Balta1701

"He's been really fun to watch this year". Ugh. Just ugh. Absolutely ugh. I want to swear way too much in this post. Straight up, this is an easy dividing line in my relationship with this franchise.

Um, no he won't. Not after his performance this year. If he comes out blazing next year (and the White Sox don't do their usual thing where they call him up to save the bullpen), he might be by the middle of the year. Literally no one is going to look at his performance this year and think "This is a guy I'm going to put on my early season prospect lists with a big boost over last year".

The comparison isn't anything involving Moss, it involves Patrick Mahomes. Last year's receiving corps in Chicago was terrible, as bad as what KC was throwing out there in game 1 against the Lions. It turned out that even Patrick Mahomes couldn't take receivers who were that bad and churn out a win against a competent opponent. That was what Justin Fields was dealing with all last year. With Moore and Claypool and better depth, they don't have to be great, but at least they have to be competent. At his best last year, Fields was able to move the ball with his legs and occasionally throw a ball to a RB or TE. If you bring the WR corps up to competent, then combined with Fields's ability to run, there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to regularly move the football. The defense has to focus on Fields because he can beat them alone, they can't focus on Fields and double team every WR, or at least they shouldn't be able to if a play is well crafted.

I would be bloody disappointed if he doesn't have a vastly more active game this week. He wasn't on a team with an incredible offense by any stretch in 2022, and he averaged 7 targets and 3.7 catches per game, which is starkly different from 2 catches on 2 targets last week. The year before that averaged nearly 10 targets and 5.5 catches a game. There's no earthly reason why he can get 7 targets and 3.7 catches per game when Sam Darnold and Baker Mayfield are the ones throwing him the ball and he should get vastly less from this Bears roster. Whether that's on Fields decision making (which comes to how he was coached to deal with situations) or on the gameplan, either way - this one is straight up on the coaches given that comparison, and it needs fixed.

Obviously I'm finished with him on the 2025 White Sox...but worth considering that even if he has a good year next year his likely contract after his 22-23 seasons will be a 1 year deal, maybe with an option in there or a qualifying offer at the end. Even the White Sox under Hahn didn't sign guys coming off 2 straight seasons of <1 WAR to multi year deals, they get 1-year prove it deals. He might have some danger in following a Rodon-like path, a good 24, a good 25 on a 1 year deal, then someone signs him for multiple years at age 30 and that's where it bites them.

Minnesota? Yeah, they have to do something. It is really mattering for them. The White Sox? They got an excellent performance in 1-run games in 2022, and that at best dragged them up to .500 and 2nd place. A great bullpen performance this year would still leave them 3rd place and well out of the playoffs, so they would be better off strengthening their roster as a whole first because they have so many holes that the bullpen isn't the biggest issue.

2022 AL Central, same rules: Minnesota: 86-76 Cleveland: 81-81 White Sox: 70-92 Kansas City: 69-93 Detroit: 64-98 Lessons: 1. Cleveland's bullpen the last two years has been super strong. They have been a massive help to this team, they won a division title because of their bullpen. 2. Minnesota could have won the division the last two years had their bullpens not been terrible. Their bullpen is perhaps the top reason why they didn't win the division last year and it's the reason why they're the worst division leader this year. They need to fix this. 3. The White Sox might not be as bad as they were this year, their bullpen has been bad and that has been a major problem, but they also were probably worse than their record last year and they probably got a little lucky overall in '22. They were a 3rd place team, well below .500 both years if it wasn't for the 1-run game swings. 4. Neither Detroit nor KC have been any good and the bullpens haven't been important there.

I think it was genuinely surprising and disappointing how bad the Bears played. They were bad last year yes, but they added a whole draft and $100 million worth of free agents and other things to that. They absolutely should have been expected to give the Packers a better game than this. It was a home game against your long term division rival. They aren't a title contending team, I think most people know that, but there is no valid reason why, with everything the Bears did, they couldn't have given the Packers a closer game than that. If the 49ers dropped a massive beatdown on you, that's one thing, does anyone think the Packers are the best team in the NFC? Do they have the best pash rush in the NFC? I sure don't think so. You've noted Claypool's effort specifically, but he's not the only one. The game plan was bad, they did a poor job of setting Fields up for any sort of success (see his WR's numbers), and the tackling and coverage were poor in addition to the lack of pass rush. Some of these things aren't just personnel - you could get an elite D-Lineman or two in next year's first round, but if your defensive backfield can't tackle, you still have a bad game. If you protect your QB a little better, but your WRs don't put in effort, don't block, and don't get separation, then you still have other problems. There's a video out there of a goal line play where Field rolled out, Kmet was out of the back of the end zone, and there was literally no one else on the side of the field where he rolled to - what the Hell was going on with that play? If the Bears did a better job of tackling, cut down the big plays as a consequence, did a better job of setting their WRs up with a better game plan, this at least makes things competitive. Maybe they don't yet have elite O and D lines, but you can at least give a better showing than that stinkfest.

