Jake

Lawrie is the type of player that a rebuilding team signs to see if he can pick up value and be traded. Seems weird to cut him unless there's something about his injuries that suggests the few million he'll earn will certainly be squandered

The Sox when most of us were kids had Frank Thomas, a very rare type of player that made it easy to love the team regardless of wins and losses. I really think it's that simple. If you have charismatic teams that compete, it's easy to be a fan. But even when you don't, having a guy like Frank Thomas makes it easy. The Big Hurt wasn't a media darling, didn't have great things to say in interviews, but was a fabulous player and person and his at bats were appointment TV.

Worth considering the possibility that somebody else will be assuming the responsibilities normally given to the person with this job title

Are we sure that it isn't the case that Renteria really wanted to keep Cooper around? I'd have to think if Cooper went on the open market, almost any team with even mild dissatisfaction with their pitching coaches would be eager to snatch him up.

The remarkable health of our pitchers over the past 10+ years—which is quantifiable, not just my feelings—has to be attributed in part to Don Cooper. This is especially true when you consider the terrible rash of pitcher injuries we had just before he took over, a time when Herm Schneider was in our employ

I like when people talk about this two-headed leadership team like you can't do it any other way besides having one guy in charge. But it begs the question why it is that such an arrangement hasn't blown up in the face of the Cubs?

I think Robin was a competent manager and someone our organization can be proud of. Firing him is fine—when the front office thinks the team is good four years in a row and in none of those years you make it, then you have to change something...and front offices tend not to fire themselves. I saw an article talking about how there was a high level of optimism as the Sox had added David Robertson, Melky Cabrera, Zach Duke, Todd Frazier, Brett Lawrie, Mat Latos, Alex Avila, Dioner Navarro, and Jimmy Rollins over the course of two seasons and how Robin will be associated with the subsequent disappointment. Some of those players are competent and were nice additions, but I'd be pretty upset if my job depended on those players helping my team rise from the ashes. I hope Renteria will be a better manager, but our problem has continued to be a lack of depth and good players. I thank Robin for not being a distraction, having some dignity, and clearly being a White Sox man through and through.

I think Robin was a perfectly fine manager, but I'm not sure they could manage the PR aspect of keeping him around. Sometimes it's worth making a change just so that you've changed something. Who knows, maybe Renteria is a superb manager.

Worth mentioning the "kid" is older than Lawrie

The thing about Guaranteed Rate is that it's not a super old company and the thing they do isn't the kind of thing a bunch of people are shopping for all the time. A pretty big portion of the people who are even homeowners probably bought the house before Guaranteed Rate was founded

I still think the Frazier deal was a good one in that it made sense at the time and hasn't been an unmitigated failure at this point. It's fully within the realm of possibility that he contributes to a winning Sox team next year and/or gets traded for more than we gave up for him next year.

Given that Shields has seen his velocity drop over the past few years, it might make sense to cut back his workload since it isn't exactly important that we get innings out of him.

I would rather hold to account the person who agreed to the Samardzija trade than the person who chose to sign Melky. Who gives a s*** about the Melky signing? The worst case is that we wouldn't have spent the money or that we would have spent it on someone worse. The way the >$10M/year FA signings have been lately around MLB tells me that was a near-harmless move. Having Melky on the team has made us more ready to win than most alternatives. But Samardzija only worked in theory if the team was good that year, which seemed unlikely at the time to me and some others. Even if you were optimistic, it was still a risky move since you were betting on all the things that can go wrong in a single season. Worse, of course, was that the player acquired wasn't even very good. The good Samardzija, who lives in many Chicagoans' imaginations and memories, wouldn't have made the team a winner but would have at least provided some cover for the logic of the move itself. Instead we traded at least one MLB regular who was cheap and under control for a long time (along with a potential backup C and solid starting pitching depth) for a guy who pitched like ass for a year and left us with just a draft pick, though we can at least be thankful for that.

