caulfield12

Series on... In 2018, Addison Barger was drafted by the Toronto Blue Jays in the sixth round of the Major League Baseball draft and made his professional debut with the Rookie-level Gulf Coast League Blue Jays that season, recording a .194 batting average, three home runs, and 18 runs batted in (RBI).

Clement has been unreal...this would have been a place where Kopech could have been utilized. Instead a young rookie backup starter transformed to reliever. Former Indians/Guardians in Clement Gimenez M.Straw, not to mention Bieber...

Especially with so many Merkin fluff articles on his leadership and all those emotional call ups to the majors videos. Kiss of death? Vaughn was similarly profiled the previous year while shedding the majority of remaining 2020-2022 veterans...

5.3 fWAR the last two seasons with one more year on his contract would have provided a lot more value than what the Sox actually got back for him. I was crucified/dismissed in this thread but actually wasn't wrong in my assessment on Varsho. Was coming off just a 1.9 fWAR season in 2023...which is now celebrated as a huge success for guys like Vargas or Sosa, btw.

Bump

Oops...jinxed him 19/43 in postseason, .442 avg, got another for 20 hits now Ernie Clement was originally drafted by the Indians in the 4th round. Clement was claimed off waivers by the Oakland Athletics on September 23, 2022.[38] He appeared in six games for Oakland, going 1-for-18 (.056) with a double.[15]

The Indians were definitely the team on the rise at that point...those mid to late 90s offenses were like Murderer's Row, modern day version.

So basically it's the Dodgers versus the Yankees for him...w/ Cubs barely an afterthought as they tout Owen Caissie's readiness.

"In Japan, meanwhile, the NLCS averaged 7.34 million viewers, up 26% from last year’s record-setting figure. That total was, of course, driven largely by widespread interest there in native-born Dodgers superstars Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Roki Sasaki. For the clinching Game 4 in which Ohtani hit three home runs and struck out 10 on the mound, an average of 10.26 million in Japan viewed, in a country of about 123 million." "Canada’s Sportsnet averaged 6 million viewers for the Blue Jays’ clinching Game 7 win on Monday. The figure marked the network’s largest telecast of the team ever, and it surpassed a record that had stood since the 2015 ALCS. That audience represented about 15% of the entire Canadian population, a level of penetration seen in the U.S. only for the later rounds of the NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl." sportsmediawatch.com

Even with SD, have gone down from $325 million to around $200 this year and will likely shed at least 3/4 in Arraez King Cease Suarez in free agency. So looking at $160-180 million in payroll. Still punching above their market size though.

Tyler Flowers comes to mind here as well...AFL HoFers.

Nobody will take Adams coming off his TJ...opportunity cost doesn't add up, unless he had close to elite stuff like S.Smith or Misiorowski.

Even though no Mariners, MLB is happy to lock up tv ratings across Japan and Canada. Japan is less than half the US population but had more tv's watching the Dodgers than US sets watching the NBA Finals, for example. It's also how they can easily argue now that Ohtani is worth $150 additional million in revenues per year to the Dodgers ALONE. The 2020 World Series was the least-watched ever. The highest rated and most-watched World Series since 2004 remains Cubs-Indians in 2016 (13.1, 23.40M).

Leyland and Dombrowski...expanding to front office. Kim Ng? Dan Evans got the Dodgers' job and rather quickly fizzled out.

Since 1980 NBA has had 15 different franchises win the championship out of 30 and they have a salary cap The NFL with the most hardened cap over the same period has had 17 of 32 win the Super Bowl. MLB with no cap has had 23 different franchises win since 1980. The richest team in baseball has not won since 2009, the Mets with NY revenues have not won since 1986, the Dodgers themselves have only won twice (maybe a 3rd this year). Chicago in the 3rd largest revenue market have had just 1 for each of their teams. Kansas City has 2. Same with the Marlins. https://www.yahoo.com/sports/article/haters-whine-dodgers-payroll-la-100814444.html

