Chicago White Sox

QUOTE (beautox @ Mar 16, 2014 -> 03:14 PM) I will say I love both Semien and Eaton's approach at the plate and I'm looking forward to both of them at the top of the order for years to come. 100% agree. Perhaps Johnson or Anderson forces their way into the picture at some point, but right now I see a long-term 1-2 punch of Eaton & Semien and I love it. Abreu is going to be an RBI machine with those batting before him. Great to finally have some OBP at the top of the lineup.

There's little doubt IMO that both Davidson & Semien start the year in AAA. Each guy should get 2 to 3 months of seasoning while they attain an extra year of service time. Meanwhile, Gillaspie & Beckham get one last opportunity to prove they can be good major league starters. If not, they either get shipped out for peanuts prior to the deadline or moved into backup roles, while Semien & Davidson assume their starting positions. If somehow Conor or Gordon shows something positive, then you have a great problem on your hands. Regardless, I see no downside to having things play out in such a way. The worst thing we could do is bring up Davidson & Semien too early and force them into a reserve/platoon role. Both need consistent playing time whether it be in AAA or the major league level. And quite frankly, an extra year of team control would be a nice bonus.

QUOTE (Eminor3rd @ Mar 12, 2014 -> 01:35 PM) This is, IMO, the best reason for hope for both Viciedo and Garcia. Sort of like a change of scenery came to them instead of the other way around. Maybe this dude gets through to them -- it's refreshing, at least, to see Hahn making a good assessment of the type of message his hitters need. It at least shows that he has a good grasp of his team. Seems like there are several front offices that don't have a clue. I'm hopeful that the Steverson hiring is the first step in an orgnazition-wide hitting philosophy. Doesn't have to be as extreme as the Oakland A's Moneyball-era philosophy either, but simply determine the high-level traits you want in a hitter and start coaching them toward those goals at a young age. Obviously every player is different, but I think it's pretty clear that even a naturally aggressive hitter like Viciedo should have spent more time working on his selectiveness in the minors even if he was otherwise successful offensively. Now he's facing really good pitching and is forced to make significant adjustments to his approach at the major league and that is usually a recipe for failure. Preach the right traits, coach them early, and hopefully you avoid extended growing pains and have less prospects ultimately flop.

I think Steverson is the real wild card here with Viciedo. He preaches selectiveness and his experience is working with young players. Whether or not he can get through to him remains to be seen, but I truly believe he is the right man for the job and would like to see him given the opportunity to work with Dayan in 2014. I've said it before, but even small improvements in selectiveness could do wonders for Viciedo's offensive game.

QUOTE (Eminor3rd @ Mar 10, 2014 -> 10:52 AM) This makes sense. I mean, the reality is that Viciedo is about 400PA away from being a "change of scenery" candidate. Everyone can see the potential, but he has gotten about 0% better at hitting over his last ~1000 or so PA -- it's very possible that the coaching staff is just saying "I don't know what else to do with this guy." I gotta disagree with you here. Viciedo was a much better player in the 2nd half of last year. He put up a .291/.327/.466 slash line which was good for a wRC+ of 114. I think it's completely unfair to ignore the improvement that a second year player demonstrated over the course of the season. He also made a lot of progress against RHP. Maybe these improvements won't carry over to 2014, but I think it's pretty ridiculous to say he's gotten 0% better.

I will say 81 wins minimum, with a small chance of pushing for the second wild card spot. Offensively, I'm very optimistic about Abreu, Eaton, & Viciedo. Obviously the offense is still flawed with a black hole at catcher and a lack of OBP throughout the lineup, but I do expect it to be much better than last year, especially if Abreu is anything close to an impact player. As for the pitching, I'm fully expecting a rebound from Danks and for Johnson to pitch like a legitimate #3 starter and not go through serious growing pains. I honestly think the rotation will keep us in the thick of things for most of the season, but the offense will ultimately let us down. Still, a fringe competitive team will much more fun to watch than last year's mess.

QUOTE (Marty34 @ Feb 24, 2014 -> 04:52 PM) More like no reward signing You'd look like a damn fool trying to sell Paulino for much at the deadline. Even in a best case scenario, the other GM will say "yes, but it's Felipe Paulino . . ." This low reward signing just spins the wheels of the rebuild. You're seriously trolling if you think Paulino would have no value at the deadline despite pitching well all season. GMs won't care about his past as long as the stuff and results are there now. Plus as we saw last year, cheap assets have a much larger market at the deadline and Paulino would fit the bill along with an extra, affordable year of team control. He won't get you a Matt Garza type package, but you should be able to get something plenty valuable and very likely a lot more than you'd get in return for Ervin Santana with three years remaining on his deal.

