Jeremy

QUOTE(Tony82087 @ Mar 5, 2008 -> 07:31 PM) I'm going to drop out of the argument, because I'm debating something I don't even agree with. Williams came out with the comment. I am just trying to make sense, and I suppose defend what he said. He didn't say "If I traded away all our veteran players, we could have the best young team in the league. It wasn't even about "rebuilding". It was about having the best minor league farm system. For the 10th time, if Danks-Fields aren't on that minor league list right now, then they have to be included in those talks, since they could help in a big way in getting a better farm system. I'm not saying it would be smart, or whatever. Thats not it at all. Just commenting on what Williams said. Gotcha. If Kenny thinks he could create the best young talent in baseball just by trading away his veterans...I don't know what he's thinking. Maybe he has a ridiculously inflated notion of our major league talent (which is highly possible). I think Kenny is either wrong or disingenuous if he believes that we have such incredible assets that we could assemble amongst the best young talent in baseball. It's an oversimplification but if you're thinking about the strength of the organization, compare the ranking of the major league talent and the minor league talent. We'd be something like 15th and 30th. That's not good.

QUOTE(Tony82087 @ Mar 5, 2008 -> 06:59 PM) If they wanted to restock the system, then Danks and Fields have to be included in the disucssion. They are current members of the Sox, and projected to be starters. So a core of Jenks-Vazquez-Danks-Fields-Buehrle-Konerko-Dye. If they traded all those players, and Williams got the fair value back, they would arguably have a top 5 farm system. Get it? That doesn't really make sense though. First of all, they wouldn't ever do it because if you're trying to rebuild you don't trade away good young players with next to no service time. The only reason you'd do that is if you wanted to have a highly ranked farm system. Furthermore we're talking about the quality of the team's farm system relative to the rest of the teams in the majors. Well, maybe we could have a great farm system then but our young talent would not be great because unlike most every other team in the league we wouldn't have a single good young player on our major league roster. Pretend we also dealt Fields and Danks we moved up to #1 in the rankings of farm systems. It'd be meaningless because the D-Rays would be #2 and they'd have Upton and Longoria at the major league level. The Red Sox would still have Buckholz, Pedroia, and Ellsbury at the major league level. Understand? The argument you seem to be advancing is "we could be a good rebuilding team if we wanted to because we could make trades (we'd never actually make and end up with the best farm system in baseball." That's technically true but if we did that we'd still have only something like the 15th best young talent in baseball because we'd have less young talent at the major league level than every other team. If we're middle of the pack in terms of young talent that wouldn't put us in a great position to rebuild or suggest that the organization is packed with assets.

QUOTE(Tony82087 @ Mar 5, 2008 -> 02:47 PM) What are you really trying to even get at with this post? Are you insuating that Dye would be one of Sox best trading chips? I could think of probably 10 others before Dye, those of which could infact re-stock a system. CWS already covered this but I think we only have a few trading chips that are really worth much: Buehrle, Vazquez, Swisher, and Jenks (I'm assuming you wouldn't trade Quentin and Fields since they're so young). When I said before that we could move into the top ten by clearing out the vets, I based my opinion on the fact that the A's moved up 21 spots (from 23 to 2) in Goldstein's rankings in one year by trading Haren and Swisher. Buehrle, Jenks, and Vazquez combined might bring more than Haren did but I'm not sure that it will be tons more. I suspect some people will be shocked and dismayed by that statement but Haren is young, cheap, and posted the 6th lowest ERA in baseball last year. He's probably at least twice as valuable as Buehrle and Vazquez. The other thing you have to remember is that this is if we traded all those players today. I'd be surprised to see the collective value of those four players increase over the next year and I could see it dropping. QUOTE(haroldbainesknees @ Mar 5, 2008 -> 05:31 PM) We really can't be surprised by this. Nor does this particularly bother me. I am a fan of the Chicago White Sox, not the Charlotte Knights or Birmingham Barons. Thus, I would rather have a strong MLB team than a stronger farm system. They're related quite a bit though. QUOTE(haroldbainesknees @ Mar 5, 2008 -> 05:31 PM) I may be in the minority on this board, but I think Kenny Williams is smart enough to realize when the time is right to stop dealing prospects for veterans. One of the reasons the farm system is so bare is because the Sox have consistently contended for playoff spots from 2003-2006. (I know 07 was a disaster). The result of course is that prospects are traded for players such as Vasquez, Thome, and Swisher who are critical to creating competitive teams, in turn competitive teams drive attendance, which generate revenue, which can be used any number of ways to strengthen the organization at any level. KW knows the White Sox are in a win now mode. All key players on the team Konerko, Dye, Thome, Cabrera, Vasquez are 30 plus. Some several years past that mark. So from my perspective, the goal at this stage at least to start the season was to re-tool in an attempt to contend in 08. If the Sox flounder in the first half maybe we will see a full scale rebuild. A lot of "win now" teams don't have barren farm systems though. I can see two reasons for this. The first is that we haven't drafted well so we've had to trade all of our good prospects instead of just some of them to acquire vets. The other is that Kenny's been particularly extreme in his desire to "win now." A lot of teams would've rebuilt if they found themselves in the situation we were in last season, thinking that there just wasn't enough at the major league level to try to win now. Also, a lot of teams (e.g. the Red Sox) insist on holding onto certain prospects or to a certain amount of their best prospects. Kenny is different in that he's pretty much never been in a situation where he was unwilling to trade prospects. That's unusual and a bit startling to me. That means if we have someone who projects to be a star in the system, Kenny will probably be willing to trade him. In fact, you could argue that he already did this with Chris Young. It's interesting that you say Kenny will know when it's time to rebuild. As I said before, most would probably have thought that around the trade deadline last year was about an obvious rebuilding situation as you can get. Furthermore, I think Kenny has pretty explicitly said he's unwilling to rebuild ever. He believes in rebuilding on the fly by injecting younger players into the system while still contending. That's sort of what he's done by adding Fields, Floyd, Danks, Richar, and Quentin into the mix (I hesitate some because only Floyd was acquired by dealing a veteran player). That's somewhat rare (though that BoSox and Yanks are doing it now, albeit by holding onto their own home grown players) so we'll have to see how it works out.