The way I see it is that the front office is always highly collaborative. There is usually a single person—typically, but not always, the GM—who leads the front office and makes the final call and when quick decisions are necessary, the leader makes them perhaps without consultation of others. But there are many people who have a lot of input. Your GM will not make many good draft picks or international signings without good scouting advice. Once the advice is there, the GM has to sift through it, make risk calculations, etc. But even then, there are other members of the front office like the assistant GM who will play a role in the weighing of risks and benefits. Lots of teams seem to have a "money man" who will play a large role in deciding whether a move is financially prudent. The GM gets the glory and the blame, but both glory and blame may in many cases be an organizational rather than individual failure. Another thing about collaborative work like this is that some try to work towards consensus. Not always in the sense that the final decision is the one each individual would make if he or she were in charge, but that everyone involved contributed and doesn't outright oppose the final decision. So my question has been whether the big picture decisions for the White Sox are really being decided in much of a different way than before Hahn and Kenny were promoted. Beforehand, Hahn could have pushed against Kenny and/or Reinsdorf at times but it wouldn't have been news to anyone because who cares what Assistant GM thinks. But if the decisionmaking structure is unchanged but the people in it have new titles, does it now matter? Of course, maybe the structure has changed and Hahn has much more of a say than in the past. He certainly is taking on some tasks that Kenny did previously, but it's unknown to us if those are really the major decisions or not.

Our current prospect strategy would put Adams as our opening day starter next year

His velocity averaged over 93, I'm not seeing this "way down" unless you kept seeing his cutters at 88-90 and thinking they were slow fastballs.

QUOTE (miracleon35th @ Aug 19, 2016 -> 12:47 PM) Hawk has to drive for about two hours to and from home games, which is why he decided to only do away games. However, getting to and from airports, staying at hotels and being away from home for several weeks during the season is also not that easy for him. It's too bad he can't rent or buy a condo in Chicago to stay at during the season or at least during home stands. I never understood why he chose to do that drive every day in past years. So now he only does away games but why is staying in a downtown Chicago Condo during a home stand any different than staying at a hotel in another city (unless he wouldn't get lodging/meals in Chicago paid for as a travel expense)? Edited to add - I'd rather see Hawk do our home games and someone else (please no more Benetti) do the play-by-play for away games. Hawk makes that commute not because Indiana is just a super awesome place, but because he treasures being able to go home and see his children and grandchildren is so important that he just couldn't bear to set up shop in Chicago full time for the entire season.

Regarding Hansen, I have to take a college pitcher's rookie league production with a huge grain of salt.

I wouldn't mind seeing Avila back next year. No need to see Navarro around here again, though. Narvaez seems a capable backup.

Given how little he walked and how little time he had in AAA, his current run isn't too surprising. We've seen the good and the bad. One thing that's important to me is that I think by the eye test he looks like he has a lot more baseball aptitude than the stats and description of "raw" would suggest. Even when he's missing at a good slider for a strikeout, he often shows that he does indeed have recognition of the pitch, just not the discipline to deal with it. And of course his defense has been much better than I expected, especially for a guy with a sub-.900 fielding percentage two years ago. I don't think he'll become a player with high walk totals, but he seems to have the natural abilities to be within normal levels, especially for a shortstop.

Typo: Hansen's draft year is listed as 2014 Also: "6. Trey Michalczewski, 3B [Previous: 6th, -2]"

He's perfectly able to let management know that the jerseys are terrible. He can b**** and moan a lot if he wants. But he has to go out and pitch regardless. He also has to not stab the jerseys with a knife as a form of sabotage. I almost wonder if he thought he could get away with it without anyone knowing who did it. Either way he thought he could ruin the jerseys to get his way and the Sox had no choice but to nip it in the bud.

Okay good, now we can blame the management again

Why do my spidey senses tell me this somehow involved poop

Only trade him if you get what you were looking for before this. Sox have the leverage over Sale.