TCS Morning 5: The Sox are just screwing with us at this point

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1. So...

Uh...you think it would be past time to do something like this...

Normally Plan A is the best plan, Plan B is the backup, and Plan C is...

Ok, so here are my most likely explanations for these, uh, quotes from dear friend Kenny Williams, and trust that these are actually in order of most likely to be employed.

A) STAY OUT OF WHITE SOX BUSINESS--The organization that prides itself on being as transparent as a block of wood is making sport of giving indecisive and unrevealing quotes to the press, under the guise of protecting trade leverage. It's not enough to just not reveal who we're targeting, let's pretend we don't even know what the basic state of our team is.

97% chance this is the case.

B) Massaging the money out of Jerry is a marathon, not a sprint, and so until he actually commits to spending, hell, they may be rebuilding for all they know.

This is depressingly realistic to me, but at least Kenny is having fun with it.

2.8% chance this is the case.

C) They are actually incompetent.

Ya never know.

Not because being situationally dependent on rebuilding or buying in based on free agent or trade opportunities is dumb, but because you'd have to be dumb to independently assess that this was not the time for the Sox to buy in unless they face significant financial restrictions.

0.2% chance this is the case.

2. 

Any news like this during a relatively quiet day, or just during hot stove season at all, is bound to get mocked. We want the Sox to go get a big bat, and they signed a guy who was a kinda-interesting part-time bat for a team like the rebuilding Cubs to sign three years ago. But, in mocking this, we overlook two things:

A) There are no bad minor league contracts. Dan Black is in South Korea. Someone has to fill the void and hit some dingers to keep Charlotte fans happy.

B) Scott Hairston in the White Sox organization has some really cool history. As Steve Peters detailed on South Side Sox, if he ever got called up, Scott would be the third Hairston generation to suit up for the Sox, and his grandfather Sam was the first black player the Sox ever signed.

3. August Fagerstrom of FanGraphs had a deep dive into the possibilities for the Sox trading Jose Quintana to fill their offensive needs in the offseason. It's a good primer on what they are likely to do if all the limitations prescribed to them hold up: which is to say I have a litany of objections that I don't want to be seen as a wholesale rejection of piece.

Specifically here, FanGraphs is using a projection based on the Sox previous payrolls to estimate they only have $20 million of spending room, and cites the disastrous results of last year's offseasons as holding them out of free agency. The latter I assume is Fagerstrom trying to project how ownership might react, but it'd be an indefensible reasoning for Reinsdorf to take, just as the Sox ownership justifying thriftiness bases on previous lean years and failing to recognize the opportunity they have with this core--which is a central element of Fagerstrom's premise!--is indefensible, but the assumption here is that the Sox are not spending, and how they might work around it.

The shiny, fun, central element of this piece is a comparison between Quintana and Cole Hamels, who are nearly identical statistically, but with Quintana being younger and signed to a very cheap contract. On the strength of this, Fagerstrom argues that a package similar to the huge haul the Phillies got is the best way for the Sox to meaningfully transform their offense. That's fun to hear, and Quintana's contract certainly could push his value up in that territory, but Hamels' stuff grades out significantly superior to Quintana's, he has a longer track record and has proven his abilities at the highest level of MLB competition. If you don't think that matters for his trade value, and that it's all about their last three years of FIP, you're willfully deluding yourself. And it's worth mentioning especially for the alleged purpose of this trade, that the Phillies got a lot of MLB or near-MLB-ready bats, but they didn't get guys who will dominate in 2016.

Willful delusion is a similar description that could be offered to the plan of tossing up two spots of the rotation to Erik Johnson, Frankie Montas and Chris Beck to sort out, but if the Sox really aren't going to find another way to help their offense, it's less hopeless than their hitting situation. As Dan Hayes mentioned, the Sox are holding out for "a small army of bats," so if they get what really pries Quintana from their fingers, it could at least achieve the feat of curing their offense fast than it would ever improve on its own.

4. Chris Sale's wacky and historic and still kinda disappointing season earned him a fourth-place finish in AL Cy Young voting. Between his W-L record and his ERA, we probably cannot be too worried about the inclusion of advanced statistics in award races if Sale is finishing fourth.

Dallas Keuchel had a great and deserving season and dragged his team to its first playoff berth in a decade, but is also not the cluster of future Hall-of-Famers having great seasons that Jake Arrieta had to beat out to win the NL crown. To feel like this year was one of Sale's best opportunities to win and that it was scuttled by weird injuries, bad defense and inconsistency would not be wrong.

