.

Obviously the Braves needed to replace an entire outfield. The White Sox only needed two of those guys…and should have sent Vaughn to the minors to get regular playing time in an effort to get him back into any type of offensive rhythm again. Yes, he was also injured, but he’s a pretty significant question mark at this point in his Sox career.

He's also had three big league seasons with a 2.4 or higher fWAR, including 3.4 as recently as 2018. Now to pick one guy specifically out of Soler, Duvall, Pederson and Rosario...that would be almost impossible to predict. But you are able to secure FOUR of those guys when the White Sox had a difficult time coming up with just ONE during the season is pretty remarkable, and also sound scouting. They acknowledge their clear weaknesses after the early-season injuries and went out and addressed them.

Kinda a sad state of affairs when we simply assume a player of that caliber would simply be gone in FA instead of being retained by the White Sox. We've become conditioned like Pavlov's dogs...guess we will see what they decide to do with Giolito and TA.

In the world where they never traded for Colome and developed Narvaez as the Mariners and Brewers did. Two were trades, Avi was “let go” meaning not offered a contract. Semien was shuffled back and forth between three different positions and never allowed to get comfortable…and not given enough playing time before they pulled the plug on him since he wasn’t considered a top prospect coming up since he wasn’t a first or second round draft pick. This is a bit of the chicken and egg thing…defensive problems caused by moving him around and classifying him as utility guy before his career got started, or his offense disappointed because he let some of his defensive issues and not feeling confident about the organization’s belief in him as an everyday starter? Garcia couldn’t stay healthy, couldn’t repeat his best season…and wasn’t adept at anything but collecting assists his best year, like Eaton, but he at least profiled like a 1.5-2.5 fWAR player with occasional higher peaks, which was a heckuva lot better than anything Mazara ever put together.

A healthy Ketel Marte is criminally-underrated around here…

Then how did Ventura, widely-perceived as the second worst Sox manager in the entire JR Era, manage it so well in 2012?

I think everyone was pretty realistic they weren’t getting Springer but wanted to take a shot at that tier right above in the $9-12 million range…and yes, Rosario was coming off an inconsistent 2020, which knocked down his price tag. Plus he was already more familiar with the Central than anyone. One of the knocks, though…was his defense, and hoping to strengthen the corners rather than weaken them around Robert. Jimenez was already in LF, which is Rosario’s natural spot compared to RF. In retrospect, we didn’t really get stellar offense OR defense, ultimately. It’s the same thing with Conforto this time around, although he’s closer to the $14-16 million per year range. A lot of posters mentioned Starling Marte and Pederson for the last couple of years, too.