Jake

This is important to mention because the moves that have been universally praised post-2016 didn't come out of thin air. The team clearly was being deliberate from 2013-2016 to try and make sure they'd have some options if the attempts to win ultimately failed. We were unlike any other team that has tried to rebuild in that we had several extremely valuable trade chips when the decision was made to go all in on the rebuilding process. This is great because especially with the new international spending rules, trying to rebuild by tanking is a fool's errand.

Moncada has also said that one of the reasons he was somewhat glad to be traded away from Boston was that it meant he could go back to 2B.

Give him a few years and Jason will be full "you gotta be bleepin' me!"

We have heard murmurs for almost a decade now about KW and Hahn allegedly telling Reinsdorf they thought the best course of action was to tear it down to some degree and instead having the owner encourage/demand they push for nearer-term victories. Who knows for sure about these things, it's impossible to verify. I do believe starting around 2012/2013, Hahn and/or KW did not want to push for a playoff run any longer because they thought it would be futile but Reinsdorf didn't have the appetite yet for anything that looked like intentional losing. 2012: The 2012 season really screwed things up. That team wasn't good, didn't deserve to make the playoffs, but came very close to making it. You could tell what they thought of the team's chances by the way they sought to improve it mid-season: acquiring Orlando Hudson, Kevin Youkilis, Brett Myers, and Francisco Liriano. Even those moves ended up costing us some talent, especially Eduardo Escobar (hindsight is 20/20 of course), but there was a deliberate effort to appear to be trying once that team started winning but also avoiding a real earnest push to improve them. In the end, the team missed the playoffs due mostly to the fact the team was very lucky for much of the season and ultimately the lack of talent caught up with them. 2013: But 2012 put the team in a position in which they could not tear down over that offseason. But they wisely invested nothing important in improving the team, either, ultimately doing nothing but making a half-assed effort at patching the gaping hole at 3B. We flushed $12M down the drain for him, but while I'm sure Reinsdorf still misses the money it had no real impact on the franchise because it wasn't as if Keppinger was supplanting some important young talent at 3B — we even decided to let Conor Gillaspie take a big portion of the reps there back when he looked like he might become a solid MLB regular. We see the writing on the wall and trade Peavy, Rios, and Thornton and in return get some familiar and less familiar faces. post-2013: In the offseason, we traded Hector Santiago and Brandon Jacobs (from the Thornton deal) for Adam Eaton. This is a fantastic trade, in my opinion. The Sox saw that fielding independent metrics for Santiago and sold high. Ultimately, I think Santiago showed that he was one of the rare birds who could consistently out-perform those metrics but he burned out relatively quickly anyway. Eaton made the team better both right away and in the future. We then traded Addison Reed for Matt Davidson. Reed ended up taking some lumps right away with the DBacks but recovered somewhat and then got very good again with the Mets. We lost this deal, but the limited value of a setup guy and the potential upside of Davidson makes me not upset about the deal — not every acquisition pans out. We also sign Jose Abreu, who was old for a prospect but just entering his prime and that deal showed us aggressively trying to infuse this team with young talent. That deal worked out very well too (even if you're disappointed that Abreu isn't "the best hitter on the planet" as some projected). I don't fault the Sox for signing a guy who was going to be good for at least 5 years and probably longer. 2014: I have no complaints up to this point, really. Then...the 2014 season happens and we just don't do anything. The team sucks, we don't really make any trades, it just isn't clear what direction the team is going. There weren't really valuable veterans to trade so it wasn't like the lack of big action was a definitive sign of what we were doing. We had Sale/Quintana in the rotation and were still wishing on Danks. We had Abreu, Eaton, Avi (who gets hurt), Semien, Sanchez, and the last dance of Dayan. We had drafted Rodon and knew he'd be up soon. So we're doing okay but there wasn't really enough talent yet in the system to get us through the rebuild without some other moves. Our best options were to make some bold trades to really tear it down, stand pat and play the waiver wire game while we figure out what we have, or start signing some veteran free agents to try to cobble together a team that could back into the playoffs. post-2014: We went mostly with the signing veterans route: We bring in David Robertson, Zach Duke, Adam LaRoche, Melky Cabrera, Emilio Bonifacio, Matt Albers, and Geo Soto via free agency. Dan Jennings comes in via a nice little trade for Andre Rienzo. I'm of the opinion that sinking your MLB product solely for draft position is a stupid path so I don't care that we spent money on free agents since it didn't cost us any talent (and none of these deals had the potential to really harm the franchise long term if better players were needed). We then made a very stupid trade that I hated the instant it happened: We get Jeff Samardzija in exchange for Marcus Semien, Chris Bassitt, and Josh Phegley. Samardzija had just one season before he would be a free agent while Semien and Bassitt were young players ready to start playing in MLB even if they were likely to need some time to develop (I never liked Phegley so I never cared that we dumped him). In Samardzija we got the league leader in hits, HR, and ER given up. Semien hasn't become a star but instantly became a 2-3 WAR player and someone who would have made that team better right away at any of 3 positions in the infield where we were abysmal all around. Hard to know what to think of losing Bassitt as he was good that year in MLB but also suffered a major arm injury that we may not have been able to prevent. 