Eminor3rd

Guaranteed Rate getting a great deal so far on those naming rights.

That's actually a good point that I often forget -- the Shields deal was, at its core, a salary dump for SD. Therefore, he was presumably available for JUST the full contract. If the Sox actually believed he was good, they could have simply paid him and gave up a random 27 year old in AAA or whatever -- meaning they either (A) didn't ever believe he was the "ace" that they pretended to believe he was, and STILL gave up talent to get him, or (B) JR's purse strings were so tight that he wouldn't go higher than $8m (or whatever it was that they ended up paying) for a midseason trade acquisition to help put them over the top. Choice A suggests a poor understanding of how to build a contender, and B is more evidence that JR doesn't care about winning enough to own a team. Regardless, not only did they give up Tatis for a bad pitcher, they could have gotten the bad pitcher and KEPT Tatis by simply being willing to pay a bit more of his contract. Okay, I'm sorry, I'm done piling on this narrative because it just depresses people, including myself. But that was a good point that I wanted to expand on.

I didn't like the Lynn trade, but Lynn/Shields is not a good comparison. Shields was bad for more than full season leading up to the trade, and was two years older. Lynn hasn't been bad since he... got good.

You'd be correct if the trade made sense, at all, at the time. Unfortunately James Shields was a bad idea even then. He was one year into his joke of a free agent deal, already 35 years old and coming off a year where he pitched over 200 innings and somehow only produced 0.8 fWAR. At the time of the deal, he had an ERA over 4 in the best pitcher's park of the last two decades. I HATED that trade the moment it was made, and I had no idea who Tatis was. It was the type of trade that, for a team trying to contend, wasn't even worth the roster spot they gave him LET ALONE any kind of lottery ticket going the other way.

Nah, I don't think so. The Cubs knew what they were giving up, they got a WAY better player back, and while Eloy is already good, he hasn't reached Tatis level yet. Our deal was a prospect who, if we knew how good he was, would never have been in any trade at all, for a player in Shields that every team (and publication, tbh) knew was garbage except the White Sox, and the prospect has now blossomed into someone who has already put up 6.5 fWAR in 143 games. I appreciate the attempt at positivity, though.

I'm excited about Yermin's bat too, but the point is that if Grandal goes down to injury, there's no way in hell the Sox are going to entrust the staff to a Collins/Yermin tandem. Even if Lucroy never gets another hit at the MLB level, he'll be tapped to lead the pitching staff and call games, because pitchers need stuff like that and love it when they have a guy they can feel confident with. And, if that does happen, hopefully Collins takes some notes.

Yermin is your third-string DH homie

No team can “afford” it’s third-string catcher getting too many ABs.

Yeah, remember that 500-foot bomb Mazara hit in 2019? Luis Robert is immensely talented and has enormous upside, but he's got a LOT to work on to become consistent, so his performance for 2021 is high risk.

Right -- particularly in the case of pitching, there's a well-established model for how to juggle depth. The White Sox seem to not understand that it exists or are unwilling to try it. If one or two of our guys is hurt or ineffective and Bernardo Flores is suddenly pitching meaningful games, it's a completely unforced error.

I'm not going to make the argument that 7 AL teams should have higher median outcomes than the White Sox, but I don't think it's an implausible argument to make, and I certainly don't think it's so "off" that it's proof that a system is garbage like some are arguing. Hendriks is absolutely better than Colome, and fWAR supports this. However, fWAR is a DIPS-based statistic, and what that is measuring is how much of the "work" of the outs that are occurring can be directly attributed to the pitcher versus the defense/circumstance. Hendriks is better, essentially, because he allows much less contact and thus eliminates the factor of defense, resulting in fewer baserunners. However, that does not mean that his performance is guaranteed to produce better results, simply that it is more likely to produce better results. And what we saw in 2020 with Colome was nearly perfect results, even if he didn't actually pitch as well as Hendriks is likely to, and even if he relied on good defense and batted-ball luck to do so. So, if the question is "Is the 2021 White Sox closer role likely to allow fewer runs than it did in 2020?", the answer is almost certainly no. I agree that Hendriks could be deployed in a multi-inning role with some regularity, which would improve his gross production, but I'm very skeptical that the White Sox will do that. And even if they did, it would have to be a LOT more in order to make up ground toward a season of 0.81 ERA. In this instance, we are comparing a projection to what actually happened last year. Even if what actually happened last year was unlikely, it's still our baseline if we're trying to find out if the team got better. Yes, Lynn is exactly what they needed. But they GAVE UP something they also needed in order to get it. In the process of filling that glaring hole, they reopened the SAME hole. The White Sox problem is that they did not have ENOUGH pitching, so they needed to acquire pitching by using a resource OTHER than pitching. In fact, it's even worse than that, because since Lynn makes so much more money than Dunning they actually paid BOTH in current pitching talent and in money to make the upgrade. If you have some oranges but you need many more oranges, you should buy oranges with money or trade for oranges with something else. You should not trade oranges you already have, and you CERTAINLY should not trade both oranges and money. You may still end up with more oranges than you started with, but you have drastically reduced your total yield in oranges. This behavior isn't something we normally have to unpack as fans because it makes so little sense that it hardly ever happens in real life. "But Lance Lynn is better than Dane Dunning." Yes, but now you only improved your rotation by the DIFFERENCE between them. FanGraphs seems to be down right now but I think Lynn projects as about a 3.5 fWAR pitcher and Dunning projects at about a 2 - 2.5 fWAR pitcher (though to arrive there with ZiPS you have to adjust his IP, which is projected as like 70 innings or something). Most Sox fans see adding Lynn as adding 3.5 wins, but really it's adding 1 - 1.5 because the WHite Sox decided to SUBTRACT Dunning's 2 - 2.5 directly in the process. They spent $8m to add a win, and they still need just as many pitchers as they did before the move. "But maybe they could ONLY have gotten Lynn by including Dunning." Then get a different pitcher. There will SO MANY other options. How many 2 win pitchers signed for $8-12m this offseason? How many other, better pitchers were traded for prospects instead of MLB talent? If the guy at the fruit stand will only accept oranges in the deal, he's an idiot and you should go to a different store. I would amend this to say some areas of LIKELY regression. And it is much easier for a player who just played over his head to return to his norms than for a young player to learn new things to get closer to his promise. In truth, each instance of potential regression and upside is a unique event with its own probability. We, as humans, are particularly ill-suited to parse and sum them objectively to arrive at a net result. Which is why we use mathematical models, like... you know, PECOTA. That's certainly a plausible claim, but I don't know how you could possibly have evidence for it at this point, so I don't think it qualifies as a very good conclusion. Certainly not one that could survive scrutiny based on the information we have today. Yeah I mean, that's a fine opinion to hold, but we all need to understand that's as far as it goes. It's a hope we share. It's completely possible, but here's the kicker -- even if the every player on the team has a career year and the Sox win it all, it does NOT say anything about PECOTA. All that would mean is that a whole bunch of unlikely things occurred at once. PECOTA is not a genie claiming the Sox will end up the 7th best team in the AL. It's giving you its MEAN outcome out of tens of thousands of trials. Real life is ONE trial, and all kinds of things can happen. What it illustrates for us is that for the Sox to win, they need to achieve higher percentile outcomes. In other words, they nearly all of that upside to manifest. And this is, honestly, exactly where they were last year -- and it's pretty much status quo for this front office.

