Chicago White Sox

I get your frustration with our past hiring processes as I hated them too. But so far, Hahn has said all the right things and has implied there will be candidates from some of the playoff teams. I fully expect a couple more guys to be interviewed in addition to TLR & Hinch.

He posted the 7th highest fWAR among position players this year. Even with him being 30 the ask will be very because he’s controllable for the next five years and is dirt cheap.

Which pitcher?

That was kind of what I was getting at. Assume we have $45M to work with this offseason to address the last three spots on the pitching staff plus RF, DH, & backup catcher. One option is going big after Springer & Stroman (let’s go with $42M combined) and then go with cheap internal options at the other four spots (Lopez, Burdi or Johnson, Vaughn, Collins). Alternatively, you could spread Springer’s salary (say $25M) over multiple positions and possibly add Quintana ($10M), Pederson ($8M), and a B tier reliever ($7M) in addition to Stroman. What would you rather have? To me, if we plan on letting Crotchet pitch out of the bullpen for a year I think I’d go with option A and hope for the best with our young arms. It’s risky no doubt, but you’re probably talking about the best offense in baseball at that point.

The GM he hired made the “Shelby Miller” trade amongst many other horrible decisions.

How would people feel if our only two additions this offseason were Springer & Stroman? That means going cheap with the bullpen, no other rotational depth, Collins as your backup catcher, and Vaughn as your DH.

Unless the new pitching coach comes in and demands his own guy, I will be shocked if it’s not Zaleski. He seems like the real deal and hiring anyone else will likely result his exiting of the organization at some point.

He also helped turn him into a top 100 prospect who led the minors in the strikeouts. Not Matt’s fault that Hansen is a bit of a head case.

We know basically nothing about their search except that La Russa is a candidate. You are drawing way too many conclusions right now and I’m not sure why. I’d wager large sums of money they will interview more than just TLR & Hinch.

His Statcast numbers were not very impressive either. He could be a defense-oriented fallback option, but I’d aim a little higher to start.

But what does Reinsdorf pushing for La Russa as manager have to do with Hahn fucking up at the trade deadline?

Why settle for a big “if” in this market? To fathom’s point, you can probably trade for someone like Calhoun for basically nothing who would be a massive upgrade and not that much more money.

How is his defense?

I wonder if the big name guys will have to take lesser long-term deals than usual but with opt-outs after year 1. I really have no idea what kind of contract someone like Springer would get normally, but it should be less than usual I’d imagine.

But what about RF? Would the Sox actually pursue a guy like Springer?

No way they stick with Mazara even if they decide to go cheap. And honestly, what’s the point? He only has one year of team control left. If he does well, he’ll be expensive to retain, if he doesn’t that’s a third straight year of shit production out of RF. If I’m gambling on a bounce-back candidate it’s Joc because he has actually been elite against RHP in the past.

What you guys thinking here. I’ve been pushing the Joc angle for a while now, but found this tweet from Stone to be amusing. Is Springer an actual possibility? Steve normally shoots anything too crazy down right away. ?

That article is completely embarrassing.

Lol...keep dreaming Ricky.

Lol...come on Ray Ray, saying Renteria was a net gain or loss of zero wins is absolutely ridiculous and makes me think you don’t watch our actual games. Yes, the team performed well this year because Abreu got in better shape and had a MVP season, our collection of former top 100 prospects (and many top 10 guys) continued to blossom, and several relievers performed well above expectations. Projection models didn’t project our team to perform this well because projection models don’t handle the development curves of young players with much accuracy, they don’t forecast a player to find the fountain of youth, they don’t expect pitchers to change their pitch usage and to suddenly become a bullpen weapon. Rick deserves some credit here, but ultimately most of our “overpeformance” is due to the players or the inherent flaws of projection systems. Ricky was absolutely horrific with the in-game stuff and he definitely cost us games. All you have to do is measure our win expectancy during that CLE series before and after some of his bullpen decisions to prove that. I think the difference between a great manager and a good manager is probably pretty small in terms of wins, but the difference between a good manager and a bad one can be significant. The Sox didn’t fire Ricky and pay him a salary to not manage our team because managers are more or less meaningless like you’re claiming. Clearly they felt an upgrade was needed and that any cost was a small price to pay to improve our chances of winning next year.

I’m not sure what you’re arguing here, but if you watched the Cleveland series you’d know how much a bad manager can cost you.

I was just reading through their greatest and wow were they bad. I’d rather have Hawk in charge of our baseball operations again than La Russia.

Why in the world do you think La Russa is capable of running a front office?

Career WAR isn’t the only thing free agents are evaluated on. The fact that Stroman has a lower ceiling and is coming off a missed season will suppress his value and that’s before COVID.

I’ll be honest, I would not trust old man Stone with any of my secrets. Dude can’t help himself when it comes to Twitter.