35thstreetswarm

You say that like it's self-evident. It's not. How is it that the antitrust exemption helps the fan experience?

No - still chasing teams that missed the playoffs, like the Jays, Mariners and Padres

Blue Jays: the AL Padres

Sox limp out of the gate behind subpar starting pitching driven by injuries and regression from Lynn. Soxtalk goes bananas, everyone's worst fears about the roster are seemingly confirmed, and baseball writes off the team. Sox catch fire in the second half behind huge performance from Eloy and a blistering breakout campaign from Vaughn, capture AL pennant.

Dammit, Adolfo-mania was gonna be mine ?

I'm all for huge steps forward, but I'm not sure why they couldn't, for example, make a big trade for a starter with assets as we know them now. I don't put too much stock in projections, particularly for teams like the Sox with young, ascendant core players. I remember you making this same argument last offseason in support of projections that had the Sox at 83 wins and 3rd place in the Central.

I am frustrated with this offseason so far. I thought they should have spent money on a starter at a minimum. I am worried that the FO is showing signs that they won't proceed with the urgency we all expected during our contention window. That said, I am incredibly excited about our young core. I also think a couple of things don't get enough focus here: (1) other teams have flaws too. The question isn't whether we have holes, it's whether ours are bigger than our competitors'. In other words, what AL roster would you swap for ours? I *might* have said Houston, but they just lost arguably their best player and cheater. With that change, I'd say "none." (2) The entire story of the contention window does not have to be written in March 2022. Even assuming we do nothing else this offseason, we could still make a huge move at the deadline, and there's some logic to being extra patient with this roster, avoiding albatross contracts, and assessing young players' development for a few extra months when you're blessed with a weak division. These factors mitigate my overall worry and frustration that we seem to be hanging back more than I'd like.

This board is the most hilarious hen-house ever

Oh for god’s sake. Don’t go Peavy44

Also, take away all their wins and they were winless in those other games

We beat them in a series at the Rate IIRC. There were more than two regular season series

We are not running the 2021 RFers out there, though. I think the argument is that a Vaughn/Engel platoon will be an improvement over the Ghost of Eaton/Goodwin etc. One can disagree but citing the 2021 #s isn’t terribly relevant.

God bless this. A disturbing number of otherwise knowledgeable Sox fans still with the “Lou-WEE Ro-BEAR” nonsense (where did they get the idea that he’s a French aristocrat?)

At this point I’ve moved on from Conforto. We need another starter more than anything. That’s my focus and I hope whatever talks the FO were engaged in haven’t died off.

Psyched to get a chance to boo that cheater a few extra times per season

I just had a vision that Engel and his bionic shoulder will be the story of the season.

I'm in. That lineup would be terrifying (even moreso than, as others have pointed out, each time a ball is hit into our outfield defense)

OK, even using 27.1 (an "average age" that has plummeted from over 29 in just the last few years for reasons tied more to tanking and $$ savings than any change in peak performance, and thus a questionable metric for current purposes to begin with): of the 7 core players I named in my post, 6 are 27 or younger, several by multiple years: Robert (24), Moncada (26), Jimenez (25), Gio (27), Cease (26), Kopech (25), Vaughn (23). The other is Tim Anderson at a geriatric 28. I actually forgot about Crochet (at 22). If you consider Sheets a member of our core (I don't), he's 25. This core I identified is quite young, with multiple players who could explode into peak performance at any time, which is the cause of my excitement and was my point from the beginning. It sounds like you're talking about something different, which wraps in injury risk to the older players on our team. That's fine and a valid concern -- but a different conversation.

White Sox core -- young but not "fresh"? I have to say this drive to rain on each and every parade is getting increasingly obtuse. The "average" age is skewed upwards by a handful of key veteran additions who folks around here (rightly) demanded we get to supplement the young core. Sure we could jettison Lynn, Hendriks, Kelly, Graveman and the like and shoot up the rankings like a bullet but I don't think folks would be too happy about that. Kimbrel will soon be gone, a move that will probably move us a few slots on its own. But the core players I named are young and there's really no way around it.

Yeah, the "average age" of a roster is pretty meaningless. Our core players--Robert, Moncada, Jimenez, Anderson, Gio, Cease, Kopech, Vaughn, etc. -- are quite young.

That tends to happen with teams whose key players are young and on upward trajectories. That's what makes me most excited about this team -- green shoots everywhere, and multiple players who could realistically explode (in production - hopefully not literally, looking at you Eloy ? )

“Full Rays” sounds pretty good to me.

The off-season presents a difficult scenario for fans from a psychological perspective. It presents a series of binary choices—“should your favorite team sign [great player]… or no?” Of course the desired answer is always “yes.” It narrows the fan’s focus to a series of those decisions and makes them lose sight of the bigger picture of team quality and construction. It creates this bizarro-world anti-season where the only currency is transactions, not baseball play, with splashiness and recency rewarded. It leads to people orgasming daily over teams that miss the playoffs while cursing teams that will prove to be much better when it matters. I fall victim to it like anybody else. But I try to keep things in perspective by remembering that soon baseball games will be played, and “off-season-winning” transactions have a pretty abysmal track record in the real world of the baseball season. We all wanted Trevor Bauer last year. We all lusted after the Padres’ roster. We wanted Paxton, or Richards, or for god’s sake SOMEONE better than dumpster-reclamation Carlos Rodon. We don’t know shit.

Maybe you should take up a collection to pay Robert another 25 million this year so you could be more entertained by his compensation

Yeah, I agree he's not the ideal choice if I had my pick. But I'd be pretty jacked up at that lineup and willing to roll the dice a bit on the defense (which we'd be doing anyway with the likely internal options.)