Eminor3rd

I don’t know what the league had in mind when they talked about “attempts to circumvent the spending limits,” but that sure as s%*# sounds like it.

For some context, Iguchi was let go as manager to make room for the promotion of Masato Yoshii, who was previously the pitching coach, and has a very close relationship with Sasaki. Yoshii is known to be a health/biomechanics expert, and it has been speculated that his promotion was the result of the Marines considering Sasaki the most important part of the organization; no one was more familiar with Sasaki's unique health situation nor better positioned to manage it. I will admit that it can be very confusing to attempt to follow these types of things as a non-Japanese person, because the language is so impossible to map to Latin-based languages, and the layers of obfuscation they tend to speak with, particularly to the media and particularly with matters that affect reputation, can be even more confounding. But regardless of what actually led to those managerial moves, I would think it very unlikely that Iguchi would have been let go if Sasaki found him to be personally important. But, you know. I don't really know, of course.

Perfectly reasonable return, probably the first of the Getz regime.

I imagine the Tigers are trying pretty hard to convince Hays to come be a rh platoon with Kerry carpenter right now. Open question if he wants to accept being a platooner in his next role.

Never have I browsed the list of non-tenders and thought "oh wow, that guy's an upgrade for the Sox" so many times.

Lol and if it was 1972 and free agency hadn’t been invented yet and the players were decades away from having earned the leverage, through a series of labor strikes and collective bargaining, to create anything remotely like today’s limited service rights constraints and the resulting market-based competitive labor market, I would say we should keep all our good players, too! I wager we’d all like to have our cake and eat it too, if it’s an option. It’s not about Garret Crochet being good, it’s about the context in which he can only be good for two more seasons before the cost to retaining him becomes a substantial obstacle to acquiring more talent. And there’s no way to make that service matter in that two year period, so why not transfer that value to a period where it can actually make a difference? And your thing about trading for mediocre prospects is a strawman; obviously no one supports trading Crochet for bad prospects. It’s simply a reality of the game that you can’t know the future, but it shouldn’t stop from playing it altogether.

Ah, yes, Chris Sale is still good, and so were some hall-of-famers. But what about James Shields? Anibal Sanchez? Tim Lincecum? Jordan Zimmermann? Barry Zito? Brandon Webb? Matt Cain? Josh Johnson? Ricky Romero? Ben Sheets? Oliver Perez? Jaret Wright? Rich Harden? Aaron Sele? Dontrelle Willis? Carlos Silva? Mike Hampton? Gil Meche? Jake Westbrook? Jeremy Bonderman? What about Erik Bedard? Ian Snell? John Maine? Brett Anderson? Jair Jurrjens? Julio Teheran? Brandon Beachy? Jorge De la Rosa? Jonathan Sanchez? Jeremy Guthrie? Matt Harvey? Justin Masterson? Whatever happened to Chad Billingsley? Mat Latos? Patrick Corbin? Andrew Cashner? Shelby Miller? Chris Tillman? Kris Medlen? Ian Kennedy? Edinson Volquez? Where did Neftali Feliz end up? Wily Peralta? Alek Menoah? Mike Clevinger? Zac Plesac? German Marquez? Noah Syndergaard? Jeremy Hellickson? Michael Pineda? Remember what a building block Chris Archer was? Reylo sucked, lol. Rodon was a free agent. So they've traded two dudes in the last 25 years you wish you had back? Would that have been enough? Or, I guess three to be fair: Fernando Tatis Jr. could make a difference for sure... except... WAIT! He was worthless PROSPECT! They traded him to GET the established star pitcher! One of them named above! You're right though, John Danks $11m/yr extension, the failure to sign Zach Wheeler, and two short-term sub-$20m contracts in the 2020's are pretty good evidence the Sox will pay top dollar for a pitcher. I'm sold! Let's see if they can ADD this offseason and turn this 121-loss ship around!

Even if I grant you projecting bust on everyone, you've missed my entire point. You'd trade Crochet for Schultz every time. Because your team BLOWS, your pitcher is two years from free agency and has managed one injury free season out of four -- while Schultz has SIX years of control. I mean for those who are trying to imagine ADDING to this roster, I feel the need to remind you that it CANNOT be exaggerated how bad this team is. This is THE worst team. Keeping a depreciating asset instead of converting it to one that can appreciate is weirdly similar the literal definition of bad process. If you want to keep the two decent players on the roster because you want to watch someone good pitch every five days for a 110 loss team, that's fine, but it's not how you move toward the next championship.

