TCS Morning 5: The games have started

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The White Sox played something resembling a baseball game against another professional team Thursday for the first time in 2016, and got righteously tuned up by the Dodgers 6-1, in a game that would have seemed especially lifeless if it wasn't, you know, the first Spring Training game of the year.

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TCS Morning 5: Employers giving out raises to be nice is probably not a trend

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In a rare moment of vaguely normal treatment of employees, the Kansas City Royals rewarded Salvador Perez for playing a vital role in their company's unparalleled success and tore up the rest of the absurd five-year, $7 million contract they inked him to before he had any real service time or any standing to pass on a guaranteed fortune, and gave him a huge five-year, $52.5 million extension.

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What Nietzsche quotes are best for post-game interviews?

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Another baseball season is closer than the frigid, loveless Midwestern landscape would currently indicate. With its impending arrival comes the knowledge that all the assorted cruelties--physical, mental, spiritual--of a high stakes six-month major league campaign are coming with it.

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TCS Morning 5: And so we wait

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It's a waiting game on White Sox news of an acquisition that will bridge the gap between "a series of good moves" and "a good offseason," or even "a good team," and at last update they are "quietly in the mix," but it's a good time to remind that the White Sox being at risk for losing a compensatory draft pick is part of what makes this offseason a unique window of opportunity.

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TCS Morning 5: White Sox could be swayed to trade a bad player

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The encouraging part of the Dan Hayes' report that the White Sox are open to trading Avisail Garcia is that it shows the White Sox are aware of what we are seeing on a daily basis, that Garcia is: currently awful, showing no progress, and an increasingly poor bet to put things together offensively to a degree that will overcome his mounting shortcomings elsewhere.

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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 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: Bored in Cleveland

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The White Sox played a sleepy bad series in Cleveland against sleepy bad AL Wild Card contender, keeping the Indians on the periphery of a sleepy bad AL Wild Card race, whose sole source of drama is the Astros falling into the void. They capped things off Sunday with a 6-3 loss featuring a fairly rough John Danks start, a characteristically high-strikeout outing against soft-tosser Josh Tomlin

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TCS Afternoon 10: It's a little late, guys

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A good litmus test of whether a runaway division leader has gone into cruise mode is if they just casually allow themselves to be firebombed for 25 runs over a three-game sweep by a woebegone fourth-place team that averages under four runs per game. Having their ace (Johnny Cueto) shelled and getting beat by a busted prospect restoration project (Erik Johnson) 7-5 was the liveliest and closest effort the Royals managed the entire weekend. 

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TCS Morning 10: Baseball is dumb; why do they keep playing?

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Tuesday night, the White Sox sure played a baseball game. Most baseball games are boring. Some, aggressively so. But with a coordinated series of disasters in every unit of the game, you can really go on quite the emotional rollercoaster in one night, even in September of an awful year with no hope

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TCS Morning 10: Chris Sale's worst is still really, really good

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Nate Jones is mortal. I don't particularly agree with the way he announced it--allowing an eighth-inning two-run bomb to Boston first baseman Travis Shaw by placing a fastball in the lefty down-and-in dinger Bermuda Triangle--but sometimes you really have to grab people's attention for them to really take in your message.

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TCS Morning 10: Playing out the string

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This weekend offered some comforting return to White Sox normalcy--no, not just the part about playing pointless late-August baseball and lacking any real hopes of the playoffs--but the part where they get a series win against the Mariners, where Seattle routinely looks incompetent and the Sox just kinda stand there. In particular, they stood there while the Seattle bullpen walked 10 batters in 9.2 innings and nearly lost two games singlehandedly, rather than just one.

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