almagest

He's days away from turning 26 and he's not performing while repeating AAA. He's been terrible in majors in 300 PAs. He's a non-prospect.

And they traded him for Ted Lilly, who had one decent and one bad year for the As.

I want to talk about that...

The Angels are "We're the Yankees but better! Now let's find someone who can't stay on the field or is actually 45 years old to spend half a billion on!"

I'm still trying to hold onto him turning it around next year, but HOO BOY.

The lack of offensive production in the minors is absolutely the biggest concern for the future. There's no way out of this futility if they can't draft and develop their own hitters. We've already seen trading for "finished" products or for highly or intelligently drafted players doesn't work if you can't do any of that yourself. Teams also are apparently super reluctant to trade top 100 prospect level offensive talent, so you'd better be good at scouting and developing lottery tickets. This is likely the most impactful offseason we've ever seen for scouting and player development hires. I wish it was someone more qualified than Getz running the show, but here we are. Hopefully he makes the right moves - I hope with better staff in place we see a turnaround from the hitting prospects that struggled this year.

He didn't tell you to wait and see. No one is telling you to wait and see. People are throwing a fit because some people are saying "I'm going to wait and see".

We're finally seeing the personnel changes happen that should have been happening for a long time, and people with some internal connections (like Jimmy and Harold) have been telling us these changes need to happen. It sounds like KW and Hahn did NOT want to make these changes, or couldn't get Reinsdorf buy in. Getz seems to understand at least some of what needs to happen, and/or managed to finally convince Jerry. These are positives for the future of the franchise, assuming Getz can hire the right people - and I fully understand why people are skeptical he will.

Hopefully it's not all just musical chairs and they find some actual good scouts.

This team just beat the probable best team in the AL by SEVEN RUNS. The rebuild is over, boys! Pop the champagne!

If Getz just ends up hiring a bunch of scouts from KC I'll grab my torch and pitchfork and jump fully on the "fire Getz" bandwagon. Hopefully we see them pry some high value scouts from good organizations.

The hitters on this roster who were here last year and expected to carry the offense combined for -2.4 bWAR so far.

No, we wouldn't be in this situation if we didn't have Reinsdorf, that's for sure.

You're living in a fantasy land if you think he's going to be replaced after one year, even if it wasn't Reinsdorf. Sure, he almost definitely wouldn't have been hired (and rightfully so), but in the small chance Getz was hired as the GM of a real team, he would at least have a couple years to put all of his changes into place. You can't turn around any organization in one season, much less a complete disaster like this one.

Yeah but you see if they completely overhauled the roster by getting rid of Vaughn, Robert, Benintendi, Eloy, and Moncada in the offseason, kept Cease, predicted which terrible relievers they let go would have a bounce back year, and had a time machine to know that guys like Jurickson Profar would post the best stats of their careers... They would win about many games as they did last year!

I want to see what Baldwin, Lee, Fletcher and Vargas do next year. Robert should be better next year, because he’s not getting traded with his terrible 2024. No sure things in the minors, unfortunately, but there’s a bunch of guys in the top 30 that are interesting and worth following. I’m also an Elko fan and wouldn’t mind seeing him replace Vaughn next year.

The Sox absolutely need hitting for the future. Not right now - what they need right now is for a giant tsunami to wash the other team into the ocean before every series starts. I don't believe in Burger as a key part of the Sox when they finally start to get decent again. By that point he'll be early 30s and guys with his profile are often in severe decline. A solid hitting prospect would definitely have been a better return for Burger, but I doubt the Sox were getting that, unless they went super young, and that's not a KW trade.

They probably still sign Senzel even with Burger, because that's what terrible teams with no help in the upper minors do. Sign DFAs and pray.

You must've missed the part where I said " It's up to [the Sox] to make sure the returns are successful". And again, Eder can still have more value to this team than Burger would've. We'll see if he makes a successful move to the bullpen or figures anything out next season.

The trade rationale made sense at the time and the Sox should keep making trades like that. It's up to them to make sure the returns are successful. Also, let's pump the brakes on declaring this a bad trade already. It's definitely been bad value since Burger started hitting again and Eder forgot how to pitch, but Burger wouldn't do much for this team other than bump them from "worst team of all time" to "worst team of all time, but like 1 more win". We'll see if it stays that way - if Eder can become at least a solid reliever he's worth way more to this team in the next couple years than a 30+ year old Burger. One tool guys don't often perform well post 30, especially given his injury history.

I don't think we can say Thorpe is doomed if he gets TJ since the general success rate of pitchers who get it is so high. Eder just might be in that outlier bucket. Or, maybe he's the "wrong kind" of lefty starter and the Sox can't reach him, which is either a player dev problem, or Eder just sucks now. Given the Sox general strength with pitching this year and the job Bannister has been doing, I'd lean more on the latter. I also think the Thorpe trade was solid at the time. Thorpe was MiLB pitcher of the year and a top 50-ish prospect. Zavala has talent and had a great year last year. The Sox just need to figure out how to work with him. Wilson was questionable but I see the rationale. He's arb eligible and I assume they'll give him another year to build some value/hopefully provide a more stable bullpen presence next year. We'll see what Getz does in the offseason with Crochet and maybe Robert, though I suspect Robert stays one more year at least given his bad 2024 so far.

Urshela was horrible with the Tigers and got released, and he was alright last year in limited playing time either with the Angels. He wouldn't help anything. Rosario is an odd case. He can still hit, apparently, but his defense has been awful. He was traded for basically nothing to the Dodgers (again), then put on waivers and claimed by Cincinnati. Either his defense is that terrible, or there are some locker room concerns with him. DeJong was also a better signing by both bWAR and fWAR.

Agreed on the trade making sense at the time. They should be held accountable for his regression, though. Maybe it's just a result of the TJ surgery, but Eder is looking like a release candidate right now.

And then he came back to the Sox in 1997 when he was already washed.

A .639 OPS for this team is fourth best among starters.