Cracks in trust the process

[Dick Allen]

12 minutes ago, iamshack said:

This entire line of posts are so incredibly ridiculous, I can only guess that you simply felt like arguing with people this weekend. This is utterly preposterous.

 

I normally would agree, but he does have a point. RH would have been fired by just about every other team given his team’s performance since he became a GM. Maybe not 4 times, but at least once.  Considering he was part of the decision making process previous to that, it isn’t like he was put in a position of cleaning up someone else’s mess, or had no idea just how bad the mess was. 

That said, these prospects are anywhere near as good as they claim, he will totally redeem himself

Edited August 4, 2018 by Dick Allen

[Balta1701]

14 minutes ago, Dick Allen said:

The time to can him was before the rebuild started. So I am pretty sure, unless something happens to JR, these guys are going to see it through. I just hope that seeing it through doesn’t mean put up with several years more of this. I would think by the end of next season, a determination as to how this is going can be reasonably done. If Yoan Moncada is still an averag player, if Gio and Lopez are still questionable starters for a good team, if Eloy struggles, if Kopech looks lost, if Luis Robert continues to not play, heads should roll. Larry Himes got canned after winning 94 games with the lowest payroll in baseball. Bad performance should trump bad personality.  I do think 2019 is put up or shut up time to both KW and RH. I don’t expect playoffs, but I do expect some of the guys we have been marketed to count on start playing like guys who are going to make the White Sox win. And that evaluation should go on every year until the team is where they claim they are headed.

After seeing how things have gone this year, I don't quite draw the line at 2019, although it would be really nice to see some improvement from those guys you list. Young players can struggle for a couple years and still break out (see Carlos Rodon let's hope?), so I will give one more pass next offseason, but things need to be turning positive by 2020 because otherwise that will mean multiple guys are actually busting and things aren't getting better. By 2021 we should be talking about a legit world series contender. That's somewhat disappointing already to me, because that's a year behind what it looked like we should be at last year to me, but I will give that one last pass since player development does take time.

[caulfield12]

1 hour ago, Dick Allen said:

The time to can him was before the rebuild started. So I am pretty sure, unless something happens to JR, these guys are going to see it through. I just hope that seeing it through doesn’t mean put up with several years more of this. I would think by the end of next season, a determination as to how this is going can be reasonably done. If Yoan Moncada is still an averag player, if Gio and Lopez are still questionable starters for a good team, if Eloy struggles, if Kopech looks lost, if Luis Robert continues to not play, heads should roll. Larry Himes got canned after winning 94 games with the lowest payroll in baseball. Bad performance should trump bad personality.  I do think 2019 is put up or shut up time to both KW and RH. I don’t expect playoffs, but I do expect some of the guys we have been marketed to count on start playing like guys who are going to make the White Sox win. And that evaluation should go on every year until the team is where they claim they are headed.

The single biggest danger is that Hahn realizes his future is in jeopardy and does something idiotic like signing Donaldson for 4 years, Adam Jones for three and somehow ending up with an “elite closer” acquisition blowing up in his face.

This has been one of the biggest problems in this age of Sox baseball...mitigating risk by spreading it around a basket of players instead of signing just one or two huge deals, then crying poor when those aging vets produce below average results which hamstring the team’s payroll and lead to deals like the one we made for Shields coming off 10 runs surrended in Seattle, a classic pitcher’s park.  http://www.espn.com/mlb/boxscore/_/id/360531112

He had only given up 9 runs that month, but it was already patently obvious SD was trying to dump him...he had mouthed off in the press and it’s still almost inconceivable that we assumed almost half of his contract, and then threw in one of the (future) top prospects in baseball for the heck of it.

Let’s not forget Royals’ fans already were questioning if James Shields was “broken” nearly two years prior to that start for the Padres.

 

http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/15884407/san-diego-padres-executive-chairman-ron-fowler-blasts-team-poor-play

It’s almost illogical why any team would have bailed out the Padres and their owner (see article) without asking for more concessions...like additional talent coming over from SD.

Edited August 4, 2018 by caulfield12

[iamshack]

9 minutes ago, Dick Allen said:

I normally would agree, but he does have a point. RH would have been fired by just about every other team given his team’s performance since he became a GM. Maybe not 4 times, but at least once.  Considering he was part of the decision making process previous to that, it isn’t like he was put in a position of cleaning up someone else’s mess, or had no idea just how bad the mess was. 

That said, these prospects are anywhere near as good as they claim, he will totally redeem himself

The entire premise is simply ridiculous.

First of all, it presumes all kinds of things in regards to what has happened over the last 6-7 years, which is speculative, in most cases likely flat-out wrong, ignores Hahn’s history with the organization, and because of that, is a very weak foundation upon which to base the entire argument. 

Secondly, how are we going to judge the guy in a role he didn’t have? Balta wants to suggest Hahn would have been fired by every other team for this performance, and yet, Hahn wasn’t working for the 29 other teams. He was working for the White Sox, whom he has worked for since November of 2000. Since then, he’s been entrusted with a number of high-profile negotiations, including Mark Buehrle and Paul Konerko several times each, Chris Sale, Jose Quintana, Adam Eaton, Jose Abreu, etc. While it is true that Rick has been GM since November of 2012, and we can only speculate in regards to the decision making process our FO utilizes, I think it’s a fair guess to suggest JR, KW and RH collaborate with a lot of direction coming from JR. Given the relative strength of the Central division, the starting rotation the FO was able to assemble, the state of the Cubs at the time, and some of the transactions Hahn and Co were able to make, I think a fairly strong defense can be levied for continuing to make a run at being competitive between 2013-2016. It is very easy to criticize now in hindsight, particularly with the success of the Astros’ and Cubs’ rebuilds, but in those years it was still very unclear as to whether those tear downs were going to be successful. 

I remember quite a bit of mocking of the Cubs and Astros around these parts as we cheered on our own failed attempts to supplement our roster through trades and FA signings (remember the excitement around here as the White Sox were hailed as being FA “winners” in 2014?). Again, hindsight is a wonderful thing. 

Thirdly, Balta assumes that the fact that some GMs are fired because they didn’t win is a wise reason to fire them. Again, there are 29 other teams. Not every team can win. I understand the arguments about the playoff drought. I do. But in my view, neither KW, nor RH have  ever made a move that one would call a “fireable offense.” While their moves have not always worked out well (Adam Dunn, trading for James Shields, etc), I challenge you to track the transactional history of whomever you believe to be the top 5-10 GMs in baseball, and I guarantee you they have moves on their resumes that look entirely foolish with the benefit of hindsight. Ultimately, KW and RH have provided a very good balance of aggressiveness and forward-thinking responsible behavior. The result of this blend of perspectives has been an opportunity to try to compete when competing made sense, with the ability to entirely pivot and reposition the organization towards a more modern, sustainable approach within a very short timeframe.

If you are of the opinion that talented people with a good thought process should be fired simply because the results don’t always bear out those talents, then you are going to be firing a lot of good people. From my perspective, the FO should only be fired because their thought process was entirely wrong, or they lacked the ability to execute on that thought process. I feel that neither of these is the case with our FO. The team simply didn’t win. And that is indeed partially their fault. But the more important measure of their work during this time period, tbh, is that they did not make any moves to seriously handcuff the organization moving forward. Say what you will about the efficacy of some of their efforts, but a seldom mentioned one is their ability to retain future flexibility as a result of avoiding the really crippling moves. 

