Yesterday the White Sox signed Paul Konerko for 3 years, 12.5 million per year. This combined with Adam Dunn for 4 years, 14 million a year raises the payroll expectation for this year up about 10 million over the presumed limit already, so those are probably the last 2 major signings we make, presumably we'll trade for some bullpen help. Last year the Sox finished with 88 wins, pretty respectable considering how awful the season started. Starting Pitching was alright, if hampered by injury, and the Bullpen was mostly outstanding but the offense was mediocre, if not for a career year by Konerko it would've been downright poor.
Kenny Williams, our GM for quite some time now (also the GM of our team that won the World Series, ending an 88 year drought), always manages to make the offseason and trade deadline interesting, and this year in relatively short order he has brought a great deal of improvement to the team, at least in the short term. Next year we will likely have a much better offense, though it may decay somewhat in the third and fourth years of Dunn's deal. Dunn is a robotic sort of player, puts up the same exact stats every year, which means 240 Avg, 380 On base Percentage, and 500 Slugging Percentage, 40 Homeruns and 100 RBIs or so for traditionalists. Paul Konerko had his best year last year, and also had his best year prior to his last contract, but the year directly following actually improved on that year. Now he's probably too old to improve on a career year, but I assume he'll be good for 300/400/500, 30-35 beans and 100 RBIs.
The only real concern for next year is whether the pitching, particularly Jake Peavy, can stay healthy, if they do we should exceed 90 wins, which may yet be good enough to win the division. The evil satanic Joe Mauer with no power Twins will likely contest the division regardless, but we have perhaps the best chance at winning. Fuck Furg's Twins, hopefully their team plane crashes into a mountain the next time they lose their 4th consecutive postseason series and 12th consecutive game to the Yankees. The Tigers have Miguel Cabrera, 2nd or 3rd best player in the American League, and Justin Verlander, top 5 AL pitcher. They really don't have much else so they'll probably finish slightly above .500, the other two teams in our division are terrible. All in all I'm fairly optimistic for next season, if the pitching is very dominant we stand a good chance of advancing in the playoffs and even making a World Series appearance/victory. Oddly enough Paul Konerko is one of the few remaining players of that 2005 team, so I suppose I should cherish his presence. Behold a random tribute.
Somehow they took a crappy song and made it sound good due to Paulie's presence and the pictures chosen, huzzah! Frank Thomas is my favorite player of all time, but I guess Konerko has to crack the top 5 now. Presumably he'll have his number retired. The Blue seat in the vid is where he hit the World Series grand slam. Fortunately the White Sox annihilated everyone that postseason so I didn't have a heart attack watching it, but suffice to say it was one of the finest moments of my life thus far. In preseason expectations this current team is probably actually better than that team, but we probably won't be that dominant pitchingwise.
The latter years of these 2 deals are going to be a bit strange as both decay, Kenny Williams is a "win now" sort of GM so while we're relatively excellent for next year and solid the year after that, who knows what happens from there though. I'm sure we won't revert to being truly terrible as it was between 2001-2004, but with the satanic Twins about we need a good team to make the playoffs. I'm still optimistic about the latter years as well, though we will have to "rebuild" sometime with more than a few excellent young players which we already possess (Best Shortstop in the AL, for instance)
Tomorrow I'll review the film Insomnia, one of Christopher Nolan's earlier works. Does it live up to the Dark Knight, Memento, Inception, and The Prestige...? Read on.
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