2015: Bonifacio instantly flopped and we did not have the young talent prepared to take the infield reps we thought we'd get from him (we traded the MLB-ready talent away). Melky was always overrated and was just okay. LaRoche was terrible, almost surely worse than Dunn would have been if we had asked him out of retirement. Relievers were all fine. Soto was fine, though we probably had a little higher hopes. We also learned once and for all that one-time cornerstones Alexei and Danks were no longer MLB players. This team was like the 2005 team except where instead of everything from the offseason going right, everything goes wrong. Our ability to compete was a mirage from the start as our good veteran acquisitions all had better reputations than their production warranted (Melky and Samardzija especially). But again, that I don't care about. The free agents were just money and I don't mind trying to win via some veteran free agent acquisitions; wasting money is a victimless crime. But the net loss associated with getting Samardzija pisses me off to this day. And while I don't mind getting the free agents, the total failures of Bonifacio and LaRoche are not positive signs. post-2015: What's a team to do at this point? We still didn't have much talent in the minors, especially as all of our young infielders (Sanchez, Micah Johnson, and Saladino) who played the previous year had done equally poorly. We had to let Samardzija walk because he played so badly and apparently clashed with our coaches/management. Our tradeable vets were few, but this was a time where you could have considered trading Abreu (but it would have been tough — this was following what we now know to be his worst season, but looked at the time could have been the start of a downward spiral) or Sale, who was a bona fide star. Quintana could have been traded but he was still so young and I think teams were still skeptical of his production. Nobody was going to trade talent for Melky or LaRoche. We just spin the wheels, mostly. We sign Avila and Navarro at catcher. Navarro will suck but it's not the end of the world. We get Brett Lawrie in what I think was actually a pretty good deal (sending Zack Erwin and JB Wendelken). He was under team control and pretty good. He then played adequately for us, especially considering the performances of the players he was replacing. I don't blame the Sox for the kid going nuts in the offseason. The Todd Frazier trade is emblematic of the approach I didn't like with Samardzija, though he wasn't a pending free agent and I wasn't a believer in either Trayce or Micah Johnson. Hindsight tells us we did sell high on those two (Trayce's value would peak about mid-season 2016 with the Dodgers). We knew then that the prize of that trade was Montas and we lucked out that he ended up getting hurt and not really producing up to this point. Perhaps we knew he would get hurt, but I don't know. Ultimately we didn't lose much here but it probably wasn't the right thing to do. In a move not many paid attention to at the time, we'd also get Tommy Kahnle for Yency Almonte in a prospect-for-prospect deal. 2016: I won't say much about this season other than our bargain-basement free agents didn't pan out and we had a major screw-up by trading Fernando Tatis, Jr. for James Shields. It irks me but I also know that most saw him as the second piece in that deal. Time will tell if Tatis Jr. becomes the star that many project, but we gained nothing by having Shields around so there's no way to say that this was smart or good even if it was reasonable to think at the time that Tatis wouldn't pan out like this. This, paired with losing Eduardo Escobar and Chris Devenski in the 2012 midseason deals, shows the perils of making "low risk" trades for veterans when you're trying to half-assedly build up the MLB club. post-2016: The fireworks begin. I don't have serious criticisms of these times. Taking a deeper dive into the previous years makes me feel pretty strongly that the key assets traded at this time were never worth as much in previous years and we basically never wasted an asset of similar value by letting him play out his deal/allowing him to decline and trading him later in those times. The front office had several failures in their attempt to do the impossible thing of brute-forcing those early 2013-2016 teams into contention, but the only important ones were losing Semien/Bassitt/Montas/Tatis in trades. The only one of those guys currently producing in MLB is Semien, so it could be worse. The more I think about it, the more I wonder whether we would have been much better off now had we gone full-bore into a rebuild in 2013. We probably would have traded Sale for less, probably wouldn't have tried to go for a player MLB-ready like Eaton, and traded Quintana for much less. In the span of time post-2013 or so, we also got a number of players/prospects in the draft and international FA and we generally did not trade them away, part of the reason for the depth we have in the system now.

