Time keeps on slippin' into the future...

Right now, here's what we have:

2008 Offense Model Projection

Idiot, slow down, slow down

Dugout central doesn't like Swisher.

That clinches it. I do.

Love the one you're with

A couple of days ago, Mike Downey made the argument for Harold Baines for Cooperstown. Fire Joe Morgan ripped the column to shreds.

I was a huge Baines fan, but seriously, any chance Baines had to be a Hall of Fame player ended when his knee injury forced him out of right field for good in 1987. His only chance rested with the 3000 hit technicality, and he didn't get that.

I don't have any problem with DHs as hall of fame players. And Baines was a good player. He wasn't a great player, though. He was one of the legion of second-banana ballplayers who can definitely contribute to a ballclub but not a true star. With the White Sox he was always the second or third best player on the team, never the first, that was always Fisk. His numbers were solid, but not immortal. Torturing them to make a piecemeal case doesn't make him a Fame-ous player.

I can make it longer if you like the style

A while back I ran the White Sox numbers through the wonderful timesaver that is Cyril Myrong et al's Lineup Analyzer to check some wild crowing about the Cabrera trade. I suppose it's time to feed the Nick Swisher acquisition through the cruncher, so I did. Using the assumptions from the Bill James handbook (available here), and not bothering to park-adjust Nick Swisher, we get 5.54 runs per game. Adjustng Swisher to USCF gets us to 5.6 or so. Exerting some slight pressure on the scales with the thumb (but not going hog-wild) we can get to 5.8. Of course the usual cautions apply -- this doesn't estimate real offense, it estimates a baseline in an ideal world, where benches don't have to get used. It's still a good place to start as you can compare that 5.6 or so to other teams idealized numbers...

I'm trapped in this body and can't get out

Many analyses of the White Sox off-season focus on how the optimum strategy for the White Sox is not to collect veterans at the expense of the farm system. This may be true.

But let's realize that the alternative strategy of dump-and-rebuild isn't feasible due to special circumstances. It may never be. Simply put, the White Sox are not allowed to surrender a season in Chicago for rebuilding, as the financial impact would be devastating. The Mariotti types have spent the last thirty years carefully building the canard that Jerry Reinsdorf is a Scrooge who steals fans' money with a second-rate product, and they would go on the warpath about cheap ownership. Rebuilding would throw raw meat to the dog pack. The attendance would drop to 12th or 13th in the league because the average (that is, non-hard-core) paying Chicago customer seems pre-disposed to believe baloney.

Now, Oakland can get away with this because they are moving into a new park in a few years and the counter-buzz from the Fremont move will restore the financial situation, and because the Giants are hardly an alternative fan draw any more. Houston could get away with it because their fans are willing to pay for anything. But the White Sox are trapped. They have to appear to be contending (or desperately trying) in April or May or the balance sheet turns bright red. Trading the expensive players to recoup doesn't work because with the White Sox fan base it takes YEARS of competitive baseball to recover the finances from a "management betrayal".

I think they have to sink naturally, fighting to survive, to keep up appearances.

One of the few bad consequences of the influx of Ivy Leaguers into the baseball analysis world is the loss of the basic truth that MLB is a commercialized amusement, and rebuilding is, well, not amusing. Florida is among the most successful franchises of the last 11 years by the championship metric, but nobody really wants to be them... MLB isn't a classroom game theory exercise. You have to get people to pay to watch teams not called the Red Sox and Yankees and Cubs and Dodgers. Each franchise has its own row to hoe.

And let's talk about the last two times the White Sox went into dump-and-rebuild mode, 1988 and 1997. The first time they had a new stadium -- and four straight jackpot draft choices -- to recover. The second time (the White Flag) they didn't financially recover for almost a decade for a trade that worked out. Dump-and-collect is not viable for the White Sox until the world stops whitewashing every sleazy, greedy trick the Cubs financial wizards do while pretending that the White Sox are run by diabolical misers.