Fourthly, if you’ve witnessed the transactions which we’ve made since the decision was made to rebuild, and you think RH is the worst GM in the League...well, I simply cannot understand that logic. The trades of Sale, Eaton and Quintana, while perhaps not perfect in every respect, are fairly difficult to really criticize in my opinion. Those are all strong returns, particularly the first and the last. The Yankees move I was not enthralled with, but to be frank, that isn’t looking too bad the further we get away from it, and to be fair, in reading the reports of how that trade came to fruition, I suspect that may have been a transaction which was negotiated more so by KW than RH, due to KW and Cashman’s longstanding history. But this FO, whomever is doing the actual negotiations, took a handful of assets with surplus value (whom they acquired, signed, etc) and turned a bottom third farm system into a top 3 system in all of baseball, the headliners of which, should all be on the mlb team within 18 months or so. 

The execution of these latest transactions, including the Robert deal, are incredibly undersold around here. The ability to get the return for Sale they did (despite the fact that he is a HoF pitcher), is to be commended. In the 12 months leading up to that trade, the VAST majority of folks here thought Sale was untradable (Balta, yourself included) because no organization would pay the necessary return. WRONG. The Eaton deal was widely praised everywhere (with the exception of ss2k, who was furious we didn’t get a few bats...was he wrong, in retrospect?), and still is likely to end up a big winner for the organization. The Quintana deal needs no explanation. The discipline to wait and wait and wait, while Quintana made lukewarm start after lukewarm start, to finally POUNCE on an aggressive GM caught up in the moment was BRILLIANT, and will likely provide this Organization with two extremely critical pieces moving forward, each of which could very easily provide more value individually than the player which was traded. 

So in conclusion...is this FO the best FO in basebal? Is RH the sharpest mind in baseball? Likely not. There are some incredibly taklented folks in this business. However, is he the worst? Absolutely not. Not even close. 

 

[Jake]

We have heard murmurs for almost a decade now about KW and Hahn allegedly telling Reinsdorf they thought the best course of action was to tear it down to some degree and instead having the owner encourage/demand they push for nearer-term victories. Who knows for sure about these things, it's impossible to verify. I do believe starting around 2012/2013, Hahn and/or KW did not want to push for a playoff run any longer because they thought it would be futile but Reinsdorf didn't have the appetite yet for anything that looked like intentional losing.

2012:

The 2012 season really screwed things up. That team wasn't good, didn't deserve to make the playoffs, but came very close to making it. You could tell what they thought of the team's chances by the way they sought to improve it mid-season: acquiring Orlando Hudson, Kevin Youkilis, Brett Myers, and Francisco Liriano. Even those moves ended up costing us some talent, especially Eduardo Escobar (hindsight is 20/20 of course), but there was a deliberate effort to appear to be trying once that team started winning but also avoiding a real earnest push to improve them. In the end, the team missed the playoffs due mostly to the fact the team was very lucky for much of the season and ultimately the lack of talent caught up with them.

2013:

But 2012 put the team in a position in which they could not tear down over that offseason. But they wisely invested nothing important in improving the team, either, ultimately doing nothing but making a half-assed effort at patching the gaping hole at 3B. We flushed $12M down the drain for him, but while I'm sure Reinsdorf still misses the money it had no real impact on the franchise because it wasn't as if Keppinger was supplanting some important young talent at 3B — we even decided to let Conor Gillaspie take a big portion of the reps there back when he looked like he might become a solid MLB regular. We see the writing on the wall and trade Peavy, Rios, and Thornton and in return get some familiar and less familiar faces.

post-2013:

In the offseason, we traded Hector Santiago and Brandon Jacobs (from the Thornton deal) for Adam Eaton. This is a fantastic trade, in my opinion. The Sox saw that fielding independent metrics for Santiago and sold high. Ultimately, I think Santiago showed that he was one of the rare birds who could consistently out-perform those metrics but he burned out relatively quickly anyway. Eaton made the team better both right away and in the future. We then traded Addison Reed for Matt Davidson. Reed ended up taking some lumps right away with the DBacks but recovered somewhat and then got very good again with the Mets. We lost this deal, but the limited value of a setup guy and the potential upside of Davidson makes me not upset about the deal — not every acquisition pans out. We also sign Jose Abreu, who was old for a prospect but just entering his prime and that deal showed us aggressively trying to infuse this team with young talent. That deal worked out very well too (even if you're disappointed that Abreu isn't "the best hitter on the planet" as some projected). I don't fault the Sox for signing a guy who was going to be good for at least 5 years and probably longer.

2014:

I have no complaints up to this point, really. Then...the 2014 season happens and we just don't do anything. The team sucks, we don't really make any trades, it just isn't clear what direction the team is going. There weren't really valuable veterans to trade so it wasn't like the lack of big action was a definitive sign of what we were doing. We had Sale/Quintana in the rotation and were still wishing on Danks. We had Abreu, Eaton, Avi (who gets hurt), Semien, Sanchez, and the last dance of Dayan. We had drafted Rodon and knew he'd be up soon. So we're doing okay but there wasn't really enough talent yet in the system to get us through the rebuild without some other moves. Our best options were to make some bold trades to really tear it down, stand pat and play the waiver wire game while we figure out what we have, or start signing some veteran free agents to try to cobble together a team that could back into the playoffs.

post-2014:

We went mostly with the signing veterans route: We bring in David Robertson, Zach Duke, Adam LaRoche, Melky Cabrera, Emilio Bonifacio, Matt Albers, and Geo Soto via free agency. Dan Jennings comes in via a nice little trade for Andre Rienzo. I'm of the opinion that sinking your MLB product solely for draft position is a stupid path so I don't care that we spent money on free agents since it didn't cost us any talent (and none of these deals had the potential to really harm the franchise long term if better players were needed).

We then made a very stupid trade that I hated the instant it happened: We get Jeff Samardzija in exchange for Marcus Semien, Chris Bassitt, and Josh Phegley. Samardzija had just one season before he would be a free agent while Semien and Bassitt were young players ready to start playing in MLB even if they were likely to need some time to develop (I never liked Phegley so I never cared that we dumped him). In Samardzija we got the league leader in hits, HR, and ER given up. Semien hasn't become a star but instantly became a 2-3 WAR player and someone who would have made that team better right away at any of 3 positions in the infield where we were abysmal all around. Hard to know what to think of losing Bassitt as he was good that year in MLB but also suffered a major arm injury that we may not have been able to prevent.

2015:

Bonifacio instantly flopped and we did not have the young talent prepared to take the infield reps we thought we'd get from him (we traded the MLB-ready talent away). Melky was always overrated and was just okay. LaRoche was terrible, almost surely worse than Dunn would have been if we had asked him out of retirement. Relievers were all fine. Soto was fine, though we probably had a little higher hopes. We also learned once and for all that one-time cornerstones Alexei and Danks were no longer MLB players. This team was like the 2005 team except where instead of everything from the offseason going right, everything goes wrong.

Our ability to compete was a mirage from the start as our good veteran acquisitions all had better reputations than their production warranted (Melky and Samardzija especially). But again, that I don't care about. The free agents were just money and I don't mind trying to win via some veteran free agent acquisitions; wasting money is a victimless crime. But the net loss associated with getting Samardzija pisses me off to this day. And while I don't mind getting the free agents, the total failures of Bonifacio and LaRoche are not positive signs.

post-2015:

What's a team to do at this point? We still didn't have much talent in the minors, especially as all of our young infielders (Sanchez, Micah Johnson, and Saladino) who played the previous year had done equally poorly. We had to let Samardzija walk because he played so badly and apparently clashed with our coaches/management. Our tradeable vets were few, but this was a time where you could have considered trading Abreu (but it would have been tough — this was following what we now know to be his worst season, but looked at the time could have been the start of a downward spiral) or Sale, who was a bona fide star. Quintana could have been traded but he was still so young and I think teams were still skeptical of his production. Nobody was going to trade talent for Melky or LaRoche.

