Monday, December 5, 2016

Playing with House Money


Sports columnists and whatever their TV version is called are among the most irritating human beings on the face of the earth.  Yesterday, one of them declared the worst thing in sports is “allegiance to a boring team” and the “White Sox are a boring team and have been for years.”  Therefore, they have to blow everything up and start from scratch the way the Cubs did.  This coming from a guy who admits he “questioned almost everything the Cubs did as they went through their rebuild.”  In other words:  I was wrong then, but not now.  Yeah, I want to trade Chris Sale based on that rationale.

Sox fans are somewhere between skeptical and numb because they know more than Mr. Columnist, who couldn’t be bothered to consider his position.  The White Sox are oranges—or stinking garbage—to the Cubs’ apples.  Their ownership and front office haven’t shown they can string together smart decisions the way the Ricketts family and Theo Epstein have.  They get it right on Sale and Adam Eaton only to get it laughingly wrong on Adam Dunn and Adam LaRoche and Jeff Samardzija and Jeff Keppinger and Wil Ohman and…

Now here’s the thing about trading Sale, Eaton or Jose Quintana to the Dodgers, Nationals or Red Sox.  Those teams have pretty consistently finished higher than the Sox, so those prospects they’d be offering the Sox already had a chance to draft and decided not.  That makes the Sox front office just like Mr. Columnist, wrong the first time but not now.

Forgive me if I don’t share in their confidence.   

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