A Twitter Journey with Rick Hahn and Mark Gonzales

Mark Gonzales, the White Sox beat writer for the Chicago Tribune, has a tendency to tweet mid-thought, I think. Rick Hahn, White Sox GM, hasn’t established his tendencies yet but as James

noted a few weeks ago his GM-Speak is already very GM-like. Between these two, it might have been a bit of a challenge to break down this tweet:

The first takeaway is that there is evidently payroll room to operate. Hooray! The Winter Meetings might not be completely dead for the White Sox after all. The second thing, though, is the word “now.” What does this mean? What changed? When did it change? Did something happen? Did we all miss something? Payroll was going to be comparable to the 2012 amount, and that amount was pretty much hit when Peavy and Floyd were extended. That doesn’t leave much…the kind of money that allows for $700,000 contracts to DeWayne Wise.

But tweets followed, and it started to come together. Hahn did not walk past Mark Gonzales as he sat cross-legged on a folding chair in the hallways of U.S. Cellular Field, telling him there was room for something be done, leaving Gonzales with nothing more, forcing him to tweet the small bit of information he was given. No, there was a conference of some sort. Subsequent tweets from the beats of various media seem to confirm this. Let’s use the timeline of @MDGonzales to touch on some of Mr. Hahn’s statements, heading into what is MLB’s busiest off-season week.

This “possibility” is potentially bad. Beckham is currently using his middle-infield defense to keep him in the lineup while he produces very little at the plate. Third base, a spot in which you would ideally plug in a player that has much more to offer offensively, might not be the best fit for Gordo at this stage of his career. If his bat miraculously turns around, then we can have the conversation again, but let’s not discuss what to do when the miracle occurs until it actually does.

That there have been inquiries isn’t too surprising. Matt Thornton has been poked at and asked about regularly for a long time. The others are for the most part team controlled youngsters that have performed reasonably in their professional chances on the mound. Teams are real suckers for that sort of thing. Jesse Crain has 1 more year and $4.5 million worth of salary coming at him, I don’t doubt that’s attractive to somebody in search of bullpen help. “Sox have depth.” They could trade pieces of the bullpen and not cease to be a team, if that’s what he means.

The less talking the better, says me.

I’m not sure what this means, but he also said that the same goes for Youkilis. It’s a wait and see game, and if somebody comes back cheap enough, they may continue to wear the White Sox uniform.

This might be my favorite, because while this all started with a tweet that seems to warn that we shouldn’t sleep on the Winter Meetings, this one warns us not to get our hopes up. Maybe something will be done, maybe not. Thanks for coming, everybody.