Balta1701

I would have agreed with you that the catcher's situation was acceptable...in early December, but at that time, we didn't know how severe the back problem for Grandal was. The White Sox did. If Grandal just had repeated leg injuries, then a decent rehab and strengthening program might have had some ability to give him a shot at playing a portion of the season. But, trying to rehab a back injury of the sort that he has seems likely to be a different beast. Learning about that made it seem way less likely that the White Sox have a reliable catcher in Grandal this year, and like it or not - Zavala and Perez with "Maybe Grandal can play through a serious back injury" is not better shape than in most teams. It has an outside chance at working, but it relies very heavily on a guy with a serious back problem. Is there a good option there? I'm not sure, the right option was to not trade away their third under control catcher last trade deadline if they had a catcher whose back had gone out. Unfortunately, that can't be easily undone right now. Also worth noting, I think some of the ludicrous trade proposals we've seen (Hendriks for two top 50 prospects from the Dodgers or for the #1 prospect in baseball!) have left people wondering why there hasn't been more done. Furthermore, this was fed by one "Rick Hahn" who said that he would have to do work on the trade market and who has since made...0 substantive trades, which suggests that perhaps this "Rick Hahn" misread the market and misunderstood his organization again.

They're a $20 billion company. They should absolutely know what they would do if a natural disaster caused the cancelation of a football game 1 week before the playoffs start, you want to think through things like that beforehand specifically because you don't want to wind up in uncharted waters. This setup isn't that different - the teams cannot currently play, that is the starting point. You don't want to publish all those things you've thought through, but you should have something thought through as an example scenario. Hell, you might even practice for things like that in the offseason as a training exercise for your staff.

I don't know what the right answer is, but the NFL should absolutely have a contingency plan for "What happens when an emergency situation causes delay or postponement of a game with playoff implications in week 16" and they should be acting on it right now. If that is a game resumption tomorrow night, then they should be getting those plans out to people right now. If that is a canceled game, then they should have rules already written for how that is dealt with. The exact situation causing it is difficult to predict, but there's any number of really bad things that could happen to a game at an inopportune time for making up the game before the playoffs.

If he didn't already want to not be here, the fact that he can play a competent CF would have made him a good fit as a backup OF.

Benintendi won a gold glove by “default”. There were literally 2 left fielders who had enough innings to qualify in 2021, Tendi and Varsh, and Benintendi played 200 more innings than Varsho. There were a number of people who did a better job fielding LF that season, but they were platoon players or had injuries so Benintendi played way more innings than them. He literally won that Gold Glove against zero competition, he is an average fielding LF who happened to play much of the season healthy. You may feel free to note how useful it would be to the White Sox to have a healthy and reliable corner OF, but he’s still only an average fielder. Luis Robert was an excellent fielder when he came up. However, in 2021 he suffered a serious hip injury and since that time his speed and range have both dropped significantly, which was exactly what was said could happen when he had the injury. That was enough to leave him a slightly below average fielding CF last year. Now it is possible that other things such as the White Sox’s coaches encouraging players not to run hard contributed to this in 2022 and that could be fixed with better coaching, but Robert’s 2020 performance just isn’t relevant to what he did in 2022 or what he will do for the future as much as his current condition.

If some big league team was willing to give Duvall $8 million, wouldn’t he be signed by now?

I don’t care that much if a guy can’t play RF, you can always move Benintendi over to RF and play your backup guy in LF if that’s the position you need to fill. I care more about CF as I can’t move Benintendi there for more than a couple days without it being a game costing disaster.

It is possible that the AED needed several shocks to restore his heart rhythm also, those things have you continue CPR sometimes as well if the first shock doesn’t resume a normal rhythm. I’m not sure if that would mean anything for his long term prognosis if it did.

Doesn’t exactly cause it to stop, it interrupts the regular heartbeat and sends it into random muscle firing rather than the standard coordinated heartbeat pattern. An AED shock across the heart is designed for situations like that, you overload the heart to clear the random firing and hopefully it resets to a normal rhythm, although damage can still happen and every second of delay is worrisome. I’m a bit worried that maybe 9 minutes of CPR meant that the nearest AED took that long to get to him.

If someone wants to offer him more than $1 million and a chance to play meaningful games in September, with what he has done the last few years, my reply to him is good luck. If the Diamondbacks want to offer him $2 million and a guaranteed big league slot and he wants to take it, then best wishes. He isn’t worth a guaranteed big league contract to these White Sox. The option to send him to the minors to start the year is quite important to this roster the way it’s set up. And comparing him to Rodon makes me physically recoil. Rodon was a young player who finally broke out after a series of injuries, with every stat saying he was excellent but wore out after 120 innings. If he could stay healthy he looked like an ace, performance wasn’t the question. Andrus is a veteran who had a 2 month stretch of extra home runs, without any support from higher exit velocities or anything else measureable, in fact many of his stats trended the wrong way when he got to Chicago, he hit a couple extra homers, with HR rates that rivaled the best HR hitters in the league for two months and way above his career numbers. Hugely important, was the difference between the White Sox winning 70 some games and being .500, but I will bet a lot he can’t keep up that Hr pace next year.

