Chicago White Sox... The thread.

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SouthSideChiDomer

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Jiggafini19Deux said:
I’m speechless.

If the Bulls are any indicator this won’t change much. I think either Haber or Getz will be promoted. Jerry said in the statement they’re hiring one guy to replace them both.

If Jerry was smart he’d go get people from Tampa. They win in the toughest division in baseball on a shoestring budget
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The problem is it would cost a lot of money to get them. If JR has proven one thing through the years, its that he's penny wise and pound foolish.
 
Jiggafini19Deux

Jiggafini19Deux

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SouthSideChiDomer said:
The problem is it would cost a lot of money to get them. If JR has proven one thing through the years, its that he's penny wise and pound foolish.
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It won't, though. Dayton Moore was making a little over $1M a year as GM of the Royals and I think he was in the top five for GM salaries in MLB.

Which is why seeing Dayton Moore's name on the shortlist of candidates for the White Sox is rather hilarious.
 
Jiggafini19Deux

Jiggafini19Deux

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calvegas04 said:
Where will they relocate to?
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They're not. He pulled this shit years ago and threatened to move.

The stadium lease is up in six years and Jerry is going to be 93 if he lives to see it. That story came out on Monday and yesterday he fired Willis and Arnold. Doesn't seem like a coincidence.
 
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Southside Sully said:
The post game show has been great. They are all hot. Ozzie just predicted Jim Thome to be the new guy. Interesting take.
Then Kap drops this and makes so much sense about Kenny..
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I got off the Kenny train years ago. The game was changing post Moneyball and front offices were becoming smarter, more efficient, more intellectual. Kenny was the last dumb jock GM left, and he didn't seem to mind. Dude went to Stanford but acted like a meathead.

When people talk about women being too emotional to lead, I play the Kenny Williams card. He was nothing but a bitter thin skinned red ass that acted out of anger and spite. Jerry created the VP of Ops job for him so he didn't have to fire him. Anywhere else he'd have been fired a long time ago.
 
Wild Bill

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Jiggafini19Deux said:
I got off the Kenny train years ago. The game was changing post Moneyball and front offices were becoming smarter, more efficient, more intellectual. Kenny was the last dumb jock GM left, and he didn't seem to mind. Dude went to Stanford but acted like a meathead.

When people talk about women being too emotional to lead, I play the Kenny Williams card. He was nothing but a bitter thin skinned red ass that acted out of anger and spite. Jerry created the VP of Ops job for him so he didn't have to fire him. Anywhere else he'd have been fired a long time ago.
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Those jocks who picked on you were assholes. Let it go, it's time to heal.
 
Jiggafini19Deux

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Wild Bill said:
Those jocks who picked on you were assholes. Let it go, it's time to heal.
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I actually was one myself and led a very quiet uneventful four years of high school. Has nothing to do with Kenny Williams have the wrong mentality for the job, but good morning and Happy Wednesday.

He'll forever be credited with the 2005 World Series, which is fine, but ultimately he held down a spot in the organization for far longer than he should have and post World Series turned into a bitter man that couldn't handle the criticism that came with the job.
 
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Southside Sully said:
The post game show has been great. They are all hot. Ozzie just predicted Jim Thome to be the new guy. Interesting take.
Then Kap drops this and makes so much sense about Kenny..
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He's probably going to be proven correct, and it is a total Jerry move, and it would be terrible. In what way is Jim Thome qualified to take the place of Kenny and Rick? He isn't.

If Jerry stays, then everyone else has to go. This would only be the beginning. Some outside comes in and brings his own people.
 
Southside Sully

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Jiggafini19Deux said:
He's probably going to be proven correct, and it is a total Jerry move, and it would be terrible. In what way is Jim Thome qualified to take the place of Kenny and Rick? He isn't.

If Jerry stays, then everyone else has to go. This would only be the beginning. Some outside comes in and brings his own people.
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It would be a terrible move to hire Thome
 
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Southside Sully said:
It would be a terrible move to hire Thome
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100% agreed.

Just as promoting Chris Getz and bringing in Dayton Moore would be about the same thing.

It's either promoting loyal former players from within or hiring people from the KC Royals. Ultimately nothing changes if this is how it goes down.
 