QUOTE(iamshack @ Mar 5, 2008 -> 12:07 PM) Once again, and I am tired of having to remind people of this. You'd deal all the quality veterans you have for young kids, and you could have one of the best systems in baseball. As Kenny has said, he could build a great farm system in 2 weeks if that was the goal. If we had an all out fire sale we could move into the top 10, maybe a bit higher. I don't really think that's something to hang your hat on though. Boston is four in Goldstein's rankings and they won the World Series last season. The Dodgers are five and they're playoff contenders. Atlanta, Colorado, and the Yanks are also in the top ten. We wouldn't have as much talent at the major or minor league level as the D-Rays (baseball's best system) and few envy them. In sum, most teams in the league have a good farm system or a competitive major league team. The fact that a few teams don't (San Fran, Houston, KC, Pittsburg) and thus we don't have the worst combination of major and minor league talent in the majors doesn't thrill me.

Obviously not a surprise. The link is below but it's subscriber content only. http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=7188

Frankly, I'm more concerned that our manager has a career OBP of .287. Seriously though, the correlation between playing success and coaching success is quite weak.

QUOTE(Controlled Chaos @ Feb 19, 2008 -> 08:57 AM) I agree. You just can't predict what's going to happen between the lines. You can make an educated guess. I suggest we make a spreadsheet and post it somewhere so all of us can put in our projections for the record of each team. I'm banking the guesses from the members of this board will rival that of PECOTA's. Does anyone have access to the Win Projections for every team? It's a good idea. I'm guessing PECOTA would come out in at least the 90th percentile, especially the most specificity you require in the predictions. If you just predict the order teams finish most fans can probably compete with PECOTA. If you predict each team's win total, I think PECOTA will do very well. If you project runs allowed and runs scored, PECOTA would probably run away with it.

Some thoughts: - When Fields playing time is fixed, that will probably be worth close to a win. - I'm not sure I even realized they had reliable Cuban translations but they're projecting Ramirez to be one of our better players next season. - Egbert is projected as essentially our fourth best starter this season. - PECOTA continues to love Vazquez. QUOTE(witesoxfan @ Feb 17, 2008 -> 05:32 AM) Didn't PECOTA (and Will Carroll, for that matter) get lucky as s*** last year with their predicted W/L? They picked 72-90, sure, but as I recall, they said the Sox would have a good offense and like one of the 2-3 worst pitching staffs in the league; that wasn't completely the opposite, as the pitching was bad, but the Sox had like the worst offense in the AL last year. If they were lucky at all, it was because the bullpen was so terrible; I don't recall a rosy forecast for our offense. Also, Will Carroll deals pretty strictly with health/injuries so he wouldn't be doing much with projecting a team's success, aside from projecting how many games a player's health will allow him to play. QUOTE(yoyozuna @ Feb 17, 2008 -> 08:44 AM) All I keep hearing is how PECOTA was dead on last year? Does anybody know what they predicted our record to be in 2005 and 2006? Also what did they predict for team like the Rockies or Brewers last year? If anyone had a system that was "dead on" like that, they probably wouldn't publish it. They'd keep it to themselves, go to Vegas, and make millions by doing things like betting a fortune on the Rockies making the playoffs. You can't see the future though and sports are extremely unpredictable. When you judge something like this the proper inquiry is never "Well, how often were they wrong?" it's how accurate were they relative to other projections.