Calling him a "league-average hitter" misses the context entirely. He started out unstoppable, then became abysmal. He was swinging at absolutely everything the whole time. This suggests that league adjusted to him, and he needs to adjust back. Given that he's never had to do that, it's very much in question how quickly (if at all) he can accomplish it. His performance this year is very risky.

Why? If you factor in regression from the obvious candidates like Keuchel and Abreu, the extreme risk of Robert, and the fact that no projection system knows how to factor COVID-19 into the equation for Moncada, you need pretty major improvement from Jimenez/Madrigal/Cease to break even. Meanwhile, how much better did the team get over the offseason? They traded a 2.5 win pitcher for a 3.5 win pitcher, and added an elite closer to replace an unbelievable 0.81 ERA from Colome. Even though Hendriks is clearly better than Colome, do you think you're going to get a 0.81 ERA out of him? I've been saying it, but I'll say it again -- the front office essentially treaded water with this offseason if you factor in the losses. The team could win it all, but it's going to take additional upside from the young stars and near perfect health.

Lol, that is NOT how math works.

I see, yes, this makes sense on a PECOTA season-style projection, which is essentially an over-under. I don't think this applies to World Series odds, though.

In what way? They don't even have the same goals. Do you have a citation?

World Series contenders have more than three established starting pitchers. I'm sorry, but you're just wrong. Legitimate contenders have been investing in depth for like TEN YEARS now. The White Sox go into every "contending season" needing every player to perform to his full potential in order to succeed. EVERYONE in the industry, including the White Sox, know that this is a dumb plan. Fanbases get excited about a rebuild coming together because it produces a situation where three quarters of your team is filled with pre-arb players, so even a small-mid market team is capable of spending to fill up the last quarter. Where most teams see this state as an OPPORTUNITY to spend money to make an impact, the White Sox see this state as an excuse NOT to spend money. And the "argument" sounds exactly like your post. "Aw come on, don't focus on what we DON'T have, focus on what we DO have! Look at these several exciting players, isn't that good enough?!" That's not how teams operate when they want to win championships, it's how they operate when they want to maintain the relevance required to keep making money. It's not thinking like a winner, it's thinking like a fucking hedge fund manager. The truth is, of course, that money FOLLOWS excellence in sports. There are a ton of ways to make money in this country -- people like Steinbrenner do it with an unwavering commitment to dominate his field, people like Jerry Reinsdorf should stick to selling real estate.

Betting odds are not projections. Betting odds are not projections. Betting odds are not projections. Betting odds are not projections. Betting odds are not projections. Betting odds are not projections. Betting odds are not projections. Betting odds are not projections. Betting odds are not projections.

And decisions won't be made until the last possible minute.

So Collins is gonna have to prove he can ACTUALLY catch. This is a great depth/fallback move.

You cannot at all expect pre-covid benchmarks to apply to the mid-covid off-season.

Again, Bauer explicitly said this is how he wanted to do it. Right or wrong, he wanted his free agency to be a part of the entertainment process. Why would it be bad for an agent to reflect the desires and goals of her client?

It's how Bauer has wanted this whole saga to go the whole time. She's just reflecting it.

Former all day for me. Hendriks is the best player in the group but he upgrades at the least-needed point. Even better, the 3 million could have still gotten you Rodon on top.

It never made sense anyway.