Chicago White Sox

Definitely filling the old Andrew Vaughn Swiss Army knife role

Results wise no doubt it’s been brutal. But unfortunately with where Hahn left things and Jerry bottoming-out the payroll, it was always going to be a very ugly season. That being said, our current Pythagorean would imply a 60 win pace which is 15 games better than last year’s expected wins based on run differential. What’s fascinating is the positional group is 29th overall at fWAR at 0.2, which is insanely fucking bad but still a big improvement over last year. Regardless, that amount is weighted down substantially by guys who are no longer on team or guys who are easily replaceable. Vaughn, Amaya, Palacious, Rojas, Noda, & Capra have combined for -4 wins in just a half a season. Meanwhile, Robert & Benintendi have combined for just 0.1 fWAR despite +$31M in salary. My point here is still there is a ton of low hanging fruit that can be solved for with relative ease with a bit more time (once real minor leaguers arrive) and some Ishbia money being spent. IMO, Robert imploding and the TJS surgeries are the most frustrating parts of the first half at the major league level. The former sets us back in terms of acquiring talented prospects and the latter wastes a golden opportunity for less heralded guys to establish themselves and give us additional trade assets to help fill out the holes in the lineup.

Honestly, outside of Robert imploding, it hasn’t been a terrible 1H. We are starting to see a collection of young bats form and Smith & Burke (who has very good over the past month) look like long-term rotation options. And some of the dumpster dive vets have performed fairly well, which is a step up from the Hahn days. Still a ways off and I wish we had some trade chips this deadline that could actually move the needle, but at least not all the kids flopped and set us back even further.

For me, it’s all about giving the most young guys at-bats and seeing who can play where. I am not an Elko believer by any means, but this is the season to give him a shot and see if he does something with the opportunity. Will help come to a 40 man roster decision faster. Vargas is probably better at 1B, but his bat is also less valuable there so why not give him an extended run at 3B to see if he might get better? With Colson no longer a major threat, the spot is open for the taking. Sosa doesn’t really have a potential long-term spot outside of 2B so I’d just let him run with that for now. For him, the focus should be learning some semblance of plate discipline, but even with say a 110 wRC+ he needs to play an actual position instead of just DHing to be of any real value. Baldwin may not be an everyday OF, but he’s capable of handling the corners to some extent and that’s the quickest path to at-bats. I also think it’s an area that he needs to work on because I think his ideal role on a legit championship club is 10th man who fills in everywhere and can replace a guy who goes down with injury without the spot imploding. I am confident he can handle 2B and wouldn’t be upset if that’s his long term outcome. I candidly haven’t been following Ramos as much as I should, but I’ve always felt like he was a dude who’d need to learn the OF because of the Colson factor. With Montgomery’s struggles, Bryan may end up being the answer at 3B long-term and push Vargas elsewhere on the field, but my current order of operations would be to prioritize Miguel from a defensive position this season. Vargas has shown me enough to believe he is a major league hitter. We need to find his ideal long-term home defensively so we can start filling out the rest of the roster around him.

I wasn’t a fan of Rojas for similar reasons. At this point, Vargas at 3B and Sosa at 2B should be near everyday things. Rojas is fine in a bench role if need be.

Montgomery appears to be cooked unfortunately. Obviously there is zero reason to give him on him right away, but he’s firmly out of the long-term plans until he shows some semblance of the prospect he once was.

Honestly, post trade deadline the lineup should be something like this: 1B: Elko 2B: Sosa SS: Meidroth 3B: Vargas LF: Ramos CF. Fletcher RF: Baldwin DH: Quero/Teel CA: Teel/Quero Hell, zero reason not to cut Rojas at this point or at least punt his ass to the bench permanently to give Sosa free rein at 2B. I’d just give Elko the 1B job right now so we can fully assess what he may be ahead of next season. Baldwin should already be getting everyday at-bats somewhere in the OF, so call his ass up. Give Fletcher one last shot after moving all the OF vets even if I remain highly skeptical. Ramos could use a bit more time in AAA, but his underlying metrics appear better than his actual results and he should probably get a shot at some point in the 2nd half. I’d also call up Lee so that Quero & Teel can get everyday at-bats between C & DH.

