Eminor3rd

The ability for your brain to process visual information quickly enough to be an effective hitter is NOT coachable. You can tell a player what to look for, and you can help him improve his load and swing mechanics to give him the most time to get it done, but if he can't do it, he just can't do it. And any coach that isn't telling guys how to do those two things wouldn't make it to the MLB in the first place.

Also, while plate discipline CAN be a product of patience and approach, it can also simply be an inability to recognize pitches quickly enough, which no amounting of coaching can fix.

Are you a real person

wat

Too long, Balta. Too nuanced. He didn't read it. He just named you MVP because you expressed despair.

No... no it does not. This is the formula for FIP: https://legacy.baseballprospectus.com/glossary/index.php?mode=viewstat&stat=493 None of those thing are in it. I don't know what stat you're thinking of, but it isn't FIP.

Do you actually think that player payroll is the only cost of doing business?

Wow, Mike Cameron really was tragically misunderstood, wasn't he?

I thought my wife had the only Donny Lucy shirsey outside of his family

Yeah, I agree with that.

With a Kershaw opt-out looking less likely (and for good reason), this is a good point. And it actually fits in with what I said. Hypothetically, if Harper and Machado both sign insane 12-year, $400m+ contracts with other teams, and the Sox then don't make any significant signings, would you call them cheap? To me, unless you think they were cheap not to be the best offer for Harper/Machado, I think the answer is "no." Those are the only guys that were worth going outside the lines for, because the current team is not at the stage where you even know which holes you need free agency to fill.

It's not about spending money for the sake of spending money, though -- it's about being willing to dip in when the market gives you an opportunity. Under normal circumstances, we SHOULDN'T expect the White Sox to dip heavily into free agency this normal year, but the exceptional youth and talent of the top of this year's class means that they need to be willing to take the additional risk that comes with moving sooner than is ideal in order to have access to talent that won't be available later. I agree with you, but I want our posters to understand the "why" of it, because that will inform our reactions this offseason.

LYLE MOUTON

omg remember Lilli-bombs?

Absolutely -- and each market has had its share of interesting caveats. For example, the Dodgers have been infamously impossible to find on cable TV in much of the great LA market in recent years because of hard-line negotiating tactics with whichever regional provider they have. The Yankees, through the establishment of the YES network, have essentially become immune to any broadcast limits with the Mets by making sure their channel is carried everywhere in the market instead of competing with the Mets over a contract with the best local provider.

The Cubs control a much greater share of the media assets in the region. Look at that map -- the doesn't explain cause, but it does a good job illustrating the effect. I think it was Lip Man maybe, in the last thread where we were talking about this, that provided a nice breakdown of the broadcast rights/licenses of each franchise over the latter half of the 20th century. I think that a lot of the Cubs' regional dominance comes from the Tribune ownership years and the way they were able to leverage that relationship to dominate the WGN TV broadcasts for so long. That gets them a much further reach geographically, which expands their media market.

Steve Stone is a pitcher, not a marketing executive. I mean generally speaking, Chicago a major media market -- in a vaccuum. But in terms of baseball media, both because of negotiated contractual channel exclusivity and because of the way the MLB literally divides territory amongst the teams, the White Sox do not occupy a major media market. That doesn't mean they can't and shouldn't spend money -- but it's disingenuous to suggest that the fact that the Sox are in a big city means that its owners are pocketing a larger amount of money than teams in smaller cities. Baseball, as a product, is a very strange bird, given the monopoly exceptions that have been granted by the government. Here's an illustration that is related: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/23/upshot/24-upshot-baseball.html

I was high on Noesi as well.

I tried pretty hard to convince myself that the Mark Teahen acquisition made sense.

Huzzah!

Yeah, totally. Not sure if you've been following the White Sox much the past five years. But if you were, it would make sense.

No reason to throw him anything else.

Avi is such an easy out. He'll swing at literally anything.

It doesn't -- it just made so little sense I couldn't help but highlight it. I'm guilty of supporting the #narrative in this thread. Sorry.

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-managers-perspective-rick-renteria-on-mentoring-young-players/ "This is my motto: I wish for them to make it, not because of me, but to make it in spite of me. That’s my motto.”