Cease To Padres per Passan

[PolishPrince34]

When Santos was shutdown at the end of the year. I believe it was a shoulder issue rather than the elbow. 

[2Deep]

51 minutes ago, hogan873 said:

Because he was ours, and we tend to remember the worst about every player, we may not appreciate how good he may have been.  He did throw some absolutely filthy innings, and he definitely relied on hitters expanding their zones.  He will probably pitch well in Atlanta, and it'll be a good trade for them.  But, as I said, we judge our players harshly.  Maybe every fanbase does, but we're really good at it.

6+ era is not good.

Melting down over and over in big situations is not good.

I saw that movie in my night mares over and over again.

[Quin]

6 minutes ago, PolishPrince34 said:

When Santos was shutdown at the end of the year. I believe it was a shoulder issue rather than the elbow. 

Elbow inflammation

It's not the worst idea to package him with Cease if it drastically ups the return. I'm also not furious if they keep him since they have him for five more years.

[spiderman]

Anyone see what Passan wrote about on ESPN+ this morning regarding Cease? Assuming it's just that the White Sox are engaged in trade talks with a few teams, but anything new?

[DirtySox]

5 minutes ago, spiderman said:

Anyone see what Passan wrote about on ESPN+ this morning regarding Cease? Assuming it's just that the White Sox are engaged in trade talks with a few teams, but anything new?

Quote

Dylan Cease
Cease's popularity on the trade market is due as much to his contract status as his pitch quality. In a sea of trade-block pitchers who will hit free agency after 2024, Cease comes with two years before he hits the market.

The controllability -- and cost control, with an estimated $9 million arbitration salary for the upcoming season and somewhere in the $14 million to 16 million range the next year -- gives the White Sox, under new general manager Chris Getz, the ability to ask for a package built around a top prospect. Teams looking for frontline starting pitching include the Dodgers, Red Sox, Cubs, Atlanta Braves, Orioles, Arizona Diamondbacks and Cincinnati Reds -- and each can put together a package strong enough to entice the White Sox, whose last rebuild included the deal that landed them Cease, at the time in Low A.

He blossomed into a top starter and looked downright unhittable in 2022, when he finished second in AL Cy Young voting on the strength of a 2.20 ERA and 227 strikeouts in 184 innings. While Cease's ERA more than doubled to 4.58 last season, he remained one of the game's best strikeout artists. Only Cole, Corbin Burnes and Kevin Gausman have more punchouts over the past three seasons than Cease's 667.

Chicago's glaring lack of depth in the major leagues and minor leagues makes a deal for Cease a near certainty. Wherever he lands, expect a hefty package to go back to the White Sox.

 

Edited December 1, 2023 by DirtySox

[Eminor3rd]

21 hours ago, baseball_gal_aly said:

You know my belief about budgets. 

Not spending money on free agency is a choice, not a necessity. If they want me to believe otherwise, open the damn books and prove it. 

You say this a lot but, you have to recognize that there is a difference between the wealth of the owner and the operating revenue of a team. The latter is liquid, the former is overwhelmingly not, and much of it is tied in the market value of the franchise itself. 

If your argument is that the owner should continually liquidate wealth to infuse more cash into the team at a loss until he/she runs out of money: well ok, I guess you can want that, but even if it happened, the owner would be setting off a spiral that would make the franchise insolvent, torpedo its value (which represents a great deal of the wealth in question in the first place), eventually leading to hundreds of lost jobs and a set of tremendous tax burdens on the city.

I say this as someone who believed as you do for a long time, and I do really get it, but I have actually “seen the books” and I think everyone would be surprised to see how narrow the margins actually are year over year. The reason owning a team is a good investment is not because they print money — it’s because the franchise value increases reliably and significantly over time, but that value isn’t just something you can withdraw like a bank account. You can take loans against it, but again, that gets dicey really quickly if you do it very often.

Believe me, I have no tears to spare for the rich. But it isn’t as simple as “be less greedy”

[Lip Man 1]

11 minutes ago, Eminor3rd said:

You say this a lot but, you have to recognize that there is a difference between the wealth of the owner and the operating revenue of a team. The latter is liquid, the former is overwhelmingly not, and much of it is tied in the market value of the franchise itself. 

If your argument is that the owner should continually liquidate wealth to infuse more cash into the team at a loss until he/she runs out of money: well ok, I guess you can want that, but even if it happened, the owner would be setting off a spiral that would make the franchise insolvent, torpedo its value (which represents a great deal of the wealth in question in the first place), eventually leading to hundreds of lost jobs and a set of tremendous tax burdens on the city.