QUOTE (Heads22 @ Feb 22, 2014 -> 10:19 PM) It's 10% of our starting lineup for one game. This is absolutely not anything to get worked up about. And an Adam Dunn HR could be 100% our offense on any given day. Until we're legitimately out of the race, his left-handed bat needs to be in the lineup everyday against RHP. Konerko will get plenty of opportunities against LHP, where he can actually provide some value, he doesn't need a token start on opening day. Honestly, if you want to appease the fans, have an on-field ceremony for him before the game. Just don't let the sentiment affect your decision-making and start him over Dunn. As long as the primary goal is winning games, then lineup decisions should always be about maximizing production.

QUOTE (Heads22 @ Feb 22, 2014 -> 06:46 PM) If we get to a point where one game makes a difference in the season and it's because PK started Opening Day - I don't think anyone will look back at the end of the season and say "if only we hadn't started Paulie" Why does it matter if we the fans isolate that moment as the reason for missing out on the playoffs? The fact would be that we missed out on the playoffs by one game and that any one of the stupid decisions we made along the way could have been the difference. I'm actually shocked that this many people are against optimizing our chances of winning. And before anyone else says "it's just one game, who cares", with the addition of the second wild card, one game is going to make or break a lot more seasons going forward. I'm sure Texas Ranger fans have a long list of items that could have made the difference for them last year.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Feb 22, 2014 -> 09:50 AM) Does Danks have any options left? Yeah, he was never put on the 40 until last year right? If so, he should have two options left.

QUOTE (winninguglyin83 @ Feb 21, 2014 -> 06:43 PM) I just can't imagine a guy who hit .167 during his fourth pro season while getting demoted to AA being in the big leagues. And striking out in more than a third of his at bats. The guy can't hit -- no matter what Buddy Bell says. Totally agree, I think a lot of people are being fooled by his strong AFL performance. He was absolute garbage last year in both AAA & AA. I'm not buying into the hype until see him put up some numbers in Charlotte. Also, if there's going to be a callup needed for CF, it's going to be Danks (if De Aza is the 4th OF) or Thompson. Everything I have read suggests that Trayce is a superior defender to Mitchell, plus he's actually shown some ability with the bat. I don't think Mitchell is really on the radar anymore, IMO the fluff we're hearing about his AFL performance is just trying rebuild some of his lost value. That could change with a strong start to the 2014 season, but I just don't think it's likely at this point.

QUOTE (Reddy @ Feb 21, 2014 -> 09:13 PM) I truly don't get this mindset to be honest. One game makes nearly zero difference when it comes to a 75-80 win team. And do you guys truly think the odds Paulie will produce worse than Dunn on this ONE day are so EXTREMELY high as to warrant him sitting on the bench his last opening day of his career? Psh y'all crazy. This may very well be a 75 to 80 win team but we don't know that yet. You give it everything you got until you know for sure because every single game matters in the end. I actually find it crazy that you'd rather give Paulie an opening day start than throw out the lineup with the best chance of actually winning the game for us.

QUOTE (Rowand44 @ Feb 21, 2014 -> 04:42 PM) I'm sorry, I couldn't care less that it's Pauly's last opening day, he shouldn't be starting against a righty. And yes it matters, there's always a chance this team ends up competing(yes it's a long shot but not impossible) and I want the best lineup out there until we're done. This 100%. Every game matters and stupid little decisions add up and by the end of the season they can be the difference between making the playoffs. I don't care if our chances of competing are slim, you do everything you can to maximize production from day 1 and that means playing Dunn against RHP as often as possible.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Feb 20, 2014 -> 11:07 AM) Last year, the Yankees received significant playing time from Chris Stewart, Lyle Overybay, Eduardo Nunez, Jayson Nix, Vernon Wells, Ichiro Suzuki, Travis Hafner, David Adams, and Austin Romine. Overbay's OPS was .688 and Hafner's .679, which were the best out of that group. Tell me some more about how Alex Rodriguez's contract didn't affect them. Now, considering it doesn't count against their payroll this year, while shedding a few other contracts, they were able to bring in a few new players while staying under the luxury tax. They won't be under it next year. I'm pretty certain the Yankees won't be under the luxury tax this year.

