caulfield12

You know things are bad when SoxFest goes all dark web/Venom....

Kyle Tucker also comes to mind....who did the White Sox get out of that draft?

Moncada/Baez I'll give you, but Giolito and Keuchel are completely different as pitchers...and in terms of expectations, Giolito was projected to be the best RH pitcher in baseball, Keuchel was a lightly-regarded 7th round draft pick out of Danny Wright's University of Arkansas.

It's called DEVELOPMENT. Something the White Sox haven't excelled in since 2008 with Alexei/Carlos Quentin/Danks/Floyd.

We can look at Jose Altuve and Mike Trout their first year/s in the big leagues as well, yes? THE POINT IS TALENT IDENTIFICATION, and EVEN RESULTS/IMPROVEMENT. Not falling off the map like Gordon Beckham or Dayan Viciedo after promising starts.

That would be true if you went 1999-2010 or you could even extend to 2012. The track record since Floyd/Danks in 2007-08 hasn't been that great, at all. Hudson...who we dumped after 3 starts for Jackson. Phil Humber? You're acting like it's 2005/06 and Jose Contreras is back to being the best pitcher in all of baseball. Don Cooper is still his same irascible, moody self...it's just that he's gotten TOO comfortable the last decade, and is living based on the approach/es of a different era of baseball that doesn't exist anymore.

After his junior year at Arkansas, the Houston Astros selected Keuchel in the seventh round of the 2009 Major League Baseball (MLB) draft.[3] He signed with the Astros and began his professional career with the Tri-City ValleyCats of the Class A-Short Season New York–Penn League, where he had a 2.70 ERA. He began the 2010 season with the Lancaster JetHawks of the Class A-Advanced California League. After posting a 3.36 ERA, the Astros promoted him to the Corpus Christi Hooks of the Class AA Texas League in July, where he had a 4.70 ERA for the remainder of the season. He began the 2011 season with Corpus Christi, and after pitching to a 3.17 ERA, received a promotion to the Oklahoma City RedHawks of the Class AAA Pacific Coast League, where he struggled with a 7.50 ERA.[2] WHERE THE HECK ARE YOU GETTING THAT HE WAS ALMOST OUT OF BASEBALL? Simply based on a small sample size from OKC?

Of course, he's also the only All-Star/MVP caliber player that we developed in a generation...and we couldn't even build a core around him, so in the end, it was all pointless. I'm sure if he gets into the HoF he won't go in with a White Sox hat on, that much is guaranteed.

Maybe not...the one that brought in the amazing Jeff Keppinger as the headliner after we were leading the AL Central for 80% of the season wasn't that great. Of course, nobody was emotionally involved in that particular acquisition, except his parents and Joe Maddon (the proud papa of one of about 10 super-utility guys the Rays developed over the last 15 years).

Not unless you count Daniel Hudson...or Jose Quintana, who obviously came over from the Mets/Yankees and spent almost no time in our minor league system. Seems like a theme...because Alexei Ramirez and Jose Abreu also skipped over our minor leagues. Maybe we just need to develop players by completely bypassing our minor league system altogether.

We only need to trade for the next Christian Yelich (highway robbery, there), sign the next LoCain at a fair price, add in Moustakas (oops, that ship sailed)...maybe Marwin Gonzalez instead...and possess a starting rotation that runs 7-8 deep with one of the best, if not THE best, bullpen in MLB. Since we're going with Astros model, might as well throw Keuchel in there as well, or Gio, at least. (It would also help to have a blocked 1B from another organization fall directly into their laps.) Easy, peezy.

Keith Law's going to to rank us 20th next year...because Kopech and Cease will have graduated and our first round draft pick this summer will already be up at the big league level in August and September.

The one big difference is that they already had Altuve and I'm pretty sure Keuchel as well. We don't have anything close...Moncada's the closest approximation, but he's closer to being out of baseball than being the AL MVP, unless we can turn back the clock to last April 23rd and pretend he's a 920ish OPS guy.

Except then we'd end up with Jeremy Haber (Hahn trained to his core) as GM and nothing would change. I'm starting to think that we have a better chance of fighting for new tax laws to punish capital gains prohibitively....or that propose 70% tax in wealth over $10 million, that might scare JR and his family enough to sell the White Sox before it becomes a reality in 2021 or 2022 (now I'm not saying it's a good idea, it just needs to be a credible threat to all the rich people and corporations in America that it just MIGHT happen...) Because we'd be better off spending time and energy advocating for that (which would lead to an ownership sale) than rearranging the deck chairs in the front office. All of that's just window dressing, in reality. As long as KW and JR are still around, nothing's ever going to change, period. The Luis Robert signing was some alternative reality/alternate reality false flag that got everyone's hopes up they were actually going to change the way they do (and approach) business for the modern, analytics-driven era of baseball management.

