Eminor3rd

Expiring contracts only

Yeah that shit’s old

I know why people want to make the comparison, but Crochet does not have anything even remotely close to the control that Sale had. They’re not all that similar in term of SP prospects.

Yeah, at this point, run some dudes out there. Then, if none of them stick, hopefully learn your lesson in the offseason and sign someone decent. Don’t need a superstar there, there’ll be a decent options available.

I don’t think this logic holds in this case. If you’re using the per-AB break even point as a baseline, then it also holds true that mediocre pitching beats good hitting, so why bother getting good pitching? The fact that outs are more common than hits is just a part of the game; you have to measure based on your teams ability relative to those norms/relative to the abilities of your opponents. At the end of the day, you just have to end up with more runs than your opponent, whether the score 11-10 or 1-0. I think if I were going to be convinced that one aspect of the game more important than the other, someone would have to show that one could be more reliably trained/lead to more consistent results. And I’m not sure that’s possible, given how offense vs. defense is a zero-sum game — if one was consistently more dominant, then the other would be equally consistently bad, and when it came to differentiation from your opponents, you’d be back to square one.

There’s no answer to this. You can overcome a lack of one with an overwhelming abundance of the other, but it’s easier to just to be balanced. If you’re thinking about what might be the right focus for improving the team, I think it’s more helpful to look at specific positions that are underperforming, i.e. 2B, SP4, etc.

Pollock was sort of unlucky, but he’s had an extremely high-variance career because of his injury history. There was always a good chance he’d bust. Kimbrel had already morphed into a risky, lesser version of his prime self that maintained elite stuff but lost all of his control/command. Despite evidence of this, the White Sox bought high on a half season bounceback, and placed him into a role he’d never held. It was a terrible move. You could imagine how it could work, but it was always more likely to fail, and the worst part is they could have just traded less for an already established setup guy in the market instead. Encarnacion was not the same after the all star break in 2019. I know this only because I was watching the Yankees every day at the time. I can’t remember if he was coming off of a small injury or something, too — but there was a very clear “before and after” point where he suddenly looked really old and physically different. Normal fans of any other team wouldn’t likely notice, but the Sox scouting staff certainly should have. No excuse for that one. Josh Harrison was a good player and is now washed up. Everyone seems to have known this except the White Sox. Sometimes old vets have stretches where they hit well again randomly, it’s called the “dead cat bounce.” I suspect even the Sox knew that a good Harrison was a pipe dream at this point, but they painted themselves into a corner by poorly managing their resources and missing better opportunities to upgrade, so it was all they were left with. Predictably desperate and bad move. Mazara was a well established mediocre player that everyone agreed that they thought would be better. If you have a plan for a guy like that, it can be a great gamble on upside that can turn gold, you just have to find a way to open up some ABs to give it a chance to flourish. What you DON’T do is hand the guy an every day role and rely on him as your only option at his position. This was another move that was always way more likely to fail than to succeed, and thus another bad move. The Sox are the last team left that doesn’t understand how volatile RP performance is, and that you should never buy it at peak value in the offseason market. The time to buy peak RP is at the deadline when you need it to last for 20 more innings (the timing of Kimbrel was right; the player and market evaluations were wrong). These offseason deals are, at best, coin flips to work out well in the short term, nearly guaranteed to bust in the long term. But they keep doing it and it keeps happening. Expect not to hate how maybe one in four or one in five end up. My view/point here is that this isn’t bad luck. This is a consistent pattern of bad moves. The Sox repeatedly put themselves in a position where the good outcome is less likely than the bad outcome. It may be true that you’d probably expected for one or two of these to have worked out better just through randomness, but they’d never be enough to turn the tide of the overall trend.

Obviously respect your opinion, but I think this is a weird argument. You could just as easily flip it and say the algorithms have led us to all-for-nothing power hitters who can only pull the ball, thus making the shift a good idea in the first place. The shift, if it really works as well as it’s supposed to, is the one thing that should incentivize players to need to be more complete hitters, more able to put the ball in play, more versatile, etc. I’m heavily in favor of the shift, because it’s a strategic move that has just as many costs as benefits. There’s a very clear and obvious way to counter it — it only seems “unfair” when the player at the plate isn’t good enough to beat it. Rather than an unfair/overpowered tactic, I see it as a natural CHECK on an unfair/overpowered tactic, which is training hitters to be able to ignore half of the game. Banning the shift would be like telling an NBA team they can’t play man to man defense on a team that’s doing nothing but shooting threes. You’re tying one hand behind the back of the defense to allow a one-dimensional offense to shine. If one team is exploiting an advantage, the other team should be able to counter with a change in strategy. The ability to set an extreme shift to counter an extreme hitter is balance, to me.

I’m not sure what your point is.

Nah, I think it's definitely too early, I don't think it's on their mind at all. Too many key pieces with lots of control remaining. Even if they let their free agents go, this team would at least be a contender in the Central through 2024 as-is: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1C4dU46AiC_pt1GtzakmASUg9UD_UnpG32kdRZ3clOnk/edit#gid=1520401900

I don’t think there are going to be any wholesale changes until this current window closes

I don't think cash is coming back

Ron, it’s old.

The Sox have never been able to actually develop hitting. They’re eternally attracted to drafting guys who are so athletic that they’re somehow successful despite their lack of polish/instruction/mechanics, and then the team just… sees if the success continues. Whether or not the team can put together a top-tier offense in a given year depends almost entirely on how many freak-of-nature “exceptions” like TA or Luis Robert they can manage to have ready on the active roster at the same time — modified by whether or not their bargain free agent signings still have one good year left in the tank or not. Gordon Beckhams, Zack Collinses, etc. just rot on the vine.

Couldn't afford to lose the depth.

Could be, for sure. But I think it's tough to draw that kind of conclusion from a week and change.

Right, has there been a clearer recent example of a manager that had left the clubhouse in disarray? The Ozzie Guillen situation is precisely the type of situation that I'm arguing would warrant a change. I haven't seen any evidence that the TLR situation is like that.

No, but I'm saying that I'd need to be convinced by an argument that is IS in disarray before I'd personally want the Sox to go through the process of changing management at this point. I bring this up only because my sense is that most of the energy behind this thread is based on TLR's recent unexplainable tactical decisions/comments about tactics in interviews.

I feel like when you make a managerial change, you enter this whole period of a new staff coming in, building relationships, evaluating current coaching staff, setting new routines, etc. While the upside of that change, ultimately, may be worth it -- there's always risk that it isn't and there's the uncertainty of how much time it takes to gel, etc. At the end of the day, the manager is an easy scapegoat, but unless the clubhouse is in disarray, I just don't think we have much evidence that even dumb stuff like batting Leury third really makes that much of a difference in the W column. I would rather ride with TLR, as long as he can maintain the morale, than roll the dice with another manager and accept the risks of momentum loss and of ending up with someone who is even worse. Because as tactically crazy and personally reprehensible as TLR may be, the managerial situation can certainly be A LOT worse than it is in terms of how the clubhouse is being handled, and in my personal opinion, that's the much larger issue as far as the impact a manager can have. I would not have made the hire in the first place, but now that we're this far in, I think the best move is to keep pressing forward.

Mediocre stretch of ten games? There are injuries but we always knew there would be. It’s April 25th and they’re a game and half back. I don’t like TLR either but you’re going to see this stretch at least a couple more times no matter WHAT the batting order is, even if the team wins it all this year.

I’m past the point of sacrificing time for strategic political bullshit for this crew. For me, they’re riding in together and they’re either going to win or they all gotta go. The time for punting is past; every season is in the window now.

It's April 19th.

Leury PH