No news this week, but plenty of questions. Let's proceed.
Kevin asks:
Do you believe pushing back the start of MLB's free agency to January 1st would create an excitement similar to the nfl or nba's free agency, or would it cause free agents to not be signed till the second week of spring training?
It'd probably do both, but more harm than good to the whole market. I can see a lot of excitement building up for the top of the class, but the bottom of the second tier could end up having to wait until March to find a deal to their liking, at least until teams decide that inefficient spending is no longer the worst fate known to man.
I don't think anybody had a problem with the way the market used to operate -- a slow-but-steady build to a mid-December crescendo, but a long enough fade for transactions of note to carry well into January. It only became a problem when the weeks of rumors stopped leading to a satisfying payoff, and that's when the Twitter-friendly NBA/NFL spree started to look enviable.
As somebody who enjoys having news to write about over the course of a winter, I greatly appreciate not having all the major transactions confined to a single week.
Mark asks:
Should Reinsdorf and KW get equal or more credit for the Sporting News Executive of the Year award or do they only get credit for the unpopular decisions. For example any GM in baseball would have signed Luis Robert, but Reinsdorf made the decision to spend the most $$.
Hahn also finished second in Major League Baseball's Executive of the Year race, and it seems premature to me. He had a good year, and a great one by his standards, but it also resulted in a third-place finish. Too much work remains for this to be EOY material for my liking. If you want to give Hahn the executive credit, though, it's less for the acquisitions, and more for the extensions. The deals for Robert, Eloy Jiménez, Yoán Moncada and Tim Anderson have the Sox in an enviable position, and that probably has more to do with work at his level than the two above. Again, though, the White Sox have to capitalize on the excellent payroll situation with signings/trades that make the most of the space. Yasmani Grandal and Dallas Keuchel were two great steps in that direction, but more can be done. Do it!
Asinwreck asks:
As thousands of travelers pour through our airports for Thanksgiving amid the pandemic, I wonder if anyone on the Sox has a less enviable job than director of team travel Ed Cassin.
Hopefully it'll only be terrible through May or so.
Trooper Galactus asks:
If the White Sox intend to pull off a blockbuster trade, who do you think is most expendable from both the prospect list and from the current roster that can bring in a top talent?
I think the two players who meet that description the closest are Nick Madrigal and Michael Kopech. I'd be happy if I were on the side acquiring them, and both could make the White Sox regret trading them away. However, I can also envision the White Sox succeeding without either player. Madrigal's lack of power makes it easier than usual for a replacement second baseman to match his OBP, and the White Sox are already used to competing without Kopech's services.
Andrew Vaughn would apply to this situation for a lot of teams, but the White Sox have such a problem with finding plate discipline that Vaughn's skills are less dispensable. This is where it'd be great to know if Jake Burger can replace a lot of Vaughn's ability.
The most traded White Sox players in the Offseason Plan Project, by the way:
- Reynaldo López (26)
- Dylan Cease (24)
- Zack Collins (21)
- Jonathan Stiever (21)
- Micker Adolfo (15)
- Gavin Sheets (13)
- Blake Rutherford (12)
- Nick Madrigal (11)
Michael asks:
Do you think the trajectory of the team would be different over the last 15 years if the 2005 season never happened?
I think so, but it depends on whether Jerry Reinsdorf would still be so loyal to Kenny Williams, Ozzie Guillen and Paul Konerko even if they didn't deliver what he most wanted. If they got to the World Series and lost, perhaps an American League pennant is still enough for the chain of command to get messy. Perhaps there would have been a willingness to overhaul the front office if a mild success in 2005 was followed by the same mostly insufficient sequence of results, and that's where the tracks might diverge far enough to clearly hypothesize an alternate history.
If Reinsdorf were attached to Williams no matter what, however, I think the present landscape would look pretty much similar. They had attendance well below 2 million, some of the league's worst TV ratings before the pandemic and a below-median payroll before the pandemic, so the gains from the World Series have long vanished. Here's hoping they don't waste the upswing so swiftly this time aroun.
John C. asks:
What are your thoughts on Na Sung Bum as a possible solution for the Sox in RF?
Generally speaking, I'm a fan of the White Sox signing any KBO star. I like reading and seeing the cultural exchange stories, and it also means that more Sox gear would be sold in Seoul. I just don't think the Sox can afford to pin their right-field hopes on him, especially since he's carrying a personal-worst 26-percent strikeout rate in the KBO. Yoshi Tsutsugo had a similar issue with a spiking strikeout rate in NPB, and he only hit .197 for the Rays in his first year.
