Podcast: White Sox Nightmare Revisited – Machado vs. Harper
Date: 10/17/2022
Rundown:
- Jim’s fear of the Los Angeles Dodgers getting knocked out early comes to fruition. Should a trophy be awarded to the best regular season record?
- Phillies hitting coach Kevin Long enters the White Sox managerial search radar
- The lessons White Sox could learn from both the Padres and Phillies
- How much have the White Sox missed out by not signing either Manny Machado or Bryce Harper
- NLCS picks
Author
I often wondered during the season if the ever-pending ‘soft schedule’ belayed a TLR firing when the heat was at its highest.
Will Jerry Reinsdorf rehire Dave Dombrowski after the latter enters the Hall of Fame in 15 years?
Rick Hahn: We can’t just throw money at the problem.
Two weeks later the Phillies advance to the NLCS after their spent another offseason throwing money at the problem. Those pesky tier 1 free agents Jerry doesn’t like do payoff.
What? The prospect of signing of Kole Calhoun and Wade Miley doesn’t excite you?
Padres also threw nearly $40mil at their problems after disastrous ’21 season.
It’s how they spend money, whether due to requirements from Jerry or some stupid Kenny/Jerry/Hahn template, the Sox mo of distributing 25 million on 5 declining / stretch / flawed players instead of 30 million on 1 star player blows up in their faces every time. And yet it’s all they’ve ever tried.
Every Sox fan should watch Welcome to Wrexham just to imagine an ownership group who A) cares and respects the fans and community
B) actually wants to win
C) creative enough to see new financial opportunities from being good / investing in the narrative
MLB to league soccer isn’t a direct comparison, obviously. But the Sox were facing 2019 off-season with a huge opportunity. The Cubs were declining, the Hawks were clearly in cap purgatory, the Bears 2019 showed they were a joke and in Pace induced hell and the Sox were in a weak small market division.
The opportunity to take over the Chicago sports market was huge. And yet Jerry was content with a bullshit offer and signing Machado’s relatives, then riding it out with the same strategy that blew up in the Sale years.
So now their salary is actually high, with nothing to show for it, since they self-limit to short term contracts in the least predictable position group in baseball to invest in.
Garbage owner, garbage front office, garbage organization.
C) creative enough to see new financial opportunities from being good / investing in the narrative
This is the part that has always made me want to slam my head into my desk. They don’t care/understand how signing big free agents could totally electrify this club and fanbase and have this team talked about like the Dodgers, Astros, Red Sox etc. are.
They got a taste of it in 2020/2021, but after two bad off seasons and embarrassing themselves in 2022, the White Sox are back to being an after thought again as the Cubs prepare to takeoff. Just pure incompetence and a complete lack of vision from the FO.
Sox throw their problems at the money….
Yeah, can’t believe we didn’t throw 100M at Castellanos and his negative WAR.
When you sign a top free agent nearly every offseason and most of them work out, it doesn’t really hurt that much when one doesn’t.
I agree with RSWS but I think it can be a tough sell to a fan base (any fan base not just the Sox). Fan bases always complain for years about every bad signing or trade and believe that bad signings/trades are unique to their team.
Theo Epstein built a World Series winner for the Cubs but the Heyward signing was a clunker. They signed him for 8 years/$184M and he produced 8.9 bWAR over 7 years before the Cubs let him go still owing him $22M. (Heyward had produced 29.9 bWAR in the prior 6 years of his career before the Cubs signed him as a 26-year-old.)
The Dodgers win many, many games each year but traded 19-year-old Yordan Alvarez to the Astros for middle reliever Josh Fields.
The biggest difference between these clunkers and the Sox clunkers is that the Cubs and Dodgers won it all. When you don’t win it all, fans are going to fixate on the clunkers. Twas ever thus.
I don’t think you even have to win it all to mute the effects. A high volume of moves can also make it easier to forget about a bad deal or a bad trade. When the White Sox make a bad decision, the subsequent lack of activity means the stink just lingers.
I agree with Jim that a high volume of moves helps mute the effects of clunker trades and signings. I also agree the Sox should make more moves.
However, I think if the Cubs had lost game 7 in 2016 there would be grumbling among their fan base till this day about the awful Heyward signing. As it is, there’s essentially no grumbling about moves the Cubs made in 2016.
Clunkers will also get less attention if an organization has an ability to overcome them. More in the farm system, ability to find a diamond in the rough from a castoff, etc.
Of course, winning a WS helps, but that’s setting the bar too high. Fans will forgive clunkers when the FO makes move that generally translate to success. Even if the Cubs lose to the Indians in ’16, I doubt you’d hear much grumbling about Heyward. From ’15-’18, the Cubs averaged 97 wins, made the playoffs every year, made the NLCS three times, and the World Series once. Maybe the FO made some mistakes (what FO hasn’t?), but that’s a FO with a plan that worked.
Well at least we know Jerry’s posting name on the site.
Jon Morosi says that Grifol and Espada both impressed the Sox during their interviews and that a decision could happen by the end of the month.
So, it looks like Ron Washington will be our new manager.
Daryl Boston, congratulations!
Up until now, I believed that Ozzie or a former Sox player with no coaching experience like AJ were the worst case scenarios in this search. Not anymore. The scales have fallen from my eyes and I’m now terrified. The world seems so cold now…
Eff Daryl Boston that effen letch.
I expect the poster to have the wrong signature
Why is Vince Coleman’s signature on the press release?