5. And finally, an electrifying moment of White Sox blog synergy in regard to hitting coach fan-fiction.

TCS Morning 5: Who knew the best shortstop in the AL was available?

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Collin did the thankful job of recapping the Alexei situation so I didn't have to Thursday, which is good, because that means it didn't devolve into 900 words of blubbering, fan-hating snark, and a 10-minute video posted at the end that's just me pointing my finger at the camera and hissing.

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TCS Morning 5: OHH MY GOD IS THE WHOLE OFFSEASON THIS BORING?!?

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Just to add to the sense that the White Sox could struggle to rope high-level candidates into this bench coach gig, Doug Padilla confirmed that Sandy Alomar Jr. did not even agree to interview for the position. This was kind of the indication already, since it would have been poor form to speak publicly about misgivings about the opening after interviewing for it. 

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TCS Morning 5: Staring at the stove, which is not yet hot

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It is nearly the deadline for activating club options, also known as the long-awaited decision day on Alexei Ramirez's future with the White Sox. Or, is better said, it's the deadline for determining whether their desire to purge $9 million from the 2016 payroll outstrips any interest in shopping the veteran for talent in return, or any interest in just not giving 600+ plate appearances to Tyler Saladino.

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TCS Morning 5: Has enough White Sox stuff happened to fill out a five-item list?

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Maybe the cruelest punishment of following a routine also-ran is spending October watching the Sox shuffle through moves and possibilities that might shift their 2016 record by a half-win or maybe even a whole one, while other teams have the fates of seasons and career legacies swayed by a few outs. There's no easier blog posts to write than "Courtney Hawkins' foot causing him to miss the Fall League will cost him meaningful reps, uh oh" but I've doing this long enough to know how purposeless they are.

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TCS Morning 10: Not a good season, folks!

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 The 2015 White Sox are done for the year. Thank goodness. What an atrocity, what a complete bungling, what an across-the-board disappointment, what a nihilistic disaster. I took in the finale in person because--well, a friend offered me tickets, and I got to spend time with my mother--but mostly to make sure they were dead.

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TCS Morning 10: Bad things about this organization

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Thursday night, an obviously fluky and flimsy redeeming quality about the last few years of White Sox baseball fell to pieces. Hard-working but consistently outgunned fifth starter John Danks stopped dominating the AL Central champion Royals, and got the shelling that's probably been waiting for him for years. Bad defense and walks can turn into a six-run disaster quickly, but 11 hits in five innings means you were just getting resolutely hammered.

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TCS Morning 10: Jose Quintana is good

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A hanging curveball left up to Mike Moustakas in the sixth kept Jose Quintana from setting a new career-best mark for season ERA Wednesday night. Instead, he wound up allowing three earned runs over nine relatively smooth frames to the Royals and will have to settle for a career-high in single-season innings, and his third-straight 200-inning, 3.51 ERA or under (weird cutoff, I know) campaign.

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TCS Morning 10: The continued ascension of Trayce

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Jeff Samardzija's White Sox career likely came to a close Tuesday night with seven confusingly efficient innings against a sleepwalking Royals team, as the Sox cruised to a 4-2 victory. There were back-to-back home runs at one point, there was a startlingly low number of whiffs, but he now has a couple of outings to point to say he figured it out as he hits free agency off a season where he posted a 4.96 ERA over 214 innings with a career-worst 17.9% strikeout rate at age 30.

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TCS Morning 5: Build your new Sox contender

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Other than psychic relief, there's no huge benefit to making Adam LaRoche sit under the bench for the last week, other than keeping the path clear for Trayce Thompson playing time, but you can give rest to Melky Cabrera, or possibly the hopeless Avisail Garcia for that. Unless the Sox are simply purging LaRoche, eating all the money, and not trying anything else, they have reasons for trying to see if he can do something remotely positive.

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TCS Morning 10: A worthwhile Frankie Montas disaster

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 Well, shoot, that didn't work.

Frankie Montas got his big, compromised chance to start a big league game Wednesday afternoon and for the most part got blow'd up over three disastrous, defensively challenged innings. He had absolutely no favors done for him by management or defense, but ultimately he's the only one who got tuned up for 3 IP, 6 H, 6 ER, 2 BB, 3 K, HR in a 7-4 loss.

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