What is our organizational offensive philosophy?

[reiks12]

Do we even have one? I feel like you can look at a team like the Reds and figure it out easily. Watching about 5 games of the Reds (my new NL team) it stuck out easily: Aggression on contact and on the basepaths. The Rays are patient and get the ball in the air. Same with the Giants. Texas built their offense on mashing the ball for power. Cleveland has a bad offense but you can see what they are building which is contact and speed. We saw how the Marlins are building around Arraez.

What did Hahn do? In 2020 I thought it was EV as everyone in the lineup DESTROYED the ball. I thought with an increase in LA we would see what Rangers fans are currently, except more. Why didnt they stick to this philosophy?

The 2023 Sox just look so lost. There doesnt appear to be any goal or philosophy. What is this offense supposed to be?

 

[Chisoxfn]

2 hours ago, reiks12 said:

Do we even have one? I feel like you can look at a team like the Reds and figure it out easily. Watching about 5 games of the Reds (my new NL team) it stuck out easily: Aggression on contact and on the basepaths. The Rays are patient and get the ball in the air. Same with the Giants. Texas built their offense on mashing the ball for power. Cleveland has a bad offense but you can see what they are building which is contact and speed. We saw how the Marlins are building around Arraez.

What did Hahn do? In 2020 I thought it was EV as everyone in the lineup DESTROYED the ball. I thought with an increase in LA we would see what Rangers fans are currently, except more. Why didnt they stick to this philosophy?

The 2023 Sox just look so lost. There doesnt appear to be any goal or philosophy. What is this offense supposed to be?

 

Mediocrity and making excuses. 

[Greg Hibbard]

“Passable” AAAA ML players for cheap

[Chicago White Sox]

12 hours ago, reiks12 said:

Do we even have one? I feel like you can look at a team like the Reds and figure it out easily. Watching about 5 games of the Reds (my new NL team) it stuck out easily: Aggression on contact and on the basepaths. The Rays are patient and get the ball in the air. Same with the Giants. Texas built their offense on mashing the ball for power. Cleveland has a bad offense but you can see what they are building which is contact and speed. We saw how the Marlins are building around Arraez.

What did Hahn do? In 2020 I thought it was EV as everyone in the lineup DESTROYED the ball. I thought with an increase in LA we would see what Rangers fans are currently, except more. Why didnt they stick to this philosophy?

The 2023 Sox just look so lost. There doesnt appear to be any goal or philosophy. What is this offense supposed to be?

 

Rick Hahn has proven time & time again he doesn’t know how to build a quality baseball organization.  For the bulk of his tenure, minor leaguers either had to learn on their own and/or had different voices at different levels teaching them different things.  There was no common philosophy from top to bottom.  So it should not be surprising that guys come up underdeveloped and do not reflect the characteristics of some sort of central vision of how win at baseball.  Jerry is  a complete joke when it comes to signing premium free agents and maintaining a culture of accountability, but Hahn is an incompetent baseball executive who has shown that the rest of modern baseball is well ahead of him strategically.

[The Kids Can Play]

Of course the White Sox do not have a plan. Whatever plan they have is worthless. To have a plan, means the FO knew exactly the type of players to scout, draft and develop or trade for, and sign as a free agents...for their specific blueprint on what constitutes a winning playoff roster.

Once these good teams have those players on the roster, they have a manager and coaching staff that make sure the plan is implemented correctly and consistently. 

Here are three teams that have a strong plan relative to what they think win games, relative to the Sox lack of a plan:

Rays - 53-27 best record in ML. HR's 122 - 3rd, - OBP - .339 - 3rd

Braves - 49-27 - 2nd best record in ML - HR's 138 - 1st, - OBP - .340 - Tied for 1st

Rangers - 47-29 - 3rd best record in ML - HR's 101 8th, - OPP - .340 - Tied for 1st

White Sox - 33-45 - 25th best record in ML - HR's - 16th, - OBP - .292 - 30th

We can add all other types of metrics, but the bottom line is, the better teams have a detailed plan in how they structure their roster. The crap teams like the Sox have no plan. If the crap teams like the Sox actually have a so called plan...then that plan is seriously flawed and obsolete.

[Lip Man 1]

Their plan is throw s%*# at the wall and "hope" something works out.

Last I looked "hope" is not a strategy. 

 

Edited June 25, 2023 by Lip Man 1

[soxfaninfl]

‘See ball. Swing at ball. Try make it go far.’ - baseball fundamentals by Mongo.

[Y2Jimmy0]

They “talk” about controlling the strike zone but everything is based on swinging. I think that’s the core problem. They focus more on swinging at good pitches than not swinging at bad ones. It hasn’t worked. The Orioles and others teach swing decisions. For instance, on a 2-0 count, if a hitter in the minors swings at an outside slider and hits a single, the Orioles would call that a negative swing decision. I’m not so sure the White Sox would. Way too results oriented. 

[The Kids Can Play]

[hankchifan]

16 hours ago, reiks12 said:

Do we even have one? I feel like you can look at a team like the Reds and figure it out easily. Watching about 5 games of the Reds (my new NL team) it stuck out easily: Aggression on contact and on the basepaths. The Rays are patient and get the ball in the air. Same with the Giants. Texas built their offense on mashing the ball for power. Cleveland has a bad offense but you can see what they are building which is contact and speed. We saw how the Marlins are building around Arraez.