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Why would anyone leave the third largest market in the country? The Cubs didn't build their fanbase by winning. Look at what happened when they strung together a few Octobers with Theo Epstein. Nashville, Charlotte don't have the population to feed the beast.

If the White Sox had any kind of sustained success like the Tigers did in 2011-14 or Cleveland did 2016-18 they'd attract more of their own fans back in addition to new ones. Hell, just win back to back divisions and people would be on board. Three or four and people would probably have strokes from the shock and joy.

Stop hiring from within or from the Royals. Go ask Cleveland, Tampa and Oakland to speak to some of their people.
 
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Just Kenny Williams being the asshole he's made himself out to be. Like I said, this is who and what he is. Belligerent meathead who held down a job for too long due to nepotism.
 
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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter: Sox Shakeup
Vol. 15, No. 86
August 23, 2023

The nice thing about being the boss is that there’s always someone to blame. Jerry Reinsdorf, who has presided over seven playoff teams in 43 seasons owning the Chicago White Sox, fired his top two executives Tuesday night. Kenny Williams, the executive vice president and former GM who had been part of the front office for 30 years, and Rick Hahn, the GM who has been with the Sox for more than two decades, are out.

In some ways, this isn’t unusual. Since winning the World Series with a team Williams put together in 2005, the White Sox have won three playoff games and no playoff series. After a rebuild orchestrated by Hahn starting in 2016, the Sox reached the playoffs in 2020 and 2021, setting expectations of a long run of success thanks to a prime-aged core of power hitters and strikeout pitchers. That team, however, finished 81-81 last year and was 49-76 when Reinsdorf fired Hahn and Williams. Injuries were a big part of the story, to be sure, but the lack of internal depth created by middling drafts and poor international work outside of Cuba left the White Sox unable to cover for those injuries.

With the third pick in the 2014 draft, the White Sox took North Carolina State left-hander Carlos Rodon. Rodon was coming off a strong college career, though with health concerns. Rodon would throw just 669 1/3 innings for the Sox in seven years, accumulating 11 WAR, before leaving as a free agent. Rodon is also the last Sox draft pick to produce even four career WAR. In that same draft, the Sox took Aaron Bummer, a personal favorite who has never really been good and healthy for more than a few months at a time.

Since then, the team has gotten 2.7 WAR from Jake Burger, the 11th overall pick in 2017, now a Marlin. Nick Madrigal (3.3 career WAR) and Codi Heuer (1.4), moderate successes from the 2018 draft, were traded in 2021 for two months, 23 innings, and no WAR from Craig Kimbrel. Andrew Vaughn was the overall #3 pick in 2019. After shooting through the minors to make the 2021 Opening Day roster, the Sox played him in left field, a choice that seemingly derailed his career. He was a replacement-level player in 2021 and 2022 and has posted one win on a .256/.319/.431 line this year.

Mind you, these are the successes. Throw in Garrett Crochet, who was Chris Sale Lite before he blew out his elbow 60 innings into his career. Stretch back to 2013 to find Tim Anderson, who just stopped being a good player last year at age 29. The White Sox haven’t drafted well for most of the last decade. Coming into 2023, Keith Law ranked the Sox system 28th in MLB.

So when the core Hahn assembled through trades and some big Cuban signings fell apart in 2022, there was no internal depth from which to pull. The lack of depth was a concern even as I was pegging them as a top-five team last year:

“Two, the Sox now have one of the worst farm systems in baseball. I keep talking about the guys past the 26th spot on the roster. Well, Vince Velasquez is now in the starting rotation. Jake Burger, a 26-year-old who missed three years to injuries and the pandemic, is on the roster. The next men up include Johnny Cueto, Jimmy Lambert, and Micker Adolfo. The White Sox just don’t have any internal depth.”

Luis Robert Jr. played 98 games in 2022, Eloy Jimenez 84, Anderson 79, Yoan Moncada 104. Last year’s team had to lean far too heavily on Leury Garcia and Gavin Sheets and Adam Engel and AJ Pollock. Eighteen players got 100 PA for last year’s White Sox, and just seven of them were worth even one win.

