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I literally just said he's not a good fit. But he's miles and miles and miles better than Sheets. Vaughn is my LF. Eloy DH.

Good. 12 teams is already too many.

Sounds like Soxtalk views you and old Brucey the same way

I don't know if you have any control over this or not but I humbly request that the 10-1 Astros over our beloved Sox game score be removed from the right side of the Soxtalk headquarters page. It just sucks to look at that every time I come here and if the work stoppage causes games to not be played it will suck more. Thanks in advance for all y'all do!

A win to finish the first half and go into the all-star break possibly tied for the #1 seed would be really nice.

DeMar DeRozan is on some kind of heater. I honestly have not seen this kind of scoring streak since MJ.

I think they have less of a case to withhold payment now that it actually has blown over and he wasn't charged in a court of law. JMO

If you ask him, he’s winning the CY Young award in 2022. If you ask me, I don’t think he’ll play a game.

I think that would be a horrible mistake. He has 2 option years left. We're in the midst of our window. Let's not waste it trying to make a strong-side platoon player out of a guy with very little pedigree and minor league success. Not to mention he is a bull in a china shop in RF, he's a poor 1B and we have plenty of those guys to go around anyway. What could possibly go wrong? His lefty stick is nice. Not suggesting we get rid of him. But any scenario that involves Gavin playing most of the time against RHP completely punts OF defense which I am very much again. Even if he DHs. Sheets will get plenty of MLB at bats in 22 even if he doesn't break camp with a starting role.

Sure, he can DH and play some 1B here and there. There aren't as many moving parts as you seem to think. I guess when you're trying to jam Sheets into an everyday role it gets a bit crowded, but that's the beauty of depth. Gavin should be in AAA playing everyday until an injury. He's a nice fallback option. He should not be shoehorned into an everyday role from the get go, and if he is, we're all going to be disappointed. Eloy and Vaughn can cover LF and DH. Grandal is going to catch most days. Abreu is going to play 1B most days. Whoever we sign to play RF is going to play RF most days. When Grandal needs to DH or play 1B, Vaughn is probably most likely to get the breather against the tough righty. IF Sox are dumb enough to run Eloy out in LF everyday, it won't take long for this little problem to solve itself when he runs into a wall in mid April.

Yesterday one of these threads reminded me that Craig Kimbrel is on our team and I got really upset.

NFL being rocked by a pay to lose scandal and racist hiring practices MLB Lockout NHL Blackhawks scandal Olympics in China MLB Steroids still in the news Minority hiring in about every league I'm thinking this is the lowest point for self inflicted problems in American sports in my lifetime. I'm thinking of the Munich Olympics and thinking that's the worst single moment in my lifetime, but the sheer number of self inflicted issues today is horrible.

I felt almost all of this post. It's a bad time to be a Chicago sports fan now, especially if baseball is your #1 and hockey #2.

As a hockey second sports fan I've really felt the sting of the Blackhawks scandal. I started caring about prospects in sports when the victim was the #1 prospect in the Hawks' system. I've read so many articles about how the victim was a bust and had every terrible character trait imaginable. Instead its some of the people I thought were respectable who are trash. That makes me feel like the current moment is especially bad, but its really just this bad for Chicago sports fans who care about baseball. Pretty much every other issue has parallels in recent memory. The Olympics are increasingly controversial in the last decade. Two of the last three winter Olympic locations were held by the government's geopolitical enemies, the Rio Olympics was terrible in many respects, and I heard more about covid and the sex-proof beds than the actual Tokyo Olympics. Racism in sports management and coaching has been a topic of conversation for a while now. Racism is becoming a bigger issue as more players are speaking out and more journalists are refusing to stick to sports but it has always been there. The NFL has a new weird type of scandal every few years and steroids have been talked about often since Bonds got on the ballot. So to me it comes down to MLB's owners lockout and the Blackhawks scandal. It's not great as most of us probably say baseball is our favorite sport and have the Hawks as our hockey team, but that makes things more Chicago and baseball specific than sports as a whole. At least the Bulls are playing some great basketball.

Rams! Champs!

Eh.. Bengals got a gift TD from the no face call on Ramsay. I say it evened out. BUT agreed for a game that close it wasn't particularly exciting. Joe Burrow will be back though no doubt. And I hope the Bengals use damn near every pick they have on O-Line help.

I think they shat their pants from the very beginning. I think they think that the rest of the industry stupidly over-values RPs as much as they do. And I think they didn't consider all the negative and positive consequences. Unfortunately, the rest of the industry read the book (not the stupid film) "Moneyball" 15 or so years ago, and discovered that RPs aren't worth as much as the SOX think they're worth. Now, with no negotiating leverage to sell an old, expensive, and mostly-ineffective closer, they're kinda screwed. Let's all hope for Philly's BP to have a few season-ending injuries like day 1 of ST. Just the mere fact that they got a player they didn't need, this far into their tenures as GM/President or GM/Asst GM should remove any benefit of the doubt. They should have known better, and they still did it. Now, as I'd mentioned before, reverse the situation: If some other schmucks already had an All Star at closer, and were DESPERATE to have Kimbrel's obese salary the fuck off their payroll, how eager would you be to pick up ALL $16M of an old, bad closer's contract? And were the roles reversed, what would you want the SOX to give up to get him? A bit of salary relief? A 27 year old AAAA type? A live arm in low A with a career 4.5 era? I'm genuinely curious. For me, If Kimbrel were on another team's payroll, and they were desperate to have him fuck off, I'd send Adolfo or Rutherford for Kimbrel, and the other team eats $8-10M. Take it or leave it. What would you send for him? All that said, I hope they can work miracles, so that a Conforto type can be signed here. We'll have to see.

