Jake

He had 4.2 WAR in 2017, which looked a lot at the time like he had put things together. Wouldn't surprise me at all if he returned to similar form.

If Manny signs with the Sox, five years from now people will remember the Sox as the mystery team.

His velocity was plummeting

I think this will make MLB teams much less likely to reach agreements like this ever again.

Moving any player on the MLB roster in anticipation of Madrigal's arrival is nuts. Let's see the kid crack a .400 slugging with wood bats before we move the superior prospect to a new position.

I've been seeing plenty of positive attention for the Sox on MLBN lately.

Would love to see Cuba amnesty these defectors so they can come home and see their families.

This should be good for everyone. Players are at much less risk and can keep more of their money. Great players will stick around Cuba at least until their age 25 season and when they leave, their teams will get a big payoff from MLB.

Both the Cubs and Astros had the added incentive of having more allowable spending on international prospects. The new CBA now gives all teams the same amount* to spend. The Astros built quite a bit from the draft, but as I've mentioned a few times on here the Cubs championship team was basically Kris Bryant plus a mixture of free agents, trade acquisitions, and players drafted before they started tanking. Bigger bonus pool in the draft is nice, but it can only be useful if you're getting a player who doesn't deserve to be drafted where you pick him with your high pick(s). *small-market teams can spend slightly more, but it is not related to record

There are very few benefits to tanking at this point. All you get for it anymore is draft position, which is not very important in baseball. Trading short-term assets for long-term assets and not wasting money can be sensible, but in general there's no good reason for a team to try to be bad just for the sake of losing.

If you were doing something like that, why not just sign Dozier to play 3B? He's not a great defender and is too old for us to care about his long-term value.

I didn't see rabbit's tweets as speaking from some kind of insider knowledge of our hopelessness but just someone frustrated with the notion that the Sox are going to be on some kind of equal footing with the Yankees/Dodgers/couple others in the pursuit of these big fish.

It's like the Sox only target catchers whose value is only high if you ignore the influence of framing

I think it's good to have an alternate way to get into the HoF other than the baseball writers' voting. I wouldn't have put Harold in. I also recognize that Harold played in an era in which players were generally evaluated in different ways than they are now: Batting average and RBIs were king. I suspect part of the reason there are some people so ardently in his corner is they feel that if Harold played in a different era, he had the bat talent to change his game in a way to suit the new incentive structure.

I'm sure we've checked on the price. Makes more sense for us to look at him as a free agent two years from now as a final piece for our contending core

Shields was in the midst of a downward trend in his velocity and it woudln't surprise me at all if they withheld information about him dealing with soreness, dead arm, etc. even if it never really developed into a full-blown injury.

Since becoming a full-time MLBer, he's put up WAR numbers of 1.3, 1.5, 0.3, 4.0, and 1.6. These are all in not quite full time roles (a little 500 PAs each year). How much extra money does the 4 WAR season get him over and above what a 1.5-ish player in his prime usually gets? It's hard to know. You could also make an argument for a guy who plays multiple positions being more valuable than the numbers tell you because you can deploy him in a way that he's usually filling in for your weakest link every time he plays. I wouldn't mind having him around, but it's hard to see why the Sox would value him more than a team that's more clearly in contention right now. It also begs the question of where we would plan to play him. We're weaker in the corner OF than we are at 3B (and he seems to be a better outfield defender than infielder), but if a couple things go right we could end up weaker at 3B than the corner outfield. In that sense, he can be pretty useful because you're not locked into a guy that plays a position where he might get pushed out by a prospect over the life of the contract.

You're pretty much going to keep pitching him unless it looks like continuing to do so is actively hurting his development. I don't see any way we end up with enough rotation options this year that we would pull him from the rotation for being merely pretty bad.

The upshot is by this metric, almost every single White Sox batter was overrated by popular alternatives. I wonder if this might have something to do with strength of schedule.

More important, why did we think it would be beneficial to push him so quickly through the minors? These probably have the same cause, but we could easily have picked him and put him on the typical prospect path and he may well have improved against easier competition.

All else being equal, I'd be more inclined to see what Moncada could do in CF. Of course, that's a hell of an experiment to try at the MLB level and I'm sure he'd be more likely to resist it. That being said, there's no reason to be considering any move at this point.

They make a pretty compelling case for why DRC+ outperforms wRC+ at both predicting future results *and* comporting better with the past results. So far I've yet to see a compelling counterargument to DRC+ other than that you'll never be able to calculate it in your head. Much less sensitive to extreme events, changes in the run environment (like the changing ball), and has clever ways to adjust for quality of opponent to avoid over-weighting strange results. I also really appreciate the fact they're publishing measures of uncertainty for DRC+, so you can see how much noise is built in. There's no easily calculated or principled way to do this for wRC+ or traditional statistics, which makes it hard to know how much to read into the number for each player.

To me upside means he could be a really good player; the upside is what he has long been. From 2012–2017, his worst season by WAR was 3.6. In that time, the White Sox have only had 7 player-seasons that good or better. None, as I'm sure you know, were by a 3B. If Seager can return to his previous worst performance, making him one of the best handful of 3B around, he'd be well worth the money. Winning these types of deals obviously requires you to be more optimistic and more correct about the players' future performance. I certainly wouldn't put too much value on the opinion of those geniuses in Seattle. As a side note about Moncada to 3B, I think that's nuts, especially for some short-term veteran. Moncada really isn't that bad defensively at 2B and his weakness there (his hands) is going to be magnified at 3B while one of his strengths (range) isn't well-utilized there. His arm would play up at 3B but he'd also be vulnerable to footwork problems that he's probably not going to pick up too quickly.

I haven't scoured the tape to see if there's something special about his regression last year that's likely to persist into the future, but with that said this is the kind of calculated risk the Sox are in a really good position to take. There's nobody pushing him at 3B and our payroll could sustain the wasted money if he keeps struggling. He's not young but not super old either. If you can get him for nothing but the cost of his contract, seems to me like a move with some serious upside.

I would gladly take Seager and I would assume we'd have to send some prospect value back to get him.