https://www.yahoo.com/sports/article/shohei-ohtani-best-baseball-player-120000576.html “Beyond even his contract, Ohtani has laid the deficiencies of the MLB so horribly bare that it will be unable to ignore them anymore. There won’t be another Shohei anytime soon, but there’s a Paul Skenes. There’s a Tarik Skubal. There will be bigger numbers and more big names traded because the team that drafted them could not or would not pay them what they were worth. His dominance and cultural supernova has the unfortunate byproduct of proving that fewer and fewer teams will ever be able to hold onto a player like that. It used to be that a group of eight-to-ten teams could compete for the biggest names. Now we’re down to essentially two, and it feels like it’s just one. None of this is Ohtani’s fault. Rather, the structure that he has blossomed in can no longer support the financial reality of its own popularity. He will almost certainly dazzle the World Series, and we will all feel lucky we got to watch. But behind the scenes, his very success may push the MLB into the great labor dispute that has been brewing for decades. And it may cost Ohtani and his contemporaries one of the seasons of his physical prime. I don’t care who wins this World Series. Ohtani and his team of super-soldiers have already won it all, and baseball players’ legacies aren’t even measured by postseason success so much as their statistical performance over time; lots of the “greatest players of all time” never won a World Series. But while Ohtani is the bringer of his own legacy, he may also be the symbol of baseball’s greatest impending conflict. Only time will tell how big this will all get.”

He handled the bullpen chaos pretty darned well...pulled the right strings relying on vets like Muncy Ki-ke and Edman as well. Pulled the plug on Conforto. Making good use of Justin Dean as well.

Name sounds like a print/copy/fax company from the late 80s/early 90s.

https://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/breaking-news/article/mlb-playoffs-posting-best-ratings-since-2017-ahead-of-dodgers-blue-jays-world-series-003655941.html

Yet dumping three led to their only WS title….Magglio/Lee/Valentin

The Angels have consistently run a Top 10 payroll and at least attempted to compete with the cross town Dodgers instead other totally surrendering the market like JR. They also brought two Hall of Famers in Trout and Ohtani into the game. More like the Phoenix Suns under Ishbia. And more often that not they have tried to run competitive teams out there. Even this year's squad was .500ish for most of the year.

"Will the Dodgers ruin baseball with another title? That probably depends on your definition of "ruin." Baseball itself would probably see higher ratings and general interest with a true juggernaut capturing headlines, as is true for pretty much every other major league over the past half-century. Last year's World Series between L.A. and New York saw a seven-year high in ratings and drew more viewers in Japan than the NBA Finals did in the U.S. However, the Dodgers putting it all together is very bad news for your team if you're not a Dodgers fan. Rooting for a team is hard enough when it theoretically has a 1-in-30 chance of winning the championship. It's even harder when you look over and see a team, particularly a rich one, seemingly ready to gobble up half the titles of the next decade. It's more a question of fairness than one about the fate of the game, though those debates might become one and the same during the next CBA negotiations, in which MLB is already pushing for a salary cap." yahoo.com/sports

Speaking of the A's... In addition to Lawrence Butler ($65.5 million/7 years), they signed designated hitter/outfielder Brent Rooker to a $60 million, five-year contract and right-hander Luis Severino to a team-record $67 million, three-year deal. Extensions for Nick Kurtz and perhaps SS Jacob Wilson are also being considered this offseason. Basically, that's four times the projected 2026 White Sox payroll next midseason.

Would appreciate you not treating me like Troy Aikman does Caleb Williams. Thanks in advance for your time and consideration. Also, please watch Netflix's new documentary "Perfect Neighbor" and let it ruminate awhile.

Every White Sox fan can dutifully throw out a list of family members who spent their entire lifetimes without a Sox WS championship. Nobody's memories of that event are going to be diminished by someone joking about an overall historic record of futility...that's also part of what made waiting for decades and even centuries in the case of some families so special and so unique. Heck, it's also part of the badge of courage of Sox fandom to refer to the bittersweet 1967 four team ending, 1977/Disco Demolition/Bill Veeck, 1983, 1990, 1993-94, White Flag, 2000, 2003, almost every memory a Sox fan over the course of their lifetime is somehow associated more with cruel and seemingly unfair defeat, and not the 41 AL pennants of the Yankees. Sox fandom has been the very antithesis of that...and that's also part of why discovering the Pope was a long-suffering Sox fan has also particularly resonated with those who find comfort in religious faith and with the timeless story of Job in the Bible. Heck, even today fans a full two decades later will recall someone on death's door who didn't quite make it see the last out of 2005 and perhaps share pictures of funeral markers with references to how important their Sox fandom was in providing adfitional meaning to their life. Others will reminisce while fondly watching 2005 highlights, just to make the last three years of suffering easier to bear. All those family members who grew up with the standard of greatness, pride and professionalism set by the Minosos, Pierces, Foxes and Aparicios of franchise history would be rolling in their graves today if they knew what a punchline that team has unfortunately become in the sports world.