Driveline miracles, baby!!! He's rediscovered the missing magic after everyone tinkered with him, and pushed him to the big leagues well before he was ready. Do you honestly believe Nova or even Rodon are part of the long-term solution in Chicago? Of course not. Same with Banuelos and Medeiros. All of the focus should be on Lopez, Giolito, Kopech, Cease, Dunning and getting whatever they can out of Covey and Fulmer.

Gordon Beckham was also a "solid kid," the rock on which they were going to build the franchise, the Derek Jeter of his time...I guess now that's passed onto Nick Madrigal.

Why would you choose the White Sox over the Phillies, though? Just compare the players they've brought in this offseason, versus our load of veteran crap. In fact, Harper would have even less incentive to play with Manny's buddies, in all likelihood. He'd think it was a total joke that a big league club tried to recruit a guy's friends in order to get him to sign a contract for less money. That reeks of desperation to a star athlete like Harper. He's already familiar with the National League East....unless he was going to the Cubs or the Dodgers (closer to his Vegas home), there's just no compelling reason why Harper would choose Chicago. At the very least, he'd be on non-competitive teams for two seasons (now we ALL have to assume there's just no way we get an impact FA next off-season), versus being right in the thick of it from the very beginning in an exciting and competitive AL East. If you had to choose between half your season in NY, Miami, Atlanta and his old stomping grounds in our nation's capital...who in God's green earth would choose cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Kansas City (a great city for suburban working parents, and the Plaza's cool, but C'MON!!!) and Minnesota (another NICE city, but it's NOT Vegas, most assuredly). Line up those four cities next to each other...it just doesn't compute. At all. PS But we had the best PowerPoint/Video Display Board approach...YAY!

Just imagine if we ended up with Kolek or Aiken that year...well, Aiken turned out to be a huge blessing in disguise for the Astros. With our luck, he'll probably become a Cy Young award winner for the Indians. It's so easy to say...well, we almost had Benintendi or Nola or Buehler or Tatis (well, we DID have him) or Machado, but then you look up at your roster and it's still going to be impossible to get past the 72-74 win mark and you start thinking they're going to be "mired in mediocrity" forever, it's just that they took the most creative/inventive path to get there. Especially with Alonso/Jay/Castillo on the roster...personifying that failure on an everyday basis for everyone who comes into the locker room.

Maybe it was his son? If it wasn't for that coin-flip in 2008...and had we lost for the umpteenth time since 2001 to the Twins, I can't even imagine the Voldemort/Grindelwald Dark Cloud that would be descending over SoxTalk. Heck, instead of the old WSI "dark cloud" insult if you were a bit pessimistic about this organization, we'll have a unique phenomenon where the 5-10% left who are still positive stand out like VENOM in the comic books. Stockholm Syndrome, of a sort. At any rate, I give those few remaining posters who are trying to see the silver lining here credit, but most of us just don't have the capacity to apologize for the embarrassment that is this ownership group and front office any longer. This was the final straw...sure, we might tune into some games, but it's not going to be the passion and excitement that was there a couple of years ago when the Sale and Eaton trades went down and it looked like we were well on our way to building a mini-dynasty in the AL Central.

Negative infinity is not an available answer. Actually, it's JR that should be getting the grade here, as there's no way to separate things out fairly between him, Kenny Williams and Hahn. But, as everyone has been writing today...it's almost impossible to come up with POSITIVE traits or characteristics that this front office is in the "top tier" of MLB at performing. We might have said "drafting and developing relief pitchers," but that's even in doubt after the last couple of seasons and how they went out and poured a lot of wasted money into two veteran relievers who will have nothing to do with our rebuild and will probably accumulate 1.2 fWAR between the pair.

Or pitchers like Covey and Fulmer who are going to be blocked by the likes of the forgettable Ivan "Thankfully I'm Not James Shields But Will Inevitably Be Compared to Him" Shields or Banuelos.

You can read every single post I've ever made here...I don't think I have once viewed or perceived him as anything resembling a hero, because he's FAR FAR FAR from it. But it's nice the rose-colored glasses are all off and the Kool Aid drinking honeymoon period is over. Now, there's just the cold hard reality of how difficult rebuilding really is...and this is with the worst division in baseball and the head start of trading off 3 Top 50 talents, not to mention the general ineptitude of the last decade...which provided us Carlos Rodon, who was supposed to be a sure-fire TOR starter. The seeming ease with which the Royals, Mets, Cubs, Indians, Braves and Astros rose to the top of the pack on the backs of young players has created an illusion that this was an easy thing to pull off. And it's REALLY not, at least...at least not for this front office.

Well, yeah...rushing Luis Robert, Cease and Madrigal up to the big leagues to "compete now" with their new veteran core in place would be so...2016. The only question is what low-level prospect we trade blows up and becomes the next future MLB cornerstone. A while ago, it was Bryce Bush as part of a rumored Joc Pederson deal.

Brokeback Mountain quote?

This has been the most correct statement uttered in the last 24-36 hours.