Leaderboard

If Grandal can make it back by September, the White Sox are fine. They'll win this shitty division regardless. If it's a season ender though, they probably can't win a title anymore

I have a problem with all the hits he gives up. Regardless of outfield positioning.

Lol you’re a clown.

That a character from Lord of the Rings?

This may mean Burger is here a while. But a big recognition of Forbes, who to me is another sign of Sox PD working better. We acquired him as a raw, toolsy player from Texas for MiGo in 2017 as a 20 year old. While producing decent averages, he had no power to speak of, but slowly climbed up the ladder from W-S to Bham. In 2019 in Bham, something interesting happened, he started to walk a lot. He doubled his walks from year before and put up a nice .330 OBP despite a low average. But again, zero power. Them we miss him for a full year and he comes back to Bham as a 24 year old and starts off with a fantastic .299/.356/.456 slash line. He had more homers in 2 months this year than all of 2019, his .150+ iso his best yet. Congrats to Forbes! Go kick charlottes ass and don’t look back.

James McCann wasn't an option to return. He wanted to leave. Why are we still doing this?

Agreed. Poster is ridiculous.

Don’t even engage.

He never said that. You did.

Run the contact play!

Even if you wave a magic wand and somehow Eloy improves from atrocious to bad in LF, the dual consideration is he cannot stay healthy. Eloy has a great bat. He sucks and adds no value as a fielder and is prone to injury. It behooves the team to keep him permanently at DH, to maximize the number of times Eloy can be healthy enough to bat in a White Sox uniform. 4/26/19 - Eloy Jimenez suffers a high ankle sprain attempting to play Left Field. Eloy is placed on IR, returned 5/20 7/16/19 - Eloy collides with Charlie Tilson attempting to play Left Field. Eloy suffers a right ulnar nerve contusion and is placed on IR, returned 7/28 7/26/20 - Eloy Jimenez attacks the wall in Left Field with his head and losses that battle. Eloy avoids IR, returned 7/29 8/25/20 - Eloy Jimenez twisted his ankle attempting to preserve celebrating Lucas Giolito's no hitter. Returned 8/27 9/24/20 - Eloy sprained his foot attempting to run the bases. Missed the remainder of the regular season and all but two at bats in the postseason. 3/23/21 - Eloy Jimenez tears his pectoral tendon, attempting to catch a ball 10 feet over the LF wall. Eloy is placed on the 60 Day IR, misses the first four + months of the season.

Dallas bitches about everything when he gets knocked around.

They have a 1B. They have plenty of DHs. Also McCann has sucked this year, and has been out hit by... Zack Collins. For 9.5 million less dollars, or about as much as Lance Lynn is making this year.

Disagree. At full strength, the Sox are as good as anyone.

I agree with you that they'll make the playoffs regardless, but I disagree that Grandal is the difference between winning a title or not. They're not competitive with the Astros/A's/Rays/Red Sox (when Sale returns)

That adds up to just short of 30 million a year for one position. That is lunacy.

They already had Grandal signed and Grandal had back issues and a a history of back issues. The amount to get McCann was probably $10 Million a year. Now you potentially have Collins as the primary catcher.

Unfortunately Collins has looked like a back-up catcher who has trouble framing and stopping balls behind the plate. Well, if Grandal is injured seriously it may be time to trade for a decent catcher. I hate to say we told you so but....there were a few of us here who were literally begging the Sox to re-sign James McCann late last season and into the off-season in case Grandal got injured.

Unfortunately this team has been pretty crap for the past 3 weeks. If it wasn't for the Twins sweep, this team would be in a lot of trouble.

Some day, some year, if you keep this up, you are bound to be correct.

It just sucks that this team is struggling not because of Burger, Sheets, Hamilton, or even Goodwin and Leury being thrust into every day play. They’re struggling because of Anderson, Moncada, Abreu, Giolito, Cease, and Keuchel playing some bad baseball overall.

Ummm, if he "sucks" a team isn't going to pick up much of his salary, which would kind of defeat the purpose of trading him. Presumably we want to keep a mediocre starter and pay him, rather than trade a mediocre starter and still pay him. And again, if it is so obvious to GMs that "he sucks" we won't get much talent in return. I also don't accept your theory that he stinks or wouldn't have playoff value. He was 5th in Cy Young voting last year, and I'm willing to give him a bit more leeway this year before writing him off. He got bad luck in the most recent start that you reference with Billy Hamilton's botched play, and bad ball/strike calls on Ryan Burr with Keuchel's inherited runners. I don't think there is a ton separating Giolito, Cease, and Keuchel at the moment. They will probably all have ups and downs.

Pitchers should absolutely have a say in where they want the outfield lined up, to an extent. Hopefully the starting pitcher, catcher, and coaches should all be in the same room when going over the strategy on how to attack hitters that day.

La Russa said today pitchers are part of the process and they will look at the spray charts for Keuchel’s starts and see what they find.