Hello Goodbye

I think Nick Swisher is a DAMNED good ballplayer, 27 years old, smart, disciplined, durable, and adaptable. In the Cell he'll probably hit like a switch-hitting Jermaine Dye with a lot more walks. He can play centerfield but he's only average there -- he simply doesn't make mistakes, but he won't run down screamers in the gaps, either. He can play first base and any corner position well. Swisher is exactly the right kind of ballplayer to go get as far as I am concerned, especially if his approach rubs off on Josh Fields. I am well-aware of the Mackowiak experience, but Swisher is considerably better than Mack, about as good a CF as Darin Erstad (now) and he hits about twice as well. I like him a hell of a lot better than a middle-aged Coco Crisp, or a middle-aged Aaron Rowand, or a middle-aged Torii Hunter, at least over the next five freaking years.

What made him expensive in terms of trade value is he's cost controlled -- he's completely signed until 2012. The White Sox will owe him about $35 million over those five years, which is about half market value. This isn't a rental player, this is an investment-grade talent... or, just maybe, there's something coming here... like flipping him to Boston (DAMN he's their kind of player!) for multiple position player prospects? What if he gets flipped for Jed Lowrie and Ellsbury? The main reason I don't see this as an option is Oakland wouldn't have needed the White Sox and they'd love those guys...

On to the out-box:

Sad to say, I think Sweeney's waiver-wire bait, so I think the trade comes down to what happens to Gio Gonzalez and de los Santos. As much hope as I have (had) for Ryan Sweeney, I'm afraid he's going to bust. He didn't show significant power in Charlotte in 800+ at bats, which just doesn't bode well. If he were a second baseman, I'd be more upset. As a corner outfielder he can't play major league baseball at all.

Now, I don't like parting with Gio at all. The only two cautions I see with him are he's short for a pitcher and you can't read pitchers based on how they did in Birmingham, Alabama, because every pitcher looks good in that ballpark. The five or so inches he's missing in height show up as stress on the ulnar collateral ligament, and his 93mph is like Zumaya's 99. In wonkese, his phenotype is a cause for concern. That said, he gets people out, and he's got enough innings to assume his arm won't fall apart tomorrow.

De los Santos has faced a total of 483 hitters in professional baseball, which means he's thrown something like 1500 pitches in his career, and at 21 years of age he's just getting started. He's struck out almost 1/3 of the hitters who've faced him, which is phenomenal, but I don't personally know what kind of stuff he's got, and nobody knows if his UCL can make it to the majors. He's a wild card.

I think how you feel about this comes down to how you feel about minor league "prospects" and whether you "overvalue" pitching. If you're John Sickels or Baseball Prospectus, and you make a living telling people you can predict minor league player futures, you hate this trade. If you think pitching is more important that hitting, (a) you're wrong (grin), and (b) you'll hate this trade.

So... Swisher's probability of being a major league regular and above average player for the next 5 years is probably as close to a lock as exists in MLB. Sweeney's probability is near 0. If Gonzalez makes the jump as a frontline starter AND de los Santos makes the jump as a frontline starter or closer, this trade will look awful. If they both make it as "just" back-end starters or middle relievers, this trade will look awesome.

How's that for equivocating?

I wonder if this means a back-of-the-rotation veteran is about to get signed or acquired for Crede?

Rocking Horse People Eat Marshmallow Pies

The Astros signed Darin Erstad to a $1M contract as a lefthanded bat off the bench.

The Transaction Oracle is too kind.

Oh, Havana, I've been searching for you everywhere

The White Sox signed Cuban exile Alexei Ramirez, who adds entertainment value to spring training by not having a pre-defined defensive position. A star in Cuban professional baseball, Ramirez supposedly can play second, short, and the outfield. Nobody really knows whether he can hit in the majors; Baseball Prospectus thinks the top Cuban league is akin to short-season A ball (that is, the Sally League). Given that Ramirez is 26 and has only faced serious competition in international tournaments, it's tough to expect anything from him except an option to AA.

We Never Really Knew Each Other Anyway

Call it sour grapes if you want, but I'm kind of relieved the White Sox failed to land Torii Hunter, Aaron Rowand, Miguel Cabrera, and to a lesser extent, Kosuke Fukudome.

