Balta1701

"This is not a rebuilding situation."

They will be heading to the suburbs. It would be very surprising if they tried to do another spaceship landing in Soldier Field Renovation. It also has the benefit of being the right decision for the city too, a domed stadium will host a Chicago Super Bowl before 2030, and it's going to be super cool, the entire Super Bowl crowd will freeze and find a deep dish pizza place and just be in awe of how well it works. The Chicago Bears should be one of the NFL's Marquee Franchises, they should have a 75000-80000 seat domed stadium for football games and the occasional visit by Beyoncé in the suburbs, and they will have a huge waitlist for tickets once its built. I don't know what they will do with Soldier Field, this is legitimately a conundrum to me. I don't know if the right decision there is to demolish the monstrosity they built and try to restore the classic field or just demolish the whole thing, that would depend on who might use a 50,000 seat stadium near the lake with no skyboxes. This is a challenge for someone who knows the options better than me to figure out.

The excuses are already lined up. “No one could have seen what happened to our closer coming” is actually true! You can’t hold this season against this front office. Time for extensions.

https://www.nj.com/yankees/2023/02/ex-yankees-bust-joey-gallo-will-have-surprise-role-with-twins.html

I’m pretty sure you told me this 7 seasons ago.

The only way he isn’t the GM is if Kenny retires and he takes Kenny’s job.

Today seems to be a helluva day for quotes. Grifol also insists there is no quarterback controversy.

https://www.nbcsports.com/chicago/white-sox/mlb-insider-jon-heyman-grades-white-sox-offseason-d-minus

This could be a number relevant for Cease. Fried was Arb-2 this year, he earned $6.8 million last year as Arb-1. Cease settled for $5.7 million this year.

They might actually want to do so in a couple of weeks if they are trying to keep him away from the team. If he's coming to training camp, he's going to be pitching and preparing with everyone else.

https://nypost.com/2023/02/02/kodai-senga-had-iffy-physical-before-mets-carlos-correa-saga/ (Heyman).

All right, so this is originally from them signing Duvall. They signed Duvall and had to DFA Matt Barnes for the roster spot. They traded Matt Barnes to Florida for Richard Bleier and again still needed a roster spot from that deal so they DFAd German. I found a version of a Boston Herald article asking why German was the guy they DFAd and all it said was they thought he would be most easy to trade for a useful return, which seems like an odd reason to DFA someone.

Straight up, I don't get this for Boston. This looks on paper like a much better deal for the White Sox. Reliever for reliever, except the guy Boston is giving up is younger, was at AAA last year, and was quite a bit more effective. Guy clearly has options remaining, and no obvious reason to think Boston needs a 40 man spot in the next day. This looks like a small but obvious win for the White Sox. Why would Boston do this?

German should also have options available so that's really bloody important.

25 year old, 4 big league innings last year, ERA of 18, 2.58 ERA in AAA for most of last year. No starts only a reliever.

You’re right those are issues that do need to be dealt with. On the other hand, how many quality young TV guys are there that won’t receive any national interest in broadcasting something else? There’s half a year when they could be doing basketball or football, for example. Didn’t Jason do a “stat loaded” broadcast for the college football championship a few weeks ago or was that a different game? I’m sure I had one of those on recently. He really is good at his job and people recognize this. That is a good thing for the White Sox, employing a guy who is good at his job and who will be around for years. The fact that Fox wants him doing games is a testament to this. Employing people who are good at their job makes the whole white Sox organization better, it helps build the brand and it’s another way to bring national exposure to this franchise. Presumably it also makes Nationwide insurance a bunch of money too. One sacrifice of that is losing him for some games, but the gain of that could be having him broadcast the World Series in a few years. How many of the most well known broadcasters for teams had arrangements like this, where they did Big Games for the national networks on the weekend and were available the rest of the season? I’d say many of them. If you don’t want a guy who has demand from Fox, you can find that, by going with worse broadcasters. This may save money in the short term, but in the long term it again sacrifices a chance to build a following in exchange for a quick buck. The good news is there’s no other instance I can think of where the White Sox have behaved that way, otherwise I’d be shaking my head saying “here we go again.”

That was not a positive read.

Worth noting, Cease, Giolito, and Lynn received on average between 4.96-5.18 runs per game. This was in the top 1/3 of MLB run support. Cueto received 4.15. This was in the bottom 40%. (Kopech received Quintana like run support last year and that won't be discussed because blah).

They were on pace to be a few games over .500...and they had the run differential of a 77 win team pretty much the whole year.

Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Except: -They picked up Johnny Cueto off the scrap heap and found their second best pitcher of the season. The only reason he was even available when he was signed was the lockout. Had Lance Lynn not gotten hurt, they never sign Cueto - who outperformed everyone other than Cease in their rotation. They had a replacement for Keuchel because of this. -They picked up Elvis Andrus off the scrap heap and got 2 months of darn near MVP performance from him. He was a notable upgrade over Tim Anderson for those 2 months, they got better because Anderson got hurt. We will probably never see that kind of upgrade from a midseason veteran put on waivers again in our lifetimes. -Seby Zavala, per innings played, was one of the most effective catchers in baseball. Effective offensively, avoided some of the defensive issues that plagued him in 2021. This combined with McGuire turned the White Sox' -The guys they brought in off the scrap heap were so effective that it basically offset almost all of the losses to injury (except for the stupidity with Robert's wrist). Had they been the healthiest team in baseball, they're basically the same team in the end, because of how effective these guys were. -They weren't all that banged up anyway compared to the rest of the league. For example, "the White Sox had 3 pitchers hit the IL" compared to "Detroit's entire opening day starting rotation was on the IL when we faced them for a 3 game series. Ponder what the White Sox's losing streak would look like if they lost all 5 starters for a month. -Their competition was weaker than expected, particularly Detroit because of how banged up they were. 19 games against that banged up Detroit team. They outscored Detroit 100-59 on the season. -They outperformed their run differential the whole season. Say what you want about ineffective management, this is generally a sign of luck that can't be easily repeated. -Their bullpen performed extremely well in close games. Their record in 1 run games was top 5 in baseball, tied with Cleveland for that performance. This was notably better than their performance in the same type of games in 2021 and will be particularly difficult to repeat now that Hendriks is out for the year.

I gotta give this round to B>W. “No Sox games, none” is a little too precise when the first game is a national broadcast.

If Sheets makes the OD roster (and there’s no injuries) then to me that means Colas didn’t.