We just spin the wheels, mostly. We sign Avila and Navarro at catcher. Navarro will suck but it's not the end of the world. We get Brett Lawrie in what I think was actually a pretty good deal (sending Zack Erwin and JB Wendelken). He was under team control and pretty good. He then played adequately for us, especially considering the performances of the players he was replacing. I don't blame the Sox for the kid going nuts in the offseason.

The Todd Frazier trade is emblematic of the approach I didn't like with Samardzija, though he wasn't a pending free agent and I wasn't a believer in either Trayce or Micah Johnson. Hindsight tells us we did sell high on those two (Trayce's value would peak about mid-season 2016 with the Dodgers). We knew then that the prize of that trade was Montas and we lucked out that he ended up getting hurt and not really producing up to this point. Perhaps we knew he would get hurt, but I don't know. Ultimately we didn't lose much here but it probably wasn't the right thing to do.

In a move not many paid attention to at the time, we'd also get Tommy Kahnle for Yency Almonte in a prospect-for-prospect deal.

2016:

I won't say much about this season other than our bargain-basement free agents didn't pan out and we had a major screw-up by trading Fernando Tatis, Jr. for James Shields. It irks me but I also know that most saw him as the second piece in that deal. Time will tell if Tatis Jr. becomes the star that many project, but we gained nothing by having Shields around so there's no way to say that this was smart or good even if it was reasonable to think at the time that Tatis wouldn't pan out like this. This, paired with losing Eduardo Escobar and Chris Devenski in the 2012 midseason deals, shows the perils of making "low risk" trades for veterans when you're trying to half-assedly build up the MLB club.

post-2016:

The fireworks begin. I don't have serious criticisms of these times.

Taking a deeper dive into the previous years makes me feel pretty strongly that the key assets traded at this time were never worth as much in previous years and we basically never wasted an asset of similar value by letting him play out his deal/allowing him to decline and trading him later in those times. The front office had several failures in their attempt to do the impossible thing of brute-forcing those early 2013-2016 teams into contention, but the only important ones were losing Semien/Bassitt/Montas/Tatis in trades. The only one of those guys currently producing in MLB is Semien, so it could be worse. The more I think about it, the more I wonder whether we would have been much better off now had we gone full-bore into a rebuild in 2013. We probably would have traded Sale for less, probably wouldn't have tried to go for a player MLB-ready like Eaton, and traded Quintana for much less.

In the span of time post-2013 or so, we also got a number of players/prospects in the draft and international FA and we generally did not trade them away, part of the reason for the depth we have in the system now.

[caulfield12]

8 minutes ago, iamshack said:

The entire premise is simply ridiculous.

First of all, it presumes all kinds of things in regards to what has happened over the last 6-7 years, which is speculative, in most cases likely flat-out wrong, ignores Hahn’s history with the organization, and because of that, is a very weak foundation upon which to base the entire argument. 

Secondly, how are we going to judge the guy in a role he didn’t have? Balta wants to suggest Hahn would have been fired by every other team for this performance, and yet, Hahn wasn’t working for the 29 other teams. He was working for the White Sox, whom he has worked for since November of 2000. Since then, he’s been entrusted with a number of high-profile negotiations, including Mark Buehrle and Paul Konerko several times each, Chris Sale, Jose Quintana, Adam Eaton, Jose Abreu, etc. While it is true that Rick has been GM since November of 2012, and we can only speculate in regards to the decision making process our FO utilizes, I think it’s a fair guess to suggest JR, KW and RH collaborate with a lot of direction coming from JR. Given the relative strength of the Central division, the starting rotation the FO was able to assemble, the state of the Cubs at the time, and some of the transactions Hahn and Co were able to make, I think a fairly strong defense can be levied for continuing to make a run at being competitive between 2013-2016. It is very easy to criticize now in hindsight, particularly with the success of the Astros’ and Cubs’ rebuilds, but in those years it was still very unclear as to whether those tear downs were going to be successful. 

I remember quite a bit of mocking of the Cubs and Astros around these parts as we cheered on our own failed attempts to supplement our roster through trades and FA signings (remember the excitement around here as the White Sox were hailed as being FA “winners” in 2014?). Again, hindsight is a wonderful thing. 

Thirdly, Balta assumes that the fact that some GMs are fired because they didn’t win is a wise reason to fire them. Again, there are 29 other teams. Not every team can win. I understand the arguments about the playoff drought. I do. But in my view, neither KW, nor RH have  ever made a move that one would call a “fireable offense.” While their moves have not always worked out well (Adam Dunn, trading for James Shields, etc), I challenge you to track the transactional history of whomever you believe to be the top 5-10 GMs in baseball, and I guarantee you they have moves on their resumes that look entirely foolish with the benefit of hindsight. Ultimately, KW and RH have provided a very good balance of aggressiveness and forward-thinking responsible behavior. The result of this blend of perspectives has been an opportunity to try to compete when competing made sense, with the ability to entirely pivot and reposition the organization towards a more modern, sustainable approach within a very short timeframe.

If you are of the opinion that talented people with a good thought process should be fired simply because the results don’t always bear out those talents, then you are going to be firing a lot of good people. From my perspective, the FO should only be fired because their thought process was entirely wrong, or they lacked the ability to execute on that thought process. I feel that neither of these is the case with our FO. The team simply didn’t win. And that is indeed partially their fault. But the more important measure of their work during this time period, tbh, is that they did not make any moves to seriously handcuff the organization moving forward. Say what you will about the efficacy of some of their efforts, but a seldom mentioned one is their ability to retain future flexibility as a result of avoiding the really crippling moves. 

Fourthly, if you’ve witnessed the transactions which we’ve made since the decision was made to rebuild, and you think RH is the worst GM in the League...well, I simply cannot understand that logic. The trades of Sale, Eaton and Quintana, while perhaps not perfect in every respect, are fairly difficult to really criticize in my opinion. Those are all strong returns, particularly the first and the last. The Yankees move I was not enthralled with, but to be frank, that isn’t looking too bad the further we get away from it, and to be fair, in reading the reports of how that trade came to fruition, I suspect that may have been a transaction which was negotiated more so by KW than RH, due to KW and Cashman’s longstanding history. But this FO, whomever is doing the actual negotiations, took a handful of assets with surplus value (whom they acquired, signed, etc) and turned a bottom third farm system into a top 3 system in all of baseball, the headliners of which, should all be on the mlb team within 18 months or so. 

The execution of these latest transactions, including the Robert deal, are incredibly undersold around here. The ability to get the return for Sale they did (despite the fact that he is a HoF pitcher), is to be commended. In the 12 months leading up to that trade, the VAST majority of folks here thought Sale was untradable (Balta, yourself included) because no organization would pay the necessary return. WRONG. The Eaton deal was widely praised everywhere (with the exception of ss2k, who was furious we didn’t get a few bats...was he wrong, in retrospect?), and still is likely to end up a big winner for the organization. The Quintana deal needs no explanation. The discipline to wait and wait and wait, while Quintana made lukewarm start after lukewarm start, to finally POUNCE on an aggressive GM caught up in the moment was BRILLIANT, and will likely provide this Organization with two extremely critical pieces moving forward, each of which could very easily provide more value individually than the player which was traded. 

