caulfield12

Hudson will get $10 million or so based on his 2019 numbers and post-season. However, if you start delving into FIP and BABIP, you'll quickly lose interest and realize how fortunate he was to be in the current position he occupies after the last couple of seasons bouncing around and being available to pretty much any team as a roster claim.

http://www.espn.com/mlb/player/splits/_/id/32574/type/batting3 863 vs. 673 (LHP) over a three year period. In retrospect, it might have been better to just sign Puig (rather than trading Walker), but that is just as much dependent upon his being accepted into the clubhouse as his numbers. He was fine with Cincy and Cleveland...at any rate, that ship has sailed. They're definitely getting a cheaper version in Mazara, even if Puig only signs for $8-9 million.

Yeah, and it's not like we package them together to acquire, say, Josh Hader. McCann's salary is a reward for 2019, insurance for Grandal, reassurance to keep Giolito comfortable and another tutor to work with Collins on the mental side of the game. So best to just let the season play out, inevitably there are injuries. Even in 2005, as durable as that starting staff was, we needed Brandon McCarthy to give them a breath of life those final 6 weeks.

Maybe its own website/dedicated blog? On the plus side, he manages to make me look, in the words of my old AP European History teacher, "brief and pithy." In all seriousness, it does prove that reading about players in a "scouting report" style is definitely an acquired taste. Or maybe he was talking about Will Smith's acting career is "now gone"???

Well, he is younger than Zack Collins, so basically being under 25 in MLB (even with 4 years of experience) can allow you to maintain that "young" label, right?

I used to love NFL football...it was third after MLB and NCAA basketball for me. But that's because I grew up in the 70's and 80's as a Dolphins' fan (and I never particularly cared for Jimmy Johnson, either...which goes back to his time at Oklahoma State, since my dad went to OU, which made him more or less a bitter enemy, haha.) After the mid 90's, it has been almost 25 years of nothing for Miami, like being a Royals' fan over that time period. So that pretty much wiped out my interest in the NFL. I lived in Kansas City for about ten years and adopted the Chiefs as my second team, but it's never the same as your first allegiance. And, the biggest problem is that living in China, most of the games are Monday morning from 1-2 a.m. through 7-8 a.m. The Chiefs are really fun to watch with Mahomes, but, you always have it in the back of your head they'll end up disappointing you in the playoffs...this feeling goes back all the way to the 1980's as well. I lived there from 1997-2007.

Dramatic? Sure, that's like saying this decade has been dramatic for Oklahoma football. They've lost 7 straight times in the College Football playoffs...while they at least gave Georgia a game two years ago, no Sooner fan believes they had a realistic chance in any of those games. But fine, I should have edited it to early 90's.

Now we've solved the mystery of why Tatis was traded...his numbers in AZ (extended spring training) were fed into a spreadsheet that spit out "strikes out too much, doesn't walk enough." Boom. All of White Sox L.A. prospects gone. "You don't walk off the island," as they say in the Dominican. Statniks/OPS devotees unhappy.

Probably needs to be merged into the Catch-All thread at some point...

Ask any Bills’ or Dolphins fans the last time they were really excited about their teams. You might have a couple of years of overlap into the early 90’s for the Bills as their three core players were still in their early 30’s, but those were really good teams that still didn't belong on the same field with their NFC opponents. Saying the 1990’s doesn't seem quite so dramatic, but whatever...it has been ages for both fanbases. Obviously Brady and Belichick have something to do with it, too.

Twins’ fans have the Vikings for at least another week to distract them from the disappointing offseason.

Right...thinking of Myers and substituted the wrong name. I suggested Myers as a guy the White Sox could acquire if they did a deal similar to Shields, but both teams chose to move on, SD clearly hoping for an offensive rebound in 2020. SD moved Reyes and Renfroe instead, and got much more athletic in the process.

That might be the fast-track approach...but they also need to consider that letting him get out to a confident start in Low A before Winston-Salem in mid-May is the best way to grow his prospect value. The other argument is that he’s missed a ton of game action over the last two years and is just getting his feet under him. And it’s not like we are going to be replacing Anderson or Madrigal anytime soon. Best case scenario, he’s Alcides Escobar and can be packaged with other prospects to fill in holes on the MLB roster. A decade ago, you could afford two offensively-challenged starters out of 2B, SS and CF. No longer the case...especially with the falloff in catching talent over that time frame. Sanchez is said to have a "polished glove" that is major league ready. Yolbert is an elite defender with a 65 grade on his fielding and a 55 grade on his arm tool. He also possesses 55 grade speed. He sprays balls from "line-to-line" and is considered to be a line drive hitter with the potential to hit 8-10 homers annually. His offense is significantly behind his defense with 45 grade tools in the hit and power department. Scouts also like Sanchez's game instincts and track record. http://www.chicagonow.com/future-sox/2019/03/white-sox-interested-in-22-year-old-cuban-ss-yolbert-sanchez/

Sanchez will be 23 by Opening Day and hasn’t even debuted with Kanny. At this rate, he’ll be lucky to make the big leagues by 26/27. In comparison, look at the career and minor league numbers for the offensively-challenged Yolmer.