Sure — and Moncada would have been the #1 if he were in the draft at Madrigal's age. He then went on to hit minor league pitching than I expect Madrigal to ever do with a bunch more upside than Madrigal has. The idea that we should imminently start prepping Moncada so that he's ready to move to a new position to make way for Madrigal is crazy to me. The burden of proof is on Madrigal and it'll take him a while to satisfy that standard even if things go as well for him as they possibly could. I don't mean to say that a person shouldn't have optimism for Madrigal at all. But the same approach to young players that would make someone envision Madrigal on the 2019/early 2020 White Sox should also be able to envision an All-Star version of Moncada. It's like people can't bear to see a guy play just adequately with their own eyes, it ruins their ability to project anything better.

I find the pairing of excessive pessimism about Moncada on the basis of just okay MLB performance and excessive optimism about Madrigal based on great college performance to be very odd.

Probably wasn't prominent in their decisionmaking but I'm glad Danish was able to come in, get the big out, and then get replaced with no chance he blows the game.

Ricky going to send out a different SS next inning? #grinderrules

B-U-S-T

Can anyone tell me where Tito Polo disappeared to? Been on DL for a while now.

Something tells me that the Bulls will be more fun to watch in general, but possibly more frustrating to watch at the end of games where being able to play tough D really matters and you need somebody who can score even when everyone knows he's going to take a shot.

There's nothing wrong with saying that Moncada either... 1. Takes so many called third strikes because his eye is not as good as we would like to think — that is, his ability to take such close pitches isn't just because he has some amazing ability to make fine distinctions in pitch location but because he takes a lot of pitches and doesn't realize these pitches are close. or 2. Needs to use his superb batting eye to know that some pitches are balls but have 25-50% chance to be called a strike so with 2 strikes, have to be swung at even if defensively. In other words, he needs to adjust his mental approach with 2 strikes. What is interesting about his issue w/ called third strikes is it suggests that while has some trouble making contact, his K% could fairly easily fall into the typical range if he adjusts his mental approach a bit...even if his contact ability doesn't change.

Tangentially related: Have there been proposals to reforming the system governing control of minor league players that could potentially alleviate this problem? I know you could have everything timed from draft/signing date, or maybe age, but I've always been interested in whether there's a good way to do it that rewards teams for developing players without either incentivizing early or delayed call-ups.

