Jack Parkman

Looks like there will be 2 game 163s

Nope. Just gonna let a few more games play out before seeing what they are. Let's see if they can beat Miami and NE.

Yeah. I'm shocked. Who is this team and what have they done with the Bears?? OTOH This is appropriate: Daa Bearsz! Trubisky has shown why he was #2 pick in draft today. That throw to Robinson in the 1st quarter was a thing of beauty. I hadn't seen anything like this out of him until today. Took him long enough. Let's see if he can keep this up.

Khalil Mack is a Madden cheat code.

Where's Mike Singletary when you need him to give a halftime speech? LOL.

I agree and I meant if he wasn't on the team, it would be more likely that they non-tendered him as he has basically zero trade value. I think the Sox are likely to bring him back, but there is a non-zero chance they non-tender him, depending on what they're hearing about Arb numbers.

If you're ok trading them for a bag of used baseballs, be my guest. I'd rather just watch them play in 2019 and let them walk at the end of next season. I think Avi is a non-tender candidate. The only reason he might get tendered is because the Sox payroll is so low. Abreu isn't blocking anyone and neither is Avi. Davidson needs to go. That is a guy that is a waste of a roster spot.

Good luck getting anything of value for either, as both are coming off bad seasons. Abreu's market wasn't that great before his 2018 season. Now it would probably be non-existent. Most teams view him as a DH. Nobody really needs one in the AL anyway.

Of course not, but it is the best way to judge proportion of the market. Extrapolation isn't perfect. Actually if you use the combo of both fanbases, the Sox have 25% of the market. the 36% number is % of the fanbase(908k/2.5M) where the 25% number comes from total followers of both teams(908k/3.4M) If that is the accurate data, and the Cubs hold 75% of the Chicago baseball market, you do the math, and the Sox market is about 2.2 M which is one of the smallest in Baseball.

95.6 mph according to pitch fx. Go to the sox website, look at the 8/30 game on the schedule, go to pitch fx data vs Benintendi in the 1st inning. It is why I still have a tiny bit of hope he can turn it around.

Going by Twitter followers, the Sox have roughly 36% of the Cubs fanbase. Meaning the Sox have 908k twitter followers and the Cubs have 2.5 million. My first set was old data. This is correct

Giolito is weird, whether he makes it depends on which guy we get next year. Do we get July/August Giolito or the guy impersonating a major league pitcher the remainder the season? If we get the former, he has a chance. If we get the latter, he's toast.

Go look at the pitch in which he struck out Benintendi in the game vs the Red Sox. During that stretch he was throwing wicked 2 seamers at 95-97 mph. EDIT Here is that pitch. 96 mph. Click on the link. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://twitter.com/pitchingninja/status/1035331563666518016%3Flang%3Den&ved=0ahUKEwjUvdaFouHdAhXJ8YMKHQMSCEoQo7QBCBwwAA&usg=AOvVaw2b7yMAqXZkI8cRQrokVsLI

Not completely. It was down a little bit, there was a lot more 92 than I was used to and a couple 91s, but he was pretty much sitting 92-93 and topping out at 95. Nothing like April and May where he was sitting 90-91 and topping at 93. Those 96-97 mph 2 seamers he was throwing in August were nice.

The acronym means: There is no such thing as a pitching prospect. What say you on this philosophy?

When evaluating pitchers, it is much more prident to evaluate based on hitters reaction to individual pitches instead of how much a pitch type moves. If hitters can pick it up, it movement doesn't matter. Giolito's stuff moves all over the place, and hitters still pick it up well. I thought Giolito's velocity gain would help make it harder for hitters to pick up his stuff. It hasn't. It seems to me, after the velocity uptick, all it took was the new advance scouting report to get around and they were right back on him again. That was the most discouraging thing and why I have flipped on him.

There is no point, which means it doesn't make sense for either party. Sox aren't a fit for Harper/Machado

Go ahead and laugh at me for that one. I was super wrong, and I admit it. September pushed me over the edge with Giolito. All of the gains he made during the summer were lost. I'll imagine I'll be getting shit for that one for a while, and I just have to take it in stride. In September, Giolito looked every bit as bad as April/May and he wasn't missing his spots as badly and still had his velocity from time to time. Better stuff, same results. If he had been working in the mid-90s all season like he has from July-end of season and had the same results in April-May-June, I would have been way more skeptical of him. I kept hoping if he got some stuff back he'd be ok, but it doesn't seem to be the case. That 2-3 mph velocity loss from his days as a top prospect seems to have really done him in. I thought that working at 93-96 would still be good enough for him but he's been working there for most of the month and still getting shelled. This data point was enough for me to give up.

