Chicago White Sox

It can’t be true. At a very minimum, he must be ignoring the vast majority of pitchers that never have TJS twice. No idea how you could follow baseball and believe on average a new UCL will only last 4.5 years. A huge chunk of the league would already be on their second surgery when that clearly isn’t the case.

That tweets translates as follows:

Japan is 15 hours ahead of us, so very possible it leaked there first!?!

Highly suspect baseball rumors are better than nothing, as long as they don’t come from peavy44.

Some nobody that claims we’re signing Wheeler, I’m just trying to get people hyped around here with some fake twitter rumors. The momentum has stalled and we need a new WetButt to believe in.

You know when Von Emor drops them balls, shit is about to pop off!!

Oh shit?!!

The incentives in Grandal’s contract are minimal, so I wouldn’t expect them to be a big part of Wheeler’s contract. As for Machado, I honestly believe the Sox simply got outplayed by the Padres. They thought they were in the lead the whole time and weren’t willing to negotiate against themselves. I think they were truly surprised the Padres came in at the end and offered $300M. Hopefully they learned that slow-playing stars is a dangerous game and that if you really want a guy more often than not you are better being aggressive. To me, Grandal is somewhat proof of that, although admittedly the catching market was pretty light and was likely to move fast.

I truly believe here. Don’t think anyone goes six years and I think something between $100M & $110M will be right in our wheelhouse.

A link to what? From an accounting perspective, the signing bonus is amortized over the life of the contract. But from a cash perspective, my guess is this goes against their 2020 payroll budget as they probably run on a November to October fiscal year.

How do you know what year they put the signing bonus into budget?

Betts, Wheeler, & Grandal combined for 16.5 fWAR last year. If they come even remotely close to those numbers next year, it would be absolute insanity for a team coming off 72 wins and with a talented young core in place (including the addition of three top 25 prospects) to not compete in the shittiest division in all of baseball. I’m sorry, but teams do NOT need to be perfect to be legit playoff contenders.

Why would we not be realistic contenders with Betts & Wheeler?

If we’re serious about pursuing Betts or Springer next offseason, then by all means go the stop-gap route. But if not, we should be exploring other long-term alternatives. I’m not convinced any of our minor league guys are the answer and RF is the last spot we can add an impact player to the lineup.

Getting an extra year of control of Moncada & Giolito would be huge as we’d have a legit five year window. I think there’s a possibly both accept deals that push out a free agency a year.

We tried signing Brantley but he preferred a contender, hard to complain there.

Mancini is RH and is arguably a bigger liability in RF. Given those factors, I’m taking Castellanos for cash only.

Sprotrac is a pretty great resource IMO and they show our committed salary for 10 guys to be ~$71M. If you allocate all of Abreu’s signing bonus to 2020 we’d be sitting at $74M plus we owe $1M for Alonso’s theoretic buy-our. All in, that puts us right at $75M. Assuming we add two starters, one reliever, a RF, and a bench piece, that means we need to include 10 pre-arb guys as well. At $650k per, that puts us at right about $82M with five roster spots to fill. My guess is we have a payroll ceiling ~$135M next year. Adding Wheeler at $20M per would put at $102M, leaving a good $30M to work with. Give me either Wood or Gonzalez for the rotation (1/$8M or 1/$6M respectively), a guy like McHugh for the bullpen (1/$5M), & Gennett for the bench (1/$5M) and we still have $15M to $17M left for RF. That would likely be enough for any free agent OF (including Castellanos) and way more than what would be required for any realistic trade target (i.e. not Mookie). To me, it’s absolutely critical we land Wheeler, as otherwise we’ll struggle to take advantage our remaining financial flexibility effectively.

I’ll take our end of the Olivo for Bradford trade.

I’d be interested if Dynasty and if there’s some form of buy-in. I’m going to wager a buy-in over $100 will be hard to find the necessary amount of people.

Lol...what a god forsaken franchise.

Very against the Pillar idea, he’s not a 2 win player in RF IMO.

Also forget his beer which is / was fucking disgusting.

I will never understand the allure of being a fake baseball insider.

The one in Berwyn has gone through multiple closing / rebrandings. He also had a failed music label amongst other things. His reputation as a business man is pretty poor.