So in conclusion...is this FO the best FO in basebal? Is RH the sharpest mind in baseball? Likely not. There are some incredibly taklented folks in this business. However, is he the worst? Absolutely not. Not even close. 

 

Well argued.  In the end, though...the “brilliance/armed robbery” of Rizzo has shifted from the most-loved to most concerning of the three moves (a lot depends on Dunning’s health moving forward), the concerns about Moncada and Kopech fulfilling their promise, etc.  The Quintana trade looks brilliant for the moment, unless Cease blows out his elbow again.  That said, even Kimenez for Q looks like a huge steal.  So we should all give him credit for being patient and maximizing his return despite one of Q’s shakiest seasons.  And making the right determination to deal Kahnle at peak value, that was smart and a lot of us questioned it as well as Rutherford’s potential.

Balta rightfully says he gets at least another year, if not until mid-season 2020.   That’s more than fair, and he also can’t control the slate of injuries to our Top 30 prospects, either.

Nevertheless, GM’s are always going to be judged by the W-L record on the backs of their theoretical baseball cards, not what ifs, theoreticals or what SHOULD have happened.

[Balta1701]

Then take a look at what actually happened. You say that there was a strong defense to trying to continue remaining competitive in 2013-2016. First and foremost, by 2015 I strongly disagreed with that at the time, and by 2016 I took a break from this site after I got tired of people being angry at me for saying that it wasn't going to work. So if you're talking hindsight, you're talking to the wrong person.

Here's a key line you say above:

Quote

From my perspective, the FO should only be fired because their thought process was entirely wrong, or they lacked the ability to execute on that thought process.

This is the absolute summation of 2015 and 2016. Their thought process was entirely wrong and they lacked the ability to execute on it. They believed they could vault a 72 win team in 2014 into a competitive roster through trades from a weak system and free agent signings. This model will not work for the White Sox. It only works for a team that weak if you can hit on every free agent acquisition and have them actually overperform - if they paid fair market value, the $60 million they spent in the 2015 offseason would still have left them a below .500 team. The idea that they could take a low 70s win team and turn it around overnight was fundamentally flawed and frankly impossible. 

And you want evidence of that? Take a look at the end results, 4th place, 4th place, 4th place. They tried the absolute best they could, they made moves that you folks thought were good, and that was the end result...BECAUSE THEIR THOUGHT PROCESS WAS ENTIRELY WRONG. A team built on a foundation of low level free agent signings is going to be a 4th place team, that's where they belonged. You say that they should have continued with their strong rotation - by 2016 that strong rotation involved Mat Latos, signed for $3 million, as one of their 5 starters. That rotation had 2 strong pitchers in it, and that was it. It was not a strong rotation, it was an average rotation with a strong front half and a back half of Latos and Danks.

Yes, the Sale, Eaton, and Quintana trades are done well on paper. As of right now that's the only reason why you can see me saying that it's ok to give Rick Hahn and company time to see how these deals work out. The Quintana one is, to my eyes, easily the most impressive, because that's the one where there was some gamesmanship and waiting on offers involved. But now I want to see results. There should be a ticking clock behind them right now. It isn't going to ring this year...but the ticking should be getting louder day by day.

Rick Hahn has the fewest wins in baseball since he became general manager. They are so far behind every other team in baseball that they could have kept Sale, Eaton, Robertson, and Quintana, and there's a good chance they'd still have that title. Teams above him, including the Phillies, started from a similarly weak foundation, with more bad contracts, and now they are competitive. Because Rick Hahn's thought process was entirely wrong, the White Sox sacrificed the latter part of the 2010s for 2015 and 2016, with a thought process that was guaranteed to fail. It only seemed reasonable if the people making decisions failed to understand that there is risk involved in free agent signings and that free agent signings are not guaranteed to overperform. Rick having the fewest wins in major league baseball since taking over is not an accident, it is a direct result of the "very good balance of aggressiveness and forward-thinking responsible behavior" you credit them with.

The 3, minimum, fireable offenses, were believing the 2015 patchwork team would work, believing the 2016 patchwork team would work, and the pre-2016 trade deadline scrambling that brought us the Shields deal. Completely misunderstanding the 2013 team is a 4th one. They did exactly what you said, they executed a thought process that would not work, and they did a poor job of it.

[iamshack]

4 minutes ago, caulfield12 said:

Well argued.  In the end, though...the “brilliance/armed robbery” of Rizzo has shifted from the most-loved to most concerning of the three moves (a lot depends on Dunning’s health moving forward), the concerns about Moncada and Kopech fulfilling their promise, etc.  The Quintana trade looks brilliant for the moment, unless Cease blows out his elbow again.  That said, even Kimenez for Q looks like a huge steal.  So we should all give him credit for being patient and maximizing his return despite one of Q’s shakiest seasons.  And making the right determination to deal Kahnle at peak value, that was smart and a lot of us questioned it as well as Rutherford’s potential.

Balta rightfully says he gets at least another year, if not until mid-season 2020.   That’s more than fair, and he also can’t control the slate of injuries to our Top 30 prospects, either.

Nevertheless, GM’s are always going to be judged by the W-L record on the backs of their theoretical baseball cards, not what ifs, theoreticals or what SHOULD have happened.

Wait, what? You just let this FO make the most important decisions for this franchise in probably 20 years. And you are going to fire them before you see whether this pans out or not? 

What did people expect when we chose this path? What has gone so drastically off track since then? What major offense has been committed SINCE we let this FO trade Chris Sale? 

People need to have patience. This was never going to be a win in 2018 thing. 2019 was always best case, and while that isn’t looking great at the moment, a LOT will change between today, and next 8-12 months. We will add a potential ace. We will add a potential all-star caliber hitter. We will potentially spend hundreds of millions of dollars in free agency. We will have a top 3 draft pick. The years the Cubs and Astros first competed came out of absolute nowhere. 

Let’s all keep our eyes on the things that truly matter here.

[iamshack]

2 minutes ago, Balta1701 said:

Then take a look at what actually happened. You say that there was a strong defense to trying to continue remaining competitive in 2013-2016. First and foremost, by 2015 I strongly disagreed with that at the time, and by 2016 I took a break from this site after I got tired of people being angry at me for saying that it wasn't going to work. So if you're talking hindsight, you're talking to the wrong person.

Here's a key line you say above:

This is the absolute summation of 2015 and 2016. Their thought process was entirely wrong and they lacked the ability to execute on it. They believed they could vault a 72 win team in 2014 into a competitive roster through trades from a weak system and free agent signings. This model will not work for the White Sox. It only works for a team that weak if you can hit on every free agent acquisition and have them actually overperform - if they paid fair market value, the $60 million they spent in the 2015 offseason would still have left them a below .500 team. The idea that they could take a low 70s win team and turn it around overnight was fundamentally flawed and frankly impossible. 

And you want evidence of that? Take a look at the end results, 4th place, 4th place, 4th place. They tried the absolute best they could, they made moves that you folks thought were good, and that was the end result...BECAUSE THEIR THOUGHT PROCESS WAS ENTIRELY WRONG. A team built on a foundation of low level free agent signings is going to be a 4th place team, that's where they belonged. You say that they should have continued with their strong rotation - by 2016 that strong rotation involved Mat Latos, signed for $3 million, as one of their 5 starters. That rotation had 2 strong pitchers in it, and that was it. It was not a strong rotation, it was an average rotation with a strong front half and a back half of Latos and Danks.

