Podcast: White Sox Front Office Fails at Trade Deadline
Record Date: 8/3/2022
Rundown:
- Rick Hahn’s poor offseason is now compounded by a quiet trade deadline. Can the White Sox players overcome the shortfalls from their GM (and manager)?
- August Abreu has arrived. Are we also seeing August Eloy Jimenez?
- Lance Lynn’s new trick
- Texas Rangers series preview
- Dylan Cease’s AL Cy Young resume
Could tonight finally be the pre-season mock up lineup we expected???
Id go:
Anderson
Robert
Jiminez
Abreu
Moncada
Vaughn
Pollack
Grandal
Harrison
Could juggle a few of the spots around but if those 9 aren’t in get out the torches and pitch forks.
I’m with you guys: Hahn’s offseason and deadline is an “F.” But if the Sox have postseason success, that’ll almost certainly change. Several players acquired in the last year are candidates to make positive postseason contributions, for one.
But, more importantly, there are opportunity costs to consider. Adding a 2B or OF of SP means less playing someone else—Harrison, Pollock, Sheets, Lynn?, Giolito?—less. And for a few of these guys, that sounds like an excellent idea right now. That’s why Hahn gets an “F.” But, surely, part of Hahn’s absence over the last few days is confidence in, for example, Pollock or Giolito or Harrison. If Sox make the playoffs and that confidence proves well placed, then the moves Hahn didn’t make will have been good for the team.
Again, I’m not saying I’m satisfied or happy with the Sox deadline. I’m not. But choosing Pollock and Sheets to be regular contributors over an outside move—as misplaced as I think it is at the moment—is a decision that could work out well. If it does, Hahn gets some credit for it.
I’m not even sure that other teams only like the top 2 or 3 players in the Sox system. It may be the players that Hahn were after were beyond his means. If his 2 targets were Juan Soto and Frankie Montas then yeah he probably didn’t have enough without including Montgomery and Ramos and Sosa but there were a lot of other players that went for a lot less. For example, Wilfred Veras would’ve been a much better player than the Dbacks got for Peralta. There continues it seems an unquestioning string of excuses for why Hahn can’t do his job.
I think Tampa Bay did a great job of jumping the market for David Peralta. They didn’t wait until teams were officially out of the Juan Soto running.
It used to be that we were the ones jumping the market, now we seem to be the ones at the door with a cup asking for handouts.
So it sounds like Rick Hahn’s plan is the guys on the team getting healthy and regaining the swagger they had “twenty twenty ish” (his words). At what point do you stop waiting for the team to start playing as hard as they did two years ago under a different manager? Is getting healthy a plan? Good grief.