The problem with Marty's idea is we simply don't need another mid-rotation starter. If you're putting together a championship caliber rotation, Sale as a #1, Quintana as a #3, & Johnson as a #4 works IMO. All three are young, cheap, & cost-controlled for the foreseeable future. That right there is your core. On top of that, we have an expensive Danks who has a reasonable chance of rebounding this year and becoming a strong #3 starter again. Throw Chris Beck into the mix, who should be ready by opening day 2015 IMO, and we should have 4 legitimate starters to cover the back-end of the rotation (and this assumes that Rienzo, Surkamp, & Paulino aren't factors). What we really need is another top-of-the-rotation starter, not at Sale's level, but one that can solidfy that #2 spot, especially come playoff time. Tanaka made a ton of sense for us because he could fill that void and do so long-term. Wasting money on Jimenez or Santana doesn't help us achieve that goal, and quite frankly, signing one of them to hopefully spin Quintana down the road seems counter-productive and incredibly risky. I get the logic in doing so, but those simply aren't the right guys to gamble on.

QUOTE (Quinarvy @ Feb 16, 2014 -> 01:11 AM) I like TUC, but this has to be up for POTY consideration.

I still don't get the point of dealing assets for a 2B when we'll have two legit prospects in AAA and another in AA. Makes no sense whatsoever IMO.

QUOTE (lasttriptotulsa @ Feb 12, 2014 -> 06:46 AM) Exactly. He also was our best offensive player last year, but don't bother trying to convince TUC of that. He's proving to be almost as big of a troll as Marty lately. While I'm all for keeping Dunn, people seem to overlook he was a negative WAR player last year. Part of the problem is that he sucked offensively when DHing and sucked defensively when playing 1B. I think last year may be a bit of an outlier, but even in 2012 he was clearly better hitter when playing 1B. There really isn't a great solution here as Abreu should be playing 1B most of the time. Honestly, the only reason I want to keep him is I think platooning him will increase his overall value and make him a positive value player in 2014.

QUOTE (Iwritecode @ Feb 10, 2014 -> 03:29 PM) DA and SS2K, I think you two are arguing past each other. I think both of your points are true. It’s not an either/or situation. Yeah, clearly there were multiple items contributing towards our draft struggles (prior to recent years). First, refusing to go overslot and passing on all Boras clients. We passed on a lot of talent over the years because Reinsdorf refused to break the "rules" or work with the agent that f***ed him over on Bobby Seay & Jeff Weaver . Second, a sustained run of solid success prevented us from getting any top 10 picks for a long ass time (18 years to be exact). Those top picks have a much higher probability of working out (relatively speaking), which put us at a major disadvantage to begin with. Not going overslot only worsened the problem. Third, our talent evaluation was incredibly poor an extended period. People can try to blame this on the lack of money, but here is the list of 1st round picks between Alex Fernandez (1990) and Chris Sale (2010), which represents a 19 year span: 2009 Jared Mitchell OF LSU 23 2008 Gordon Beckham SS Univ. of Georgia 8 2007 Aaron Poreda LHP San Francisco 25 2006 Kyle McCulloch RHP Texas 29 2005 Lance Broadway RHP TCU 15 2004 Josh Fields 3B Oklahoma State 18 2003 Brian Anderson OF U. of Arizona 15 2002 Roger Ring LHP San Diego State 18 2001 Kris Honel RHP Providence HS, New Lenox, 16 2000 Joe Borchard OF Camarillo, CA 12 1999 Jason Stumm RHP Centralia, WA 15 1999 Matt Ginter RHP Mississippi State U. 22 1998 Robert Wells RHP Baylor U. 16 1997 Jason Dellaero SS U of South Florida 15 1996 Bobby Seay LHP Sarasota, FL 12 1995 Jeff Liefer 3B Long Beach State U 25 1994 Mark Johnson C Warner Robbins, GA 26 1993 Scott Christman LHP Oregon State U 17 1992 Eddie Pearson 3B Bishop St JC 24 1991 Scott Ruffcorn RHP Baylor U 25 That list is absolutely pathetic. Doesn't matter how bad your player development is, you're bound to hit on a couple of your 1st round picks. I mean for f***'s sake, Kip Wells & Gordan Beckham were the best pitcher and position player we drafted in the 1st round during a 19 year period. That's almost impossible to believe. This leads me to the final reason for our struggles which is poor draft philosophy. For a period of time under Duane Schafer, we were wasting high picks on "safe" college arms like Ring, Broadway, & McCulloch with the intention of possibly flipping them quickly to help the major league club. That was a terrible idea from the get-go, as these players offered limited upside and eventually all sucked and brought back very little in return. Then after this period of time, the Sox switched to targeting raw, toolsy guys like Jared Mitchell, Trayce Thompson, & Keenyn Walker that had impact player potential but extremely low floors. While this was somewhat of a step in the right direction, the White Sox front office failed to have a development staff in place that could actually turn these raw prospects into major leaguers. Not understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the organization or simply overlooking them contributed to this poor draft philosophy.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Feb 4, 2014 -> 05:18 PM) Offensively, he might be a better offensive "prospect" than Davidson but I can't come to any reasonable argument by which he's a more fully developed offensive player. I'm similarly not sure he's a better offensive player in the big leagues than Alexei right now. His numbers in AAA were worse than Davidson's in a cup of coffee there, his numbers in the big leagues were worse than Davidson's when they both were up in September. Davidson's had a full year at AAA already. Semien's had most of a year at AA. Semien might well keep tearing it up this year and by midseason tell everyone "I'm going to destroy the big leagues", but he's not there yet. Semien had a wRC+ of 123 in AAA, Davidson a 117. I would argue Semien was the better offensive player, especially given that Semien was still adjusting to the league at the time. Obviously the major league stats lean heavily in Davidson's favor, although I think Semien might have simply been worn down by that point from a long season. Honestly, I think both guys could probably use a month or two of seasoning at AAA to start next year.