Didn't Wilyer get in trouble for some kind of attitude-related problem this year? Or am I thinking of someone else.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with this. Out of the three prospects you mentioned today they are: now the #5 overall prospect (Jobe), a 24-year old that has been inconsistent but already has a 30-plus homer season and still three more years of control (Torkelson), and a good-glove backup catcher with upside and 5 more years of control (Dingler). As of today, Jobe alone makes that trade a win, even if Tork never figures it out. You're trading a guy with only two more years on your team that just lost almost every game in the season. You can't look at this like a snapshot -- taking things one year at a time is exactly why the White Sox have delivered you exactly one flukey championship in the last 100 years. I mean, are you suggesting Mayo and Holliday are busts? Neither of them even has HALF a season under their belts. Coby Mayo is 22 years old dude. You know who else was sub replacement at 22? Paul Konerko. Jackson Holliday is TWENTY.

FWIW, consensus seems to be that he can still throw 100+ whenever he wants, but that he's been coached very stringently to lay back in order to improve command and reduce injury risk. Despite this, he has still spent a ton of time out of the rotation, and his command is very inconsistent. Ultimately, he has his best nights when he lets it rip a bit more. From what I've seen over the last few years, the quality of his secondaries plays up quite a bit when they are primarily utilized as off-speed pitches, rather than relying on their movement/shape to miss bats. He can throw very hard and spin the ball reasonably well but he needs a ton of work, and he has to be considered a higher health risk than average. To be fair, they have treated his health EXTREMELY carefully, so maybe he could have pitched more than he did.

Interesting, hadn't heard that one

Not that I heard. FWIW, the same source told me two years ago that the Dodgers were going to be the overwhelming favorite for Yamamoto because they had been developing a relationship with him basically since he debuted with Orix. Regarding Sasaki, this source also mentioned that Sasaki really hit it off with Darvish during the last WBC, but that he thought that because of that, he may specifically avoid the Padres and Dodgers "out of respect for Darvish & Ohtani," seemingly implying that he thought it would be disrespectful to compete with them for the spotlight. Or something like that.

I've got one source that believes Sasaki will specifically avoid the Dodgers specifically because Ohtani is already there. I don't know if he's right, but the source is someone who would know stuff.

I think Painter was realistic when he was in the middle of his injury rehab. Now that he's back and shoving, I can't see him being on the table.

Granted.

It would absolutely bonkers not to trade Crochet this offseason. Extreme injury risk with only two more years of control and there’s never in history been a team further from contention than the White Sox right now. Literally none of the players on the current active roster will be on the next White Sox contender. Waiting for this year’s deadline should be a distant plan B to consider in the event of a horrible seller’s market.

Are you suggesting the literal worst team of all time team shouldn’t rebuild?

This is one of the very few decisions the Sox have made over the past five years that doesn’t seem like the wrong move the moment it is announced.

Tie between (1) Nicky Lopez gets Leury Garcia extension, and (2) Matt Foster traded for 5+ out-of-options DFA candidates to create budget room to give Nicky Lopez the Leury Garcia extension.

Lol, took the same picture

He seems to be implying that this season is an inevitable and necessary part of the proper first step to long-term success, which is both totally bonkers and completely consistent with the rest of his reign of terror.

f*** everyone involved in this organization

The team hasn’t signed a high-dollar free agent since Albert Belle.

I believe that JR has a very specific, very idiosyncratic vision of how “things should be,” with regards to compensation, player culture, management structure, fan experience, public relations, etc. I believe that vision may have had some link to reality in about the 1980’s, but has persisted totally unchanged in the subsequent decades, other than perhaps to have been strengthened in the few instances that someone was able to talk him into some divergent tactical decision that went onto fail anyway because of the impossible scenario within which it was expected to thrive. With each year that passes, JR’s version of “the business of sports” becomes increasingly untethered from anything resembling current reality, but unlike an average person in this scenario, JR’s superpower is to remain unflinchingly stubborn, such that no amount of influence or persuasion can pull him from his course, and perhaps to the point that the most heroic efforts to do so may even further harden his resolve. I believe he truly wants to win. But he ONLY wants to win HIS WAY. And having mired himself in this cesspool of toxicity for so many years, it may even be to the point where he would refuse an opportunity to win any other way, even if it was right in front of him. He has become an anti-hero, so unwilling to get out of his own way that he now finds himself consistently in the way of others’, but his utter lack of self-awareness and shame make it impossible even to pity him. Maybe years after he’s gone, we’ll be ready to dig in further, because I think he may be as interesting as he is malignant — but it doesn’t feel interesting right now.