Hunter and Rowand don't project to be worth the money they're being paid. Rowand in particular raised polite oh-dear-god remarks from analysts. Considering that his projected ZIPs numbers aren't really any better than Brian Anderson's projected statistics from PECOTA last year (before the Grinderstad spring training incident and the injury), paying him a guaranteed $60M would have been nuts. I don't know which of Goldilocks, or Jerry Owens, or Ryan Sweeney will outhit Rowand over the next five years, but I bet one of them will, and they all might. I'm comfortable with giving them a chance.

Paying Hunter 50% more than that would have been even more nuts. Torii Hunter is a good center fielder, but dear God that is a lot of Arte Moreno's dinero for a team that already has one overpaid centerfielder with years left on his contract...

And God knows the price for Cabrera was too much to pay, as the Tigers will find out when AARP calls for their lineup in a couple of years.

Fukudome is a tougher call, but we don't actually know if he was even capable of playing a major league center field; a lot of the White Sox buzz tacitly assumed he could step in and play a solid center, and maybe his selection of the Cubs was partly his way of saying, "No, I can't."

So put another record on...

A lot of people love the Tiger deal.

One Tiger fan ran the numbers using Cyril Morong et al's lineup analyzer, which is a fun (if tedious) toy. They got a "tasty" 5.831 runs per game number.

5.831 runs per game is good, almost 950 runs. It's wrong, of course, because of the unstated fallacy that Cabrera (or anyone's) National League numbers translate to the AL. Put in the NL-to-AL translations for Miguel Cabrera and Jacque Jones (per Nate Silver), and you get a sharp drop from 5.831 to a still-good 5.658:

I ran the same numbers using the same source projections (Bill James) for current White Sox hitters (Note: These load real slow!) and got 5.300 runs per game. (Brian Anderson gives about the same result.) I'd be thrilled with this at this point, that's about 850 runs. (It doesn't matter a lot who plays center field. So let's say you put in Fukudome at .375/.500. The mill grinds away and says 5.554 runs per game, an increase of about 40 runs a season. You put BA or RS in center and you get about the same as with Owens.)

The problem is the estimator is, of course, sensitive to your guesses for OBA and SLG. I tweak the numbers a little without making them seem at all "fake" and I get the offense up to 5.580 runs per game:

As for the Tigers, put in some accelerated age-related decline for their geezers and you can get to 5.528.

Yeah, that's right, I said geezers. Their average lineup age is going to be about 32 years old. Gary Sheffield is going to be 39. Granderson and Cabrera are their youth, at least until they make a trade.

So if I put my thumb on the scale ONLY SLIGHTLY I get comparable offenses. (The ballparks aren't really comparable, of course, but never mind that).

He captured it and brought it home

Acquired, for minor league DH-to-be Chris Carter, Snakes' former top prospect Carlos Quentin...

I know Black Betsy is really high on Carter, and maybe with good reason, but right-handed players who play first base in A ball should have huge warning signs on them (since, if they are any kind of athlete, they'll be at third or in the outfield).

So I looked at Carter's minor league fielding statistics, and what did I see? A .977 fielding percentage at first base, which is otherwise known as "Dr. Stoneglove". (Frank Thomas' minor league fielding percentage was about
.987...) While Mike Ward would have loved ripping the poor guy a new one twice a week, I don't want to think about it.

Carter has already been used as a DH in the Sally League, because he can't play defense. So Kenny got a LF from the Snakes -- made extraneous by the Byrnes signing -- for a minor league DH.

As for Quentin, he's a stud prospect who lost his luster in a couple of injury-plagued seasons. Runs adequately (not good enough to play center), righthanded power hitter, threw OK before his injuries... kind of like BA with a penchant for being hit by pitches, more power, more raw talent, and somewhat less fielding ability. Can't play center -- he's a corner outfielder.

This is a very good deal for the White Sox.

You can shine like silver all you want

So Scott Linebrink's signing is sending shock waves through the industry. Right. Give me a break. Giving him 4/$19M is pretty stupid, but where's the outrage over the enormous pile of cash handed out to Coco Cordero at about the same time? Or the Angels' overcall bid for Torii Hunter after another overcall bid for Gary Matthews Jr last year? Where's the outrage of Boras and A-Rod cheating on the performance-clause ban, which is far more dangerous and earth-shattering?

Fish, he got a hook in his throat

Scott Linebrink reportedly negotiating with the White Sox for four years and nineteen million dollars...