I say this as someone who believed as you do for a long time, and I do really get it, but I have actually “seen the books” and I think everyone would be surprised to see how narrow the margins actually are year over year. The reason owning a team is a good investment is not because they print money — it’s because the franchise value increases reliably and significantly over time, but that value isn’t just something you can withdraw like a bank account. You can take loans against it, but again, that gets dicey really quickly if you do it very often.

Believe me, I have no tears to spare for the rich. But it isn’t as simple as “be less greedy”

I grant you things could have changed dramatically but I recall reading the details brought out in the book The Lords of the Realm by John Helyar about how the Stanford economist chosen by the owners and the MLBPA destroyed the myth that teams were losing money during the 1994-1995 impasse.

Owners have never allowed their books to be examined by agreed upon professionals since then.

MLB is now a 10 billion dollar industry by their own admission, that ranks right up there close to the NFL.

Color my skeptical, very skeptical that owners are losing money and that owners can't by and large do more to invest in winning then many are doing. In my opinion it is a matter of choice. JR's own words this past summer about how finishing in third or fourth place doesn't mean you had a bad season was telling in my opinion. 

[ptatc]

28 minutes ago, Lip Man 1 said:

I grant you things could have changed dramatically but I recall reading the details brought out in the book The Lords of the Realm by John Helyar about how the Stanford economist chosen by the owners and the MLBPA destroyed the myth that teams were losing money during the 1994-1995 impasse.

Owners have never allowed their books to be examined by agreed upon professionals since then.

MLB is now a 10 billion dollar industry by their own admission, that ranks right up there close to the NFL.

Color my skeptical, very skeptical that owners are losing money and that owners can't by and large do more to invest in winning then many are doing. In my opinion it is a matter of choice. JR's own words this past summer about how finishing in third or fourth place doesn't mean you had a bad season was telling in my opinion. 

Owners do not allow the MLBPA to see the books because the union has not given them a reason to. If the union agreed to a salary cap as other sports do, the owners would have to open the books. 

[WestEddy]

25 minutes ago, ptatc said:

If the union agreed to a salary cap as other sports do, the owners would have to open the books. 

I've always been told, never make something contingent on "seeing the books". You can make numbers say anything you want, depending how you depreciate assets, or don't, etc. 

[Eminor3rd]

1 hour ago, Lip Man 1 said:

I grant you things could have changed dramatically but I recall reading the details brought out in the book The Lords of the Realm by John Helyar about how the Stanford economist chosen by the owners and the MLBPA destroyed the myth that teams were losing money during the 1994-1995 impasse.

Owners have never allowed their books to be examined by agreed upon professionals since then.

MLB is now a 10 billion dollar industry by their own admission, that ranks right up there close to the NFL.

Color my skeptical, very skeptical that owners are losing money and that owners can't by and large do more to invest in winning then many are doing. In my opinion it is a matter of choice. JR's own words this past summer about how finishing in third or fourth place doesn't mean you had a bad season was telling in my opinion. 

I have no reason to doubt the veracity of the research in that book, but I'd point out a couple things:

1) As you acknowledged, it would be a gross understatement to point out that things have changed since 1995. In fact the very strike event that is subject was a watershed moment for MLB labor that has kicked off three decades of major gains in terms of revenue invested into player labor. Inflation since then is roughly 100%, but MLB salaries have grown at closer to 400% over the same time span. Also the internet happened, and major bumps in broadcast revenue. In the 90s, front offices had a couple dozen full-time employees, today there are a couple hundred. This is all good news -- but the reality is that the economic landscape from then to now isn't similar. I have no idea how much profit Jerry Reinsdorf, for example, was pulling in 1995, but there's a good reason he wanted to collude with all his other cronies back then, and his fear has become a reality. Player salaries are literally the majority of the operating cost today, and that's crazy when you consider the cost of operating a stadium nearly daily for six months out of the year. 

2) I haven't read the book, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but most of the analyses of that type I've seen over the years include asset value as part of the "losing or making money" equation. That is very important when the question is whether or not owners deserve any measure of subsidy for investment (they don't) and or whether or not we should sympathize with them when they cry poor (we shouldn't), but it's very different from the issue of annual liquid revenue, and more specifically, the ability for an org to cover significant spending increases based on team need.