Yes, the Sale, Eaton, and Quintana trades are done well on paper. As of right now that's the only reason why you can see me saying that it's ok to give Rick Hahn and company time to see how these deals work out. The Quintana one is, to my eyes, easily the most impressive, because that's the one where there was some gamesmanship and waiting on offers involved. But now I want to see results.

Rick Hahn has the fewest wins in baseball since he became general manager. Teams above him, including the Phillies, started from a similarly weak foundation, with more bad contracts, and now they are competitive. Because Rick Hahn's thought process was entirely wrong, the White Sox sacrificed the latter part of the 2010s for 2015 and 2016, with a thought process that was guaranteed to fail. It only worked if the people making decisions failed to understand that there is risk involved in free agent signings and that free agent signings are not guaranteed to overperform. 

The 3, minimum, fireable offenses, were believing the 2015 patchwork team would work, believing the 2016 patchwork team would work, and the pre-2016 trade deadline scrambling that brought us the Shields deal. Completely misunderstanding the 2013 team is a 4th one. They did exactly what you said, they executed a thought process that would not work, and they did a poor job of it.

Here we are, back at point number 1. 

You have absolutely no idea what the owner of the team wanted. Have you ever read actual accounts from GMs about how operating an MLB team actually works, in real life? 

Most GMs are simply doing their best to carry out the orders of their Owner. Sometimes, their owner is not being entirely reasonable. You should read Ned Coletti’s book to get an idea about that. 

Not everyone gets to come in and make the decision whether to compete or not simply because they are the GM. See Jake’s post below. And before someone says it, NO, IF YOU WERE RICK HAHN AND JR INSISTED YOU TO TRY AND COMPETE IN 2014, YOU WOULD NOT QUIT YOUR JOB. That is a downright ridiculous, disingenuous notion that couldn’t be further from actual truth. 

I suspect there is some truth to what Jake is saying, and it very well may have taken the futility of 2013-16 to convince JR to allow them to rebuild. The Cubs winning in 2016 also has a huge influence on JR, and this is fairly well-documented. 

You admit that it was basically impossible for the White Sox to win between 2013-2016. While I have been watching baseball long enough to disagree with that, you are correct in stating it was an incredibly difficult task. In the end, I don’t lay much fault at their feet for not succeeding in a such a task, particularly since it was very likely not a choice they had in the first place.

[caulfield12]

9 minutes ago, Jake said:

We have heard murmurs for almost a decade now about KW and Hahn allegedly telling Reinsdorf they thought the best course of action was to tear it down to some degree and instead having the owner encourage/demand they push for nearer-term victories. Who knows for sure about these things, it's impossible to verify. I do believe starting around 2012/2013, Hahn and/or KW did not want to push for a playoff run any longer because they thought it would be futile but Reinsdorf didn't have the appetite yet for anything that looked like intentional losing.

2012:

The 2012 season really screwed things up. That team wasn't good, didn't deserve to make the playoffs, but came very close to making it. You could tell what they thought of the team's chances by the way they sought to improve it mid-season: acquiring Orlando Hudson, Kevin Youkilis, Brett Myers, and Francisco Liriano. Even those moves ended up costing us some talent, especially Eduardo Escobar (hindsight is 20/20 of course), but there was a deliberate effort to appear to be trying once that team started winning but also avoiding a real earnest push to improve them. In the end, the team missed the playoffs due mostly to the fact the team was very lucky for much of the season and ultimately the lack of talent caught up with them.

2013:

But 2012 put the team in a position in which they could not tear down over that offseason. But they wisely invested nothing important in improving the team, either, ultimately doing nothing but making a half-assed effort at patching the gaping hole at 3B. We flushed $12M down the drain for him, but while I'm sure Reinsdorf still misses the money it had no real impact on the franchise because it wasn't as if Keppinger was supplanting some important young talent at 3B — we even decided to let Conor Gillaspie take a big portion of the reps there back when he looked like he might become a solid MLB regular. We see the writing on the wall and trade Peavy, Rios, and Thornton and in return get some familiar and less familiar faces.

post-2013:

In the offseason, we traded Hector Santiago and Brandon Jacobs (from the Thornton deal) for Adam Eaton. This is a fantastic trade, in my opinion. The Sox saw that fielding independent metrics for Santiago and sold high. Ultimately, I think Santiago showed that he was one of the rare birds who could consistently out-perform those metrics but he burned out relatively quickly anyway. Eaton made the team better both right away and in the future. We then traded Addison Reed for Matt Davidson. Reed ended up taking some lumps right away with the DBacks but recovered somewhat and then got very good again with the Mets. We lost this deal, but the limited value of a setup guy and the potential upside of Davidson makes me not upset about the deal — not every acquisition pans out. We also sign Jose Abreu, who was old for a prospect but just entering his prime and that deal showed us aggressively trying to infuse this team with young talent. That deal worked out very well too (even if you're disappointed that Abreu isn't "the best hitter on the planet" as some projected). I don't fault the Sox for signing a guy who was going to be good for at least 5 years and probably longer.

2014:

I have no complaints up to this point, really. Then...the 2014 season happens and we just don't do anything. The team sucks, we don't really make any trades, it just isn't clear what direction the team is going. There weren't really valuable veterans to trade so it wasn't like the lack of big action was a definitive sign of what we were doing. We had Sale/Quintana in the rotation and were still wishing on Danks. We had Abreu, Eaton, Avi (who gets hurt), Semien, Sanchez, and the last dance of Dayan. We had drafted Rodon and knew he'd be up soon. So we're doing okay but there wasn't really enough talent yet in the system to get us through the rebuild without some other moves. Our best options were to make some bold trades to really tear it down, stand pat and play the waiver wire game while we figure out what we have, or start signing some veteran free agents to try to cobble together a team that could back into the playoffs.

post-2014:

We went mostly with the signing veterans route: We bring in David Robertson, Zach Duke, Adam LaRoche, Melky Cabrera, Emilio Bonifacio, Matt Albers, and Geo Soto via free agency. Dan Jennings comes in via a nice little trade for Andre Rienzo. I'm of the opinion that sinking your MLB product solely for draft position is a stupid path so I don't care that we spent money on free agents since it didn't cost us any talent (and none of these deals had the potential to really harm the franchise long term if better players were needed).

We then made a very stupid trade that I hated the instant it happened: We get Jeff Samardzija in exchange for Marcus Semien, Chris Bassitt, and Josh Phegley. Samardzija had just one season before he would be a free agent while Semien and Bassitt were young players ready to start playing in MLB even if they were likely to need some time to develop (I never liked Phegley so I never cared that we dumped him). In Samardzija we got the league leader in hits, HR, and ER given up. Semien hasn't become a star but instantly became a 2-3 WAR player and someone who would have made that team better right away at any of 3 positions in the infield where we were abysmal all around. Hard to know what to think of losing Bassitt as he was good that year in MLB but also suffered a major arm injury that we may not have been able to prevent.

2015:

Bonifacio instantly flopped and we did not have the young talent prepared to take the infield reps we thought we'd get from him (we traded the MLB-ready talent away). Melky was always overrated and was just okay. LaRoche was terrible, almost surely worse than Dunn would have been if we had asked him out of retirement. Relievers were all fine. Soto was fine, though we probably had a little higher hopes. We also learned once and for all that one-time cornerstones Alexei and Danks were no longer MLB players. This team was like the 2005 team except where instead of everything from the offseason going right, everything goes wrong.

