Balta1701

Wow so Jerry has decided to give white guys an easier path than minorities? Who would have guessed that.

The move itself is generally understandable as sending a message to a guy who has clearly stank this year. The questions that this raises include - why isn’t this standard applied to the veterans (and you know darn well it isn’t), and why they didn’t take steps to work on this before handing him the RF spot last spring. Maybe we should ask the minor league coordinator what exactly he was doing with his time I bet he has to come up with an excuse.

For now, Boylen. (It’s a closer debate if you asked about LaRussa and Boylen).

Might as well save a little on Zavala since they need his roster spot next year for Perez.

In his previous role, didn’t the Minor league coordinator have the ability to put some serious influence on several of these? If he were prepared to do them, getting buy in from ownership on some of these should be important to, but it’s clear that wasn’t part of the original agreement where he took the job as issues like the staff were things he said they would talk about later. For a big example, we have heard a lot about the owner having to clear draft picks, right up to the last few minutes, and this fits with some of their draft choices. Why would we expect that to change if the owner hasn’t agreed to change it? Theres just no reason to believe they will do the bare minimum when the guy brought in didn’t do these things in his previous role and when they have no buyin from ownership.

They're trying to send a message to the rookie here, not to the fans. He may well deserve it, but at the same time, it's awfully frustrating to see the level of effort everyone else puts out on an average day for this franchise while only a couple rookies get singled out for this kind of message.

Oh I expect them to try, and I expect them to be fighting the Tigers for 3rd place again at best. Their roster is just awful.

I mean, the realistic answer is "I don't care who plays RF for them next year they're in a 3 year rebuilding process again so it doesn't matter", you could play Colas there and hope for the best or you could find someone off the scrap heap as a platoon player and hope that they become useful enough to move at the deadline, and either one works equally well if you've admitted you're playing for 2027 already. But the problem continues to be all the times they refuse to admit that. You have an owner who insists he owes it to White Sox fans to not conduct a GM search because it's important to "Win Soon". You have the constant rumors about acquiring a catcher who turns 34 next May.

Colas actually had a 12 game stretch in the 2nd half of August where he was 11/43, 2 walks (more than Vaughn over that time) and a .741 OPS. But, in September he's 5/29 with a .528 OPS.

The one I still remember was with Semien - he was treated as a utility guy early, but he was playing SS more than any other position on the way up through the minors. When he got sent to the As, he was terrible defensively at first, but when they had Washington start working with him there was an article in the local Oakland papers about how Semien had never done the basic fielding drills that everyone is supposed to do at SS. This wasn't them taking a shot at the White Sox, this was a positive article about how they expected him to get better once he got to do the basic work, and turns out the article was correct. But, from a White Sox perspective, this was an indictment I never forgot. How on earth does a guy come up through your system, get labeled as a utility guy, but also spend most of his time at SS, and yet not go through basic SS fielding and positioning drills? Where did they expect him to get to practice these things, did they expect him to Google all of them and do them on his own? They had him for years and this was the case. I don't find it that surprising that so many guys come up with the White Sox and struggle, and I don't think it's scouting as much as it is a complete lack of practice and no interest in practicing. Guys in the minor leagues are supposed to teach themselves, that's the way it's' done here.

Much like Vaughn, who is giving you pitching of any ability at all for Eloy Jimenez? Eloy is on the edge of not worth his contract, if you trade him you are hoping for at best salary savings, nothing that makes this team better long term. Eloy for a 28 year old A ball reliever is a pretty fair deal, and frankly I’d probably have done that too, but again I think the next 3 years are lost anyway so I have no urge to pay Eloys remaining money.

Eh, Burger had trade value. If he had a bad second half with the White Sox or had an injury, that could have gone to zero really fast. From my perspective where the next 3 years are basically written off already, I get the concept of moving him and holding Vaughn. Whether they did their usual quality on the return, I don’t know yet. But, I still won’t get bent out of shape about Burger being a difference maker for this flopped franchise, because he wasn’t when he was here.

A fair point, but I can’t imagine why anyone would think Vaughn has any trade value either way. He’s burned that.