In the playoffs. Or the Twins would have actually won some games in the postseason for once.

In these cases, you take the players who have the ability to play any position up the middle with at least 3-4 tools and spread the money around instead of putting all your eggs in one basket. Unless they’re convinced he can realistically be a two-way player and will be a positive addition to the mix, there’s no point in getting into a bidding war over a player who has very little in common with Ohtani except the nice marketing catch-phrase they fed to Passan. He also has added that Japanese leg kick timing mechanism to his hitting, which doesn’t always translate well to the faster pace of the American game. On the plus side, Coca-Cola would be willing to spend hugely on a future superstar with the last name of Colas.

Last exciting Bills team was in the late 80’s. Good for Buffalo. So many exciting young QB’s in the game today.

Maybe they were expecting their “Cuban Connection” to drive results...with every youngster on the island now wanting to join an organization with four premiere Cuban talents? For example, Puig and his agent pushing to join his countrymen. Perhaps we’ll see the same trend with Colas taking less money to join the Sox. The Trump administration complicating the process makes sense, although you can always argue someone is getting paid big bucks to do risk-analysis/risk-mitigation and playing out worst-case scenarios. This so-called connection has always been part of the reason for bringing in Robert, Abreu’s notable presence. Pretty sure Jose Contreras is still involved as a team ambassador, too. Every little bit helps. Not to mention having a Spanish-speaking manager, that creates a huge comfort factor and keeps the cliques from taking over the clubhouse. Recently, we have Abreu’s three year deal...when just one year at $17.8 million seemed most appropriate. He’s very clearly bringing something to the table beyond what we can see on the broadcast.

Except that’s predicated on him being a lot more selective at hitting almost any pitch in the strike zone earlier in the count...he walks a lot less than expected for someone of that size. Of course, he rarely strikes out, as well. Almost always puts the ball in play, somewhere.

Isn’t the most logical explanation that they were going to shift resources back to the MLB roster...for example, Machado’s $250+ million? In 2016/17, we were already anticipating that 2019 was going to be their first competitive year, at least until the Kopech TJS and about nine other major injuries, including Carlos Rodon. The 2000-2016 philosophy was quite obviously to invest the majority of spending to the big league roster. It was stated many times. The one thing that doesn’t make much sense was how poorly we allocated money in FA last year...other than McCann. It’s almost as if there was zero back-up plan when they lost out on Machado for how to spend the money. In retrospect, another $25-30 million should have been thrown at international operations, but what’s done is done. Jesus Pena and Yolmer Sanchez, for example, are the best Dominican and Venezuelans...going back a decade. Unless you want to count Tatis, which was more about the connection between the father really personally pushing the organization on his son’s potential and KW/Paddy than any type of academy presence down there. It’s pretty remarkable pretty much to have zero success there, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and the Pacific Rim...

They’re not going to allow someone to run that much if he’s not closer to the 80-85% success range. And minor league numbers can usually be thrown out...he’s an extremely instinctive baserunner, he’ll figure it out when he is not going through learning through different leagues, catchers, pitchers, in the course of one season. Plus the big league scouting reports are much more detailed...we’ve read recently about weaknesses there for the Sox compared to other organizations.

The only argument seems to be that we’ve only gone over $1 million twice for kids in that 16-18 age range, which was Adolfo and a 1B mentioned earlier in the thread. Of course, we’ve also got the worst development results...so who’s to say if some of those kids couldn’t or wouldn’t have succeeded in other organizations? The biggest positive is we seem to have been right on Robert, Jimenez (already a stud at time of trade), Tatis, Semien, Anderson, Moncada (see Eloy)...at least in initially identifying them. That’s arguably six of the Top 50 (if not 40 or even 30) overall position player talents in the game today. Then you add in Alexei and Abreu, the only real miss we’ve experienced in the last 12 years was Viciedo. At least that’s the positive spin on it.

It’s going to be hard to trust Lopez’s control in the late innings, but we walked that tightrope with Jenks. That said, he’s going to have to get more swings and misses on the fastball, which should be possible in just 1-2 inning bursts at maximum velocity.

Their record in 2012 was in the top half and the overall pool money was smaller then? They also were never one of those competitive advantage teams like the Tigers and Cardinals...can’t remember if that was ever part of the pool money or just related to compensatory draft picks.

The White Sox have been wonderful at drafting four first rounders in a row limited to the 3-4 fWAR range. That said, Madrigal doesn't have to be a superstar with his fielding, speed and contact skills. David Eckstein put up 13.8 fWAR his first six years in the majors...a 2.3 fWAR average. The problem is that if you strip out his 4.5 outlying season, he only averaged 1.7 fWAR, which is below what we’ve come to expect from Yolmer and Leury. https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/you-cant-measure-heart-or-david-eckstein-bows-out/ That said, a consistent 2.5-3.5 fWAR Madrigal is just fine, because that might be the lowest output in the starting lineup...other than RF and possibly DH. You’re not asking him to lead the team or do too much. 7-8 years of a Gold Glove 2B with 30+ steals and a 750-775 ops has a good amount of value, even in today’s game.