Linebrink is not a leak-type reliever, he's a burst-type reliever. What I mean by that is his usual game is a scoreless inning, but once in a while, oh my God. In 71 appearances last year, he posted scoreless innings or more in 52 of them, and one or fewer runs in 62 of them. A four spot, three threes, and five twos inflated his ERA. He tends to do this from time to time. He does finish what he starts and he doesn't bleed runs. That's what you get with a setup man.

Chicago fans aren't really tolerant of the burst-type reliever, so this should end well. Yeah.

Let's toast the hero with blood in his eyes

So Torii hunter is an Angel, for five years and ninety million dollars.

Wow. Of course, congratulations to Hunter, who now will be able to serve his dogs their food on antique china if he feels like it.

And congratulations to Kenny Williams, who was saved from himself. A close bidding war might have created a situation where the White Sox, who don't need an aging centerfielder to add to their aging first baseman and DH, could have gone to seventy million for Hunter. By blowing away the field (what used to be called "pulling a Tom Hicks") the Angels managed to, in one swoop, make their fifty million dollar centerfielder from last off-season (with a no-trade clause) redundant, and possibly raise the going rate for centerfielders by four million a year for no good reason.

To know how it feels when the universe reels...

Item: The White Sox traded John Garland to the Angels for Orlando Cabrera and, apparently, $1.5 million. Both Garland and Cabrera will be eligible for free agency after 2008. Garland is owed $12 million next year, and Cabrera, $9 million.

After careful consiration, I come down in favor.

First, the White Sox aren't really going to contend in 2008, or 2009 for that matter, unless Miracles Occur. So one question really is, are you more comfortable hoping for miracles with Gio, Egbert, Broadway, and Danks, or with Sweeney, Anderson, Owens, and Richar? I know what I think. The ONLY real assets the White Sox have in the minors worth talking about (at least above A ball, that is) are a handful of starting pitchers. They have few position player prospects ready that I trust. They simply have to trade pitching for position players because otherwise they'll be PLAYING pitchers at positions.

Second, there is the matter of public perception. The White Sox can get away with hoping for Gio et al because, at least two to three times a week, they will still put a veteran major league pitcher on the mound, and more if Contreras can bounce back. But the everyday lineup is there EVERY DAY, and putting Andy Gonzalez and Richar and Owens and Cintron on the field is just brutal. Those guys shouldn't be in the majors, let alone occupying a significant chunk of your roster. In these days of four-man benches, these guys will play a lot. So you, the fan, can't even pick and choose which games to watch because they are *all* bad. The White Sox can't afford to risk that financially.

Third, there is the "message" with the free agent CFs the White Sox are allegedly courting. (I'll believe it when I see a signing.) "We're going to put a veteran defense behind young pitching" is a selling point. "We're going with D-list position player prospects but keeping JG for an extra year" isn't. Everybody in baseball knows Garland is gone after 2008. Whether OC won't be re-signed is open to doubt.

Finally, Cabrera is 33 but otherwise he is the kind of player I think you should be glad to see Kenny picking up. He's a defensive plus. He's smart. He stays healthy. Yeah, he's 33, but he's not Omar Vizquel, and he's tied down for one and only one year, and the problem with old players isn't the next year, it's the next four. Even if he turns into a giant crater, the pain will be over in 10 months anyway.

Garland will be missed, sure. But the relief of not being blinded by the uglier alternatives is probably worth it.

By the way, John... thanks for 2005.

It's been such a long time

The last time I posted, the White Sox were watching the Tigers win their division, waiting for next year...

A year later, the White Sox have imploded, with every one of Baseball Prospectus' worst predictions having come true.

The spiral was hard to take -- so hard that yours truly couldn't bring himself to post a word about it here.

So, Johnny's spent his time in the sanitarium, cleaning up the razor wounds, and it's time to pick up the thread as the White Sox try to arrest their decline.

Anxiously waiting the first transaction,

I am,

Your obedient servant,

Johnny Mostil's Razor

Somebody else's baby

The Detroit Tigers are in the World Series. Every White Sox fan knows it could've easily been the White Sox.

