Eminor3rd

No I’d rather waive Zavala to keep a decent defender on the roster for a season for once.

Sox talent eval is so advanced, give ‘em credit: they were among the teams that recognized there was value in trying to add the reigning AL mvp.

Only good defensive catcher the Sox have had in like a decade. I know I’m overreacting to this one. Seby Zavala is ok or whatever, McGuire wasn’t hitting, etc., but Rick Hahn is the absolute lord of robbing Peter to pay Paul. Of all the ways to land what he needs, he always finds SOME way to open up another hole at the same time. It’s just hard to believe there wasn’t another way to get a mediocre lefty RP

“This is what three consecutive years of dogshit decision-making can do to a promising rebuild”

I haven’t paid less attention to a white sox season in 15 years. I didn’t expect that to happening during a contention window, but here we are. That said, I don’t really consider it “giving up,” the Sox just aren’t demanding my attention like they typically have. I’m just doing other stuff.

Expiring contracts only

Yeah that shit’s old

I know why people want to make the comparison, but Crochet does not have anything even remotely close to the control that Sale had. They’re not all that similar in term of SP prospects.

Yeah, at this point, run some dudes out there. Then, if none of them stick, hopefully learn your lesson in the offseason and sign someone decent. Don’t need a superstar there, there’ll be a decent options available.

I don’t think this logic holds in this case. If you’re using the per-AB break even point as a baseline, then it also holds true that mediocre pitching beats good hitting, so why bother getting good pitching? The fact that outs are more common than hits is just a part of the game; you have to measure based on your teams ability relative to those norms/relative to the abilities of your opponents. At the end of the day, you just have to end up with more runs than your opponent, whether the score 11-10 or 1-0. I think if I were going to be convinced that one aspect of the game more important than the other, someone would have to show that one could be more reliably trained/lead to more consistent results. And I’m not sure that’s possible, given how offense vs. defense is a zero-sum game — if one was consistently more dominant, then the other would be equally consistently bad, and when it came to differentiation from your opponents, you’d be back to square one.

There’s no answer to this. You can overcome a lack of one with an overwhelming abundance of the other, but it’s easier to just to be balanced. If you’re thinking about what might be the right focus for improving the team, I think it’s more helpful to look at specific positions that are underperforming, i.e. 2B, SP4, etc.

Pollock was sort of unlucky, but he’s had an extremely high-variance career because of his injury history. There was always a good chance he’d bust. Kimbrel had already morphed into a risky, lesser version of his prime self that maintained elite stuff but lost all of his control/command. Despite evidence of this, the White Sox bought high on a half season bounceback, and placed him into a role he’d never held. It was a terrible move. You could imagine how it could work, but it was always more likely to fail, and the worst part is they could have just traded less for an already established setup guy in the market instead. Encarnacion was not the same after the all star break in 2019. I know this only because I was watching the Yankees every day at the time. I can’t remember if he was coming off of a small injury or something, too — but there was a very clear “before and after” point where he suddenly looked really old and physically different. Normal fans of any other team wouldn’t likely notice, but the Sox scouting staff certainly should have. No excuse for that one. Josh Harrison was a good player and is now washed up. Everyone seems to have known this except the White Sox. Sometimes old vets have stretches where they hit well again randomly, it’s called the “dead cat bounce.” I suspect even the Sox knew that a good Harrison was a pipe dream at this point, but they painted themselves into a corner by poorly managing their resources and missing better opportunities to upgrade, so it was all they were left with. Predictably desperate and bad move. Mazara was a well established mediocre player that everyone agreed that they thought would be better. If you have a plan for a guy like that, it can be a great gamble on upside that can turn gold, you just have to find a way to open up some ABs to give it a chance to flourish. What you DON’T do is hand the guy an every day role and rely on him as your only option at his position. This was another move that was always way more likely to fail than to succeed, and thus another bad move. The Sox are the last team left that doesn’t understand how volatile RP performance is, and that you should never buy it at peak value in the offseason market. The time to buy peak RP is at the deadline when you need it to last for 20 more innings (the timing of Kimbrel was right; the player and market evaluations were wrong). These offseason deals are, at best, coin flips to work out well in the short term, nearly guaranteed to bust in the long term. But they keep doing it and it keeps happening. Expect not to hate how maybe one in four or one in five end up. My view/point here is that this isn’t bad luck. This is a consistent pattern of bad moves. The Sox repeatedly put themselves in a position where the good outcome is less likely than the bad outcome. It may be true that you’d probably expected for one or two of these to have worked out better just through randomness, but they’d never be enough to turn the tide of the overall trend.

Obviously respect your opinion, but I think this is a weird argument. You could just as easily flip it and say the algorithms have led us to all-for-nothing power hitters who can only pull the ball, thus making the shift a good idea in the first place. The shift, if it really works as well as it’s supposed to, is the one thing that should incentivize players to need to be more complete hitters, more able to put the ball in play, more versatile, etc. I’m heavily in favor of the shift, because it’s a strategic move that has just as many costs as benefits. There’s a very clear and obvious way to counter it — it only seems “unfair” when the player at the plate isn’t good enough to beat it. Rather than an unfair/overpowered tactic, I see it as a natural CHECK on an unfair/overpowered tactic, which is training hitters to be able to ignore half of the game. Banning the shift would be like telling an NBA team they can’t play man to man defense on a team that’s doing nothing but shooting threes. You’re tying one hand behind the back of the defense to allow a one-dimensional offense to shine. If one team is exploiting an advantage, the other team should be able to counter with a change in strategy. The ability to set an extreme shift to counter an extreme hitter is balance, to me.

I’m not sure what your point is.

Nah, I think it's definitely too early, I don't think it's on their mind at all. Too many key pieces with lots of control remaining. Even if they let their free agents go, this team would at least be a contender in the Central through 2024 as-is: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1C4dU46AiC_pt1GtzakmASUg9UD_UnpG32kdRZ3clOnk/edit#gid=1520401900

I don’t think there are going to be any wholesale changes until this current window closes

I don't think cash is coming back

Ron, it’s old.

The Sox have never been able to actually develop hitting. They’re eternally attracted to drafting guys who are so athletic that they’re somehow successful despite their lack of polish/instruction/mechanics, and then the team just… sees if the success continues. Whether or not the team can put together a top-tier offense in a given year depends almost entirely on how many freak-of-nature “exceptions” like TA or Luis Robert they can manage to have ready on the active roster at the same time — modified by whether or not their bargain free agent signings still have one good year left in the tank or not. Gordon Beckhams, Zack Collinses, etc. just rot on the vine.

Couldn't afford to lose the depth.

Could be, for sure. But I think it's tough to draw that kind of conclusion from a week and change.

Right, has there been a clearer recent example of a manager that had left the clubhouse in disarray? The Ozzie Guillen situation is precisely the type of situation that I'm arguing would warrant a change. I haven't seen any evidence that the TLR situation is like that.