Balta1701

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.

I don't know where to share this.

Kenny Williams Jr.

Financially I think they’re in 90s Cubs mode. Anyone who cares one bit about the product on the field will be dumping their packages. The only people left are businesses, probably a few scalpers who have great spots, and people who do this every year and don’t want to stop. That group is probably pretty insensitive to price.

Andrew Vaughn, last 6 games of August: .227/.227/.409/.636. .222 BABIP. Andrew Vaughn, first 6 games of September: .348/.348/.652/1.000. .316 BABIP. He's coming around finally, it's a super long trend of...6 solid games! (By the way, his last walk was August 18. He has 2 walks since the start of August. 3 since the start of July. Yuck. I mean, wowza that's bad.).

Because that's been systematically our complaint the last 5 years, the White Sox use their computers too much and need more people who go with their guts.

At this point, unless I was willing to send Kopech down, yeah I'd try him in the bullpen next year too. If he gets off to a good start in the pen, that's a tradeable asset at the deadline and people would pay for that.

Well here's the problem. The White Sox's 46% save conversion rate is really quite bad, but if they saved 20 of those games, that would be EXCEPTIONAL. Right now, the top save percentage in MLB is the Red Sox, who have saved 40 of 53 for a 75% clip. If the White Sox actually saved 43 of 50 games, they would be converting saves at an 86% clip, vastly better than any other team in baseball. Last year, with Hendriks most of the year, they saved 48/71 - their bullpen outperformed a lot, and they converted at a 67% clip. You're not just talking about Hendriks there, you're talking about Hendricks being as good as he's ever been and also everyone in the bullpen being absolutely excellent.

I kinda wish I could believe the bolded, I'm pretty sure they stopped caring about that several years ago too.

Naw, he's just that unprepared. The best answer he has to anything is some version of "We'll figure it out in time" because he genuinely hasn't had time to work through these things, and in many ways he's not expected to, he's supposed to give appropriate deference to Reinsdorf making the decisions that he wants to make.

Naw, they've got a good amount of money to spend and have several decent prospects to trade. This roster is still awful, but they can get themselves up to a 65-70 win team on paper and that will be enough to convince some people that they've done a great job and are set up to compete in the Central (If people talked themselves into the 2023 white sox being competitive, they'll believe the same thing next year).

Try a Brewers game?

I'm trying to figure out whether Cease or Kopech has improved.

They’re in KC?

Dude, 2022, Robert. Wrist.

I'm more worried that they are determined to trade for Salvador Perez, and as a "Face of the Franchise" type guy the Royals will make the White Sox pay more in prospects than he's actually worth based on his contract and performance.

If you are having a hard time believing he was using, here's the spin rates. I could remove the X-Axis and you could literally pinpoint the exact day that the sticky stuff checks started. Cease and Lynn show similar drops, literally on the exact same series.