Eminor3rd

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 2, 2015 -> 01:01 PM) Then spending $100 million of additional funds on this roster with veterans over 30 who you expect to gradually get worse and more likely to be injured each year and trading for a major addition with 1 year on his contract was absolutely foolhardy. If your team isn't ready to compete right now, why on Earth are you spending money on free agents? Why on Earth are you trading players for a guy who won't be here in a year? Because the balls-out/rebuild model is obsolete. Practically every team in baseball is moving to one where they shoot for 85 wins every year now because it makes sense under the current post-season structure.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Jun 2, 2015 -> 12:32 PM) When your staff is mailing it in, not doing what you expect them to do. These guys watch them every day. We don't. People just assume Robin shows up, gets dressed and sits there bored to tears waiting for the game to end so he can go home. Articles, like this one, speak of the entire staff's work ethic. Stone was talking about the White Sox staff the other day saying they are there to help almost all day long. They come early, stay late, give them extra BP, extra fielding, additional side sessions for pitchers if requested. People love to see other people get fired. That's one reason Trump's show is still on the air. From the bits and pieces we get at the full story, not the little you see on TV and assume, the coaching staff and manager is the least of the White Sox problems. This

QUOTE (Special K @ Jun 2, 2015 -> 11:58 AM) Under what scenario do you ever consider changing the manager and his staff? When you have reason to believe that the staff is failing at their job. Unfortunately, we fans may never have that information, but the front office see what we cannot.

Time to slow these f***ers down. I like this pitching matchup for a game 1 win.

QUOTE (Lemon_44 @ Jun 2, 2015 -> 08:13 AM) I think Lucroy is being way overrated. There aren't many players that are going to pull 4 of the top 7 or 8 players from a team's farm system, no matter how bad the system is, and Lucroy is not one of those players. Justin Upton only pulled 2 of SD's top 10(#3 and #7) and 3(#14) of their top 20 plus an outside the top 20 Mallex Smith. It's all about affordable team control remaining. Upton was a one-year rental at $13m, Lucroy comes with 2.5 seasons at a total cost of less than $10m for the duration. That's why he'll be more valuable if he moves.

QUOTE (Quinarvy @ Jun 1, 2015 -> 01:46 PM) Montas, Hawkins and Davidson would probably be the highest I'd go/still be comfortable giving. Maybe throw in Sanburn or another reliever type arm. I just want to hold onto Danish, Anderson and Adams as badly as possible. That won't be nearly enough to get it done, but it could be a blessing in disguise. As good as Lucroy is (and I'm a big fan), he'll be a 30 year old catcher next year who has started to catch the injury bug. Seems like a good candidate to start being worse. Good contract, though.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 1, 2015 -> 11:31 AM) Schizotalk.com If the team finishes 81-81, it'll be the perfect fan identity crisis experiment.

Day after win: "Midseason Additions" bumped. Day after loss: "Who Can the Sox Sell" bumped.

I wonder if he'd take a deal based on the Stanton extension if we offered it right now. Can't let him get to free agency.

Let's make this a winning streak! vs. O/U -- Number of zombie bat boys spawned in the underworld using the bones of previous races and blood from Jose Quintana's earlobes, calves, tongue, and penis: 16.5

Samardzija will have value, but nowhere near the amount of value to get anything in the neighborhood of Addison Russell. Even if he rebounds, he's a pending free agent now, and he's the third best option on the market.

QUOTE (chitownsportsfan @ May 29, 2015 -> 02:30 PM) That is a Orwellian double speak SouthSider2k. Thibs was the head of his department including on how minutes were distributed. Then he wasn't, once GarPax got pissed and hired Jen. So, you're the boss, until you're not. There's no chain of command, well there is, but it's a "circle" at the top with JR, Hahn and KW. He runs the Bulls the same way. He needs to stop meddling. That sounds like the exact opposite of the passage you quoted about the Bulls.