Here is the list of positions I have come up with where I feel the White Sox have sufficient depth to get through a season with no problems. 1. People named Reinsdorf. 2. The Grounds Crew. Thanks to Roger Bossard. Right now I don't think they even have enough marketing people, they definitely don't have enough radio and TV people under contract, I'm not sure they have enough vendors considering they picketed the bloody stadium at the end of the season, and there's literally no position on the diamond where I would say "They have enough depth that they won't have any issue during this season." So, would Elvis Andrus make sense for this team receiving an invitation to spring training? Absolutely. If they were to sign him, I would go so far as to say that between the injury histories of Moncada and Anderson, Leury's performance and injury history, and the inexperience of Sosa and Romy, there would be a high likelihood that he would make the team out of spring training. If he didn't' make the roster out of spring training we would probably need him for something by the end of May, and right now they have no one they could call up who could fill that kind of role. They would wind up calling up Burger and playing Leury or Romy full time at 2b or SS if someone struggled or got hurt, which is just a mess. The White Sox would be better with Elvis Andrus as an additional option than they are right now. Elvis Andrus is not a starting player on anything other than a bottom of the league team. He is a guy who can be slightly above replacement level, we shouldn't count on anything more than that. But, the White Sox right now don't have replacement level infielders in their organization if anyone gets hurt or if anyone (including Leury, who was awful and who had a back injury last year) struggles again this year. Now here's the problem. If Andrus was on this roster as a spring training invite, and the setup was for him to come up once someone had a chance to struggle through April or once someone got hurt, and he was in a spot where he might receive 200 plate appearances and play 50 games...that's not a terrible plan for $1 million. However, the question is whether we could limit him to that role. If Tony LaRussa was the manager, I would have to say "No you cannot sign him. If you sign him, he will receive 600 plate appearances regardless of how bad he is. It will not matter if a rookie can outperform him, he will get preference because he's a veteran." Can Pedro Grifol manage a veteran and 2 rookies at infield positions? I don't know. I don't have a lot of confidence that they won't screw it up, but if they could do it correctly, having him in the organization could make them better overall. It is also possible that someone could give an Elvis Andrus type player a big league contract. There are bad teams in the league, he could potentially start for one of them right now. The White sox should not offer Andrus that kind of deal, and if he would prefer that to a minor league deal with a team that has an outside chance of competing, then that's his business, find someone else who can fill that role.

Someone has to note the Blackhawks ownership covering up a sexual assault issue in this discussion. That’s a whole different level of stuff.

Jeremiah Green, drummer of Modest Mouse. Too many drummers this year. Watch over your drummers please.

A team like Arizona should be signing guys who have decent skills but who may or may not be healthy at positions where they don’t have anyone young, playing them for the first half, and trading the ones that are healthy.

Because the White Sox’s players were not as good as they were supposed to be. Projection systems didn’t know that Grandal’s back was blown out so they assumed he would still be an above average catcher, and they didn’t know how much Robert’s 2021 injury might affect his 2022 performance. Those two alone basically make up the difference between their projections and their final record. But…those projection systems already did say the White Sox were weak. The White Sox and the Cardinals showed as the weakest projected division winners, so it’s not surprising at all that they were vulnerable. And…projection systems typically underestimate young teams because they have no data on them. Cleveland was a young team, the White Sox were an old team, that’s the setup where a miss is more likely. If we follow that rule again this year - Cleveland is still one of the youngest teams in the league, the White Sox are fairly old overall (although a little younger than last year). Anyway, as I said, Cleveland is flat out better on paper. The White Sox were better on paper last year and turned out to not be. Cleveland could underperform this year, it’s baseball frankly you can’t count out the Royals and Tigers yet, anything is possible. Zips, for example since I have it open, got 4/6 division winners right and the only 2 playoff teams it missed were the White Sox (out) and Phillies (in). It isn’t hopeless, it’s not hopeless for KC and Detroit yet. It is absolutely an uphill climb. On paper, Cleveland is absolutely a better team. Baseball isn’t played on paper, but you also can’t ignore that.

They were substantially better than the White Sox last year. They played 16 rookies last year, so they have a decent chance of being even better and way deeper this year. Their system is top 5 in baseball so even if people get hurt they have serious depth to call up and use for trades. They’re weak spots last year - power in the middle of the lineup, catcher - they have improved at those in free agency. They lost no one of importance to them in Free Agency. They have one of the best managers in baseball. They now have playoff experience also. If you go position by position, Cleveland is as good or better than the White Sox on paper across the whole roster. A couple might be narrow wins for the White Sox , but on paper that’s it. The White Sox had a negative run differential last year so the White Sox might not even be as good as their .500 record from last year. The White Sox lost their second best player and second best pitcher to free agency. The guys they added in free agency are just trying to make up for what they’ve lost, and they still need others to improve just to make up that ground. The White Sox have a bad system particularly at the upper levels, so it is difficult for them to fill in for injured players with callups or trades. There is a scenario where the White Sox are better, where literally all the problems the last 2 years were LaRussa related and they are super lucky with health this year. Grifol almost certainly would win manager of the year in this case. On paper this is Clearly Cleveland’s division. Someone has to seriously overperform to catch them. It can happen, but very few people outside of Sox fans and no projection systems are going to pick the White Sox this year.