The 2023 team met much the same fate. From February:

“They have done a terrible job of drafting. Most of this team is actually the result of trades, plus Luis Robert, a Cuban signing. [...] They have no internal depth, which is something that killed them in 2022 and could do so again in 2023.”

Closer Liam Hendriks was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in the offseason. Jimenez has missed 40 games, Moncada 60, Anderson 30, a few of those after a suspension. The few big-money free agents on the roster, like Yasmani Grandal and Andrew Benintendi, are killing the offense. Lance Lynn allowed a homer every four innings before being traded in July. Once again, the White Sox were tapping their farm for a job it wasn’t qualified to do. Lenyn Sosa, Seby Zavala, Gavin Sheets, and Romy Gonzalez have all provided sub-replacement level play. Oscar Colas, potentially the next big thing out of Cuba, has been a disaster -- .218/.257/.301 with poor defense in right field.

From the moment he traded Sale, in 2016, through the playoff appearances in 2020 and 2021, Hahn did a great job. He traded his way from last place to a division winner, signed a burgeoning superstar from Cuba in Robert (and before him, Jose Abreu), did good work with MLB free agents -- Lynn, Grandal, and Hendriks all were big parts of the 2021 team. Even now, Hahn’s rebuild has to be considered a success. The 2020 and 2021 White Sox were good baseball teams.

What I failed to see in projecting the Sox for success was that the years of unproductive drafting and scouting were chipping away at the foundation, limiting the team’s ability to win when things went wrong. That created some desperation, starting in ’21 with the Kimbrel trade, and Hahn subsequently spent a lot of money on relievers Hendriks and Kendall Graveman and Joe Kelly when his team had more pressing needs. Five years for Andrew Benintendi, who was coming off a career year at 27, hasn’t worked out in the first year. Hahn’s work since the Kimbrel trade two years ago hasn’t measured up to his work prior to that, and it’s why he’s out of a job today.

With that said, it’s the decisions he didn’t get to make that I’ll wonder about. After the 2020 season ended in a first-round loss, the Sox let Rick Renteria go, in part because of Renteria’s tactical shortcomings. With the opportunity to bring in a young manager familiar with modern baseball thinking and able to relate to current players, Reinsdorf -- not Hahn, not Williams -- hired Tony La Russa, then 76. The Sox won a weak AL Central with Hahn’s best roster in ’21, though not without controversies, and La Russa seemed to lose the thread in 2022 as his health failed. La Russa’s hiring prevented the White Sox from selecting a manager who would grow with the roster, in service of Reinsdorf’s desire to fix a mistake from the Reagan era.

That’s not Reinsdorf’s only fingerprints on this situation. The White Sox have simply never behaved like a team that’s worth $2 billion, that shares the third-largest media market in the country. As was highlighted at the time, the team’s $75 million agreement with Benintendi was the largest free-agent signing in franchise history. Since Hahn became the team’s GM in 2012, the White Sox have had a top-ten payroll twice, in ’21 and ’22, and have had bottom-five payrolls more often, twice, than top-five ones -- never. The White Sox have never sniffed a payroll tax payment, and this year, with a team crying out for one more star, they opened the year a star’s salary -- $25 million -- away from the threshold.

So, yes, it’s been a long time since 2005, and maybe Kenny Williams had exhausted the goodwill from that particular memory. Yes, Hahn’s work rebuilding the roster was not matched by his work turning that roster into a perpetual winner, with drafting and developing players a key weakness.

The biggest reason the White Sox are what they are, though, still has his job. Until Jerry Reinsdorf is no longer running the show, the White Sox will be a third-tier MLB franchise.
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Dead on as he usually is about most things.
 
Jiggafini19Deux

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You could really make this up. It's so stupid, such a mess, so predictable that you could write it.
 
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They haven’t had a second-round pick pan out at all in this time span, including supplemental pick Keenyn Walker, whom the White Sox reportedly took because Williams flew in and liked him in a one-game look. (I lived in Arizona at the time, and area scouts I knew thought Walker was a fourth- or fifth-rounder.)
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I believe this is true. I have almost no doubt. It's how he operated and it showed in the results.

Keith Law did not spare the rod in this article. He roasts the White Sox, and Jerry, to the ground.
 
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