Who the White Sox should be picking 1st in 2025 under old rules, not #10

[caulfield12]

https://www.yahoo.com/sports/no-1-brothers-ethan-holliday-100738617.html

“Ethan, 6-foot-4, 195 pounds, has a chance to be the best of all of them, if you listen to scouts and talent evaluators. He’s got the size, the strength, the competitiveness, the heart and desire to be a perennial All-Star.

He’s widely considered the best eligible player in the 2025 amateur draft, and if selected first, the Hollidays would join Peyton and Eli Manning as the only brothers to each be drafted No. 1 overall in American pro sports history.

“People look at the size and some of those raw abilities," Matt Holliday says. “He’s got 111-mph exit velocity with the bat, he’s got an incredible strong arm, and just some of the tangible things at a young age that he was further along than Jackson was.

“They’re different in a lot of ways, but it’s not fair to Ethan or Jackson to compare. They’re just both talented baseball players who are the biggest fans of each other."

If you ask Jackson, who’s 4 inches shorter than his brother, he’ll tell you Ethan will be the best player in the family. If you ask Ethan, no one will ever top his dad Matt, and he’ll be grateful to be mentioned in the same sentence as his brother.”

Edited August 19 by caulfield12

[southsider2k5]

And best of all we will have 9 players picked in front of us, so no matter who breaks out from that group, we will have a decade to rue the day this anti-tanking rule was put into place, because no matter who it is, he will always be the guy the Sox should have picked.

[WhiteSox2023]

8 hours ago, southsider2k5 said:

And best of all we will have 9 players picked in front of us, so no matter who breaks out from that group, we will have a decade to rue the day this anti-tanking rule was put into place, because no matter who it is, he will always be the guy the Sox should have picked.

That’s sad.  Maybe all of them will be busts and the Sox pick will reign supreme?

[southsider2k5]

14 minutes ago, WhiteSox2023 said:

That’s sad.  Maybe all of them will be busts and the Sox pick will reign supreme?

[Bob Sacamano]

20 minutes ago, WhiteSox2023 said:

That’s sad.  Maybe all of them will be busts and the Sox pick will reign supreme?

HA

[Dominikk85]

I don't love the New rule. I get that eternal tanking is bad but when you are rock bottom you need 2-3 good picks in a row.

The Os got 4 top5 picks in a row (1,2,5,1) which gave them a huge competitive advantage and a big part of their core (Rutschman, holliday, cowser).

I would prefer it to not get more than 4 or 5 top10 picks in a decade rather than  not twice in a row.

Imo really bad teams should be able to tank hard for 3 years in a row, what you don't want is teams who tank all the time.

 

Give teams an incentive to be good for 5-6 years before they rebuild and punish teams who tank, be good for 1 or 2 years and then sell off again (I know this happened to the sox too but kinda due to some catastrophic events and not intention to tank again quickly).

Edited August 20 by Dominikk85

[TheFutureIsNear]

35 minutes ago, Dominikk85 said:

I don't love the New rule. I get that eternal tanking is bad but when you are rock bottom you need 2-3 good picks in a row.

The Os got 4 top5 picks in a row (1,2,5,1) which gave them a huge competitive advantage and a big part of their core (Rutschman, holliday, cowser).

I would prefer it to not get more than 4 or 5 top10 picks in a decade rather than  not twice in a row.

Imo really bad teams should be able to tank hard for 3 years in a row, what you don't want is teams who tank all the time.

 

Give teams an incentive to be good for 5-6 years before they rebuild and punish teams who tank, be good for 1 or 2 years and then sell off again (I know this happened to the sox too but kinda due to some catastrophic events and not intention to tank again quickly).

Even just moving the team back to the 5th pick is a big punishment…all the way back to 10 is just crazy. 
 

I also think the MLB is greatly overestimating how much some of the terrible owners like Jerry care. This new rule is essentially trying to force owners to pay up and invest $ to get the team better. Jerry is going to give a big “No Thank You” back as an answer, he just doesn’t care if the team remains bad. And he’s not the only owner

[southsider2k5]

Also of note for the Sox, in 2024 the first pick cost $10,570,600 and the 10th pick cost $5,953,800.  Jerry is probably thrilled to save $5 million next year.

[Dominikk85]

I also hate the lottery. Maybe have a lottery between the 4 worst teams or so, but that the guardians who had the 9th worst record and made the alds a year before (more a down year of some guys rather than being really bad) got the first pick imo is a distortion of competition.

[Quin]

2 hours ago, TheFutureIsNear said:

Even just moving the team back to the 5th pick is a big punishment…all the way back to 10 is just crazy. 
 

I also think the MLB is greatly overestimating how much some of the terrible owners like Jerry care. This new rule is essentially trying to force owners to pay up and invest $ to get the team better. Jerry is going to give a big “No Thank You” back as an answer, he just doesn’t care if the team remains bad. And he’s not the only owner

I'm like...50-50, in large part because there's no international draft. Nothing is stopping the Sox from giving Juan Soto that extra $100K other than Jerry.

But at the same time, small market teams get those competitive balance picks. 

I think the best route would have been an NBA style draft limiting how far a team could fall based on record + if you want to punish large market teams like they do now, no competitive balance picks anymore.

[Dick Allen]

A major market team that let's itself get this bad, deserves all the bad that it gets.  But hey, didn't the Sox select Collins at #10, and didn't Hostetler say he would have drafted him 1-1?

[Panerista]

Dude will look good in a Nashville jersey.