Rutherford's OPS was fine, but I would have liked to see him in the 12-15 HR range to feel really good. Birmingham is gonna be tough on him. Personally, I'm on the fence between cautiously optimistic and moderately skeptical.

On the other coin, reasons for optimism with undeperforming prospects/young players: 1. Moncada's K rate has really gone down since mid August, and he has raised his BA 20 points from then to now. 2. If Kopech had to blow out his elbow, now is the time for that to happen when the Sox aren't counting on him as a major rotation piece. 3. Giolito showed flashes of pure dominance when he had his shit together on the mound. The great majority of the time he was crap, but he put together a 6 week stretch that saved his season from being downright horrible, and that same stretch he looked like an MLB pitcher. I wouldn't completely write him off yet, but it is getting close to that point. 4. Robert had 2 hand injuries. Those are known to be power sapping. Let's see what he can do when he's healthy. 5. Adolfo looked good before he had to get TJS 6. Rutherford is 21, and in A+ so there is still time for him to develop power 7. Dunning and Hansen also still have plenty of time to turn things around. I'll feel a lot better about Dunning if he makes it through ST healthy and Hansen if he can throw strikes again in April.

I'm not trying to be pessimistic, just as objective as possible. A lot of players could make huge strides in 2019 that makes everything come together. I just don't see how 2018 could have gone any worse unless EVERYONE sucked and got injured. At this time last season, I was legit excited for the seasons to come. Now, I have a heavy amount of skepticism. The answer is, we have to let 2019 play out but by the end of next year, we should have a better idea about whether or not this is going to work. I edited the word in my initial post as "best case" to "most likely" which is what I actually meant. The best case is obviously that a lot of these guys figure it out and the team takes off as intended.

Then you're not getting any top FA. You have to offer the opt-out 2-3 years into the contract, otherwise it is an absolute non-starter from the player's perspective. Especially with guys that young. If they're not willing to do that, then stop lying to yourself and saying the Sox have a snowball's chance in hell to sign a top FA. When it comes to FA, the Sox best bet is to sign a 29-30 year old FA and hope he stays productive through his mid 30s.

It is an organizational problem that runs much deeper, the Sox are starting to look like the Bulls in terms of being a massive clown college, so that is not good. This rebuild has to work or the Sox staying in Chicago past 2030 looks questionable at the very least.

The few bright spots: Jimenez is as good as advertised Cease was able to increase his innings, dominate, and stay off the DL Luis Gonzalez and Luis Basabe look like decent prospects Lopez looks, at the very least, like a decent back end of the rotation starter, with the potential to be a mid-rotation guy. Palka looks like he could be something. What, I don't know. All of the crap that happened this year: Kopech TJS Burger lost a year and a half of development time to injuries Hansen got injured and looks more like his senior season at OU rather than the guy who led the minors in strikeouts in 2017 Dunning had an elbow injury that has a non-zero chance to end with TJS in ST 2019 Robert missed the majority of the season with injuries, and hit 0 HR in 6 weeks of game action Rutherford still doesn't have any power They spent the 4th overall pick on Madrigal, who might be nothing more than a glorified singles hitter Zack Collins isn't a catcher, which probably makes him a fringe prospect at best. Not good for a 10th pick overall. Zack Burdi came back from TJS throwing 93-95 instead of hovering around triple digits. Not good for his future prospects to be an MLB pitcher Giolito looks like a bust at this point...I had really high hopes for him this season, but at some point you have to call a spade a spade Moncada is a huge question mark at best, and could be on his way to joining Giolito in the bust category. The same comment about Giolito could be said here. Avi looked more like the 2016 version Abreu had the worst season of his career For the majority of the season James Shields was the Sox best starter. All of the minor league bullpen arms that looked promising came up and got torched. (Hamiliton, Burr, Vieira) At this point, 2020 looks like a pipedream at best, and while it is too early to write the whole thing off as a failure, if things stay the same in 2019 you seriously have to consider an organizational housecleaning. In conclusion, it seems like in the most likely scenario we end up right back where we were in 2016 with about 4-5 decent players and a bunch of crap, maxing out at 75-78 wins, but without the benefit of the great contracts that made this "talent" acquirable. I don't think the Cubs or Astros minor league talent as a whole ever looked this questionable. We all thought we were going to see the golden age of White Sox baseball coming up. Now it looks horrible. They're losing around 100 games with no end in sight.

This was, as Rick Hahn suggested, the most difficult year of the rebuild. However, I don't know how this season could have realistically gone any worse. Besides EVERYTHING possible going against the Sox, this season was an unmitigated disaster. At this point last year it was easy to be optimistic about their future, now it is extremely difficult. I'm going to add an assessment of all of the Sox major rebuild pieces in another post in this thread.