If the Sox managed to add Na as DH help while biding their time until Andrew Vaughn plays games against earnest competition, that's more palatable. If Na wants more playing time, this probably isn't the team for him.
Scott asks:
How did the ZiPS projections for this past year actually pan out?
That leads to a bigger question and that is what system seems to be the best at predicting?
Dan Szymborski reviewed the year in ZiPS in a three-part series at FanGraphs -- teams, hitters and pitchers. Big-picture, it seemed like ZiPS had a decent handle on big-picture performances like standings, league rates, etc. But 60-game samples lend themselves to extreme performances that projection systems aren't designed to reach, so individual misses were larger than most.
The White Sox were emblematic of this. They had the best projected record of any Sox team in more than a decade, and they delivered on that potential. They also had a number of outlier performances for better (José Abreu, Tim Anderson, Nick Madrigal, Dallas Keuchel) or worse (Nomar Mazara, Dylan Cease, a COVID-hampered Yoán Moncada). It tracked guys like Lucas Giolito, Yasmani Grandal, Eloy Jiménez and Luis Robert well enough, but I don't think you're going to see a whole lot of robust comparisons between systems this time around, because hopefully there will be no need to project 60-game season with limited divisional play again.
Previously, ZiPS had been in the middle of the pack, stronger for hitters than pitchers. But many of the higher-performing systems are aggregators that bake in original projections like ZiPS, and they're geared toward fantasy baseball purposes. For my purposes -- general progress and bankability of the White Sox as a competitive enterprise -- ZiPS suits me just fine.
John O. asks:
Can you better describe the before-the-draft process the Sox would have gone through with Kelley, Thompson, and Dalquist? (Or the process Masyn Winn, J.T. Ginn, Petey Halpin, Blaze Jordan, and other big-overslot + later-than-expected players might have gone through with their respective teams this year or in 2019). How certain is a player like Kelley that he will be taken by the Sox and receive the amount of money he wants at a specific point? Is he telling other teams “I won’t sign for under $3m,” or is he telling them “the Sox say they will give me $3m in the 2nd round so you need to beat that?” Is any of this technically disallowed by the MLB Rule 4 draft rules but done by all the teams anyway, or is it all 100% above board?
The book "Future Value" is great for things like this. It doesn't go into a specific negotiation for example, but it gives this overview:
It's technically illegal to negotiate before a player is picked, or help coordinate someone to slide down the board to a pick with more money to offer, but this happens really often and both sides are incentivized to keep it happening to create more certainty about what will happen on draft day. There are still instances where unforeseen things happen, but it's common for agents to know that they have interest from, say, these four teams in a row, then nothing for five picks after that, and so they negotiate as picks come off the board to try to get as much as they can, then to perform damage control to get to one of those four teams before a free fall.
It always seems like a team could put the screws to a player after drafting him, knowing his options are limited, but the increased certainty benefits both sides enough to not disrupt the balance. Usually the player's side gives a number to interested teams, which gives the player a few options rather than pinning all the hopes on one team's draft plans holding up. There's nothing stopping an agent from shopping a higher number if they feel good about their leverage with an interested team, but they run the risk of bait-and-switch if they move the target too high for a team that had strictly budgeted a certain amount, and nobody wants to develop a reputation for being unreliable, especially since hard draft caps means that an agent and player aren't likely to do better than good enough the following year.
Andrew asks:
After listening to Josh and Dan talk about Lucas Giolito, how important is it for the Sox to sign him to an extension this offseason?
It's not of utmost importance to me, just because Giolito has already undergone Tommy John surgery, and he tends to miss starts with injuries here and there. He's also been acutely aware of his value since he was drafted, so I don't think he's going to be somebody who signs himself away for a no-brainer price. So I've been content to enjoy him maximizing his earning capabilities through arbitration.
That said, if the White Sox are going to do it, this winter seems like the time. There's nothing else to need to see from him, either as a pitcher, teammate or citizen, so the cost only shoots up from here. I suppose Giolito could suffer a setback in 2021 that forces him to lower demands, but those aren't circumstances worth crossing fingers for. It's a much nicer story if the still-unofficial hiring of Ethan Katz lays some track toward a longer partnership with a productive pitcher, not out of transparent corner-cutting Yonder Alonso friends-and-family scheme, but as a sign that the White Sox endorse the way he improved, and want to expand those benefits to his teammates.
Here's where I'd appreciate Katz being announced, and/or the manager not being somebody who can't and won't talk due to pending legal matters. Even if they couldn't share specifics about a theoretical Giolito extension, it'd be nice to know what they have in mind for starting pitcher usage, and how they aim to develop pitchers to make the thought of losing a Cy Young candidate after 2023 seem less daunting.