Ultimately, the 2006 White Sox died from neglect. Not from the bullpen, not from the starting pitching, not from the unexpected bad luck of sharing a division with a couple of teams on Missions from God.

They died because, in his haste to cement a second championship team, Kenny Williams forgot to have any backup plans. When Brian Anderson struggled at the plate, there was no major league caliber option to back him up. When Scott Podsednik struggled at the plate and in the field, there was no option to replace him except Pablo Ozuna.

They died because of gratitude. When the bullpen struggled, blood flowed, and Riske and McDougal were brought in to (mostly) stem the bleeding -- but not until Cliff Politte got 30 innings to blow multiple ballgames before earning his release. One has to think that Podsednik not being replaced had more to do with his homer off Brad Lidge last October than any realistic assessment of his contributions. His defensive drop-off made him possibly the worst regular position player in the league.

They died because of stubbornness. Boone Logan got far more opportunities to show he wasn't ready that any rationality justified. Anderson, despite his manifest problems hitting lefty pitching, was platooned, deepening his slump. The use of Cotts and Logan as LOOGys despite poor performance in that specific role was stubbornly repeated.

Now comes the offseason, the great time to blog because, well, you can't be proven wrong for six months.

Good luck to the Tigers. But we all can't help but think it shoulda been our time again. In baseball, unless you're the Yankees, the opportunity not seized doesn't usually come again for a long time.

Capitalize on this good forture

When Joe Crede broke his finger last year, he was a lifetime .251/.300/.428 hitter. Given the high expectations, that would officially qualify as a major disappointment.

Since he came off the DL on September 10, 2005, Joe Crede has now played in 85 games. In that span he's hit .320/.354/.560.

Here's one way of looking at it: double his last 81 games and you get:

.312
34 homers
118 RBI
28 walks (nobody is perfect)

Suffer not your neighbor's affliction

As midnight approached on May 27, the Detroit Tigers were coming off a win off the Indians and were an incredible 35-14. Virtually everything was going right for the team, easily leading the league in ERA and scoring runs in bunches. One more game against the Indians, who they'd been dominating, followed by stretch against the Yankees, Boston, the White Sox, and Toronto, gave the Tigers an opportunity to quiet the last naysayers.

The Tigers have now gone 3-9 in the last 12 games, being outscored 70-42. Three things have gone wrong for the Tigers:

• Their schedule suddenly got a lot tougher,
• They started suffering injuries (Maroth, Monroe, I-Rod), and
• Their mixed-bag bullpen started giving up a lot of runs, capped by last night's meltdown.
  

They have managed to cling to first place mostly because the White Sox have not played Whack-A-Mole with them quite enough yet. The wheels aren't off yet, but the Detroit lug nuts look to be loose or missing for 2006. This is not to say the Tigers aren't long-term contenders; the wealth of young pitching plus more coming (and Zumaya eventually moving into a key role) augurs well for their future -- if Leyland doesn't Dusty-Baker the young pitchers first, that is. On the other hand, Polanco, Ordonez, I-Rod, and Guillen aren't spring chickens, and the latter three have terrifying injury histories (which are the reasons they're all in Motown in the first place), so keep in mind the possibility that this team could be a mirage.

Indians followers are amazed at the team's floudering at 29-31. "With all that talent," they ask, "how can they be under .500?" The answer, of course, is that the pitching staff isn't the same one they had last year, and in virtually every case, the replacement in 2006 is worse than the 2005 role-player. It hasn't helped that Cliff Lee has regressed to ordinary, but Paul Byrd and Jason Johnson simply haven't pitched well, and the smoke-and-mirrors 2005 bullpen is scattered and the replacement just hasn't gelled. From the perspective of a White Sox fan, the Indians' decision to use Aaron Boone at third and the Broussard/Blake hot starts should stretch out the playing time for three candidates for long-term replacement, and lead the Indians to avoid some tough decisions they should make for 2007. Of course, Boone's supposed heir apparent, super-prospect Andy Marte, is not hitting at Buffalo (.256/.324/.363). Is it possible the Crisp trade, surrendering Crisp and bullpen handyman David Riske, will turn out to be the supposed "2005 Major League Executive of the Year's" serious mistake? We can only hope.