QUOTE (chitownsportsfan @ May 29, 2015 -> 01:58 PM) here's a very candid look into how a JR FO works, from the statement on Thibs: It's a joke, you can't run franchises like this. GarPax is a laughingstock around the NBA despite many good draft picks, because of how obviously strained the relationship between Gar and Paxson is. Powerful men don't like to form consensus with "interdepartmental input". This isn't Google or Facebook, it's a sports franchise. One guy should be making the final call, yes he can take input from those below him but it's a tyranny of one, not a "consensus of information" or whatever mumble jumble JR uses. That sounds like a model for how all big organizations should run. If you want to see what happens when the top dog in the organization steamrolls the managers he's hired instead of delegating and letting them handle their areas of expertise, look at the Marlins. How many times have you heard the following cliche out of the mouth of some billionaire: "I surround myself with smart people and let them work."

How do you guys have so much insight into how well the White Sox internal chain of command works? Are you all ex-employees or something?

QUOTE (LDF @ May 29, 2015 -> 10:27 AM) not when there is no, and i mean no certified replacement to take over that position. i am talking about the defense. again i will use this word. the org ASSUME that the org had a replacement for other positions and found out, that was not the case. making a trade is ok, when the org knows that it was protected, but when that is not the case, how many games would be lost for that error in misjudgement. I was hard on the "trade Alexei" train for a while. At one point I think I was the conductor, actually, because I thought Sanchez or Leury Garcia could handle it and I wanted to see if their bats would grow with regular PT. But after they made the Samardzija trade, it didn't make sense to move Alexei anymore, so I can't grumble there.

QUOTE (elrockinMT @ May 29, 2015 -> 09:25 AM) Rodon needs to mix up his pitches and keep it in the strike zone area Yeah I don't want to see him throwing many first pitch sliders. He needs to get ahead with well located fastballs so that slider actually makes them chase. Seems like hitters are just expecting it every time and laying off because he doesn't force them to expect a fastball.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ May 29, 2015 -> 09:56 AM) I don't think everyone in the world thought it was an overpay, and reality is starting to set in for Semien. He obviously still has good offensive numbers, but he has dropped about 70 points off his OPS the last couple of weeks, and now up to 18 errors. If he had 18 errors for the White Sox, he would be getting skewered here. I was referring to the Addison Russell trade as the universally accepted overpay. I don't think we overpaid for Samardzija at all.

QUOTE (oldsox @ May 28, 2015 -> 08:58 PM) Just last June the A's gave up a #1 prospect to Cubs -- Addison Russell. For a year an a half of a pitcher pitching much better. We're selling a worse version for just a couple months. And everyone in the world thought that was an overpay in the first place.

Gametime 7:10CST / 8:10EST vs. O/U combined strikeouts by starters: 13.5

I say we just DFA the next bum who gets picked off.

Sometimes I feel like I'm witnessing a different reality than half of this board. We're in year TWO (2)(!) of the Rick Hahn rebuild, the farm system is stronger than it's been in ten years, we've got a relatively clean set of financial commitments going forward despite a huge bump in payroll, attendance is up, and the White Sox continue to increase their revenues every single year. How can an argument be made that the fans or city of Chicago is holding the team back? Is the team being held back at all? By what?

QUOTE (shoeless_joe21 @ May 28, 2015 -> 04:53 AM) Shark Positions White Sox for Timely Win Hawk Positions White Sox for Timely Whine Well done

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ May 27, 2015 -> 02:03 PM) I very strongly disagree with the concept that you should not judge the GM based on the results of their decision rather than how the decision looked at the time. It's an excuse that leaves us with a losing franchise. If a person makes decisions that constantly look correct at the time and blow up in their face every single time...then it is absolutely time to reevaluate that decision making process and that's where we are right now. The assumptions behind those moves are simply incorrect. We're ignoring defense. We're ignoring fundamentals. We're continuing to push people too aggressively. We thought we had a team (both this year and in 2013) that was ready to compete and we spent a whole lot of money based on that assumption. We are totally failing to understand this roster, this team, or how to build a competitive team. If every decision looks fine and they completely implode, then we need to reevaluate how we're judging these decisions. Either that, or every decision we made did work out, and the coaching staff completely failed in their job of getting those players ready to go. Take your pick. I'm going with "both". neither is not an option unless you're ok with winning 45% of your games. I just don't agree with most of your premise. I'm not firing someone for making good calls that turned out badly in a game where that simply happens all the time. You let him go when you don't think he's the best one for the job anymore. Obviously everything needs to be re-evaluated when an outcome is undesirable, but the results of that re-evaluation can very well be "we did everything we could, it just didn't work out." It's just not true that the only explanations for failure are bad roster construction or bad coaching. One can be both capable and prepared for success in sports and still fail. If you want to make a criticism that he didn't put players on the field capable of passable defense, I think that's fair. But making decisions based solely on outcomes is a recipe for disaster in nearly, if not every, industry. There's just no argument at all to ignore context. It makes no sense.