QUOTE(Vance Law @ Feb 1, 2008 -> 04:28 PM) It doesn't surprise me that there is a disparity, because this business of ranking baseball prospects is such a complete crapshoot. Take a look at past Baseball America lists and note what sort of success they have at predicting Major League success. My favorite is the #8 (#8!!!) prospect on the 1999 list. Just because the rankings weren't as "accurate" as you believe they should be (I don't know how you're forming that standard) doesn't make them a crap shoot. For instance, compare the 1-10 rankings to the 90-100 rankings on each year's list. I'm guessing you'd rather have the guys ranked 1-10 at least 9 out of every 10 years.

QUOTE(Vance Law @ Feb 6, 2008 -> 01:35 PM) What's all this now? Are you bothering to make the distinction, "The team got "older and more expensive" by adding Swisher and also, "the team got younger and less expensive" by adding Richar and Quentin. Why would you not simply look at the overall picture to say that with the changes Williams has made, the 2008 team with Swisher, Quentin, Fields, Richar, Danks, Floyd is a notably younger team with more cheap and dirt cheap starters than we've had in recent years. People are suggesting we didn't get older and more expensive with the Swisher deal and I simply clarified that we did. Our payroll is over $100 million and our average age is 28.1 I don't see this as a young cheap team even if it includes some young cheap players. The only move on your list that cut major payroll was the Floyd deal and that didn't happen this past off season. None of the other deals made the team less expensive. QUOTE(Vance Law @ Feb 6, 2008 -> 01:35 PM) You're referring here to the post I made about the 2001 BA top 100 list. As I state there, my point is simply how silly, meaningless , and poor that list (and therefore any list including this year's) is at predicting future MLB success. That's a really bizarre logical leap. QUOTE(Vance Law @ Feb 6, 2008 -> 01:35 PM) On both the fronts of who is included, and their relative rank order( "aw nuts, our guy is only #74 while the White Sox are kicking our butts with Borchard at #23"). They ranked our guys Rauch, Borchard, Crede, Ginter, Wright and no one else, while the correct order would have been Buehrle, Rowand, Crede....... So in other words, you have access to 1,700 player rankings and you're forming your opinion based on five of those 1,700 rankings? QUOTE(Vance Law @ Feb 6, 2008 -> 01:35 PM) I made no case anywhere about whether or why or how prospects should be traded. I particularly like, "everybody realizes that not all prospects pan out" as a rationalization for 1 out 5 prospects pan out. If you read the post carefully, you'll notice that I disagreed with your contention that four out of the five prospects didn't pan out. Any way you cut it, we're still talking about five players. If zero out of five "panned out" or five out of five "panned out," it still wouldn't mean much. QUOTE(Vance Law @ Feb 6, 2008 -> 01:35 PM) It's unreasonable to expect ALL of them to pan out. It's reasonable to expect them to be wrong 4 out of 5 times (or 6 out of 7 with MB and AR). My point, again, is that these lists with their rankings are overall a worthless indicator of future success. A counter-argument of "hindsight is 20/20" will not be valid. I'm not saying I could do a better job of accurately predicting the future. I'm saying the list isn't worthwhile, and that people like lists. I'd say for them to be worthless the entire rankings (not just five of them) would have to be no better than random or it would need to be possible to better project future performance using some other factor (e.g. minor league stats). Are you saying that all evaluations of minor league players based on scouting projections are inaccurate or just BA's?