Presumably the land would be sold off or converted into something else? It would technically be owned by the state I believe, if there's no events happening there then the state could decide how they wanted to use it, there would probably be a rezoning step and then some money put towards development. No reason to keep a bunch of parking lots if no one is parking there. It would be a big plot of land available for development ideas.

Don't bring him back to the big leagues until he has gotten back to his normal velocity? Maybe a full 6 to 8 week spring training, maybe even longer as no matter what he did his body wouldn't be in full athletic shape after chemotherapy? Seems like a good starting point.

While true, there's also one problem - the bullpen is terrible. Joe Kelly was bad and regularly injured. Aaron Bummer was and still is awful. Graveman was acceptable, Santos was acceptable, Middleton might have been tolerable, that's at most a couple tolerable arms. Guys like Lambert, Banks, Shaw - they're borderline big leaguers, the guys who should be called up if someone else gets hurt. Crochet was rushed back so quick from TJS that his body fell apart, and he had a WHIP over 2 while he was here. And they rushed Hendriks back from bloomin' cancer to try to save the pen and his arm gave out because of it. Who is actually supposed to pitch in these games?

I mean, they're also 27-48 on the road. I think they're just bad.

Minnesota is all of a sudden 15 games above .500 and ahead of 4/5 of the AL East.

I think there was a genuine expectation that they would perform better than that game. It sure sounded like it over the offseason, they spent a lot of money, they brought in a lot of players, they didn't expect to be the worst team in football any more. They might not have won, but at least that they wanted to be competitive. They weren't, not remotely. They were hoping for the team to be overall better on both sides of the ball, and they weren't. They are still a young team so it's entirely possible that they could get better over the course of the year, however, I don't think it's ridiculous at all to have wanted and to have expected a better week 1 performance, by a long shot.

I honestly don't know what the area around the park is like these days, my experience has always been "It's a giant sheet of parking lots that are practically walled off by the highway on one side". This is very different from places like Cleveland and Pittsburgh, where the ballparks have been integrated into a downtown area that needed the infusion of cash and needed the foot traffic to help grow businesses in a downtown needing revitalization. There might be areas like that in Chicago, but it's certainly not a city in need of bringing new visitors to the downtown area to revitalize foot traffic. Maybe there's some areas in the city this makes sense for?

Don’t worry, I guarantee that we will hear how happy everyone is with the job Getz has done and that we won’t ever see another 1b shoved into the OF again. Like we heard this year.

For this to happen though, someone is going to have to present a full development plan to the city where the ballpark is only one part of it. That means there is going to be money in the project that doesn't go to Reinsdorf, and his ballpark would be part of a revitalization plan. Does that sound like Reinsdorf?

I do think there's a difference in the type of municipalities here. For Buffalo, this is both a local pride issue (they are a smaller city) and the state is motivated to put money into these areas to support growth outside of NYC. Similarly, in Vegas, they're dumping tax money into stadiums because they want to establish themselves as something other than a tourist city, and while we're at it these stadiums probably support the big tourist industry that there as well so everything kinda fits together. In Chicago, you have a city and a state that have long-running budget issues and no huge reason to dump tons of money into this. They aren't trying to establish themselves, they aren't trying to preserve the one major team in a small city, and there's an overall understanding that the last deal was terrible for the city and that governments shouldn't be funding teams like this. I wouldn't be stunned if he got a deal to keep them there, but I'd be genuinely surprised if there was anything like the last sweetheart deal available for Reinsdorf this time.

So isn't this DH actually Royals @ White Sox, in Chicago not KC?

There are certainly some players for whom that works, but I think all of us have recognized that there are pretty clear and dramatic differences between what teams are getting out of their systems and this is probably a pretty big factor. High draft picks help some teams (Baltimore) but not all teams (Kansas City), so you've got scouting and you've got development staff as the key differentiators.

Didn't those people picket the stadium protesting low wages and inconsistent work at the end of last season?