Balta1701

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?

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.