QUOTE(StatManDu @ Feb 4, 2008 -> 02:11 PM) I think the whole thing is interesting. ... I think the Sox have done a good job of keeping their good prospects and getting teams to take prospects that aren't so good. The above list is a good example of how good the Sox have been at keeping good prospects. See, it doesn't look to me as though they're discriminating much about who they will and won't trade. If a team wants one of our prospects and that allows Kenny to get someone he wants in return, he'll make the deal. Pretty much all of the top guys have been moved aside from Fields and I'm not convinced that retaining Fields was planned. He just became less expendable because he ended up becoming part of the big league club out of necessity. As far as the results, I think Kenny has been lucky some and we just haven't seen the repercussions of dealing a lot of these guys yet. I mean we've already had one guy come back to bite us and the odds that no one out of the group of DLS, Carter, Cunningham, and Gio pans out seem small. QUOTE(Vance Law @ Feb 4, 2008 -> 02:16 PM) Not dismissing your points, but another thing to note is the difference between trading our prospects for expensive aging veterans, and what we've done, bringing in Swisher, Quentin, and Richar. Traded 5 prospects for 3 young starting major league position players. With Fields, Danks, Floyd, Jenks...that's 7 of the top 15 important players at 27 or younger. It's largely not the deals themselves but the underlying philosophy that alarms me. Doesn't it seem strange that Kenny wants to trade more or less every last one of our top young players? Even in deals for other young players? Maybe you can chalk some of it up to his dissatisfaction with how the farm system has been run recently but this type of behavior dates back for some time and the types of players Shaeffer has been criticized for the most - McCulloch, Broadway, etc. - are still around because they don't have much value. Also, I have to take issue again with people talking as though we didn't get substantially older or more expensive by adding Swisher. Yes he's great, still relatively young, and signed to a very reasonable deal. You can't compare him with home grown prospects though. While he's about three or four years from reaching his peak, the guys we deals are more like 8 or 9 years away from their peaks. While he'll make a reasonable amount of money for an All-Star caliber player - roughly $35 million - over the course of the next five seasons, in Gio and DLS' first six seasons combined they'll probably make less than $5 million total. It's apples and oranges, unlike players like Quentin and Richar who don't have much more MLB service time than a prospect who's yet to make his major league debut. QUOTE(max power @ Feb 4, 2008 -> 03:10 PM) It seems like the sox have been pretty good at holding on to "can't miss" prospects when they've had them. The only exception I can think of is chris young. Which prospects has Williams held onto that have or will become good players? Fields is about the only one I can point to. That would make him an unimpressive one for two in holding onto can't miss guys. Counting Buehrle seems like a bit of a stretch since he was already on the major league roster when Williams got the job and ditto for Jenks since he was never a desired young player on our team prior to becoming an important cog. He's traded most of our "can't miss" young players: Reed, Young, and BMac. How much credit he deserves for the fact that Reed has been injured and unproductive and that BMac was mediocre last season is debatable; it obviously looks like he whiffed big time on Young. QUOTE(Vance Law @ Feb 4, 2008 -> 03:49 PM) And to further point out the relative meaninglessness of these lists and their rankings: 2001 Rauch #3 Borchard #23 Crede #36 Ginter #44 Dan Wright #61 One of those 5 (for which we were ranked the top farm system) turned into a major league starter. While the 2 most successful major league players thus far from our system from this time, Buehrle and Rowand, were never ranked in their top 100 list, and the "can't miss" guys Rauch and Borchard...missed. I don't think that's particularly damning. Everyone realizes that not all prospects pan out. That's not a reason for trading them all IMO. Probably the biggest reason prospects don't pan out are injuries to pitchers and that's exactly what happened with Wright and Rauch. Still, I think you're putting some spin on the results with these players. Despite, the worst arm injury a pitcher can suffer, Rauch is better than the two free agent relievers we just shelled out millions for so I don't think he's devoid of value because he's not a starter. It's devastating to think about what could have been if he was never injured but it would've been much more devastating to have traded him and then watched him have a Beckett or Peavy type career on another team. QUOTE(StatManDu @ Feb 4, 2008 -> 08:45 PM) In hindsight now, if the Sox could have gotten a proven starter or hired gun for Jon Rauch in 2000 ... maybe they win the World Series. Rauch was just another of Sox prospects that they couldn't trade or were hestiant to trade. Among the others: Johnny Ruffin, Scott Ruffcorn, Corwin Malone, Royce Ring. The more I think about this, the more I think the top job of a GM is to find a sucker to take your prospects for good players! Hindsight is great but GM's don't have it. Imagine the haul Minnesota could've gotten if they dealt Liriano right before he was injured? Well they couldn't predict the future so they didn't deal him. Also, it's important to distinguish Rauch from guys like Ruffin, ruffcorn, Malone, and Ring, since he was 10 times the prospect any of those players ever were. Sure it's possible he would've been mediocre were he never injured but the odds are much more highly in favor of him becoming a top of the rotation starter and teams don't like to deal those types of players for rent a players in pursuit of a Championship. If we are going to employ hindsight, considering that we were swept in the first round of the playoffs in 2000, one good starter wouldn't have been of any value to us.

Great article. I think all the moves are good in a vacuum but something like the Swisher deal is a major blunder in context. QUOTE(Fantl916 @ Jan 29, 2008 -> 03:28 PM) think of it this way... cleveland gets way too much credit for having an offense that is far inferior to both the sox and tigers. Cleveland scored about two runs per game more than us last season. I think we've improved but not enough to close a game that large.

