WestEddy

But it's a bar, nonetheless. My belief is that KW/Hahn had competing philosophies that caused chaos. Hahn may have had some good organizational ideas or instincts, but KW hated his guys, and Hahn eventually gave up (my take). I don't think Nick Hostetler was an idiot. Their drafts were never panned by the experts. They took first rounders in the first round, and picked up guys who were consensus first rounders in subsequent rounds. I can't imagine they regularly drafted guys who were untalented, and then taught them how to suck worse. That's on development. If they just drafted tools and fundamentals guys, they should have had a system spitting out Zach Remillards and Jimmy Lamberts. But they didn't. Nobody can pin point whether amateur scouting sucks, international scouting sucks, or player development sucks. Maybe that's a result of nobody having defined responsibilities for implementing an actual program. Some people would say "it all sucks, fire everybody". I guess that's why a guy putting order to an organization doesn't register as a positive with them. I have no idea if Chris Getz is a Kellogg Business school darling who is going to set the organization straight. But any order is a step in the right direction. Maybe JR shuffles off in a couple, the team sells, and there's at least a semblance of order for the new guy to work with. In which case, I don't get the complaints about Getz being inexperienced. It either matters that he's run a couple of front offices previous to this one, or it doesn't. I've worked for guys who embrace the chaos, then when somebody comes along who can alphabetize the files, they get bored and mess it all up, again by switching jobs on everyone. Maybe that's what Reinsdorf is, and it works for him in certain ways. But that's why Getz deserves the benefit of the doubt. One voice vs. two. Bringing in outside voices rather than guys from within. He's already doing things everybody was screaming for.

This is probably the funniest part of all these glum rants. Chris Getz has pretty much spent his life in baseball. He's worked in a front office for 9 years. I think it should be a rule that anybody who complains that Chris Getz has no experience to run a front office should also lay out their own baseball resume.

The A's model seems to be lose for 4-5 seasons, win for 2. Starting in 2008, the Rays had 6 winning, 4 losing, and are on 6 winning, again.

If they have a regular White Sox dude, he sure doesn't post with any regularity.

If this was the old regime, I'd guess he wasn't enough of a "grinder" for KW's taste. Now with Bannister in the fold, I'd imagine they did thorough analysis.

I only want The Athletic for Keith Law's draft analysis, and the odd article I click on from Twitter. I never read Baseball America when I got the digital copy. It used to be just for the lists, but now everyone has top 10 prospect lists, and MLB basically took that away from everyone with theirs.

Patino was out of options, so he would have to be carried on the 26-man until he played his way off of it, then DFAed.

Why is everyone assuming that you can't trade pitching prospects for positional prospects? If one team is offering 3-60 grade prospects and they're pitchers, I'd take that over 1-55 grade and 2-50 grade positional players.

I just clicked on a link, and there was a red button at the top of their page, offering $1 a month for a year. I thought this might be of interest to the community. Please feel free to delete if this is just clutter.

It's weird that everybody accepts that the White Sox could cut at least 8 dudes off the 40-man without losing anything, but once they get DFAed, "oh anyone but that one guy!!"

Not if you believe the press leaks. It has been said repeatedly that the Sox will wait for the few major free agents to come off the board until they begin to seriously consider offers. We can also surmise that the delay is because teams just keep bidding higher and higher.

If Cease's 2023 mirrored his 2022, we'd be talking about an even bigger haul. Cease has an absolute range of value. Other teams bank on their staff being able to keep him in the upper part of that range, while the lower part is still an above average major league pitcher.

I'm guessing Cincinnati doesn't see India as a "change of scenery" candidate. A deal for Cease would have to be all prospects, lest Cin starts pretending India's an All-Star.

Now you can write fan mail to Ohtani and Yamamoto to give money to solve LA homelessness. See how much power you have?

If the Orioles were doing the Rays' plan, they would have made a sneaky move with Santander for a starter, somewhere, and promote one of their savages to play outfield.

I'm guessing that people who run billion dollar corporations have a plan, and aren't shaken to their foundation when another company acquires a hot asset. It probably goes something like: plan A: get Yamamoto plan B: snell, monty plan C; cease, 3 or 4 other names bandied about, make other trade of lesser starter, replace a prospect plan D; something else plan E: hug prospects

Lynn and Grandal were gets, at the time. The propeller-head stat-geeks loved Grandal almost as much as they loved Tyler Flowers' framing. And yes, most free agent signings don't turn out to have every year be an MVP season. Adding Wheeler and Harper to Lynn and Grandal would have been great. (Keuchel was a fallback after Wheeler's wife chose Philly, as I remember.) I'm guessing JR or KW pulled the plug on Harper.

Now Yamamoto's going to have to go to some pro shop and buy his own Rams' jersey with his name on it.

It's probably not them, it's Getz. He's the one creating the wait for Yamamoto to shake out so he has a clearer set of bidders.

I'm guessing Rick Hahn stopped by the offices to say hi at an appropriate interval after being let go, to tell Getz about this one clause in this one contract he forgot to put in the system calendar.

Elijah Evans wrote an article about possible trade packages for Cease. I think he also crowd-sourced on Twitter, a bit. https://www.justbaseball.com/mlb/the-five-best-dylan-cease-mock-trades-for-the-chicago-white-sox/ If you don't want to read the whole thing, here's his 5 teams (he doesn't think the Dodgers will pursue Cease):

Whenever I see that someone is from Chicago, I immediately Wiki them to see where they were born or grew up. She's vaguely, 'north side'. I want street addresses and pictures, dammit!!

Or at least something from Jones/Solometo/Chandler. The article seems like "let's send a bunch of our projects for the top trade piece on the market". I also have a feeling about Pittsburgh. We played the same game with Quintana. Austin Meadows and Mitch Keller were the headliners being bandied about. The interest never went beyond writers throwing out names.

MLB seems to have dropped their prospects link off of the main menu. You have to go to teams/players to back into the top 100. https://www.mlb.com/prospects/pirates/ https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/PIT/2023.shtml

Something called The Wrightway Sports Network wrote an article just throwing names against the wall. He seems to be focused on guys who already have pitched in the bigs and started their clocks. I don't know the Pirates' system, but some of the names thrown around (by some podcast nobody) seem to be big leaguers (Connor Joe?), who I can't imagine Getz being interested in. https://twsn.net/2023/12/the-pittsburgh-pirates-need-to-trade-for-dylan-cease