Jake

Don't feel like digging it up but Law is down on Zavala, saying he got some negative reports on the kid's level of effort/focus and has gotten more worried about his propensity to whiff.

Bold statement I know, but chances are the Sox are projecting some of the players involved differently than we are.

Iriarte made a few relief appearances right after he was promoted last year and finished the season how he began, as a starter. I suspect the relief appearances were more about load management than anything else.

Thorpe led minor league starters in swinging strike rate last season so I think I'll wait to see somebody actually hit him before I freak out about poorly sourced reports on his current velocity.

Seems like Thorpe has a not-unreasonable chance to outperform Cease as soon as this season. The other guys are riskier although you'd expect Iriarte to at least reach the MLB bullpen if reasonably healthy. Zavala more of a lottery ticket but interesting. Wilson is a weird add although he probably makes the games more watchable this year. He may be flipped at the deadline for something useful. Thorpe being basically ready for MLB with high-ceiling is a lot of upside in my view: up to 7 years of production.

What is the source of the 5 players claim?

Not going to bother finding the source, but I saw some research that IIRC was presented at SABR last year showing that spring training stats are useful — your projections will be more accurate if you incorporate spring training stats into your models. The main issue with spring training is sample size, so of course you don't want to conclude too much from 25 at bats or whatever it may be. On the team level, you do have a bigger sample size although it's cluttered with non-rostered guys. But the fact that your minor leaguers are terrible is also relevant for how the season will end up going.

Pritzker is going to take a meeting with the Sox ownership group and significantly soften his stance if not totally turn it around.

Horn is a lefty who, based on the numbers, has shown some propensity to miss bats which is the name of the game nowadays. Thompson, according to all information available to me, stinks. I believe in the potential of all men but I'm not losing sleep over this trade.

Yeah that has been confusing me. I'm not sure what their angle is at all, TBH, because it seems like they may genuinely backing out of the Arlington Heights situation over it with no viable plan in sight in Chicago.

I find the mayor's openness to this to be interesting given that I would have profiled him as someone hostile to this kind of thing. That's probably good news for the White Sox. I've yet to see any meaningful opposition to the Sox proposals by any public officials, as a matter of fact.

Most folks are aware of the dubious claims made about the economic benefits of public financing for sports stadiums/arenas. Biggest issue tends to be that while there is undeniably significant economic activity generated by a new ballpark, there is lots of economic activity with any investment of that size into a similar plot of land. Jerry's best argument here, IMO, is that this is not true about the 78. For the reasons discussed previously ITT, as best as I can tell the 78 has somewhat limited options in terms of what kinds of stuff you could build there due to the ground it's on, the stuff that is built near it, etc. And there's some proof in the pudding too: there's literally nothing there! Crazy that an area right in the heart of Chicago is completely undeveloped. I think it's at least a plausible argument that nothing useful may happen there if the Sox don't get a stadium there. If so, this is a matter of adding economic activity to the city rather than just prioritizing a baseball field over some other form of development. It's unclear to me how far he can get with the line of argument that the Sox may end up leaving town if they don't get a good stadium deal. It sure seems like many stakeholders including Sox fans, are happy to tell the team to f*** off and go play in some other city. Maybe it's the Cubs' world and we're just living in it.

I took Jerry's statements in the article to mean that he personally won't take the Sox out of Chicago, but when he's dead his son will have to sell and any owner that doesn't intrinsically love the Sox/Chicago like he does will want to get the hell out of there if they aren't contractually obligated to a nice Chicago-based stadium.

Not to carry too much water for JR, but I do think this factoid of no $100M is partly just due to circumstances. Hahn seemed to be a true believer in conservative payroll management and I suspect someone else in charge could have convinced Jerry to go big on a contract somewhere along the line. And presumably he was willing to give someone like Machado over $200M (i.e., Sox didn't get him but I assume the offers were made in good faith and not just for the purpose of leaking out "we tried" afterwards). Sox have had fairly high payrolls in the very recent past. I've been frustrated with how the Sox never hit the accelerator when the window was open and no doubt Jerry could have opened up the pocketbook further, but I also think the guy he just fired was telling him the plan was good.

With regard to public funding, I am generally very skeptical of giving these rich guys handouts. So far we haven't heard anything too egregious about the proposed 78 deal so we'll see on that. But as a general thought...I'm not a fan of unilateral disarmament either. I don't need the Sox to be the one team who ends up with a shitty ballpark because they didn't get public help. The Sox can be the team who got a shitty ballpark with public help (joking, maybe)

I suppose one way to think about it is that he can get acclimated in a pretty low stakes environment — the amount of people watching games is probably going to be half (or less) of what it would/will be when the team is good. He can take his lumps out of the spotlight and when folks jump back on the bandwagon he'll be his best self, hopefully.

Seems good, looking forward to seeing what it's like.

Why is it weird? I thought a big lesson of the TA controversies was his apparent pro-procreation stance.

The White Sox gave Martin Maldonado $4.5M

This. I think it was always bad baseball strategy to make any decisions based on whether it would improve your draft position, but any doubt about it is gone now with the lottery system in place. Make an honest effort at producing a competent ballclub and see what happens. Who knows, maybe you'll get the #1 pick anyway.

Not enough brainpower to come up with a list but I'll say that I've never been able to make myself hate a player just because he wasn't good. Waste of energy to be mad at a guy because Jerry Reinsdorf gave him a contract IMO. On the flip side, I think it's fine to like a guy mostly because he is good at baseball (although it's not required, obviously; see Albert Belle for more details).

The idea of Robert as a good target for the Mariners is crazy. They have one of the few players who has an argument for doing literally everything (including long-term cost control) better than Robert does at the same position.

I don't know how many guys have come over from Korea, especially guys who started stateside like Fedde. Merrill Kelly is the big success story that I'm familiar with. So for whatever it's worth, Fedde pitched a hell of a lot better in the KBO than Kelly ever did. Of course, scouting is a bit harder than just comparing statistics.

I can see the logic for waiting until the top FA are off the market, but isn't there also some logic to trying to make a deal before that? Some of the teams who may sign those guys will be taking themselves out of Cease's market in doing so. Less competition for Cease's services could lower the price, I would think.

Something that jumped out at me about Soroka when looking through his Statcast numbers, etc. His most valuable pitch in his good season was his sinker. In his brief MLB comeback, it was not. Statcast measures several inches of lost drop from 2019 to 2023. I strongly suspect his return to form will depend on finding the movement he used to have on that pitch. As a one-time sinkerballer myself, I don't really envy him because I never fully grasped what I did to make it move the way it did. Luckily the high-tech gizmos available today allow for much easier trial and error in practice sessions.