I'll just reiterate that I'm not suggesting for a moment that all the owners are doing just fine and always will be. It's just important to make the distinction between the entity that owns the capital an the entity that actually makes up and runs the business. And is is critically important for ALL of us -- fans, players, employees, etc. -- that the business remain healthy, because as icky as it feels, without the business, none of this even exists.

Edited December 1, 2023 by Eminor3rd

[CWSpalehoseCWS]

https://x.com/dfeely14/status/1730641792310075492?s=46&t=YB66BSH8MdsOmPwZtTqy1w
 

FWIW - he is a Jomboy guy, so he probably does hear some stuff. That would be a pretty disappointing headliner IMO.

[Lip Man 1]

11 minutes ago, WestEddy said:

I've always been told, never make something contingent on "seeing the books". You can make numbers say anything you want, depending how you depreciate assets, or don't, etc. 

This situation was pointed out in Helyar's book, how the Stanford economist pointed out numerous examples of MLB owners "cooking the books" in various ways to show income that was generated through concessions and broadcast revenue to cite examples was supposedly going to other businesses when in reality the funds were going to them. How Ted Turner was manipulating the Braves broadcast revenue was cited in detail. 

The MLBPA is the strongest union in the world, they will never agree to a salary cap, nor should they in my opinion.

You beat odds of a 100,000 to one as Howard Cosell once said, to get to the top of your profession, you deserve to collect big.

If an owner can't or isn't willing to play the game the way it is being played today by other owners trying to win, they need to sell to someone who does. 

 

 

Edited December 1, 2023 by Lip Man 1

[Lip Man 1]

2 minutes ago, Eminor3rd said:

I have no reason to doubt the veracity of the research in that book, but I'd point out a couple things:

1) As you acknowledged, it would be a gross understatement to point out that things have changed since 1995. In fact the very strike event that is subject was a watershed moment for MLB labor that has kicked off three decades of major gains in terms of revenue invested into player labor. Inflation since then is roughly 100%, but MLB salaries have grown at closer to 400% over the same time span. Also the internet happened, and major bumps in broadcast revenue. In the 90s, front offices had a couple dozen full-time employees, today there are a couple hundred. This is all good news -- but the reality is that the economic landscape from then to now isn't similar. I have no idea how much profit Jerry Reinsdorf, for example, was pulling in 1995, but there's a good reason he wanted to collude with all his other cronies back then, and his fear has become a reality. Player salaries are literally the majority of the operating cost today, and that's crazy when you consider the cost of operating a stadium nearly daily for six months out of the year. 

2) I haven't read the book, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but most of the analyses of that type I've seen over the years include asset value as part of the "losing or making money" equation. That is very important when the question is whether or not owners deserve any measure of subsidy for investment (they don't) and or whether or not we should sympathize with them when they cry poor (we shouldn't), but it's very different from the issue of annual liquid revenue, and more specifically, the ability for an org to cover significant spending increases based on team need.

I'll just reiterate that I'm not suggesting for a moment that all the owners are doing just fine and always will be. It's just important to make the distinction between the entity that owns the capital an the entity that actually makes up and runs the business.

Honestly Helyar's book is a great read, recommend it highly. Have read it myself several times. You'd think a book on the history of labor relations in baseball would be boring but it was anything but. 

[Eminor3rd]

1 minute ago, Lip Man 1 said:

Honestly Helyar's book is a great read, recommend it highly. Have read it myself several times. You'd think a book on the history of labor relations in baseball would be boring but it was anything but. 

I'll check it out -- honestly I'm not sure why I haven't yet. I've heard it referenced several times over the years.

[ptatc]

31 minutes ago, WestEddy said:

I've always been told, never make something contingent on "seeing the books". You can make numbers say anything you want, depending how you depreciate assets, or don't, etc. 

This is true to. Who knows if they are accurate in other sports either but it's the closest anyone will get. 

[Quin]

29 minutes ago, CWSpalehoseCWS said:

https://x.com/dfeely14/status/1730641792310075492?s=46&t=YB66BSH8MdsOmPwZtTqy1w
 

FWIW - he is a Jomboy guy, so he probably does hear some stuff. That would be a pretty disappointing headliner IMO.

Getting the D-Backs #4 prospect (per MLB, #18 on Fangraphs mid-season rank) as the top guy would be borderline baseball malpractice.

