Chicago White Sox

I really think they want to give Collins a shot. It’s really now or never time for him.

Got to love the tools and advanced approach at the plate at such a young age, but it’s so hard to really to know much at this point given he still hasn’t made his stateside debut. I personally hope they push him to Kannapolis next year, but that would be aggressive and I’m guessing it’s going to be a packed OF.

If we don’t draft a QB in the 1st, we should be prioritizing O-Line above all else. Definitely need WR help though, but should be able to get a nice talent in the 2nd and possibly 3rd if need be.

He’ll 100% be statewide, whether they send him to full-season ball is another story.

No doubt the game has changed and I bet there were a lot more sinker-ballers back then. But how does it look when you only include closers? Looking at the Fangraphs leaderboard, there were several closers with big K/9’s such as Gagne, Nathan, Dotel, & Lidge. These guys still existed back then, even if not as commonplace. My point still remains that Koch was never as dominate as Hendriks currently is and multiple metrics would agree with that.

Billy Koch’s best K/9 was 9.18 whereas Hendriks has been around 13.14 the last two seasons. There is nothing comparable about the two other than they both have been closers.

Kannapolis should be a ton of fun to follow.

100% agree. We’ve wasted tons of money over the years on B & C tier guys. Let’s finally stop throwing away money and just sign arguably the best reliever in baseball while the rest of our relief corp is dirt cheap. Hendriks is potentially a game-changer for us, especially come October.

Kluber is getting a one year deal.

Jerry is not going beyond 5 years for a game-changing SP, so outside of Springer this is the next best option IMO.

I don’t think this is true.

Thanks for sharing James!

At this point I’m expecting something around 4/$50M getting agreed to next week.

I’d assume Kannapolis. With most minor leaguers missing a year of development and Great Falls now eliminated, I’d expect a pretty loaded Kannapolis roster next year.

Not as good as last year’s insane class, but this should be a really good draft for WRs.

Just my opinion, but I think there is a difference between Chris Getz hyping up prospects in a random interview and people like James getting intel from people in the know.

Give me Richards over Quintana

While true, there are a lot of dumb and/or uninformed people who will never understand these fucks were trying undermine democracy.

Gotcha...I thought this was in regard to Musgrove. Unfortunately for Lopez he has probably run out of starting opportunities and will need prove himself in the bullpen. Maybe in shorter stints his stuff will play up and he’ll be able to maintain better focus.

That’s great, but what did Lopez do materially different in those starts rather than in his bad ones? If the answer is nothing, I’m not sure what you’re arguing other than almost all pitchers have good & bad starts which no one is debating.

You keeping saying this about his last 32 starts, but he put up a 3.91 FIP over those starts with good peripherals. You keep anchoring on ERA as the end all be all for some reason and even then he was at 4.36 over this same period of time, so saying he was terrible is simply not true whether you consider advanced metrics or not.

I wouldn’t overpay for Musgrove and I do think that someone will ultimately be willing to give up more than we would, but it’s at least worth exploring IMO.

I’m ignoring them because as I stated in my post, his pitch usage changed substantially and the spin rates on his two breaking balls increased significantly last year, reflecting a fundamentally different, more effective pitcher. So I don’t really care what his results were when he was throwing way more 4 seamers & cutters, because if I were the GM and acquiring him I’m expecting the 2020 version of Musgrove to be here to stay. And I don’t care about his ERA that much either, since it can be impacted by all sorts of factors such as poor defense and flukey bullpen strand rates. Again, my question is whether or not those changes are substainable or simply result of a random eight game sample size. If my pitching coaches and pro scouts believe that the 2020 version of Musgrove is for real, then I’m totally fine giving up a couple prospects that are further out or have option issues (like Adolfo) for a guy who might be a damn good #3 starter and is controllable for another two seasons for dirt cheap. If not, then I would just sign a guy like Richards to fill the #4 spot. But in this day & age, what a pitcher has been in the past isn’t the end all be all if he’s demonstrated a path towards success via changes to or improvements in his pitch repertoire & mix as things can suddenly click and transform said pitcher into something fundamentally better.

I don’t get why you are only focused on ERA and ignoring every other metric, but his xFIP would have been 3.89 even if you exclude those last two starts. But real talk, why are we only excluding the good starts and not the three bad ones to open the season where he was clearly the victim to flukey home-run and strand rates? There is a reason his ERA sucked at the point in time you are referring to and nothing about that ERA is predictive about expected performance. The real question is can he maintain a 44% usage rate of his breaking balls and a +50% whiff rate on those pitches over the course of a full season. If he can, he will be an incredibly successful pitcher going forward and would a great addition to our rotation.