Our ability to compete was a mirage from the start as our good veteran acquisitions all had better reputations than their production warranted (Melky and Samardzija especially). But again, that I don't care about. The free agents were just money and I don't mind trying to win via some veteran free agent acquisitions; wasting money is a victimless crime. But the net loss associated with getting Samardzija pisses me off to this day. And while I don't mind getting the free agents, the total failures of Bonifacio and LaRoche are not positive signs.

post-2015:

What's a team to do at this point? We still didn't have much talent in the minors, especially as all of our young infielders (Sanchez, Micah Johnson, and Saladino) who played the previous year had done equally poorly. We had to let Samardzija walk because he played so badly and apparently clashed with our coaches/management. Our tradeable vets were few, but this was a time where you could have considered trading Abreu (but it would have been tough — this was following what we now know to be his worst season, but looked at the time could have been the start of a downward spiral) or Sale, who was a bona fide star. Quintana could have been traded but he was still so young and I think teams were still skeptical of his production. Nobody was going to trade talent for Melky or LaRoche.

We just spin the wheels, mostly. We sign Avila and Navarro at catcher. Navarro will suck but it's not the end of the world. We get Brett Lawrie in what I think was actually a pretty good deal (sending Zack Erwin and JB Wendelken). He was under team control and pretty good. He then played adequately for us, especially considering the performances of the players he was replacing. I don't blame the Sox for the kid going nuts in the offseason.

The Todd Frazier trade is emblematic of the approach I didn't like with Samardzija, though he wasn't a pending free agent and I wasn't a believer in either Trayce or Micah Johnson. Hindsight tells us we did sell high on those two (Trayce's value would peak about mid-season 2016 with the Dodgers). We knew then that the prize of that trade was Montas and we lucked out that he ended up getting hurt and not really producing up to this point. Perhaps we knew he would get hurt, but I don't know. Ultimately we didn't lose much here but it probably wasn't the right thing to do.

In a move not many paid attention to at the time, we'd also get Tommy Kahnle for Yency Almonte in a prospect-for-prospect deal.

2016:

I won't say much about this season other than our bargain-basement free agents didn't pan out and we had a major screw-up by trading Fernando Tatis, Jr. for James Shields. It irks me but I also know that most saw him as the second piece in that deal. Time will tell if Tatis Jr. becomes the star that many project, but we gained nothing by having Shields around so there's no way to say that this was smart or good even if it was reasonable to think at the time that Tatis wouldn't pan out like this. This, paired with losing Eduardo Escobar and Chris Devenski in the 2012 midseason deals, shows the perils of making "low risk" trades for veterans when you're trying to half-assedly build up the MLB club.

post-2016:

The fireworks begin. I don't have serious criticisms of these times.

Taking a deeper dive into the previous years makes me feel pretty strongly that the key assets traded at this time were never worth as much in previous years and we basically never wasted an asset of similar value by letting him play out his deal/allowing him to decline and trading him later in those times. The front office had several failures in their attempt to do the impossible thing of brute-forcing those early 2013-2016 teams into contention, but the only important ones were losing Semien/Bassitt/Montas/Tatis in trades. The only one of those guys currently producing in MLB is Semien, so it could be worse. The more I think about it, the more I wonder whether we would have been much better off now had we gone full-bore into a rebuild in 2013. We probably would have traded Sale for less, probably wouldn't have tried to go for a player MLB-ready like Eaton, and traded Quintana for much less.

In the span of time post-2013 or so, we also got a number of players/prospects in the draft and international FA and we generally did not trade them away, part of the reason for the depth we have in the system now.

You can really stretch and argue Tyler Flowers (second time with Braves), Devenski, Semien, Escobar, Montas (more progress this year), Junior Guerra, Bassitt...with the leftovers like the Big 3 core and a healthy Rodon...could have been close to competing, but it still feels like an 82-85 win team.

Quintana was better his first four big league seasons than recently, so they were fortunate to get the overpay from Epstein...Sale’s value was similar back then, maybe bumped up a notch for each healthy season he accumulated.

The common thread throughout it all...terrible free agency moves and major developmental disappointments from Beckham and Viciedo.  You have to be right at least 40% of the time on those headline acquisitions.  Missing on Benintendi by one spot or Burger perhaps never being the same...it’s from that same “one key injury” line of thinking with Jared Mitchell, non performance from Hawkins, the constant string of disappointments that can’t easily be overcome by a mid tier payroll and revenue producing organization.  Even Rodon has been a mild disappointment, although he looks really good again, at least for now.

[caulfield12]

13 minutes ago, iamshack said:

Wait, what? You just let this FO make the most important decisions for this franchise in probably 20 years. And you are going to fire them before you see whether this pans out or not? 

What did people expect when we chose this path? What has gone so drastically off track since then? What major offense has been committed SINCE we let this FO trade Chris Sale? 

People need to have patience. This was never going to be a win in 2018 thing. 2019 was always best case, and while that isn’t looking great at the moment, a LOT will change between today, and next 8-12 months. We will add a potential ace. We will add a potential all-star caliber hitter. We will potentially spend hundreds of millions of dollars in free agency. We will have a top 3 draft pick. The years the Cubs and Astros first competed came out of absolute nowhere. 

Let’s all keep our eyes on the things that truly matter here.

That’s the big IF (the 3rd would be an elite closer or praying for Burdi)....those are three $50-150 million dollar acquisitions right there off the bat that many expected would come THIS offseason.  Let’s just say $250-300 million in new spending.  Will JR commit?  What happens when either Arenado or Rendon extend with their current teams?  We always say it should be easy to find someone for this position or that, but it absolutely hasn’t been a piece of cake since 2006 onwards to make those slam dunk acquisitions.

[Balta1701]

6 minutes ago, iamshack said:

Here we are, back at point number 1. 

You have absolutely no idea what the owner of the team wanted. Have you ever read actual accounts from GMs about how operating an MLB team actually works, in real life? 

Most GMs are simply doing their best to carry out the orders of their Owner. Sometimes, their owner is not being entirely reasonable. You should read Ned Coletti’s book to get an idea about that. 

Not everyone gets to come in and make the decision whether to compete or not simply because they are the GM. See Jake’s post below. And before someone says it, NO, IF YOU WERE RICK HAHN AND JR INSISTED YOU TO TRY AND COMPETE IN 2014, YOU WOULD NOT QUIT YOUR JOB. That is a downright ridiculous, disingenuous notion that couldn’t be further from actual truth. 

I suspect there is some truth to what Jake is saying, and it very well may have taken the futility of 2013-16 to convince JR to allow them to rebuild. The Cubs winning in 2016 also has a huge influence on JR, and this is fairly well-documented. 

You admit that it was basically impossible for the White Sox to win between 2013-2016. While I have been watching baseball long enough to disagree with that, you are correct in stating it was an incredibly difficult task. In the end, I don’t lay much fault at their feet for not succeeding in a such a task, particularly since it was very likely not a choice they had in the first place.

If we're at the point of putting the blame on 1 person and that being Reinsdorf due to things behind the scenes that neither of us can know but which you are presuming to be true I guess I have no ability to disagree with that because it's all supposition. However, I will note that your argument definitely supports the people at this page who say that the #1 problem with this organization is the ownership, and somehow I doubt that the people agreeing with your post will also agree the next time we have a thread that turns in that direction.

In the end the result is the same. The White Sox are the worst team in baseball since Rick Hahn took over and it's not particularly close. If that's the fault of ownership, then we have the worst ownership in major league baseball. If the buck stops with the General Manager, then we have the worst General Manager in baseball. If they have such a poor working relationship that ownership does not trust the general manager's opinion of the ballclub, then we have the worst of both.

