Balta1701

Just to stress, the White Sox were 26th in fWAR from their pitching staff and 24th in fWAR from their starters last year. Their bullpen was historically bad even though people said "I think the bullpen might be ok" coming into the season. Multiple guys were dumped and got better when they went elsewhere. Pitching "Wasn't as bad as hitting" but no, it didn't "work". These guys shouldn't be graded on a curve.

In general with Grifol he was lower in KCs organization and didn’t have experience like “being Bochy’s bench coach”, there was no other team even considering Grifol at the time and there was nothing on his resume that made you think he was an obvious manager candidate. However, Grifol talked a good game at the start, almost everyone including the press was willing to give him a shot based on how awful LaRussa was, and it wasn’t until the next season started where you began to realize how over his head he was. On paper, Venable’s resume is a substantial improvement. How that will translate, we will see, and Grifol’s complete implosion should leave some skepticism.

Dodgers bullpen is better rested despite it being a bullpen game. Flaherty vs Cole for tomorrow, Yankees need a big full game from Cole and for the offense to show up again.

How big does the Yankee lead need to be for you to pull Weaver to save his arm a bit for tomorrow?

Naw, this is an actual lottery. The worst team can wind up with the 6th pick, and the worst 3 qualifying teams have the same odds.

They spent more in 1 year than any other team in the AL last offseason.

You do realize there’s a lottery now right?

Sonofa…Freeman did it.

Santander would be very much a Rick Hahn and Kenny Williams type signing. 30 year old DH, .300 OBP, other than relievers that’s like their dream player. That said, my current expectation is that Getz will sign a couple of his previous overpaid vets for leadership, keep Clevinger for his important leadership in domestic violence and teaching teammates how to harass a woman online, and drop the payroll down below $80 million. This will give Reinsdorf and the owners a big payday and also keep the payroll commitments low, making it easier to sell or move the team by limiting the cash they need to come up with for payroll. By comparison with that, I’d be ok with Santander, at least it’s an effort to improve.

Gotta hire someone.

Not because the White Sox made them look bad, but instead because several of them were terrible. For Grifol, he won’t manage again because he was bad, but he’s going to get a managers salary for 3 years. He will probably make more in these 3 years than he would in the next 10 otherwise.

Yeah but the problem with that is Grifol stank. Thats why he won’t get another job, he was an old school coach who let the team get out of control. But even with that for him, he can go back to being a 3b coach or a AAA coach and this 3 year contract is probably the best money he will make in his entire career.

It may not seem obvious from our perspective but this could easily be a stepping stone job. Manage here for 2 or 3 years, get experience, the team looks a little bit better under you, and you move on. There's only 30 of these jobs, this might be one of the worst, but guys who look all right in bad situations are getting valuable experience, and it's a decent salary boost.

Is there any reason to be obviously disappointed if we were to wind up with one of those two, based on something someone knows about them?

Let's see what he does with this, because the 2024 White Sox were very, very anti-analytics. Phil Nevin would be an "analytics guys will be locked in the corner over there and we won't talk to them because they don't like bunting" kind of hire. Pedro was very anti-analytics, despite what he said in his initial press conference, LaRussa is anti-analytics, Reinsdorf sure seems to be. It is 100% possible to "Execute change in that department" by making it smaller and less relevant.

Phil Nevin is exactly who I expect them to hire based on my stereotype of them. They came in last year thinking they would prove the nerds wrong about baseball, that baseball wasn’t built by stats or anything like that, it was built by important men with TWTW. They were going to bring in leaders, white guys who knew how the game was played like Eckstein. “The baseball people are back in charge” was one of their slogans. They overpaid leaders like DeJong, Lopez, Maldonado, and Clevinger. They were going to play “fast.” This setup lost them 121 games. Phil Nevin is most famous in managing for saying after a game he was going to throw at another team then sending in an opener to do that the next day. His teams emphasize bunting, being aggressive, playing fast. He is my joking stereotype for what I think they’re looking for, a guy who can prove that baseball was played correctly in 1978. Nevin is them saying their format is right and they just need more TWTW. Im sure they could find other guys like him, but we already know that’s who he is.

Eh, they're not "LEAKING EVERYTHING ON PURPOSE TO PROVE THEY'RE GETTING GREAT OFFERS" like they did in a previous trade discussion, so no worries if we haven't heard every name yet.

Welp.

I would have much less problem with someone cheap but intelligent than I would with a “baseball folks are back in charge” hire like Nevin.

That sounds like a sneeze.

The guy blew $4.5 million on a completely washed up Martin Maldonado, took on Lopez and Soroka even though the Braves GM tried to help by saying they were going to be non tendered, picked up Stassi who never played, signed guys like Flexen and Brebbia, and the true crescendo was giving Clevinger a contract worth more than the league minimum when no one else on baseball would sign him. Thats some serious wasted money.

While true, I think LaRussa at age 80 is probably unlikely to be physically able to survive it, and a manager dying in the dugout would be a lot even for the White Sox

Yup. You can’t find a guy who sounds more like “everything that has been wrong with this team” than him.

Honestly, no he wouldn’t be. If the team was actually better around him he’d be viewed as an unacceptable weak link and an easy place to upgrade. We’d at least be trying to find replacements for him at the deadline, or making him a full platoon then nontendering him in the offseason. A good example of this is Houston. Their plan A at 1b, Abreu, flopped big time. They had minimum salary guy Jon Singleton in their org and he took over as a replacement level player once Abreu was cut. this made them better, but they also kept playing their catchers, rookies, and injured players like Bregman there to try to find production. They will probably keep Singleton around this offseason because he’s at a minimum salary, but that’s probably their number 1 position to upgrade since an average 1b is a big upgrade that won’t cost a lot.

And as a final chefs kiss, when people write the history of this era, and there’s a footnote about the team that broke the all time loss record, it will note that the team was assembled by GMs Chris Getz and Rick Hahn. So his cowardice has left him in the record books for doing a terrible job. Beautiful.