What did Hahn do? In 2020 I thought it was EV as everyone in the lineup DESTROYED the ball. I thought with an increase in LA we would see what Rangers fans are currently, except more. Why didnt they stick to this philosophy?

The 2023 Sox just look so lost. There doesnt appear to be any goal or philosophy. What is this offense supposed to be?

 

The philosophy looks to me is to swing away early in the counts , and swing for the fences as often as possible.  Unfortunately,we don’t have many contact hitters or consistent sluggers.  Need to change philosophy to more patience at the plate and some small ball leading to homers with men and not just solo homers. IMO. 

[South Side Hit Men]

Let Robert Junior hit home runs and hope for the best.

[nrockway]

It seems like there's no consistent idea but I'd be wary about thinking the Giants or Reds are some organization to model. Reds are hot now and Elly might end up being the best infielder in the game, but it's basically just luck and paying a bunch of 16-year-old Dominicans $10,000 and hopefully one of them turns out. Same thing with the Rangers, I'm getting 2021 Sox vibes from them. We'll see. 

I still can't get over that quote from Robert along the lines of "I don't know what pitches the pitcher throws, just how hard he throws" and it really shows that everyone on the team is completely lost at the plate unless they're facing a pitcher they've gone up against 1000 times. There are good hitters on this team but are immediately at a disadvantage due to, what I assume, is a 'philosophy' that doesn't prioritize scouting MLB teams and relaying that information to the players. I think the offense improves dramatically if these guys could learn to take a pitch or have some trivial understanding of 'this guy is probably going to throw a slider out of the zone. don't swing at it'. 

[Lip Man 1]

16 minutes ago, nrockway said:

It seems like there's no consistent idea but I'd be wary about thinking the Giants or Reds are some organization to model. Reds are hot now and Elly might end up being the best infielder in the game, but it's basically just luck and paying a bunch of 16-year-old Dominicans $10,000 and hopefully one of them turns out. Same thing with the Rangers, I'm getting 2021 Sox vibes from them. We'll see. 

I still can't get over that quote from Robert along the lines of "I don't know what pitches the pitcher throws, just how hard he throws" and it really shows that everyone on the team is completely lost at the plate unless they're facing a pitcher they've gone up against 1000 times. There are good hitters on this team but are immediately at a disadvantage due to, what I assume, is a 'philosophy' that doesn't prioritize scouting MLB teams and relaying that information to the players. I think the offense improves dramatically if these guys could learn to take a pitch or have some trivial understanding of 'this guy is probably going to throw a slider out of the zone. don't swing at it'. 

Hell Robert didn't even know the name of his hitting coach. What does that tell you about how much interaction there is?

[GreenSox]

Given that this team has consistently been  in the bottom tier of OBP for most of this century, i don't think I'm going out on a limb to say that the org's philosophy is to be extremely aggressive; taking pitches is not prioritized.

[shago]

15 hours ago, Lip Man 1 said:

Hell Robert didn't even know the name of his hitting coach. What does that tell you about how much interaction there is?

To: White Sox coaching staff:

"What exactly is it you'd say ya *do* here?"

- The Bobs

 

[caulfield12]

16 hours ago, Lip Man 1 said:

Hell Robert didn't even know the name of his hitting coach. What does that tell you about how much interaction there is?

Montoyo... the bench coach, too

[Quin]

[bmags]

My Take:

- Hahn hired Steverson and in typical white sox thought, they figured bringing in 1 guy from oakland and just giving him plenty of room to operate but no resources he'd turn the org into a walk machine Hahn wanted.

- Steverson tried to build an organizational approach to hitting and building out more selectivity, but most of our farm systems were run as independent fiefdoms where playing time was all they offered. This took a while to set up.

- Virtually our entire minors was wiped clean and restocked in 2017 onward.

- During that time of 2017-2019, I feel like you did hear more pressure for players like Jimenez and Robert to up their walk rates while in minors. 

- The sox version now of trying to have a scouting and pd team in sync is hostetler drafting lots of unathletic college seniors with great K:BB ratios.

- The players start to make majors, and Steverson has great success turning a walk-minded player like Moncada to find his groove. Anderson wins batting crown. 

- But the crown jewel coming up is Robert, and he had many periods where it looked like he had never seen a baseball at bat per at bat. Meanwhile in AAA their hitting coach made great strides in improving his contact rate. I'm sure around the same time Hahn's crack team of analysts were like "oh it's K-rate that matters, not walk rate! Check out this model that just shows the 2017 houston astros getting lower k rate guys!" and they fired steverson and went with Menechino.

- I swear from 2020 onward in the minors it was like power + contact was all that mattered, There was zero progress being made in walk rates. That's why Montgomery sticks out like a sore thumb, it was just seemingly a case of a player willing himself through this trash org.

I wrote this mainly because I think this is a nice case of showing how hahn thinks he is doing baseball but does it really poorly. Even as he does an outside hire, he basically expects them to be a "Great Man" who fixes org. Then when he tries to do "synergy org" with scouting and player dev, they do it in the most obvious and embarrassing way possible.

Then they abandon it, then again. Not even sure there is one now. But it is crazy.

Look at the stats for our AA affiliate vs Tampas. For players with at least 100 PAs, the Montgomery Biscuits have 7 players over .340 obp. The Birmingham barons have 3. And our max is .350 and theirs has like .430.