The problem is that it's a small and unrepresentative sample. If you peruse BA's old top 100 prospects lists it looks a lot more like Russian Roulette IMO. http://www.baseballamerica.com/today/prosp...ures/26983.html Yet another way to look at it is by noting that Robin Ventura, Alex Fernandez, Frank Thomas, Jack McDowell, Magglio Ordonez, Mark Buehrle, Ray Durham, Joe Crede, and Carlos Lee among others were all White Sox farmhands at one time. Where would a team like St. Louis be if they adopted a "always trade prospects because they often don't pan out" approach and dealt Pujolz? Like most things in life, you need some balance and Kenny's approach right now is pretty extreme, considering that we probably have the worst minor league system in baseball right now.

I'm confused. Thome has averaged 573 plate appearances the last two seasons. Why is it considered a lock that he'll get 564 this season?

QUOTE(kyyle23 @ Jan 7, 2008 -> 01:47 PM) Just out of curiosity, did you get banned on that website for broadbrushing white sox fans there like you do here? No. As I said I wasn't looking to offend anyone and was just making an observation. I'm not making any absolute statements and I don't see why the notion that certain fan bases might have certain tenancies is highly offensive. I've always thought that unlike that other board, people's opinions are respected here even when they're unpopular. If that's not true and my opinions aren't welcome, I'll gladly leave.

QUOTE(lostfan @ Jan 7, 2008 -> 02:41 AM) You know what really kills me about the Chris Young deal... they act like we got completely screwed on that deal and that Kenny should've KNOWN he was going to be a better CF than Anderson, shame on him for having a broken flux capacitor on his Delorean and not being able to know in advance. If you're ready to defend a WS title and you have to bank on one of your two really good, 5-tool prospects filling a hole, are you going to go with the one that's still a raw AA project that is still working on hitting for average (power numbers notwithstanding), or the (apparently) refined player who tore up AAA and hit close to .300 in the minors? If I have to flip a coin I'm going with the second. Does anybody think Chris Young would've been the same impact player he is for AZ that he is on the Sox if he was put into the starting role in CF in 2006? I somehow don't think so. I tend to think we would've been just as impatient with him as we were with Anderson. Yeah that choice obviously blew up in Kenny's face but I don't really fault him for making it at the time. Although... last time I checked, that hole in the roster brought Jim Thome, who doesn't exactly suck (not happy about Frank leaving, but whatever, what can you do). And the player we gave up bought us a legit #2 starter. Anderson and Young weren't equally good prospects at the time of the trade IMO, Young had an edge. I for one wouldn't have been too nervous about Young playing CF in '06. Skipping AAA isn't unheard of and the stuff about a raw player struggling with his batting average is revisionist history since he hit .277 in AA right before we dealt him. Also, let's not forget that the pressing hole we filled at the time was "sixth starter." Trading Young was by no means essential to defending our World Series Crown. Look at Boston, you don't see them bending over backwards to deal all of their top prospects. QUOTE(witesoxfan @ Jan 7, 2008 -> 03:56 AM) The fact that Javy put up an ERA under 4 really tends to help that cause. And Javy put up an ERA under 4 in the AL Central. What's your point? I understand the argument, I've participated in it before. My point is that, for the most part, only White Sox fans seem to hold these views. Everyone else sees one of the more promising up and coming position players in baseball who makes $300,000 versus a veteran starter coming off an above average season who makes $11.5 million a season and it's a no brainer to them. QUOTE(witesoxfan @ Jan 7, 2008 -> 03:56 AM) There are two sides to this story; the only reason the Vazquez deal looks bad right now is because the Sox are bad; if the Sox are good, and Javy's a big part of that, nobody even looks back on this deal. It's a huge winner of a trade. That's what hurts most about the deal; it's not that the Sox lost Young, it's that they got a semi-expensive starting pitcher when the team is seemingly not going to be good by the end of the decade. I don't see how losing Young isn't extremely harmful to this team. We just traded away our last two substantial minor league assets because we didn't have a CF. Vazquez was more valuable than Young last year but at ten times the salary. This year I wouldn't be surprised to see Young contribute more than Vazquez for a tenth of the money. The argument in favor of the trade would essentially have to be that if the Sox had been contending last year then the edge in production that Vazquez had over Young in the last two seasons was worth roughly $40 million, regardless of how good Young is from this point forward. QUOTE(witesoxfan @ Jan 7, 2008 -> 03:56 AM) That's absolute bulls***. How many people went crazy about how much the Sox gave up for half a year of Freddy Garcia? In my experience very few. Because I complained about that trade, I was bullied and eventually banned from the White Sox message board I used to post on. QUOTE(witesoxfan @ Jan 7, 2008 -> 03:56 AM) Beyond that, people were pissed off about the Vazquez trade, and that involved ONE prospect, not THREE in comparison to the Swisher deal. Yeah, that one was less popular. I think a lot of that had to do with the team already having five SP's though and the fact that Javy was coming off a bad year in NY. QUOTE(witesoxfan @ Jan 7, 2008 -> 03:56 AM) What they are saying is that the Sox pitching prospects generally don't pan out well; can you blame them? Jon Rauch and Gary Majewski are among the few traded prospects to pan out for another team. That's why Sox fans really don't care about trading pitching prospects. And for every all-star and superstar prospect, you have more who flame out...what's your point? My point is that such an absolute position is untenable and hence it's alarming that a number of people are taking it. Such an argument advocates trading King Felix or Jake Peavy as minor leaguers if they were in our system because "White Sox pitching prospects never work out," and that scares me. QUOTE(witesoxfan @ Jan 7, 2008 -> 03:56 AM) You are merely looking at one side and seem to be completely ignoring the fact that the White Sox do not produce prospects at a very good rate and that when they do produce quite a few prospects, they generally flame out and become nobodies. They've had their share of good players come up through the system, without a doubt, but it's not as if they have been a prospect factory over the past 5-10 years. I'm sure a lot of White Sox fans feel that way due to the number of disappointments over the years but I'm skeptical that high caliber prospects in our system develop less often than equivalent prospects in other teams' systems. I don't think you can win without successfully integrating players from your minor league system into the major league club, not without a massive payroll at least.