FWIW the thing that pushes Schwarber's D into the positive is the arm component, which is the hardest part to keep afloat in the long haul as runners wise up. And IMO Statcast has the best method for grading outfielders on their ability to catch the ball. It does not make Schwarber look good at all. This is of course an apples to oranges comparison because we know Yoan Moncada would be a better LF than Kyle Schwarber. And is Yoan getting better or worse on defense? It's hard to say quantitatively. What I will say is he had a run of bad errors that coincided with the depths of his batting slump. I think those kinds of things are the most easily corrected class of fielding problems. His UZR range component has been consistently good and I believe that to be the hardest thing to improve for an infielder — it's kind of like trying to get a guy to run faster. His double play component of both UZR and DRS has improved. I see some upside for an above average defender in Yoan, perhaps even better than that. He so far has struggled with committing errors, so the downside is that he's below average. I tend to think he'll be about average when it all washes out as he probably doesn't have the hands to avoid some simple errors but has the athleticism and arm strength to make up for it with good plays. Last, the idea that Yoan is presently *bad* overall is nonsense. If this Yoan Moncada is all he'll ever be, he's a middle of the road MLB player and could play up in a platoon in the right roster configuration. He's already better than Gordon Beckham ever was at 2B. By Sox standards, that means he has 4-6 seasons ahead of him before we close the books.

One of the secrets to this process is that once you're pretty sure you have a few sure things produced by your system/early rebuild trades, you go out and buy some veterans to round things out.

As has been said, the extent to which folks are penciling Nick Madrigal into the lineup and beyond is the kind of thinking that will generally set the stage for disappointment. I don't take it as a given at all that he'll even be a MLB player. I'd like to see him hit the pitching in the low minors first, preferably. A lot of stuff can happen between now and whenever he finds his way to AAA.

Am I the only one not seeing the aforementioned article?

Lot of straw arguments going on in here. It's not that you expect a player to magically become worse while dominating AAA. The question is *when* will he be reaching his potential in MLB. A guy with an 1.100 OPS in AAA is probably not getting more prepared to hit MLB pitching while he's in AAA. So long as that is true, you're not just delaying the time when he becomes a free agent but also the time when he's a player that's going to carry your team. Maybe he's going to be great as soon as he is called up, but maybe he'll need a year or two or three. While some have written off Moncada already, it's very plausible that by this time next year he's setting the world on fire and we'll be glad that we have him ready to go in mid-2019 rather than being right in the middle of taking his lumps at that point. As for the specific situation with Eloy, the more the Sox bide their time the less sense it makes to call him up. That being said, I think with all else being equal he could benefit particularly by having a couple months of MLB experience and then an offseason to deal with whatever happens in those 2 months. He can get that experience and then has an extended time to see what adjustments he has to make, adjustments that may be hard to implement in the middle of his rookie season. Depending on what the Sox see, it can also help them in their planning with regard to player acquisition to see just how ready he is.

Kopech worked out of trouble fairly nicely there

Austin Meadows to me is more comparable to an advanced version of Blake Rutherford

The Sox managed to keep their only HOF in living memory around right up to the point they didn't want him anymore and decided instead to replace him with a younger HOF player. If Eloy is going to be Frank Thomas level of good, I think the Sox will have as good of a chance as anybody to keep him around.

I'd venture to guess that if he's willing to grind it out in AAA for the indefinite future, he might find himself in the right place at the right time to pick up those service days. The fact that he's at least a solid defensive CF who can run makes him a guy a team can rely on for a limited role when there's an injury.

I'll say this: I don't think it's remotely unreasonable to say that Eloy is better prepared to hit MLB pitching than Yoan was at this point a year ago.

I always thought it was next to impossible to keep the ratio both steady enough and low enough, but that might be something I heard from some gym dopers.

So the following is something different/less stringent than what you're talking about? from https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/mlb-introduces-random-unannounced-in-season-hgh-testing/