The first statement is true. The second statement not so much. If they were so good at developing pitching, our competitive window wouldn’t have crashed and burned like it did. The simple reality is from 2020 to 2023 we had a single pitcher in Cease achieve 10+ fWAR or basically average 3 wins over those 3 1/3 seasons. Giolito would have as well if he had made all his starts. Throw in one awesome season from Rodon after non-tendering him and that’s pretty much your entire “internally developed” pitching staff post rebuild. “Success story” Lopez put up 0.1 fWAR over 18 starts during this time frame before one good season as a reliever with us. Kopech put 0.7 over 56 starts in between one good season as a reliever. 1st round picks Carson Fulmer and Zack Burdi flopped incredibly hard. Former top 100 prospect Alec Hansen flamed out in AA. Dunning has flashed some backend potential, but ultimately wasn’t that big of a loss. Pretty much nothing on the relief side of things that was actually sustainable. I’m really struggling to see where all this premium development took place. They did some good work with Cease and it was well documented over the course of the 2021 offseason. I’ll give credit where credit is due. Katz did some good work with a former top 10 prospect when he wasn’t actually part of our org, so again, not giving the White Sox any props here. And then you got good ol’ Rodon who should have been the 1.01 pick when we drafted him who they couldn’t figure out how to turn in a front-end SP in the first six years they had him. Glad we got that one awesome year out of him, but the goal of development isn’t to wait until after you have non-tendered the player and are down to your last year team of control before getting them to start approaching their ceiling.

The White Sox got 6 fWAR over his first six seasons. They literally non-tendered him after that point because they didn’t believe he was worth $4M. I’m sorry bro, but that is not proof of quality pitching development whether you want to use the “isn’t always linear” trope or not.

Yes, starting with we must go back 20 years to evaluate whether Rick Hahn was good at his job. Unfortunately it turns out he was and we mistakenly fired him.

Former 1.03 pick Carlos Rodon wasn’t healthy or good until his final season with the White Sox after they literally non-tendered him and brought him back on a 1/$3M deal a week before spring training began. Somehow taking seven years in the majors to develop a highly regarded college pitcher is now considered a huge development win and proof we were best in class.

Yup, all of this. Great post and great summary. I feel like people have lost their minds if they think we were this juggernaut at developing pitching talent under Hahn. We had an embarrassment of pitching talent coming out of that first rebuild and we only had one awesome year to show from it. For the most part, our key pitchers were consistently inconsistent and many underperformed. Like have people actually forgotten how our competitive window ending after like two seasons?

The vast majority of these examples are from a different regime during a different era and bear no credence on the org that Getz inherited. Come on my dude, using Philip Humber to justify our recent org capabilities is beyond ridiculous. You cite Lucas Giolito who was a former top 10 overall prospect who had to go outside the org to right the ship. Lopez’s stock had not fallen when they acquired him and he never really fixed him as a starter. Cease was a consensus top 100 prospect and I don’t recall anyone referring to him as a designed reliever. Honestly, almost none of these examples are a flattering endorsement of Rick Hahn and our pitching developments under him. I am one of the biggest KW fans in the world, but the game quickly passed him by when analytics started becoming ingrained in the game and his lawyer lackey who was supposed to be on the up and up on this stuff failed epically in keeping us in par with the rest of the league. I see no credible argument that the Sox were best in class at developing pitching (or even average) during the second half of Hahn’s tenure and the best, most recent example you cite is literally a dude that Getz and Bannister turned into an insanely good SP and valuable trade asset.

Again, using a 20 year sample is completely unreliable to evaluate how the org is doing today at something. Pretty much every member of the org outside of Jerry is long fucking gone from the beginning of that sample. I fully get there will be noise with shorter sample sizes, but that doesn’t change the fact that assigning credit to past leaders, processes, & outcomes is completely irrelevant to things today. Again, name me all this pitching that we developed under Hahn and explain what we he was doing so differently from other orgs that made us industry leaders. As for the data discussion, you are again missing the forest from the trees. You are taking about machine learning when these fucks couldn’t do basic statistical analysis in house and were unable align specific definitions for fairly basic (but critical) advanced metrics and how to apply them. Analysis paralysis is a thing, but utilizing bad data and applying the takeaways incorrectly is a dangerous fucking problem and has held us back for years. At the end of the day, we need to learn the basics before we have to worry about any of the problems you are highlighting.

Having data available to your hitting, pitching, & development coaches in real time is incredible valuable. Having clean data and aligned definitions on said metrics is critical for it to be used consistently and accurately. These are basic requirements to be a competent organization which we are not. We need to keep pushing to get to the cutting edge if we want to be great, but for now I just don’t want to be the worst org in all of major sports and by wide margin. These are just baby steps but 100% necessary ones. I will certainly not try to sell you that Getz’s vision will get us to promise land because I need to see some actual on-field results before I believe he’s doing anything more than addressing low hanging fruit. However, I truly believe what Getz is doing is actually legitimate and vastly different in scope than the bullshit Hahn claimed he was doing to modernize the org.