QUOTE (Chilihead90 @ Feb 4, 2014 -> 12:08 AM) Anything other than a high draft pick or a playoff contender is a bad result for a season. Mediocrity is a franchise killer. No offense, but this is completely ridiculous. Teams rarely jump from bottom 3 to playoff contender in one season, as success is usually built over multiple seasons, especially for a team with a young core. Also, if we were to get another high draft pick next year, that likely means a lot of our young players failed to make progress in 2014. Not sure how that would ever be a "good" result.

Marty, if we were to dump Dunn, what exactly would you do at DH next year?

QUOTE (IowaSoxFan @ Jan 30, 2014 -> 05:10 PM) I am hoping that the Sox make him a QO at the end of the year and he declines. The Sox get a solid prospect for him and dont have a power vaccum from the LH side of the plate this year. I understand that the scenario is unlikely, but its probably not impossible that Dunn will be looking for multiple years instead of one. I could see a team give him a 3/$16-18M next winter. The Twins for instance are going to be starved for power, have a hole at DH and their 1st pick will (most likely) be protected. Anyway, that is what I hope. There is about a 0.1% chance we offer Dunn a QO next year and a 99.9% chance he'd accept it if we did. Come on man, you throw out a 3 year, $16/$18M deal when a QO would practically be worth that much alone.

QUOTE (IowaSoxFan @ Jan 30, 2014 -> 04:03 PM) He only played 60 games last year in the majors, mostly due to injuries. When he did play he was more of a fourth OF splitting time between LF and CF backing up Kubel and Pollock. His slash line was .252/.314/.360, so he wasn't really humming along either. If they can't trade De Aza before the season, I don't see any negative to starting Eaton with Davidson, Semien, and Sanchez in AAA until you can deal off guys and open places for them to play. These deals were not made to win a WS this season, but to contend for the next 5 years after this season. I agree sticking him down just to keep service time down would be bush league, but if it is the long term interest to further his development and build value in Viciedo or De Aza for a deal, keeping his time down is a happy consequence not a reason for making the move. Eaton posted a 163 wRC+ and a .995 OPS in AAA in 2012. I think he's shown he can handle AAA pitching. To best further his development, he needs regular at-bats against major league pitching. Starting him at Charlotte would be a huge mistake.

QUOTE (Eminor3rd @ Jan 30, 2014 -> 12:51 AM) De Aza has been unquestionably better than Viciedo the past two years, and it isn't even remotely close. I have never said otherwise. However, that doesn't mean he will be the better player going forward.