Mike Rankin and James Fox welcomed on Sox Machine Editor-in-Chief Jim Margalus to preview our preseason prospect coverage of 2023. Jim shared insight on how he evaluates Chicago White Sox prospects such as Lenyn Sosa, Oscar Colas and Cristian Mena, among others. He also provided opinions about the new coaching staff and how he feels about the way the franchise operated in the offseason.
25 thoughts on “FutureSox Podcast ft. Jim Margalus of Sox Machine: Prepping for Chicago White Sox preseason top 30 week”
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Wacha to the padres… cause of course
Preller must be Hahn’s envy. His boss lets him spend without limit, Jerry won’t let Hahn do a god damned thing. Padres are going to be fun to watch. Fans can’t accuse ownership of making no effort, at least.
Ownership letting them sign high end free agents to long term contracts while also signing mid tier guys to fill holes is definitely something Jerry wont let his guys do…. but im not letting Hahn off the hook for misallocation of funds either. 170ish million payroll isnt a joke level of spending.
It isn’t a joke level of spending, but Hahn is FORCED to misallocate on some level. The best guys he has been allowed to sign during the whole rebuild are Grandal and a 3 WAR outfielder. No GM is going to win without getting better players than that. Harper, Machado, Wheeler, Springer, Xander… those are the difference makers and the guys that help teams get to the World Series, not guys whose total contract value is 75M or less.
a wonderful example of the Friedman quote “if you’re rational about every free agent, you’re going to finish third on every free agent”
the extensions to Yoan, Eloy, and Robert are preventing them from filling out the roster, especially Yoan. Profar and Andrus are white sox if those deals don’t exist.
Jerry’s cheapness is the only thing preventing them from filling out the roster. Give me a break with any other excuses, look what other teams are doing with much higher payrolls. Philadelphia isn’t a bigger market than Chicago and they have signed like 6 free agents to 9 figure deals. Jerry got 30M from Disney and chose to lower the payroll. He is cheap, phony, and selfish, and that is 100 percent why this team is a lost cause. The Sox have spent money once in the past decade.
i could not care less about Profar and Andrus not being White Sox. their sins in the field of depth come from a lack of sufficient prospect depth. either they don’t draft well, or they don’t develop any but their top few guys well. profar and andrus aren’t the free agents they’re missing out on to help this squad be a real force, it’s the Harpers, Machados, and Wheelers. Grandal and Hendriks were genuinely good moves, they’re just not big enough to be the biggest.
Exactly. If you could re-wind back to the end of 2020 and just have them spend like a team that was serious, like beating Toronto’s 5 year 125M offer for Springer (or preferably Harper before that), and adding Semien a year later…spending more but skipping the money they wasted on Eaton, Garcia, Kelly, Harrison… this team would be dangerous. And Hahn would probably get more praise than blame, because the team wouldn’t be a shadow of what it could have been.
I’m genuinely pulling for the Padres at this point, why not. Very interesting team over there. Dodgers are great but not unbeatable, esp when the Pads have Xander/Machado/Tatis/Soto back to back.
Absolutely agree with you, although it’s is a joke the way Hahn spends/allocates it.
Preller is notorious for his work ethic. E.g., a day after the trade deadline people see him at some HS showcase in Tennessee scouting 17 year olds. Not only does Hahn not have any desire to work that hard, he’s not a talent evaluator so he doesn’t even have the requisite skills to be of any use in a situation like that.
Why work hard to succeed on the field if you’re not measured by success on the field?
…is what Hahn would tell us.
…if he was made to answer.
Hahn is a tool for the most part, I agree. But no GM is going to win if they are not allowed to sign better free agents than a 3 WAR outfielder during a 5 year rebuild. Better players are more expensive, that’s all it is ever about. Hahn is bad but Jerry is the insurmountable problem.
Ask Tampa, Milwaukee, Cleveland who’ve been competitive every year in the last 5 years. Houston and St. Louis if you’re just talking about free agents (not counting trades/extensions). The 2021 Giants, Oakland before last year, the 2014-15 Royals. It’s possible.
The best use of money they could choose, and rather cheaply i imagine compared to player salaries, is to hire some people away from the Dodgers or Rays player development people. Hahn sucks but is not the Sox only problem apart from Jerry. They don’t draft or develop well, and need betterr people throughout their organization. I’d love them to fire Hahn but am cyincal they would hire anybody good to replace him anyway. They haven’t had a really good GM ever, basically. Anyway is pointless, we all know where this team is at, and teams with owners as bad as Jerry are basically screwed because the GM and all other employees flow from him. That Hahn has been GM this long, or at all, is Jerry’s fault in the first place.
Exactly. Hahn, as the GM running the whole operation, is responsible for the processes around scouting, drafting, player development, analytics, etc. Those processes are way more important than guessing on the right free agents, because even good GMs miss on those fairly often.
The reason why they don’t bring in people from other organizations, while I’m sure money is a part of it, is that that would take away power and responsibilities from Hahn and his cronies, who’d rather maintain power and not improve the organization than improve the organization while giving up power.
It’s a sad, sad situation. A lot of wasted potential. Too late for the kind of regime changes it would require under this ownership. Jerry will be dead at some point… then perhaps this club can take on a different persona.
Signing Wacha would have been such a simple and elegant gesture on the part of the Sox to say to the fans, we really screwed up with the Clevinger signing – we will spend beyond what we planned to try and fix this. Shockingly, they missed the opportunity.
I think we just hope for an innings eater like Dylan Bundy at this point.
Wacha for rumored $30MM two years. I don’t get the Padres. They spend money like drunken sailors and they can only play 26 guys. Yet they still have holes in the OF.
They are gonna put Tatis Jr in RF, Soto in LF and Grisham in CF.
And they actually expect to compete this year? I don’t see one DH/1B in the bunch!
Left center and right center are the holes, I guess.
Man, I don’t get the fascination with Wacha. He has more negative WAR seasons than 3 WAR seasons at this point and there is nothing in his profile that excites me yet the Padres spent big and there were/are a lot of people who wanted him on this roster.
He was the best available, but not a great answer I agree. He isn’t worth 30M/2 years most likely. But he’s a nice 6th/7th starter on a team like the Padres that does not care about money and actually recognizes the importance of depth, and is prepared for eventual injuries. Their owner wants to win the WS and doesn’t care about money, because he has enough of it already and would freely spend to bring happiness, fun, and excitement to his city. What a foreign concept to Jerry.