[iamshack]

1 minute ago, caulfield12 said:

That’s the big IF (the 3rd would be an elite closer or praying for Burdi)....those are three $50-150 million dollar acquisitions right there off the bat that many expected would come THIS offseason.  Let’s just say $250-300 million in new spending.  Will JR commit?  What happens when either Arenado or Rendon extend with their current teams?  We always say it should be easy to find someone for this position or that, but it absolutely hasn’t been a piece of cake since 2006 onwards to make those slam dunk acquisitions.

I think the competition will be fierce, and I don’t want them to spend just to say they spent, but I think they will definitely be swinging a big bank account this offseason. 

[chitownsportsfan]

this thread is awesome guys, some really amazing posts.

Edited August 4, 2018 by chitownsportsfan

[Balta1701]

Just now, iamshack said:

I think the competition will be fierce, and I don’t want them to spend just to say they spent, but I think they will definitely be swinging a big bank account this offseason. 

Coming into this season I would have said yes absolutely and thought we would definitely score one of them. I'm no longer as certain. Rick keeps implying they will in his public statements...they definitely have the money to do so, but it also seems too early based on the big league ballclub, and it's not like we won't have competition for Machado who seems like the best fit of the 2 big guys. That competition will come from teams like the Dodgers, Yankees, and Phillies, who also have comparably huge resources and better ballclubs than we do. I'm more worried than I was a few months ago that the people who are saying they'll strike out could be right.

[Chicago White Sox]

12 minutes ago, caulfield12 said:

That’s the big IF (the 3rd would be an elite closer or praying for Burdi)....those are three $50-150 million dollar acquisitions right there off the bat that many expected would come THIS offseason.  Let’s just say $250-300 million in new spending.  Will JR commit?  What happens when either Arenado or Rendon extend with their current teams?  We always say it should be easy to find someone for this position or that, but it absolutely hasn’t been a piece of cake since 2006 onwards to make those slam dunk acquisitions.

We’ve never had this much financial flexibility in recent history.  When the time is right to spend, there will be no more excuses for coming in second.

[caulfield12]

One thing is certain...having four lower budget teams (with Ilitch passing) makes Hahn’s ultimate task of returning to the postseason far easier to pull off than in any other division in baseball.  We don’t have to worry about being outspent or compete with another ascending team (see Braves/Phillies together in NL East).

You would say downright impossible to fail until you study the complete history of the franchise...but even that mindset can be broken (Maddon/Epstein). 

Edited August 4, 2018 by caulfield12

[Eminor3rd]

2 hours ago, caulfield12 said:

The Tigers had a LONG run of success under DD, just no World Series title.  Avila?  A wash?  Marlins produced Yelich, Realmuto, Stanton, Jose Fernandez, Ozuna...they blow lots of teams away in terms of development.  DBacks weathered the LaRussa/Stewart fiasco quite well.

Almost nobody in baseball would choose Hahn over Preller in terms of talent evaluation.

So that gives you the Orioles...but 80% of that gets dumped into the lap of Angelos and Showalter...and they made the playoffs in a much tougher decision at least twice if I recall correctly.

Maybe the Twins?  Well, they earned a WC and had the top ranked system 2-3 years ago.

 

Would enjoy seeing Beane with at least $150 million to spend in Chicago...but doubt he ever leaves Cali.

None of the doom-crew around here would take ANY of that as an acceptable outcome for this rebuild, nor the tenure of any administration whatsoever. 

Edited August 4, 2018 by Eminor3rd

[iamshack]

14 minutes ago, Balta1701 said:

Coming into this season I would have said yes absolutely and thought we would definitely score one of them. I'm no longer as certain. Rick keeps implying they will in his public statements...they definitely have the money to do so, but it also seems too early based on the big league ballclub, and it's not like we won't have competition for Machado who seems like the best fit of the 2 big guys. That competition will come from teams like the Dodgers, Yankees, and Phillies, who also have comparably huge resources and better ballclubs than we do. I'm more worried than I was a few months ago that the people who are saying they'll strike out could be right.

I agree, there is a very real possibility we could wind up with neither Machado or Harper. I suspect they will be in on Kimbrel as well. 

I dunno about Arenado being resigned as Caulfield mentioned. To me, he’s an even bigger prize than Harper or Machado. 

But even if we do fail to get one of those elite guys, I don’t know that it matters. This is about resources, and the various markets will be plenty liquid to allow Hahn and Co. to take advantage of the amount of resources he will have. There are a number of different paths that can be taken, and I trust that we will use opportunity to our benefit to succeed irrespective of which they choose. 

[Chicago White Sox]

12 minutes ago, Balta1701 said:

If we're at the point of putting the blame on 1 person and that being Reinsdorf due to things behind the scenes that neither of us can know but which you are presuming to be true I guess I have no ability to disagree with that because it's all supposition. However, I will note that your argument definitely supports the people at this page who say that the #1 problem with this organization is the ownership, and somehow I doubt that the people agreeing with your post will also agree the next time we have a thread that turns in that direction.

In the end the result is the same. The White Sox are the worst team in baseball since Rick Hahn took over and it's not particularly close. If that's the fault of ownership, then we have the worst ownership in major league baseball. If the buck stops with the General Manager, then we have the worst General Manager in baseball. If they have such a poor working relationship that ownership does not trust the general manager's opinion of the ballclub, then we have the worst of both.

Your need to cast blame on just one individual is fascinating.  The reality is multiple parties are to blame for our recent failures, Rick Hahn included.  But there is no doubt Reinsdorf put us in a bad spot in his half-ass attempts to go for it those last couple years.  He asked the front office to complete a task that would be incredibly difficult without a significant increase in spending and that clearly did not happen.  That doesn’t mean Hahn should get a pass for the bad moves he made, but he was most definitely set up for failure.  And before you say “we don’t know Reinsdorf was the driving behind going for it”, we do in fact know that KW & Hahn wanted to rebuild much earlier than we ultimately did.  If you’ve been paying attention close enough, the facts are all out there.

[Balta1701]

6 minutes ago, iamshack said:

I agree, there is a very real possibility we could wind up with neither Machado or Harper. I suspect they will be in on Kimbrel as well. 

I dunno about Arenado being resigned as Caulfield mentioned. To me, he’s an even bigger prize than Harper or Machado. 

But even if we do fail to get one of those elite guys, I don’t know that it matters. This is about resources, and the various markets will be plenty liquid to allow Hahn and Co. to take advantage of the amount of resources he will have. There are a number of different paths that can be taken, and I trust that we will use opportunity to our benefit to succeed irrespective of which they choose. 

And I'm gonna hit back on the bolded and say that in my eyes, this group has absolutely earned no trust with their decision making. Hence why I'm still so frustrated over the last 5 years, I believe that the people who made decisions that I find to be terrible are still there. They absolutely nailed a tear down, but they are still the same people who put together 4th place rosters and convinced themselves they would be right there at the end. 

So, at the very least, I'm nervous, and as this season goes on I'm seeing more ways that this could flop, with the free agent signings as part of that.

[iamshack]

2 minutes ago, Balta1701 said:

And I'm gonna hit back on the bolded and say that in my eyes, this group has absolutely earned no trust with their decision making. Hence why I'm still so frustrated over the last 5 years, I believe that the people who made decisions that I find to be terrible are still there. They absolutely nailed a tear down, but they are still the same people who put together 4th place rosters and convinced themselves they would be right there at the end. 

So, at the very least, I'm nervous, and as this season goes on I'm seeing more ways that this could flop, with the free agent signings as part of that.