Wasn't Garcia also fighting back soreness most of last year, with no real chance to rehab or recover from it?

At the same time though, I think it seems likely that even if they manage to fill one of the remaining holes, they will leave themselves with 2 or 3 other obvious places where things have a high likelihood of going wrong. Outfield - they desperately need a backup OF. You could absolutely have signed Kiermaier for that money and said "Expensive but totally fits the roster". Infield - had they signed Segura to the same deal the Marlins just did, you similarly would have said "yup that makes complete sense, this is actually decent infield depth and this could help bring in the rookies a lot over the next 2 years". Catcher - If Grandal's back goes out in March and this turns out to be a mess, I don't think anyone can be surprised. Starting pitching - it took 1 guy getting COVID last year for Dallas Keuchel to, on paper, be their #2 starter, and a guy they signed as their 6th-7th starter right at the end of spring training last year wound up being their second most important starter. Davis Martin (whoa I almost typed Davis Mills) is fine as one swingman, but this is another obvious spot where the depth could easily collapse by April 1 if two guys pull muscles in spring training or during the WBC. The White Sox haven't made trades to clear any salary or fill any holes so far, and many of the teams that might have taken salary on have done their spending on free agents. There are a couple of possible guys left as free agents who could be useful for each of these positions, but the quality is declining. Their payroll is only about $5 or $6 million below last year's payroll, so it is starting to seem unlikely that they have the resources to fill all of them. If they signed Duvall tomorrow, you'd say it made sense and filled one hole, but you could totally expect that some of the other weaknesses are going to come into play. Depth has been an issue for this franchise each of the last 2 years. I was sitting here at this point last year complaining about the lack of depth. It doesn't seem weird to me to be harping on it again, and it won't be surprising to me when people start saying how no one could have overcome injuries like these in April of next year.

A replacement level player is by definition 0 WAR per season. Leury has played 10 seasons (wow). That means, on average, he is a 0.3 WAR per season player. He is, effectively, on average, within error of a replacement level player for his career. That's a guy who, overall, you should have a decent chance of replacing with comparable production midseason by picking a guy up on waivers. Overall, no, that is not good enough for a role player. From 2017-2021, a 5 (ok 4.5) year stretch, he put up 5.8 WAR. That...is acceptable for a role player. It's not Chris Taylor who is an excellent utility player, it's not an average starter on a medium team ~(2 WAR per year). But for a backup, playing part time, getting some value out of being able to play at difficult positions, that's a tolerable role player. That isn't a guy who should be batting 2nd or 3rd on anything other than a 55 win team. That isn't a guy who should be batting 3rd while your recent #3 draft pick bats 7th. That isn't a guy who is so important you can't afford to put him on the IL when he's banged up. That isn't a guy who you need to get in the lineup every day because he's so important that he needs at bats to get out of his slump.

Let me look up the Braves for you. Spencer Strider - made the team out of Spring Training. Was in a swingman role. His first start was on May 30. This kept his innings reasonable and gave him time to work into the role. Michael Harris Jr - made his debut on May 28. Grissom - called up on August 10. All 3 of these guys were given time during the year to work into their roles.

I think this conversation is coming up right now in large part because the insurance options and backup plans available are dwindling. I don't think anyone out there thought it was a grand idea for the White Sox to sign Nimmo and Benentendi while cutting payroll elsewhere to fit them in. However, if I play this out - Robert regularly has been injured the last 2 years. It would absolutely, 100% make sense to be proactive about resting him early in the year. You should absolutely, 100% expect that he will have a small muscle pull somewhere, and you should be proactive about putting him on the IL when that happens. On top of that, given that Colas is a rookie who isn't all that experienced at baseball in the US, who did move quickly, and who has never played more than 117 games in a season, could there be some serious benefit to giving him extra days off to stay fresh and extra days off to stay in the dugout and receive coaching and practice? Throwing in at least 20 offdays for Benintendi, haven't I just set up need for a guy who can competently play at least 100 games, including some time at CF? There are only a handful of options remaining who can do that. There are not competent options for this in the White Sox's organization right now, their backups are Reyes/Hamilton/a big boost for Cespedes. This is a point of discussion right now because there are now only a few competent options left and the White Sox haven't gotten one. It should continue being discussed until we see an actual fix.

How many of them were in their important role on opening day, rather than earning it during the season?

While I still cannot guess what the White Sox's payroll limit is, I continue to think it's worth pointing out that $5-$6 million for 1 more player puts them pretty much right onto last year's payroll. At some point, there may be an additional reason why they're not getting these done - all of Duvall, Segura, an extra catcher, and an extra swingman pitcher might make sense for this roster, but they may not be able to afford it.

It is entirely possible that this happens. But what team is going to give you a useful contributor and take on $9 million in salary because they are so certain that it will? Literally none. As with Kimbrel last year, you could take a bad contract back if you could find one, but no team is giving you a valuable big league level guy with several years of affordable control for a guy who is effectively worthless.