Exactly what team wanted Andrew Vaughn as an upgrade at the trade deadline? Teams that make deadline moves are trying to get better or to tear down. Who needs a middling 1b? If I did, I’m not giving you a decent AA starter for him, he’s one step away from being nontendered or available on waivers.

They are still a young team and they still have a lot of upcoming draft resources, so they’re still working to rebuild things. 8-9 would be the kind of positive movement you’d be pretty content with overall, but you’d really like them to have come out a little tougher than this at home against GB of all teams.

You think teams are intimidated by his .754 OPS? And that guys like this are hard to find? Meanwhile here’s Atlanta:

Teams would have given a guy like this an opportunity to slowly work his way up sure.

Notice that Getz didn’t identify this as a problem with the offense, he identified not being athletic as a problem.

As I said at the bottom, this could certainly be true, but it also doesn’t excuse the White Zack their bad decisions. If they’re going to have this many limits on their drafting, on their international signings, on their free agent spending, then they have to do everything right when they’re holding a possible starter since some of them won’t work out even if you do everything you can correct. They can’t afford these high risk low reward behaviors if they’re not willing to rebuild every couple years if they don’t work out.

That 2019 Twins team won 101 games and was top 4 in fWAR for both offense and pitching. That was a worthy team too, their problem of course is they can't ever beat the Yankees in the playoffs.

He threw a grand total of 2 IP at AAA on September 3rd and they decided bringing him back in 13 months was not smart and shut him down for the season.

Huh?

No one answered this so I will. 2017 and 2018: Kopech starts off both years in the minors. He sets up a pattern, he struggles with his control early in the year then his control and performance improve during the year. He looks like a guy with a big arm but who needs work to find his control. In 2018, there is a game early in the year where he walks 5 in a short outing and it shows in his stats. Then he goes the month of July and barely walks anyone, he has clearly found a groove, and gets called up. He pitches 4 games and leaves with TJS. He is out through the end of 2019. Some people have disputed whether he should have been called up at the time, it was controversial, I personally had no problem with it as I felt he had done what he needed to do in Charlotte and it was time to give him some big league innings before the season ended. In 2020, for various personal reasons, he opts out of the shortened COVID season. While this isn't the team's fault at all, this does mean that he hasn't thrown a pitch in anger in nearly 3 years by the time he comes back in Spring Training of 2021. So you have a guy who has a live arm, hasn't pitched competitively in 3 years, and had a couple cycles of of "Needing to build up innings so that his control would improve". This seems like a guy who should absolutely be sent to the minors to start 2021, or at least given a method to be able to start for a part of a season, he needs a chance to throw as many innings as he can. Personally I would have put him in the minors and said so repeatedly at the time, they should have been trying to push him up to 100+ competitive innings to strengthen his arm. They put him in the bullpen to start the year. Ok, fine, they moved him to starting in May when someone was hurt, and then he hurt his leg and went on the IL. When he came back, they brought him back without any minor league rehab stint, brought him back right before the all star break so he had extra time just sitting around, and then buried him at the back of the bullpen for 2 months. He had a grand total of 2 outings that reached 2 innings in all of July and August combined. He didn't throw 3 innings in an outing again until September 29. Don't get me started on how he was used in the playoffs as that was LaRussa stupid too. He threw a total of just over 70 innings the whole year. At the time, I guarantee you I was saying "Fine, this might work for this year, but you're taking the risk that the guy will not be able to find the kind of control he was developing in the long seasons in 2017 and 2018, and you're risking whether he can strengthen his arm enough to be a starter with this short of a season." What are his problems now? Control, use of his secondary stuff, and a few additional injuries. Now that's not necessarily the only problem he had, 3 years off is going to be tough to come back from for anyone. He may well have other personal issues, I don't know anything about his current work ethic, and Ethan Katz may well have no good solutions for him. But in terms of mishandling him, for both Kopech and Crochet they put them in the 2021 bullpen to "Win now" and one of the risks of doing so was "This might help you right now and leave you with both of these guys struggling with injury and control if you try to move them to starters." That is precisely what happened, and I continue to believe that this is no coincidence, the White Sox gambled these guys' future as starters was unimportant compared to their 2021 success, and wound up with guys who can't handle themselves as starters.