No offense to anyone but I think you'll almost always find most Sox fans in favor of a prospects for major leaguers deal. First of all, despite Sox fans' reputation as pessimists, most fans I've encountered defend the overwhelming majority of Kenny's moves. Look no further than the Chris Young trade: the consensus in baseball is that Young is a highly promising young player and we got hosed in the deal but many White Sox fans still adamantly defend the deal. People moan about Young's OBP even though he improved markedly in the second half of his rookie year and posted a .358 OBP in the minors. More importantly though, Sox fans seem very willing to throw their support behind any deal where "unproven" prospects are deals for established players. People in this thread seem to be explicitly saying they believe a prospects for major leaguers deal is always a good deal, which I find completely mind boggling. Every All-Star and Superstar player was a prospect once and most of them where highly touted prospects like DLS and Gio.

QUOTE(WCSox @ Jan 3, 2008 -> 06:12 PM) Again, Gillick gave up Gio for a washed-up Freddy. That seems to support the notion supported by some here that he's at least somewhat overrated. He'll probably be a halfway decent starter, but we already have Danks, Floyd, and Broadway... along with Mark and Javy under contract for several more years. Again, why would you use a year old trade as a means of evaluating a prospect when there are much more accurate measures. If you see something red flags in scouting assessments or his performance then point to it. Trying to find meaning in a multi player trade that occurred a year ago is worthless. QUOTE(WCSox @ Jan 3, 2008 -> 06:12 PM) De Los Santos appears to have highest upside, but he's a good three years away. Sweeney is an afterthought in a suddenly-crowded outfield. I don't know why people have suddenly come to the conclusion that outstanding prospects always spend a full year at each level. That's pretty far from the truth. Regardless, I don't think it matters how far away he is because my point is simply that we shouldn't decimate our farm system to the extent that it's by far the worst in baseball. Whether DLS would help in a year or three years, he's a good prospect who can quite possibly help the team win games down the road for very little money. QUOTE(WCSox @ Jan 3, 2008 -> 06:12 PM) I agree, but I don't think that's the point of this trade. Swisher's under contract until 2012 and he's only making $6-$8 million/year. It sounds to me like Kenny wants to rebuild around Swisher, regardless of what happens this season. Our farm system already sucks. Dealing these three guys doesn't change that. If that's the case then Kenny's stupider than I thought. You don't rebuild around 27 year old players; Swisher will be exiting his peak in three seasons. You build around players like Gio or DLS because you can get six pretty cheap years out of them and they'll still be in their prime when that six year period ends. QUOTE(WCSox @ Jan 3, 2008 -> 06:12 PM) Our farm system already sucks. Dealing these three guys doesn't change that. Sure it does. There's a world of difference between a poor farm system and one that's by far the worst in the game. QUOTE(WCSox @ Jan 3, 2008 -> 06:12 PM) What's the worst that can happen? If the Sox fail to make the playoffs this year (which I agree is likely), they deal Paulie and Cabrera at the deadline for prospects to replenish their craphole of a farm system. They can also deal JD for prospects and buy out Thome's option next year to save more money. The worst that can happen is a need for a full scale rebuilding effort with a bare farm system. That's pretty bad because you have to wait several years to acquire talent and then several years to integrate the talent. As I said in my last post, seven years without contending is the worst case scenario and that's horrific. I've already explained why I don't think we can replenish the farm system through trades. QUOTE(WCSox @ Jan 3, 2008 -> 06:12 PM) The real problem with the Sox is that their scouting department is completely f'ed up. I'd rather fix that and try to get by with proven major-league talent in the meantime than put all of my hopes on Gio and DLS with an irrational Ron Schueler-like optimism. Of course improving the scouting is important. That doesn't mean that we might as well gut the farm system of the few good prospects we have. The fact that our means in bringing in young talent right now is poor is actually a strong argument in favor of retaining our few quality prospects. It's not an issue of pinning the team's hopes on a couple players, the issue is that if you trade away all of your best prospects you can never improve the team via the farm system and that makes it extremely hard to have success. QUOTE(RockRaines @ Jan 3, 2008 -> 07:23 PM) How many people are going to keep b****ing about the farm system until you realize the absolutely solid core of young studs KW has collected. With a successful farm system, for a contender they usually have what, 3-5 players that are homegrown maximum, that are cheap, young, and hitting their peaks. We have our future middle of the order and possibly 2 arms in the rotation for basically the next SEVERAL years. The top levels of the farm system are so insignificant right now with that young core its ridiculous. KW turned Gio into thome and Swisher, thats ridiculous. Our young core pales in comparison to a lot of teams. Fields, Quentin, Richar, Danks. That's it. Richar could be solid but doesn't have a huge upside. I like Fields and Quentin but neither looks like a world beater. Danks was never an elite prospect and put up an ERA of five and half last year so he has to be considered a bit of a question mark. Players like Broadway and Floyd are not highly regarded and someone like Swisher is not too young. Compare that to the young cores in places like Cleveland or Boston and it's nothing to get excited about. Most teams have a young core as good or better than ours and they still have the opportunity to further improve via their farm system in the future while we don't. QUOTE(Chisoxfn @ Jan 3, 2008 -> 07:29 PM) We can only hope that as Buerhle came through in the shadows of Kip Wells, Jon Garland (who panned out), Aaron Myette, Matt Ginter, and Lorenzo Barcelo....that Lance Broadway can do the same (outplaying Gio/DSL/etc). Unfortunately, absolutely nothing indicates that will be the case. Buehrle was excellent in the minors whereas Broadway has been very mediocre. QUOTE(Chisoxfn @ Jan 3, 2008 -> 07:50 PM) Would Jon Garland have gotten the Sox an A prospect, I think so. Therefor, I think OC does, considering there are many in baseball that believe the Sox got the better of the deal (which would mean his value is > Jon Garland's). Hard to say. Regardless, there's a huge difference between a player with a year left on his contract and a player with a few months left.