So all the decisions they’ve made since December of 2016? No trust earned there?

[Balta1701]

6 minutes ago, Chicago White Sox said:

Your need to cast blame on just one individual is fascinating.  The reality is multiple parties are to blame for our recent failures, Rick Hahn included.  But there is no doubt Reinsdorf put us in a bad spot in his half-ass attempts to go for it those last couple years.  He asked the front office to complete a task that would be incredibly difficult without a significant increase in spending and that clearly did not happen.  That doesn’t mean Hahn should get a pass for the bad moves he made, but he was most definitely set up for failure.  And before you say “we don’t know Reinsdorf was the driving behind going for it”, we do in fact know that KW & Hahn wanted to rebuild much earlier than we ultimately did.  If you’ve been paying attention close enough, the facts are all out there.

I said this in another thread - a significant increase in spending would not have completed that task. Go through the 2015 free agent market, imagine the White Sox had boosted their payroll to $200 million, and ask yourself if they could build a championship team. The guys that signed at positions the White Sox could have used wound up including people like Sandoval, Chase Headley, Russell Martin, and James Shields, many of whom were disappointments even in the first year, let alone over their full contract. We had a huge discussion here that offseason over whether we should sign Victor Martinez as the top DH on the market and he's put up about -4 fWAR over his deal (I opposed it). If you gave the White Sox a $200 million payroll that offseason, and you signed Max Sherzer, Jon Lester, David Robertson, and Nelson Cruz - literally the White Sox would have had to guess 100% right on every single one of their signings for this to happen - then they actually would have had a shot at one of the 2 wild cards, but even then in part only because that year the 2nd wild card had a low win total. 

Now that's playing hindsight. That's actually looking back and saying "here's guys who were actually worth their contract" and imagining that somehow we hit on all of them. That's something which can't happen. If we had boosted our payroll to $150 million, maybe we sign Headley and Martinez instead of Bonifacio and LaRoche, and we get one guy who is slightly better over at 3b, but now we're stuck with an even worse deal at DH. That's how the free agent market really works out, and that's why trying to rebuild that team via the free agent market was fundamentally flawed.

[Balta1701]

25 minutes ago, iamshack said:

So all the decisions they’ve made since December of 2016? No trust earned there?

The trades are good on paper, I believe that is obvious. December 2016 was only the 2nd time I thought Rick Hahn handled his franchise correctly, the other being before 2014 where they acquired some assets intelligently in what should have been the start of a 3-ish year rebuilding program. As I said above, the Quintana deal really is impressive because Rick played poker, held his cards, and waited for another team to blink. However, as of right now we have 0 solid big league players from them (ok fine maybe 1 Moncada as a 3 WAR player). Until they actually have a record of these guys becoming strong big leaguers, we have no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt and many reasons to be skeptical. 

Those players are being fed into the same development system that has failed us so far, with many of the same actors there. The GM who extended Robin Ventura after the worst coached season I've ever seen now has a head coach who won't sit Anderson even though his knee hurts enough that he's getting thrown out at the plate because he can't run fast enough. The same GM who pulled the trigger on Fulmer and then called him up from AA to save his failing bullpen in 2016 when he had an ERA of 5+ is still making draft picks. In a development I didn't expect, we have a huge rash of minor league injuries this year - is that a one season thing, or is there another systematic problem we haven't addressed yet? Are we systematically acquiring players who have injury risks that we're not evaluating properly? Are we making sure these guys are conditioned appropriately in the minors prior to the start of the season? If we see guys with incorrect techniques, are we actually correcting them or are we treating them like Marcus Semien and telling them they're on their own, possibly contributing to the rash of injuries in the process? If the same people who established a 4 year record of awful decision making are still making decisions, there could be other awful moves that they've made that would not show up as failures yet.

I don't know how many metaphors I can give on this. They should be on the thinnest ice in history. The clock should be ticking. The ice hasn't cracked yet and the alarm hasn't gone off yet, but no, until I see the big league roster actually break out as is happening right now with the Phillies and Braves, they have earned no trust from me. They should have been fired, tarred, and feathered after 2016, but nothing I can do to make that happen. If I am going to turn around from that point of view and trust them, they have to prove it. I will grant them time based on the quality of those trades...but that time has limits, and I'm going to sit around being nervous and imagining all the other things that they could have screwed up, as you see above.

[iamshack]

4 minutes ago, Balta1701 said:

The trades are good on paper, I believe that is obvious. December 2016 was only the 2nd time I thought Rick Hahn handled his franchise correctly, the other being before 2014 where they acquired some assets intelligently in what should have been the start of a 3-ish year rebuilding program. As I said above, the Quintana deal really is impressive because Rick played poker, held his cards, and waited for another team to blink. However, as of right now we have 0 solid big league players from them (ok fine maybe 1 Moncada as a 3 WAR player). Until they actually have a record of these guys becoming strong big leaguers, we have no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt and many reasons to be skeptical. 

Those players are being fed into the same development system that has failed us so far, with many of the same actors there. The GM who extended Robin Ventura after the worst coached season I've ever seen now has a head coach who won't sit Anderson even though his knee hurts enough that he's getting thrown out at the plate because he can't run fast enough. The same GM who pulled the trigger on Fulmer and then called him up from AA to save his failing bullpen in 2016 when he had an ERA of 5+ is still making draft picks. In a development I didn't expect, we have a huge rash of minor league injuries this year - is that a one season thing, or is there another systematic problem we haven't addressed yet? Are we systematically acquiring players who have injury risks that we're not evaluating properly? Are we making sure these guys are conditioned appropriately in the minors prior to the start of the season? If we see guys with incorrect techniques, are we actually correcting them or are we treating them like Marcus Semien and telling them they're on their own, possibly contributing to the rash of injuries in the process? If the same people who established a 4 year record of awful decision making are still making decisions, there could be other awful moves that they've made that would not show up as failures yet.

I don't know how many metaphors I can give on this. They should be on the thinnest ice in history. The clock should be ticking. The ice hasn't cracked yet and the alarm hasn't gone off yet, but no, until I see the big league roster actually break out as is happening right now with the Phillies and Braves, they have earned no trust from me. They should have been fired, tarred, and feathered after 2016, but nothing I can do to make that happen. If I am going to turn around from that point of view and trust them, they have to prove it. I will grant them time based on the quality of those trades...but that time has limits, and I'm going to sit around being nervous and imagining all the other things that they could have screwed up, as you see above.

I’m sorry, but making good trades “on paper” is the primary function of the FO. RH is not General Fortune Teller, or General Crystal Baller, or even Head of Player Development. 

He went out and got the players his scouts told him he should be getting, and now he has turned them over the the folks who are in charge of developing those players. 

I concede that ultimately, the responsibility is his to ensure all facets of the organization are working to create players that ultimately produce for the ml team, but you’re admitting his primary function was done well.

As for these points about these guys not contributing yet...I fail to understand how you can hold it against th FO that these assets are still on their expected development track. The FO is being responsible in allowing them to get the repetitions necessary to succeed in the major leagues. This is precisely what they should be doing. 

Your conclusion of being on thin ice is your own, and one I don’t come anywhere close to agreeing with. Whether you think they should have been fired after 2016 or not, that does not somehow place them under some other framework from which to be evaluated once they were not fired. This organization went down a certain path when Chris Sale was traded, and it remains on a trajectory which is perfectly acceptable for that path. How that should result in thin ice or a sinister ticking clock is beyond my understanding. If this was not 2018, but instead, 2022, I could fully understand, but it simply isn’t.