White Sox reportedly sign David Robertson to four-year deal in the middle of the night

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Well, we're still waiting on some Samardzija details, but I guess this will pass the time.

There are two extreme poles at work here. One is this extreme outlay of money (Reportedly over $40whatever, not mine) and years of commitment for a reliever, even super-high leverage reliever. The other pole is how utterly hopeless the Sox were looking for a strikeout at the end of games last season, and their lack of immediate options to fix that problems:

--Nate Jones (Broken)

--Jake Petricka (Strikeouts aren't really his thing)

--Daniel Webb (I donno, maybe he'll suddenly get completely better?)

There's never been a time where I've seen other teams' fans and bloggers talking about a huge closer contract and didn't think they were kidding themselves, or overreacting to an immediate need...but it sure isn't hard to see the immediate need.

It helps that Robertson is also extremely good, and the No. 1 reliever on the free agent market for a reason. His career 32% strikeout percentage plays anywhere, in any ballpark, his injury history is devoid of major arm problems, and if you care about such things, he took to closing beautifully last year (39 out of 44 saves and all) and will only be 30 by Opening Day. Pick a reliever who could shove for the next four years, this is probably your guy.

You never need that huge, overpriced, gas-guzzling SUV to get through the snow, but this is a really sweet SUV and the Sox have a ton of snow.

Again, this is pretty blatantly philosophically ill-advised. It dovetails into a clearly 2015-centric approach indicated by this simultaneous Samardzija trade, could grow less ridiculous as the market expands, and thankfully provides an infinitely more watchable and entertaining end-game experience, but I feel like we should mention the planning that we know to be problematic before we're accused of having not done it later. How did we not see this disaster coming? We did, but we had to keep going on with our lives.

Once this is is done, we can go back to basking in how much better the 2015 White Sox are now, which they are.

 

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