Balta1701

Well you can’t let a guy this valuable come in as a lame duck. He told me so. 7 year extension.

When journalists have to rely on access for their careers, you just aren’t going to get the kind of pushback on bland stuff like this that you might otherwise want.

Hahn’s first year felt a lot like Phil Emery’s last year with the Bears. They hired Trestman, it collapsed completely in year two, and the Bears just said “nope” and completely started fresh. The White Sox extended everyone and Hahn is still here a decade later.

It might have genuinely been unfair, but there’s a decent fraction of sports who would have fired a GM after 2013. Guy adds payroll, comes into the season expecting to compete, loses 99 games? Sports are results oriented and those results are not acceptable For most franchises. I believe Arizona fired a guy after one year in a situation like that.

If they were winning and then in an offseason multiple recent players called out their culture unprompted, in ways that could hurt their careers - I’d worry something much worse was going on than just laziness.

I’m in Houston and they’re still kinda pissed at Bagwell for playing GM for a couple weeks and at the owner for letting him. Abreu getting to normal has helped.

The Astros were operating without a GM at the time, they'd fired James Click because the owner didn't like him. The owner made that decision with the input of Jeff Bagwell. They also signed a reliever to big money at the same time and that guy's been awful this year. Not their normal procedure nor their current new GM.

I mean, you've got that, but you've got a guy coming back from cancer. We don't really need to discuss this in detail but that is a body that has been through some serious stuff, it's not a body that has been fine tuned for athletic performance over the previous several months. You've got that injury last year which should have made you a little cautious, and when he got back to the minors - his velocity was down. At the very least, this is a guy where you should take your time with him enough that I can't say "wow you rushed him back quickly from cancer". If he still wound up with the surgery, you'd say it made sense and there was nothing you can do, but you can't give me full ability to say "you rushed him back from cancer what is the matter with you" and I was saying that before he made his comeback because it was obviously true.

There appeared to be consequences for it when he did so.

You say all that like LaRussa, Grifol, and Ventura are innocent bystanders who are being overpowered. I don’t believe that. I believe this is the culture they want, that the front office wants. If no one works too hard, no one looks bad by comparison. Everyone gets their paycheck, everyone gets their midday nap, and all that’s important is you tell the owner that you’re working hard and so are your bosses, so that no one blows up the scam.

Yeah, because it is super difficult to… read an article on ESPN. How could one find the time to do this?

Granted, but we shouldn’t ignore how laziness and a lack of effort was the number 1 defining characteristic of Venturas last 4 seasons too. And that it started, conveniently, in 2013. Renteria they did work harder, but they also refused to work smarter because he didn’t believe anyone else could have any answers other than him. Then with LaRussa we combined the worst of both of those.

Starting? Naw that was under Ventura, in 2013. Hitting these specific players? Sure that works.

Most businesses aren’t so heavily protected from market forces that you can get away with this level of disinterest. In the real world, you surround yourself with yes men who take advantage of you, here’s the end result:

You say that like LaRussa was an outside consultant brought in to talk about this team on the radio, and not the teams manager for two years.

I’m gonna go the other way here and defend Middleton. First of all, he’s a reliever, he doesn’t run the team. He can only do so much. Secondly, if you believe him, he did speak up when given the chance, in the players meeting in the losing streak. Third and the big one - I don’t see him having any benefit in saying this, rather the reverse, he felt it needed said so he did it. He’s a journeyman reliever, he’s now been on 5 teams, including a forever wishing they could compete LAA and a rebuilding Arizona. He’s burned his bridges with the White Sox, there will probably be other teams who would rather protect their clubhouse than have a bad culture be exposed, and frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if the White Sox’s front office is motivated to tell other Gms to stay away from him. He cost himself money here because seemingly he felt something needed to be said. The protect the locker room attitude is a reason why these guys are able to get away with treating the business like this. It takes some stones to break that to call out bad behavior.

We are all saying the same thing though. These players are symptoms of the problem, as is Grifol. The “don’t work too hard, but make sure everyone tells the boss we’re doing great” attitude goes all the way to the top. They hire managers who push that attitude, they hire coaches who tell the players to take it easy and tell the boss everything’s great. They keep players who go along with this plan. This is what the top two guys want, because then they don’t have to work too hard either.

Even with all that, a 2 week mini spring training after fighting cancer just doesn’t seem like enough.

Still, he can’t have been sitting around saying “you know what the problem is? These guys are working too hard”, right? The guys above him are better than tolerating this. How did this become his attitude when he has the managers spot?

He can’t have operated like this with the Royals, can he? They’re not well run overall but but there can’t be that many organizations that tolerate this lack of professionalism, right? He was under Matheny and Yost there, that can’t be stuff they’d be ok with right? Both have won a lot of stuff and coached in multiple spots, including St Louis and Milwaukee.

I’m pretty sure I first posted this video to sum up the White Sox in 2013. Might have been 2015, but this attitude goes all the way back to Hahn’s first year.

Wouldn’t they have to get used to this throughout the minor leagues too?

They sure didn’t treat him like a guy walking an injury tightrope.

No owner would leave the 4 million population Seattle metro area for a tiny 1.5 million metro area like Oklahoma City.