Ok Alexei is putting up one of the dumbest defensive seasons I've ever seen.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ May 27, 2015 -> 11:24 AM) In that case, the team's general manager vastly overestimated the talent available on his team because some of them had made it look too easy last year and invested $50 million this season based on that overestimation. The team's General Manager then has completely failed at his job by any reasonable standard, costing his employer a huge amount of money. He should be replaced. Balta, I love you man, but this response completely missed the entire point of the part you bolded in my post. When it comes to roster moves, a GM makes his money by making predictive decisions. The reality is that every decision you make that is predictive needs to be viewed, essentially, as a probability. For example, every player in baseball, in a given season, comes with a small chance of becoming the best player in the entire league. They also come with higher likelihoods of being average or whatever, but there's no way to prognositcate what is going to happen ahead of time. It's all a deal from the deck, and the GM's job is to stack that deck in his favor as much as possible. So let's take Chris Sale, who has posted a 4.29 ERA so far. Heading into this season, we could expect that there's a tiny chance he'd bust and be the worst pitcher in the league, a larger but still small chance he'd win the CY Young, a larger chance he'd hit the DL for the whole year, a and so on with other outcomes -- but the most likely single outcome was that he'd put out a star-level season as one of the top 20 or so pitchers around. That is the outcome that Hahn expected and should be judged on putting out. Unless you think Chris Sale is a true talent 4.29 ERA pitcher and shouldn't have been considered the ace of a contender, you have to be comfortable with Hahn expecting more. Yet, here we are. Our ace has, on average, pitched like a #4 guy. That's how the cookie crumbles, though, there was ALWAYS a chance that would happen. When you look around the roster, you see a LOT of that to varying degrees. A ton of dudes who are performing below what consensus expected. But the only thing strange about is that it's all happening at once. Individually, they're all realistic, if not necessarily the most likely outcome. And then, when you look around the league and realize that half the teams have to lose every day, even that it's all happening at once doesn't seem strange. Yes, it MIGHT be a coaching problem or a player dev problem or something else that is theoretically fixable -- but from where you and I sit, we have NO evidence to suggest that or anything else in particular. Occam's Razor demands that the most likely outcome is the dudes are just s***ting the bed. Half the guys in the league do it every year. I disagree strongly with the desperation that everyone is feeling regarding the roster. If you look at the preseason predictions thread, you'll see me predicting a roughly .500 record, and yet I adored the offseason that Hahn had. This is because I think he did an EXCELLENT job of balancing short and long-term interests. When I look at the 25 man, the only boat anchor I see is John Danks. I see a team that's due for some bounceback in a lot of areas and is going to retain long-term flexibility in others. Yeah, Samardzija is likely not going to provide value going forward, but that's the cost of doing business. There's no point in running a team if you aren't going to try to win, and the cost was very reasonable. Again, I think we can all agree that the most likely outcome for Semien was much worse than reality and the most likely outcome for Samardzija was a much better one -- but there was ALWAYS a chance it would turn out this way. He traded a guy with a 10% chance of hitting like a star for a guy who had maybe a 50-60% chance of remaining one. Those are rough, oversimplified estimates, but you get my point. If you want to claim the GM failed, you have to judge him on the decisions he made at the time he made them. When the outcomes all fall in the realistic range, sometimes it's just the luck of the draw. You can make a claim about a systemic problem with coaching or scouting, but you need some real good evidence to back it up, and it's very difficult to come up with any from where you and I sit.