His comments aren’t that bad when you read the entire statement within context.

Tell him and all the other McStans to go watch the Mets.

So you wanted to drop $10 million a year to start McCann 50-60 games a year, on top of the $18 million for Grandal?

Scherzer was rightfully upset because he was pulled off of the mound mid inning in a big spot on the game. He wasn’t mad at the umps but mad that Girardi was essentially icing him

If we can just get a couple of guys on we’ll have our clean up hitter at bat as the tying run!

And now we see why cease was left in a couple batters too long. This bullpen is a dumpster fire.

Taking strikes and swinging at balls is an amazing strategy

Welcome to Soxtalk!

God knows he won’t use energy trying to frame pitches

Watch out, Ron is going to report you to mods.

Okaaay...later everyone...let's be less embarrassing tomorrow!

At least it doesn't appear to be an Achilles.

I think if it was a tear he would have gone straight down the tunnel. He seemed to put more weight on it with time. I’m cautiously optimistic it isn’t too serious. Might be an IL stint though.

We have the worst training staff imaginable. This shit can’t keep happening. Gonna have to trade for a starting catcher now.

Is that a joke?

Gee whiz, another series with the Twins. Oh boy. Please baseball, get rid of the schedule in which teams play their own division so many times!! Why are people OK with this boredom? Sox could be playing more games vs. Milwaukee, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis if they want to keep it regional and reduce the amount of games vs. these divisional teams. Drives me crazy.

Is anyone on the team good enough for you ? Serious question.

What's interesting about yesterday's game is that suddenly yesterday he's changing his pitching style to adapt to the lack of sticky stuff. Yesterday's game was the lowest %age of changeups he's thrown in any start since 2019 and the highest %age of sliders he has ever thrown in any game in his career. He was using the slider to get his strikeouts back now that he has lost some of the effectiveness on the changeup and fastball. It didn't win the game for him, but it might eventually be a path to doing so.

So let's see Andrew Vaughn's list of times he hurt himself playing the OF.

He won't be happy if they try Burger at 2nd base. Doubt they do that when he starts though.

No they aren't . Except he's better off just hitting the mute button on himself and discuss it with his manger and defensive positioning guy based if they have the stats to confirm or refute what he's saying. I guess you would have need a lot of info we sure don't get. Seems like he want OF's to play shallower for him because he's saying he either gives up singles or HR's if you don't count doubles or triples that get hit down the line and just count the ones that go over OFers heads. You would need a chart that has where the OFers are positioned on every hit he gave up and where the ball landed and analyze the data. Of course then if you play the OFers shallower ,extra base hits are more damaging than singles and most OFers are better coming in than going back so you have to take that into consideration and analyze all that data too. It's also very hard to trust your eyes. A slow OFer with a bad jump might look fine to the eye when he doesn't get to a ball when he misses it. If a faster OF gets a good jump but runs a bad route but still can get to the ball, he looks worse because the bad route is more visible to the naked eye. To viewers, for the slow OF with the bad jump a double just looks like a double. For the fast OF with the good jump with a bad route it's going to look worse to us if he barely misses it and we see the bad route or even if he catches it we say he took a poor route to that one. We see the routes but we very rarely get enough video proof when watching the game on TV to say how good or bad the jump was. The Jump and Route data baseball savant uses is all based on studying video replay and analyzing how fast an OFer covers the ground in the amount of time the ball is in the air and how direct the line to the ball was. A straight line being great and a not so straight line bad . Then there is always how wind might affect a ball in mid flight which can always make a route appear bad. You can't make a blanket statement like Leury is a bad OFer by eye analysis. He appears sometimes to look bad but often uses his superior speed to run down balls a lot of average OF's couldn't reach.

No way a Story deal happens. COL expects to both replace and upgrade over the value of the draft pick they will get after offering a QO with Story rejecting it *and* they will expect to take the deal of the highest bidder/best centerpiece most likely among bidders. On the Sox side (and everyone else's side) there is the fact that a midseason deal eliminates the possibility of offering the QO and recouping a draft pick, so there's no second year or any compensation when he leaves in FA. So in essence Story costs a shit ton more than someone like Escobar and Schoop and probably similar to Frasier or maybe a tad less but then there's no second season. So no. It's not happening. Unless the Sox are willing to take on a bunch of money along with it in a package deal ie Blackmon which again means no. IMO Ketel Marte is a more realistic target than Story. My opinion is we'll get Escobar or maybe someone like Schoop who won't or can't get a QO and is merely a rental.

I don’t dispute that the other guys are not good defenders, but is Eaton? He was years ago. Has not looked particularly good this year. I say, play the hot hand.

It's almost a circular argument for me. I don't want to give up too much for a 3 month rental at 2B *unless* they are fully healthy and viable for the WS. Unfortunately we ain't know that until after the trading deadline.