QUOTE(WCSox @ Jan 3, 2008 -> 03:37 PM) I agree in general, but our farm system was pretty bad before this deal. Gillick dealt Gio for one year of a broken-down Freddy. That doesn't exactly scream "Future stud!" I don't recall DLS being projected to be a super-stud either. Having Sweeney would've been nice, but we're not lacking outfielders at this point. I don't see any value in evaluating prospects based on their trade value a year ago when you can just look at their performance and scouting reports instead. Gio lead the minors in K's so he obviously performed pretty well (though there's room for improvement in some areas) and scouts seem to like him even if they don't love him. DLS is a guy that the scouts do love and he put up impressive numbers last season. I don't think either player is one of the top 20 prospects in baseball but that doesn't mean they don't have worth to the team and couldn't still become very good major league players. QUOTE(WCSox @ Jan 3, 2008 -> 03:37 PM) Outside of losing Garland, I think that Kenny's done a halfway decent job of doing what he said he was going to: Re-tooling this team for one more shot at the playoffs... especially considering that he had no top-tier prospects to deal. He's improved the team significantly at SS, in the outfield, and we have a legitimate setup man now. I'm not sure that the Sox are a playoff-caliber team right now, but they look a hell of a lot better offensively than last year. And I'm not sure that the 'pen could be any worse. And if things don't work out this season, KW deals Paulie and Cabrera at the deadline for prospects and the Sox get a jump-start on their rebuilding. Sounds like a win-win to me. I agree we're improved, but I don't think we'll make the playoffs. What happens when this push fails and we have a .500 team with a $110 million payroll and no farm system? I've been saying I won't criticize Kenny for taking a win-now approach at this point since he made moves last season that forced the team to go that direction and I can't continuously trash all his future moves for that decision. However, spending money is one thing and trading the last valuable prospects in the system is another. This is pretty clearly an ill advised attempt to win now and rebuilding is hard when you're starting completely from scratch. Yeah, we can start trading veterans once we end up rebuilding but I'm not sure how much value our players will have. I'm skeptical that any will bring back as much as we just gave up for Swisher. Cabrera will bring very little in a deadline deal unless he's having a phenomenal season. Paully will be 32 this season and we don't know what his decline phase will look like. Maybe he brings a pretty solid haul if he continues to perform well and we deal him soon. After that, Buehrle and Vazquez are the only two I can think of who have considerable trade value. We can build through draft picks too but those will take a while. The question becomes, if this current team doesn't cut it then we do we next have a good season again? It's starting to seem as though we'll be looking at a four year rebuilding plan if we're forced to tear things down completely. If we don't contend this season or the next, that means we could be looking at seven years in a row without a contending team. Yikes. QUOTE(juddling @ Jan 3, 2008 -> 03:45 PM) i think the same was said when Royce Ring was traded. He then went on to be traded 3 or 4 more times that season IIRC. Sox traded him twice in the last few years and Phillies got him and gave him back so mabye his sh*t isn't as good as everyone thinks it is. Quentin is essentially a prospect himself so yeah, deals of that nature and BMac for Danks aren't a problem in that sense (though it does concern me that Kenny dislikes all of his own prospects). Swisher is signed to a very reasonable contract but he's still going to make $34.8 million over the next four seasons whereas the first six combined seasons from Gio and DLS will cost roughly $3 million. That's a pretty big difference. QUOTE(sircaffey @ Jan 3, 2008 -> 04:03 PM) At what point do you stop trading away pitching and start acquiring some? With prospects being as good as gold recently, where is the pitching going to come from? This team doesn't draft well. This team doesn't develop talent well. This team doesn't commit long-term contracts to SP (Buehrle being the one exception). So if we aren't going to develop it from within and we aren't going to get it from the free agent market, where is it going to come from? I just don't understand the philosophy here. You win the WS almost exclusively on pitching, and suddenly you choose to get rid of almost all of the pitching in this organization. I'm baffled. Kenny is still awfully enamored with his scouts if he's willing to ship out talents like BMac, DLS, and Gio and then plug Floyd into the rotation. He seems to believe he can pick out pitching talent better than everyone else. I guess we'll see if he's right, but I'm not terribly optimistic. QUOTE(SoxFan1 @ Jan 3, 2008 -> 04:05 PM) We gave up a lot, but when was the last time one of our pitching spects really panned out? Buehrle? Jenks doesn't really count. Do people really believe that for some reason only (pitching) prospects of other teams pan out and not ours? Or do people believe which prospects become good major leaguers and which don't is almost entirely random? I'm confused. It seems obvious that prospects do turn into great major league players with some frequency and that this happens with highly touted prospects much more often than fringe prospects. It seems that if only due to the sheer volume of prospects Kenny has traded away, he's going to move some All-Star caliber players before they ever hit the majors. In fact, it's looking like he's already done it once with Chris Young.

