Eminor3rd

No. Even if they play at 90-win pace the rest of the year, they’ll still finish below .500.

At this point I hope this team moves to Las Vegas before the A's do.

I legitimately have no idea.

What it comes down to is that it just is NOT that difficult to draft and develop a 2WAR corner outfielder. Free agency is a fine way to improve your roster, but in terms of dollars, it’s by far the most inefficient method available to teams. Invariably, teams are going to end up with a hole or two to fill with average players, and so the premium is worth it to pay to complete the team. But if you find yourself spending the bulk of your budget building your roster with veteran role players through free agency, there’s just no way you can stretch it to the point that you can ensure you can also make sure you have depth, extend your stars, make aggressive deadline moves, etc. The $/WAR number is a curve with a bump in the middle; there is surplus value to be found on both tails: cheap bounceback candidates on the low end and superstars on the high end. You never want to be in a position where you need to buy at the middle of that curve if you can avoid. Bizarrely, that seems to be the White Sox actual plan. Or at least they seems to be pretending that those players in the middle actually belong on the high tail. Better franchises focus on developing the types of players that end up in the middle, and if they can do so in sufficient number, they can focus their free agent spending on the tails. You want BUY 26-year old Manny Machado instead of relying on being able to develop his equivalent out of the spoils of two or three trades. Between this tendency to buy Benintendi-types and the fetish for signing veteran relievers at their peak market value, the White Sox FO seems malignantly obsessed with spending money in the least efficient way possible. It’s frankly embarrassing that this group is led by an Ivy League business grad, because the consistency of this tendency just defies explanation.

Just expiring contracts. The only solution for the franchise is for the front office to get fired when the window closes. That’s assuming the FO is still committing themselves to their dumbass roster strategy of having the bulk of its significant players all playing the same, low value defensive position. If not, they could at least entertain the possibility of moving under-utilized value for different value in places they need. But, you know.

“I’m done with this team”

What a waste of time

Ah, now I ‘member.

I don’t even remember what it feels like for Bummer to have a good inning.

Big catch

No more rebuilds with current leadership. They need to push chips in however long it takes to convince reinsdorf that it’s time to move on. The only question is how deep the hole will be before the plug is finally pulled. Because of how insanely long the leash that they’ve had, we know exactly what this group can and can’t do. They can negotiate contracts and negotiate trades effectively. They cannot build/manage a competitive player development system, and that they cannot manage a payroll or build a roster effectively. There is less doubt about this than than in any typical administrative evaluation, because a typical administrative group in this situation would have been fired long ago. In a relative sense, we have a LOT of data.

Bro it’s April 19th

I think the answer is handedness plus the insane belief that Sheets can technically play RF. If you are also on the type of drugs it requires to agree with the second part of the previous sentence, it makes sense. But I agree it was the wrong decision still, simply because I just don’t think this team can afford to prioritize preserving the floor they get from replacement level players at the expense of the upside available from others. Burger could look useless in a few weeks, but giving the ABs is still the better decision IMO. That said, it’s still pretty challenging to keep both Jiménez and Burger on the same roster, particularly one as thin on defensive versatility as this one.

Yamamoto is gonna slay. Maybe Giolito and Lynn coming off the books makes the Sox a player there? But it doesn’t make them better, just fills a fresh hole.

Because normal ST had been leading to such great health outcomes for our players.

The reason you’re so tired of it is because it’s a multi-year, organizational philosophy issue that many of us have been complaining about for all of those years. Pointing out that the Sox couldn’t sign a star backup shortstop this season is a strawman — literally no one is making that argument. But pretending that consistently competitive franchises haven’t been prioritizing the development and retention of multi-positional, situationally specialized 2-WAR players all over the diamond for almost a decade is being purposefully blind to the reality of the meta-game. Now that Al Avila is out in Detroit, there’s one team left in baseball that still builds its roster around the idea of nine position players and five starting pitchers.

Good fucking lord

Is it me, or is Giolito shaking out his arm a bit ominously after breaking balls? ?

And yet the team will never invest in depth

Agreed. Feels like 81-81

Jumping in late here, but am I the only me who looked at this Twins lineup today and thought, “how is this team beating anyone?” Obviously not the opening day card, but jfc

It’s at least moderately fun when the opponent squanders opportunities too, I guess.

Brutal

It wasn’t that good