Balta1701

Cease and Kopech have 2 years of control remaining after this one. There is no “next 3 years” for them.

Continues to be throwing his weakest fastball since he came back from TJS in 2017.

Naw, this is the kind of stuff that happens all the time. It's usually something like $25k - if there's an opportunity for big league time with another team, for a veteran guy stuck in the minors, usually the team holding him will want to trade him and let him have the shot. This kind of move maintains goodwill with future veteran free agents. If you try to hold onto a guy and deny him a chance at a couple weeks in the big leagues elsewhere, then future veterans will be more skeptical about signing with you.

There is no way the people in that row of seats thought they had any chance at a HR ball.

He did, but the White Sox traded him for "Cash Considerations" to Detroit, so he's there now.

Kenny Williams literally said that on the radio the morning after Machado signed. In the same interview he said the White Sox couldn’t guarantee 2027/2028 to Machado because they had to be prepared to sign their next core and also insisted that their 8/$250 offer with 2 team options was actually worth more than the Padres offer because the team options would pay more money if they were picked up. I believe some of us noted this contrast at the time, it contributed to them being called clowns. (He also said the White Sox don’t do player opt outs).

Missed strike to Grandal. Didn’t matter. Helluva play.

Reinsdorf also hired Kenny Williams as the GM, and while he wasn’t great, he wasn’t the worst in the league. He was a gambler, you’d wind up with surprisingly good years and stunningly bad years under him, leaving the team about average with a regular chance at the playoffs. That is such an upgrade from Rick Hahn it isn’t funny.

I don’t think too many teams have 20 games where they’ve scored 5+ and 35 with 4 or fewer.

I mean yeah it does, we Don’t want him to struggle and he doesn’t want to have a bad first night back. It won’t decide a division, but rushing him back so that he could pitch on a holiday with a good crowd, eh.

Props to Benintendi for getting to that.

He listed 17 teams as winners and 13 teams as losers. I suggested he was too harsh on 3 teams. But just following the numbers, he has 17 teams as winners and you interpreted that as 1/3. So, from your math, 13/30 = 2/3. I agree, that is the math required to excuse Rick Hahn.

That works for me. There’s like 6 or 7 teams truly mired down there as pretty bad. KC, Pittsburgh have some excuses because they truly have limited resources, and KC still won a title recently. Colorado, Arizona, Chicago, LAA, Cincinnati, Miami, those are just really bad franchises.

Juuuuust a bit inside.

For an excuse that ended I’ve heard it a lot this week. Today even.

I think the group you’ve been too harsh on is 6, Detroit, Philly, and Texas. Each of those teams had just finished a stretch where they were competitive, but got too old and too expensive so they had to switch to rebuild. Maybe some mistakes in there (Cabrera, Howard extensions), but overall they’re sort of “normal”, they go through cycles of competitive and rebuilding, and this time period caught them during most of a rebuilding stretch so their record isn’t great. The Cubs, Nationals are similar styles, except you caught the peak for those rosters in the selected time period. I would have no problem being in that group compared to the real losers at the bottom.

Winning teams do. Losing teams do not. Winning GMs plan for them to happen and overcome them. Losing ones expect their fans to whine and call themselves unlucky. The White Sox are one of the healthiest teams in the league and we’re still hearing people whine about how they’re struggling because of injuries. It’s laughable.

The Dodgers have 5 starting pitchers on the IL right now. What horrible luck. No team could possibly overcome that kind of loss and still be in first place. Injuries man, it’s impossible to prepare for them.

They lose enough that Rick Hahn has no choice but to make moves he doesn’t want to make. Maybe he sells off a couple pieces. Finally he gets fired at the end of the year. Can’t be worse.

Well there is a lottery?

The problem is that your hope is my doom and gloom. Because we also have all seen enough baseball to know how this goes. Theyre now as healthy as any team in baseball. That should set them up to play .500 ish ball over the next tough stretch of games. So they go into the all star break 8 or 10 games under .500 but only 6-7 games back in the division. Rick Hahn doesn’t sell anything off and adds a reliever, he spends their draft trying to find other relievers to help right now. One more losing streak in the 2nd half and they finish 8 or 10 games back, but Rick reminds management how hard it was to get to third place and what a great job he did, so nothing changes, again. So we keep doing this, and limp through a 74 win season next year, probably after signing another domestic abuser because we can afford them. You know, hope.

So does Clevinger.

He played 3 games at Birmingham, on the 24th, 25th, and 26th. He did not play the last 2 days. He went 1/8, with 4 walks - 3 of those on Thursday, when he had 6 plate appearances.

Because you can’t hit a ground ball out of the ballpark and Anderson hits the ball into the ground now.