Swisher is a very good player signed to a favorable contract through 2012; my only concern about him is whether or not he can play CF. I think this deal is pretty awful though because I just don't believe you can decimate your farm system like this, at least not unless you're adding the final few pieces to a championship team. We now have the worst farm system in baseball by a considerable margin. I don't understand how any Sox fans can be okay with that. Even if you don't like prospects we can't improve the major league club through trades any longer because we don't have the prospects to trade. Furthermore, if you never inject homegrown young talent into your system then you end up paying everyone on the roster a ton of money and the only way to win with that type of team is if you have a $200 million payroll, which I don't see the White Sox doing anytime soon. It's hard for me to understand how some people think we can be a successful organization without ever incorporating successful home grown talent into the major league squad.

When reached for comment, Kenny Williams directed a string of expletives at the best player in the history of the franchise.

So if you're the GM of a championship team, you should have your job for life? Sorry, I can't get on board with that one.

QUOTE(rockren @ Dec 6, 2007 -> 04:56 PM) .I do believe people can rip KW for not starting the rebuilding process back in July...that would've been the perfect time to have done it. Exactly. The die was cast a while ago. People shouldn't continue to bash Kenny every time for a questionable direction he took us six months ago. If you hate this direction the best you can hope for is that if we're not going to contend - and that seems relatively unlikely - we lose enough games to bring on a full scale rebuilding project further down the line and/or Kenny loses his job.

Kenny resigned A.J., Buehrle, Dye, and Vaquez to extensions in the past nine months and Contreras and Paully were already signed to long term deals so missing out on a couple more veterans wouldn't have made turning the entire team over into rebuilding an easy, logical next step, especially with all the no trade clauses and 5/10 rights floating around.

QUOTE(hitlesswonder @ Dec 5, 2007 -> 01:09 AM) Going for it or not, signing Linebrink was not a good move. If they are going for it, that $5M would have been better used to bring in an impact position player like Jones or Fukudome. If they aren't going for it, signing a declining middle reliever to a contract with a NTC and losing a pick is not a good plan. I agree with you but at the same time if he didn't make changes to the pen, people would've railed on him for it.