You are missing the forest from the trees here man. “Copying what others are doing” is 100% without question what we need to be doing. Will that make us a best in class organization? f*** no. Will it give us an edge over others? Definitely not. But it will quickly bring us out of the god damn Stone Age that we were stuck in under Hahn. You have to start somewhere and getting your basic foundations in place is the first step towards righting the ship long-term. Going from being completely incompetent to just below average would be a massive improvement. As for your pitching analysis, using a 20 year sample to highlight our capabilities as of late is completely flawed. 20 years ago pitching labs and biomechanics were barely a thing and have obviously grown in prominence over time. So much of the value that you are citing is likely driven by a single draft pick that was selected and developed by a different group of people using different processes (ones that were likely more up-to-date at the time). Change your sample to players added in the past 10 years and tell me where we rank. Hell, make it five and tell me where we rank. We are well fucking past the Don Cooper & Herm Schneider glory days. And let me be clear here, there is certainly a PR angle at play here. I’m not a fool who believes everything Getz says and I know there is an intrinsic motivation for him to hype up all the behind the scenes stuff. But that doesn’t change the fact that they are actually trying to modernize the org by bringing in external ideas, best practices, and people. Again, that won’t solve all our problems, but it should materially bridge the gap between us and most other orgs outside of probably the Rockies. And if we can be even be in the realm of acceptability, there is a chance even a mediocre GM can get lucky and put together a competitive team. But until the basics are in place, the current nightmare we are enduring will never end.

Having analytical data that isn’t clean and aligned up is a massive problem. Having your data not in the cloud and easily accessible is a massive problem. Not having all your groups leverage analytics as part of their decision making process because they all operate in silos is a massive problem. You say that we should address low hanging fruit…well this is a huge part of it. Let’s not undervalue all the things we were doing wrong that ultimately led us to be the worst team in baseball history.

Disagree with pretty much everything in this post. How were they good at pitching overhauls previously? Show some receipts and tangible actions that suggest they were even close to league average in this area prior to Bannister and the various foundational overhauls they have implemented since Getz took over. Did you even watch the video? One of the first things that Bannister mentions is how they had to completely revamp the R&D department because everything was broken. Data itself wasn’t clean and definitions weren’t aligned upon, it wasn’t it in the cloud and easily accessible, and it wasn’t be used throughout all groups as part of the broader decision-making process. Fixing these issues is the definition of addressing low hanging fruit and helps not only hitting, but hitting & fielding as well. Lastly, saying all these foundational improvements are just PR fluff because they haven’t immediately impacted our W-L record is silly. No doubt there is a PR angle to touting one’s horn, but fixing our foundations is the single most important thing needed to right this ship in the long-run and it’s all we should really care about at the moment other than Jerry’s reign of terror ending. But if you’re actually paying attention, you can see signs of better process baring some fruit. Again, it won’t immediately change our W-L record because we are basically starting from zero, but that doesn’t mean it’s not vitally important or actually working.

Lol…who did I attack? Me telling a poster there is a difference between awesome and sucking is somehow name calling? Is this a serious post? And no offense, you ridicule and insult posters all the time. You and West Eddy in particular have gone back and worth relentlessly, making personal attacks against one another. I’m not really sure who you are grandstanding for here. The quality of this board has taken a hit in recent years and the post I cited was a perfect example of that. That should be expected to some extent given how bad the team has been as of late, but you trying to say my post is somehow contributing towards that drop in quality is quite frankly absurd and hypocritical.

Explain how the “opinion” that a dude hitting 35% above league average sucks is rationale? Why do I have to entertain something so ridiculous? I have debated with posters on whether we should have signed in Tauchman in the first place, which is a fair conversation to have given the state of the org. But to say a guy “sucks” who by all objective measures does not suck is not a credible opinion and should not be treated as one.

Especially for a GM without a scouting background and natural ability to identify talent.

What in the world are you talking about? Who am I mocking for “daring to have an opinion”? The guy who said a dude hitting 35% above league average sucks? If that’s your example, then no, that’s an actual objective opinion to be had and should be mocked relentlessly.

Also, Rick Hahn should be thoroughly embarrassed for letting things get so far behind the times.

Some really good stuff in here.

Yup, I get that everyone is pissed off about most things White Sox and rightfully so, but it’s immensely frustrating when we can’t have any back & forth dialogue before the “everything sucks” boo birds come out. If you have zero hope or are unwilling to entertain it, then take a break and go find a better use of your time.