Balta1701

Theo has a Twitter?

Does he have a personal connection to there?

Normally when people make these threads and I have nothing positive to say I stay away. This time…no. I am disappointed he can only be fired from his job as I also want him fired by catapult.

It’s not earth shaking performance, but it’s a helluva lot better than what we’ve been getting. That org has some clear major restrictions on it that wouldn’t be present here, a combination of gamblers moves and good pitching development would work decently well here and probably leave a regularly competitive team.

Charcoal can be reignited.

Thought about this on the way home. Unless they hire Getz or Haber, the moment they interview anyone outside the organization the first and #1 message they are going to get is that this kind of horseshit is unacceptable and must stop or the person won’t take the job. The owner has a role to play, they have to work cooperatively to determine the budget and the general plans, they have to give an environment of consistency and reasonable standards and accountability, they have to bring in good people for the non baseball activities to make the organization run well and not be embarrassing. But no one from outside this organization is going to take the job if they suspect ownership will overrule them about the manager, or want to decide draft picks, or set limits on number of staff, or limit their efforts in the international market, or have unreasonable limits to the sizes of contracts they can offer, or hold these kind of grudges. Any candidate worth their salt is going to tell the White Sox that this must stop. That doesn’t mean Espada will be our next manager, but it does mean that either this all changes and the GM gets an agreement that allows them to be the GM, or it will be Getz. No one else on earth will tolerate the way these things have been run. They will hear some version of this in every interview they conduct, anyone who takes the job will know that the lifetime contracts and 4th place is good enough attitude won’t last now.

Fair.

This would absolutely be the correct way to conduct said process. Bring in outside professionals to work with ownership, external consultants with distinct backgrounds.

Yeah but that's also unknowable if they didn't announce someone new today, you know that. They think they have something that makes sense, then something else happens - another job becomes available, someone gets promoted, who knows.

Let the new GM decide how to handle the coaching staff, including when and how to conduct a coaching search. Imagine that a GM is not officially hired until mid November. While that's a long timeline, it may not be obscenely long if this set of steps came about suddenly, or if they are waiting to interview people who are employed by teams in the playoffs. They'd immediately have to make decisions on options, protecting people for the 40 man roster, waiver wire pickups, and the rule 5 draft, with the winter meetings hitting almost immediately. That would all be happening at the same time that the GM would be taking their first steps to overhaul the staff around them. In this case, it would not be outrageous for a GM to say that they simply weren't in a good spot to deal with a coaching search, and that a professional coaching search done at the end of 2024 would be able to be much better run and more effective than a scrambling one done in the middle of everything else. This is not a terrible situation, 2 of the few people on Earth who thought this team was competitive in 2024 were just fired, Grifol in the end will make no difference in those results. If they want to run a coaching search this year, they have to make sure they're in place to do it well. You don't want candidates turning you down because your GM is trying to do too many things at once.

This should be up to the new GM. It's entirely possible that a new GM may not want to immediately conduct a coaching search. They have the right to do so and let things stabilize first before doing so, and I won't be mad. There's no coach who fixes the White Sox in 2024, if a GM wants to get their people and system in place elsewhere, fine, worry about a coaching search in October 2024 once you have time to prepare.

To be fair, it literally took Nightengale like 3 minutes to put his name forward.

Bah, they need someone to actually coach the rest of the season, and who knows how long a GM search may take, you may well just keep him on for next year and then do a coaching search fall 2024 if this process takes significant time. Worry about the rest once we see how this process goes.

You need someone to answer the phones while you're searching for a new GM. I'll complain about things like that after a search is done, not before.

Tuesday, August 22nd, 2023. Just writing that down so I don't forget.

FWIW, it appears that Nashville is not exclusively covered by any one team. In terms of blackout restrictions, it is considered within the range of both Atlanta and Cincinnati. That could make it more difficult for either team to claim that they were losing part of their market if any team moved to Nashville (including future expansion). https://www.sportingnews.com/us/mlb/news/mlb-blackout-restrictions-map-2023-baseball-games/m843wsljyvrrdmf50zjhusre

https://www.mlb.com/news/rob-manfred-outlines-next-ballpark-steps-for-a-s Nashville is pretty darn far from Atlanta, its a 4 hour drive, so I'm a little skeptical about this being the major impediment others think.

We recently had a much more relevant example of a team moving much closer to another team's market, with Baltimore having to accept the move of the Nationals to Washington, which was explicitly within the television market area assigned to the Orioles. That still happened.

I don't dispute Chicago being massively bigger, and you can count whatever you want in that, but if a team was making the case to move out of there - Chicago already has a team that is much more liked by the city as a whole. There is a decent case that Chicago's market is well served by the better franchise and that the second team could grow the sport's fanbase as a whole if it moved elsewhere. If a different city put up a serious stadium offer, it's going to be considered.

Because it's the White Sox and all pitchers must be moved to the bullpen.

Yes, I don't understand that. A quick check gives the Oklahoma City metropolitan area as 1.4 million people, a similar check gives Nashville at 2 million people. In general, I find the suggestion that 1.4 million is 50% higher than 2 million to be something I do not understand. Nashville also has other moderately sized urban areas somewhat nearby (2.5 hours drive time or less) in Memphis, Knoxville, and Louisville, - the largest city in that range of OKC other than Dallas (which has its own team) seems to be Tulsa which is smaller than Memphis and Wichita, which is less than half the size of Louisville and smaller than Knoxville. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_metropolitan_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville_metropolitan_area

I literally have no idea what your mathematical relationship there means. Only cities that are way too small get teams, not mid-sized cities? There are 2 basic ingredients that I think are required for a team to truly make a move like this. First, you need a long-running stadium issue - with things hitting the papers now, and the expiration of an unbelievably team friendly deal, we're set up to have that by the end of the decade. Seattle had this. Oakland had this. The second is ownership who is motivated to pick one city over another. In Seattle's case, the team was sold to an ownership group that was motivated to move them. In Oakland's case, ownership clearly wanted out of there and turned down a generally fair deal. This is certainly possible in the case of the White Sox, an out-of-state group purchasing them is one way this could go down. If the White Sox were to stay in the hands of the Reinsdorf group, then it will come down to stadium deal quality. As I keep saying, the last deal the White Sox got was so ungodly team friendly that no one in the state of Illinois will ever sign off on the like again. Frankly, they shouldn't, it's now well understood how bad these deals are for taxpayers and Illinois has long term financial issues they have to consider. That is where another city could come in, should they be motivated to make this happen. I don't know whether that will be the case in 2030, but it's possible - if Illinois demands something of an equal deal, with a large portion of a new stadium paid for by the team, and another city offers a stadium that is largely publicly financed, that might make up for the difference in metro area size in the eyes of ownership, but it is an open question whether such a deal will be available.