Chicago White Sox

That would be a horrible move. Three years of Benintendi coming of a fairly ordinary year is not worth a top 20 prospect plus taking on a albatross contract.

This is a vast over simplification that is only considering top 100 status. There could be teams that are high on Stiever & Walker for example, whether Baseball America or Pipeline have them ranked as top 100 prospects. Also, the Dodgers nearly traded us two years of Pederson for a pair of interesting arms, neither of which were top 100 guys. Your view on prospect value is very much outdated, as even guys in the 101 to 200 range are commanding quite a bit of value today.

Why would they have to do this? Are season ticket holders really going to jump ship after an awesome o season because they lost in the playoffs?

Well at least in CF Engel only started 65 games there, so plenty of room for improvement over Leury, Cordell, etc.

I mean, if his bats fall off a bit, that third year is going to be pretty painful. $15M is quite a bit of flexibility down the drain.

Yup, always take BPA and if that was Vaughn then you worry about fit later.

Alcantara struck out less than 7 per 9 innings. Regardless, don’t see why a rebuilding team is trading a 24 year starter with a year of major league experience under his belt plus the 4th overall pick for Tim Anderson.

His 1.0 fWAR is tied to getting ~550 plate appearances. As a bench player let’s say he gets half of that and you don’t pay 1 win players the same $/WAR as you do an average to above average everyday starter. The reality is he should make like $2.5M to $3M at his current offensive production. Also, for reference, Eduardo Escobar got 3/$21M coming off a 30 HR season and then went out and repeated it this year. Yolmer being a complete black hole power wise makes him incredibly unattractive in the juiced ball era no matter how good his defense is.

IMO, the biggest failure with the rebuild is potentially getting little to nothing out of those 2015 to 2017 drafts. You can’t go three years without adding a few major quality leaguers and expect sustainable success, especially when your LatAm operations is mostly non-existent. Looking at the 2015 draft, Fulmer is almost certainly a bust (at least with us) and he’s the only top five pick still in the organization. Our last hopes with this draft are Zangari (6th), Zavala (12th), & Mendick (22nd). If we’re lucky, we get one quality bench player from this draft and that’s really pathetic. That being said, we did forfeit our 2nd & 3rd round picks so expectations should have been tempered. There’s still some hope for 2016, but it’s very possible we end up with very little to show from it as most of the guys left are high variance players and/or injured. Collins could still be something, but his margin for error shrinks if he can’t stick behind the plate. Lambert was flashing starter potential before he went down, so there may be hope for him with a strong recovery. Hamilton & Burdi both have plus stuff (the latter has admittedly lost some), but are coming off multiple injuries. Flores has fringe stuff but maybe could be a swingman. Hansen is a fucking headcase and his ceiling is now that of a reliever. Again, there is some hope here, but we’d really need Collins to step up for this to be decent. And finally 2017. Burger’s injuries have been devastating and have stacked the odds against him ever amounting to something of significance. Gonzalez hit the Birmingham wall and it remains to see if he has anything more than 4th OF ceiling. There are a few low upside arms still in the system plus Abbott in short season ball, but this draft will most likely come down Sheets & Tyler Johnson if LuGo can’t take another step forward. And honestly, while I’m excited about the improvement in power that Sheets displayed this year, it ultimately means nothing until we see how he does in AAA. At this point, it’s very possible we end up with one good reliever and one solid bench piece as the entire haul of this draft, which would be terrible.

Hendricks took a below market deal for whatever reason (for reference he got less than Eovaldi got a year ago despite much less of a track record). Unfortunately he’s not a good comparison for what a quality starter on the free agent market is going to make.

Cole Kalhoun is nowhere close to a top 15 free agent. He’s going to get like a 1/$8M deal from someone. As for the other guys, the article wasn’t suggesting signing all of them. I would bet large sums of money we don’t sign Wheeler & Keuchel. Three top 20 free agents should most definitely be doable if we’re not signing any of the top three guys.

Definitely. If we can buy out one year of him & Giolito, that gives a strong four year window from 2021 to 2024 plus an outside shot next year with the right moves.

My god no. Why are we spending that much money on a backup infielder when the guys in front of him are Yoan, Timmy, & Madrigal? His defense will be vastly underutilized. And no one goes from non-tender to “good trade chip” when you slice $1-2M off their annual salary and then lock in three years.

He was the 15th ranked pitcher by fWAR this past season. If he’s ordinary, then there aren’t a lot of unique pitchers out there.

100% agree.

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I’d be incredibly disappointed if our offseason was signing two of that second group.

I didn’t see this posted anywhere, but it’s from a Bruce article from yesterday: https://670thescore.radio.com/jose-abreu-important-free-agent-white-sox

You haven’t received a response because you are a legit crazy person.

Where did the Buster & Passan 7/$175M rumors come from? And are you saying they didn’t have Merkin come out and claim the Sox’s offer had not changed?

Great post Jimmy. I do agree that Jerry is the bigger problem and KW/Hahn have made it pretty clear they wanted to rebuild earlier but Jerry wanted to keep going for it (despite not providing them with a sufficient budget to do so). It’s no doubt tough to run a high end operation with the restrictions Jerry puts in place. Regarding Machado, are you suggesting that Reinsdorf wouldn’t let them go beyond 8/$250M? That has always been my assumption and why our front office decided to add his friends. Also, what kind of decisions is KW still making? Is he actually interfering that much with the day to day stuff?

Last offseason should be a textbook of what not to do when negotiating huge contracts. They basically convinced the Padres to jump in by publicizing their low-ball offer and were overly cocky for no apparent reason.

Some of these are very fair points, but ultimately Hahn is the primary day-to-day decision maker and therefore he should be the most accountable for our recent failures. I think way too often KW is treated as the boogie man by Hahn supporters and to me that’s bullshit. Also, there is no doubt he made three quality trades to kick off the rebuild and Robert looks like he will be the real deal, but after those four moves it’s pretty sad how little he’s been able to accomplish over the last three seasons. And yes, I get he ran out of trade chips, but our recent drafts have very been underwhelming outside of top five picks, our LatAm operation a complete non-factor, we continue to struggle at player development, and worst of all I have seen very little creativity in terms of using major league roster spots. Most rebuilds end up with a diamond in the rough or two and we have almost nothing to show in that regard, because we wasted a fuckton of at-bats on guys like Yolmer & Engel that simply don’t move the needle. Because of all these factors, our margin of error is razor thin and we need to hit a home run in free agency for this rebuild to be successful. So yeah, while I can appreciate his good moves, I simply can’t ignore the position the bad ones have put us in.

It’s not him, but not really looking to call out the specific person. It was more about the reasoning for creating this thread, as I was surprised Rick still had vocal supporters and wanted to see if they felt as strongly about him after seeing all the facts laid in front of them.

Moncada & Giolito are scheduled to be free agents after the 2023 season and for now the next four years represent the primary window (obviously subject to change). For Hahn to reach a .500 record by the end of this stretch, the Sox would have to average exactly 100 wins over the next four seasons. I hope Hahn plans to spends some serious cash this offseason, because he’s got his work out for him!