OmarComing25

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Sep 26, 2015 -> 05:03 PM) See, this thinking drives me completely batty because this is the thinking of the White Sox front office and it's so much the thinking of a losing organization. All you've got is a list of "excuses" even if you don't want to call them that. "Oh if LaRoche had kept this up", "If Sale had kept this up", "we're so close we're right there". Every single losing organization can say stuff like that. They're still losing organizations. But you know what? The winning organizations could say that too, but they don't. Put the Cardinals in that same mode. How many excuses could the Cardinals make this season? "Wainright missed almost the whole year. Holliday, our best hitter, was out for more than 1/2 the year. Molina has hit the DL. Adams has missed most of the year. Peralta has put up a .626 OPS the 2nd half. Yadier Molina has a .660 OPS on the season - that's his worst in 5 years. I could keep going if I wanted. Winning organizations put together rosters that can take that. Losing organizations give a list of all the bad things that happened and pretend "oh if a few of those were different we'd be right there". Some things always go wrong! Especially if you're buying guys who are in their mid to late 30s. Play the excuse game the other way with the white sox and you can make them seem awfully lucky. In 2014, Abreu, Sale, Garcia, and Eaton all hit the DL. Nate Jones was out for the whole year. This year we've been remarkably healthy, out of that group the only thing resembling the DL was Sale missing 1 start. Eaton looked like an injury prone player last offseason and he's been almost 100% healthy. We've gotten great stints from Soto and Trayce Thompson that no one would have expected. How on Earth did the White Sox get that lucky? No one would have ever guessed all those positive things could happen. The Cardinals could make excuses like that. Their excuses put ours to shame if they wanted to make them. Instead they went out and won >62% of their games and put away the only division in baseball that has 3 playoff teams with little stress. That's the difference between a winning and a losing organization and we're the latter. First of all you're comparing us to the best organization in the MLB, yeah the Cardinals are very good at developing talent. Secondly, Nate Jones was hurt most of the year, as was Albers, and Sale got off to a rough start due to a lack of Spring Training, but I'll give you the breaks we've had on health. That's about it for breaks though. Literally everyone had a massive drop-off from 2014 except for Q, Eaton, Danks and a couple bullpen guys. I get there were risks of guys not repeating those years but there was a HUGE drop-off from almost all of them. Very few guys performed how they were projected to do, and the projections were pretty pessimistic as it was. I'm not trying to make excuses, I'm pointing out that the difference between the White Sox this year and contention is not as large as people are making it out to be. I still think 2016 should be a rebuilding year, and there's still a lot of work to do, I just don't see the reason for extreme pessimism like so many have here.

Meh, it's their first playoff birth in 7 years.

Danks has been very good against good teams this year (and last year too). It's the bad teams he sucks against.

QUOTE (Swingandalongonetoleft @ Sep 26, 2015 -> 03:57 PM) Hope Danks does well. There is a litany of names on this roster that are a bigger reason this year is the way it is than JD. He's been fine as a 5th starter.

Abreu 97 RBI on the year.

Nah Frazier isn't worth it. His bat has disappeared since the All-Star Break, he'll be 30 next year and the Reds would want a ransom for him.

Road team has won the last 5 games between the Cubs and Pirates. Maybe having homefield advantage isn't a good thing.

Hell, you don't even have to go back to 2014. LaRoche had a .760 OPS entering June. He keeps that pace the rest of the year, Samardzija doesn't completely fall apart after the deadline, and Sale repeats his first half ERA, there's a good chance we make the playoffs. And again, a 10-game improvement really isn't that much in baseball, that's turning 5 of your losses over 162 games into wins. The difference isn't as big as it might seem. My point is that we were a couple breaks away from a playoff berth even this year, yet a lot of posters here act like the situation is completely hopeless.

The way some Sox fans talk you'd think we're on pace to lose 100 games this season. If two of LaRoche, Melky, and Alexei just repeated their 2014 seasons, we'd be right there for a playoff spot this year. Throw in one of Samardzija and Sale coming even kind of close to their 2014 ERAs and we probably win the second wildcard. The difference between 76 wins and 88-89 wins is really not that much in baseball, teams make that kind of jump every year, and we have done it several times in the last decade. All it takes is a couple breaks going your way.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Sep 25, 2015 -> 09:50 PM) Joe Borchard for Matt Thornton Loiaza for Contreras Jon Garland trade too

Seems like Rodon's getting squeezed a little bit.

Holy s*** Trayce. Hell of a play!

Dumb play by Alexei but dumber play by the fielder saves him.