[ptatc]

30 minutes ago, Lip Man 1 said:

This situation was pointed out in Helyar's book, how the Stanford economist pointed out numerous examples of MLB owners "cooking the books" in various ways to show income that was generated through concessions and broadcast revenue to cite examples was supposedly going to other businesses when in reality the funds were going to them. How Ted Turner was manipulating the Braves broadcast revenue was cited in detail. 

The MLBPA is the strongest union in the world, they will never agree to a salary cap, nor should they in my opinion.

You beat odds of a 100,000 to one as Howard Cosell once said, to get to the top of your profession, you deserve to collect big.

If an owner can't or isn't willing to play the game the way it is being played today by other owners trying to win, they need to sell to someone who does. 

 

 

If they don't give in to the salary cap, which is their right, then there is no reason for the owners to open the books. There is no reason to give the union and agents more information than needed. 

Not saying that the union should agree to a cap but in management /union CBA you have that give and take. 

[Tnetennba]

3 hours ago, hogan873 said:

Provided Bummer could throw the ball over the plate.

That part 

[GREEDY]

48 minutes ago, CWSpalehoseCWS said:

https://x.com/dfeely14/status/1730641792310075492?s=46&t=YB66BSH8MdsOmPwZtTqy1w
 

FWIW - he is a Jomboy guy, so he probably does hear some stuff. That would be a pretty disappointing headliner IMO.

You can always spot an educated guess misrepresented as a rumor when the author replies to their own tweet essentially listing all of the reasons they personally think their fake rumor might be correct.... it is like a kid in school showing their work.

They always do it, can't control themselves.

[Bob Sacamano]

4 minutes ago, GREEDY said:

You can always spot an educated guess misrepresented as a rumor when the author replies to their own tweet essentially listing all of the reasons they personally think their fake rumor might be correct.... it is like a kid in school showing their work.

They always do it, can't control themselves.

And it's also fair to assume any team interested in winning in the next 2 years "has been looking into Dylan Cease deal with White Sox."

[bmags]

25 minutes ago, Quin said:

Getting the D-Backs #4 prospect (per MLB, #18 on Fangraphs mid-season rank) as the top guy would be borderline baseball malpractice.

I'll say one thing on this - I have made fun of Hahn because I am 100% certain he was way too swayed with publicly winning deals by getting things like "your top hitting prospect and top pitching prospect" which was determined by industry consensus. I feel in my bones that is right, and that he was obsessed with guys like Rutherford because he was another top 100 guy and he ignored that hew as freefalling.

I think our prospect guys now are much better about updating scouting looks throughout year, but I'd much rather get some guys that are on the upswing rather than just "highly rated"

That said: getting a short, soft-throwing pitching prospect as the main piece would be brutal. As A piece, well I'd say "oh maybe we got the new kyle hendricks" and it's nice he's probably thrown more innings last year than the rest of our rotation combined sans Cease.

[fathom]

3 minutes ago, bmags said:

I'll say one thing on this - I have made fun of Hahn because I am 100% certain he was way too swayed with publicly winning deals by getting things like "your top hitting prospect and top pitching prospect" which was determined by industry consensus. I feel in my bones that is right, and that he was obsessed with guys like Rutherford because he was another top 100 guy and he ignored that hew as freefalling.

I think our prospect guys now are much better about updating scouting looks throughout year, but I'd much rather get some guys that are on the upswing rather than just "highly rated"

That said: getting a short, soft-throwing pitching prospect as the main piece would be brutal. As A piece, well I'd say "oh maybe we got the new kyle hendricks" and it's nice he's probably thrown more innings last year than the rest of our rotation combined sans Cease.

Him for Eloy makes more sense

[JoeCredeYes]

14 minutes ago, GREEDY said:

You can always spot an educated guess misrepresented as a rumor when the author replies to their own tweet essentially listing all of the reasons they personally think their fake rumor might be correct.... it is like a kid in school showing their work.

They always do it, can't control themselves.

If Lin is the "top prospect" we better be getting Alek Thomas/Perdomo/McCarthy type young major leaguers as the headliners. 

[SoCalChiSox]

37 minutes ago, Quin said:

Getting the D-Backs #4 prospect (per MLB, #18 on Fangraphs mid-season rank) as the top guy would be borderline baseball malpractice.

Lawler + Pfaadt plus a decent third piece (Thomas)?

Edited December 1, 2023 by SoCalChiSox

[fathom]

1 minute ago, SoCalChiSox said:

Lawler + Pfaadt plus a decent third piece (Thomas)?

Way too much from Arizona side.  I don’t think they trade Pfaadt or Lawlar no matter what.