Balta1701

I’m going to join the crew of not complaining about then adding players to Charlotte, that’s normal and it’s good for them to have veterans and win ballgames. There’s nothing abnormal about that. It’s the idea that the White Sox are unusually weak or banged up that has bothered me for a couple years now because it’s never been true. It just seems like it because of the lack of depth. Guys like this are fine to help in the minors. That doesn’t excuse the big league mess.

Tampa Bay currently has three starting pitchers and three of their relievers on the IL, plus they lost the guy drafted right after Burger on top of that. The White Sox have 3 relievers, 2 starting position players, and one backup on the IL. That’s why both of these teams are struggling so badly and why they’re so evenly matched right now, no one could overcome these numbers of injuries.

You can say I was. The White Sox had a genuine issue with the 8th inning and LaRussa had no idea how to handle a bullpen. They were going to get out managed by everyone in a playoff series, the only way to have a chance was to have a bullpen good enough to be idiot proof. They definitely could have used 2 strong relievers at that point. My biggest mistake was failing to look beyond the first line of Kimbrel’s B-R page. He had a great ERA, but his BABIP and HR/FB rates were both career lows, so if you looked down the list at all you realized his first half was luck and he was going to give up a lot more homers and hits in the 2nd half. I was actually pissed at myself when I looked down that table in mid August while wondering what had happened. I do take some solace in the fact that a multi-millionaire GM didn’t look any more into his B-R page than I did.

Yes that’s right, Elvis Andrus is your lead off hitter. .217/.286/.261/.547.

IIRC Texas wanted a ton for him at that point, like Robert or something that was ridiculous.

“Hahn, Grifol retained for 2024.”

Since adding guys from the scrap heap to fill the holes on this roster and turning over the coaching staff has worked out so great, do it again with the same people.

There was zero reason to structure “youre not a music producer!”’s deal with a mutual option unless they counted that money as deferred onto their next years budget. Benintendi’s salary is $16.5 million in 2024 because they backloaded it. They couldn’t afford to pay $12 million to Clevinger, $15 million to Benintendi in 2023. While they can always backload things onto 2025 again, they will be dumpster diving for any positions they try to fill if they continue to think they are competing. It will be more of it than in 2023.

The big ones are the young guys, Benintendi (they are paying him $8 million this year so they already backloaded 1/2 of his 2023 contract) and Clevinger, where they used a mutual option to delay $4 million.

Lynn is a $18 million team option. So you have $30 million to spend, and you spent $18 million on Lynn alone. You have $2 million to spend on every other player you sign. Rick Hahn is always excellent at this type of work.

Next offseason, the White Sox will have to replace 3 starting pitchers, 2 relievers (one good), their starting catcher, and their bench, just to tread water. Thanks to backloading deals they might have only $20 or $30 million to spend on those spots. Do you trust Rick Hahn to have any success at solving that riddle?

They were 5-14 in 2018. They did in fact reach 14-11 and briefly got to 1st place in 2017.

Plus, both the 2017 and 2023 White Sox are in equal positions where they don't expect to win and are just hoping for a high draft pick so it's totally ok if they lose while a couple of rookies develop.

The Mets’ Trumpets for Diaz entering seemed pretty darn epic to me, they even brought in the guy who played the song for the playoffs last year. The problem is this specific player and the uncaring, no class organization around him.

He’s this petty but also a bloody coward who doesn’t have the balls to even stand behind things he does. Stay Classy, San Diego.

No first Fireworks night is April 28. https://www.soxon35th.com/white-sox-release-2023-promotional-schedule/

Lance Lynn had his surgery on November 10, 2015. He next pitched in a big league game on April 6, 2017 - nearly 17 months later. Mid May would have Crochet pitching in the big leagues 13 months after his surgery.

" The numbers that stabilize quickly" is doing an unacceptable amount of work in this tweet. Rather than asserting that, we can readily look at his historic monthly numbers. All of these will be month by month, combining his performance against all pitches - he's had basically 1/2 of a month this year, and that shows up as a point at the end. Showing monthly performance is important because it lets us see the scatter in his historic performance. This is a good one to start with, because we see that his barrel rate is quite low right now, although not the true lowest of his career. However, we also see that he commonly bounces between 5 and 15%, with a high of 20%, so a single 2 week period at 2.5% is low, but the range is so large that the difference between 2.5% and 5% isn't certainly predictive. Here is the next one, Exit Velocity. Obviously this is actually down, again it's the second lowest of his career. But, monthly totals varied last year by almost 6 mph, and his best highest exit velocity was associated with his slow start. This is concerning but there's a lot of variation again. Is Jose Abreu suddenly failing to swing at pitches in the zone? It's slightly low, but it's not unreasonably low compared to his career. Is he chasing more than normal? His chase rate is higher than his career average, but it's no higher than in any random month throughout his career. Thus, is the phrase "He's swinging at a lot more junk" accurate and well supported, on the grounds that his numbers these first 2 weeks are higher than his career mark? It may be true that it has ticked up relative to his career mark, but it's totally within the realm of monthly performance in recent years. Here is something that is abnormal. When he is swinging outside the zone, he is making less contact. This is about the only one where I would say his performance is extreme relative to any other month of his career. But, again, the variation helps here - remember this is 2 weeks of performance, so you'd expect that the variance over 2 weeks would be larger than the monthly variance. Abreu is making less contact than last year on average, but he's making more contact than May of 2021, for example. Here's another case where comparing his 1 month performance to the average over last year is missing the variation he showed last year. There might be something to him making a little less contact, and perhaps some of the other things such as his low exit velocity stay put and wind up mattering to him. But given the monthly variance, the claim made in that tweet is stretching the data beyond the breaking point, it isn't fair to draw that conclusion from the measurements we have so far.

Let me know if you want any tips, attended about a half dozen games there.

For those who didn’t look at this, Elvis Andrus’s 2022 White Sox stint was the flukiest thing I’ve seen in stats recently. When he joined the White Sox, his exit velocity went down, his ground ball rate went up, his strikeout rate didn’t change, his walk rate dropped dramatically, his launch angle went down, but suddenly his home run rate went up to 20% of his fly balls, which would have been among the top HR hitters in baseball and which is totally unsustainable for a guy with a 6.7% career mark on that. This was statistical payback for Cesar Hernandez, who they acquired after he had a huge HR/FB rate and they were astonished that it went back to normal when he came to the Sox. If the mechanical fix helped him hit more weak ground balls, then it was almost successful except for a few fly balls that went over the fence. Giving a guy a starting job after a fluke HR/FB season is a Hahn move to the letter. It’s why they acquired Hernandez. It’s exactly what they did with Kimbrel. Can’t ever look past the first row on the MLB.com stats, that’s nerd territory. If anyone wants to bet me that he will have 500 plate appearances and a HR/FB rate over 15% this year, let me know what the terms are. That’d be a big drop from last years Sox performance. Go for it.

Romy has played 3 games in CF since he was a 19 year old at Miami in 2016. This is such White Sox thinking.

You realize that photos have “metadata” right?