That looked painful

QUOTE (nitetrain8601 @ Sep 25, 2015 -> 06:43 PM) Has he showed vast improvement from one year to the next? Not really. In fact, you can argue his defense has gotten worse. Even if he's peaked he'll be easily worth his contract. But his power numbers and baserunning value are significantly better than last year.

A lot of money comes off the books after next year. Get a few value signings/trades this offseason (lotto tickets and such), let some of the young guys play, and look to 2017 to compete when guys like Anderson and Fulmer are hopefully ready. Don't expect to be contenders, but if things go well and a few guys rebound or break-out we could have a year like 2008 while not sacrificing any pieces for 2017.

QUOTE (Mike F. @ Sep 25, 2015 -> 06:34 PM) Isn't that what the Sox tried to do this year, and the year before that, and the year before that? We all know how that plan worked out. No, the Sox didn't try to rebuild this season. Rebuilding teams don't spend all that money in free agency or trade away 4 young players for a guy in his walk year. 2014 was the only year they really tried that, and the results were as expected.

Another thing to consider is that there's a difference between scorched-earth rebuilding and general rebuilding. You can rebuild without blowing everything up, which is what I think we should do for next season. It doesn't have to be one extreme or the other.

With how the Yankees lit up Rodon last time they faced him, this is a pretty big start for him.

QUOTE (Mike F. @ Sep 25, 2015 -> 05:57 PM) Yes. That's why I'm not a huge fan of sabermetric statistics. They're so subjective. Stats like wins, losses, walks, strikeouts, ERA, K/BB ratio, etc are concrete and will always be the same no matter that website you're on. Sabermetric stats aren't. I guess I'm more of a traditionalist myself, but I just can't get behind supporting sabermetric stats until there is a clear way to make and evaluate them without there being a gray area. It's baseball, there's more variance and randomness in this sport than any other (which makes it by far the most difficult sport to bet on). There will never not be a gray area, but sabremetrics has come a long way in being able to explain some of that gray area. Those stats you listed might stay the same on every site you're on, but there's a huge gray area in how baseball players come to get many of those stats. A 3.50 ERA for one pitcher is not the same as a 3.50 ERA for another pitcher, there's a lot of gray in how each pitcher reached that number.

QUOTE (nitetrain8601 @ Sep 25, 2015 -> 05:57 PM) Makes perfect sense, especially if you think Eaton has peaked, which I do. I don't like him long term for this team unless we decide to sign a bunch of boppers. Eaton has very good minor league numbers too, it's not like he's come out of nowhere. I'm not sure why you think he's peaked.

QUOTE (nitetrain8601 @ Sep 25, 2015 -> 05:40 PM) Sorry, I rather have Trayce out there full time and see him learn the ropes. Eaton is a nice player to have, but is the type if player you should dump if you have a bad team. I'd trade him in a package. That makes zero sense.

But what if we make the playoffs?

Castro has been great the past month. No one wanted him at the trade deadline, but now the Cubs might be able to find a taker for him in the off-season.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Sep 25, 2015 -> 03:45 PM) Actually they both take into account defense but they do so in different ways. It's really a remarkable difference and I've been struggling to explain it since it was pointed out last month - the White Sox pitchers are vastly worse on Baseball Reference WAR than in Fangraphs WAR while the defense it's the opposite. This isn't just the defense, as other poor defensive teams don't show the same effect, it is something unique to the 2015 white sox. Somehow they're giving up a ton more hits and runs than you'd expect for a team giving up as few walks and getting as many strikeouts as they have. Baseball-Reference generally is more "what actually happens on the field" while fangraphs is thought of more as "what should have happened", so you could say that they're just getting unlucky, but that's unbelievable for an entire staff for an entire season to me - that seems like something far more systematic. They're giving up more hits than they should. Some of my guesses are "poor defensive positioning", or "Pitchers that are really bad at pitching to their defense and are really stubborn" but honestly I'm still waiting for a good explanation. I thought Fangraphs more or less ignored defense, because it assumes pitchers have no control over balls in play. To address your second point though, our whole staff isn't getting unlucky, Sale and Samardzija have FIPs much better than their ERAs (though Sale's gap is closing with all the bombs he's been giving up lately). However Rodon, Quintana, and Danks have relatively very little differences (Quintana is at 0.27, Danks and Rodon are at 0.02). Our bullpen is actually outperforming its FIP (3.64 ERA, 3.85 FIP), so you could actually argue that our relievers have been lucky. But an entire staff could very well get "unlucky" if the defense is s*** in terms of underperforming their peripherals.