True...but I like watching them on MLB.TV and having warm thoughts.

Abreu 1b, Vaughn LF, Eloy DH, Grandal C, Conforto RF, Sheets AAAA, Collins who gives a shit. Easy.

I want nothing to do with expanded playoffs but the best record down idea is kind of intriguing.

I'm personally a fan of a solution for the NHL playoffs proposed by Down Goes Brown. Basically you count the wins (or won-loss record) starting the day after each team is mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. So if you're eliminated on August 30th, you tally up the wins starting August 31 for your team. If the next team is eliminated on September 3rd, then you have a 3- (or 4-) game head start on them to tally up more wins. It incentivizes tanking earlier (and thus still encouraging deadline dealing) maybe, but it will also incentivize teams to actually play to win if they want to get the top picks. Not sure how you'd do it in MLB where it's based off of winning percentage (as opposed to wins / "points"), but it would give the worst teams a better chance while giving them something to play for.

Let's spell this out in a single post. Bauer while in Ohio starts a relationship with a woman. It lasts a couple of years, but has several incidents. The police are called once when she says he hit her during sex without consent, police report is filed, pictures are taken. The woman gets a citation for underaged drinking out of one of those. A couple years later, that same woman takes out a protective order against Bauer in 2020, using texts/snapchats where he says he'd kill her. Bauer's attorney says everything was consensual, that the Washington Post went talking to all his exes to find one that would say something bad, that the woman had tried to extort him. However, interestingly enough, this isn't public enough for the Dodgers to find out about it, which is odd for an extortion case. His attorneys imply that the texts/snaps didn't from him, but the order is granted. Bauer signs with the Dodgers. Has a relationship with a Pasadena woman, eventually she also winds up requesting a protection order. This one goes much more public, he gets suspended, but his lawyers say the same thing and the case/order get tossed out. In the meantime, through his online persona, more than once he retweets something some woman said about him so that his hundreds of thousands of followers will go and harass the woman in question. He knows full well that he can get in trouble if he personally threatens to kill someone, but if he puts up a bat signal and a thousand of his followers threaten to rape and murder someone using anonymous twitter accounts, the police say they can't deal with that many threats and the victim should make sure that there is a semen sample left on the body if one of them goes through with it. At least one of these is a minor. While law enforcement hasn't figured out any way to deal with this type of organized harassment, "I can do this because the cops haven't figured out how to prosecute it" is about as terrible of a defense as one can offer. With all that said, 2 questions to everyone. First of all, put yourselves in the shoes of a GM. Imagine your team signed him. If there was another incident, this pattern of behavior becomes extremely relevant and an indictment towards you - you're putting yourself fully on the line for him. If Rick Hahn signed him, and next time he carries out one of the threats he sent, Hahn is out of the league for having trusted him. Are you willing to put your career on the line for this guy? And second, going along with that first question - has Bauer done anything that makes you think he has learned from these incidents and that they're unlikely in the future? I'm a believer in rehabilitation, and that if a person does their time we should give them a fair chance to get back to their lives afterwards. Has Bauer actually been punished? Is his online persona any different? Has he shown anything that suggests he won't get out of control again in his private life? Or has he kept up the same act, all the while having his lawyers aggressively go after these women? Is he a risk to do something substantially worse? If you're a GM, do you have any reason to think this will be the last incident with him? I'll hang up and listen.

The Sox fired their DJ after he played some Whitesnake songs for Chuck Finley.

If the threads are still available, you will see what I thought about Brett Myers. It was disgusting he was on the team. I still watched, still went to games, but wouldn't anymore. I know the players are not all angels, but I tend to draw the line at wife beaters and child abusers. As far as Bauer, I guess it's possible he is totally innocent and was set up, but....There have been others that claimed he was a rough sex guy, and in the USA, Trevor Bauer and his wealth have a big advantage in the legal system.

I know all players have their faults, but if the White Sox ever wanted to look the other way on this guy, they will lose me until he is off the roster, and who knows, I may find something more interesting in the meantime.

Fuck that guy

I have a hard time believing this is any worse than it ever is. I wonder how many people even know there is a baseball lockout right now.

And we have the lockout Trout drawings, which Trout himself enjoys!

I don't think the question is the quality of the play it is the outside the lines issues.

Some perspective on the NFL, they just had two of the greatest playoff weekends they've ever had. The need for QB really has dragged me down since the bears are never with one, but I don't remember a time where I was so excited to just keep watching the playoffs. The NBA has an incredibly diverse set of superstars after years of just the super wings, now you have Jokic, Ball, Trea, Steph, Luka, along with the stalwarts still performing. And a now dominant east and a league where nearly all the teams are competing. I maintain that the issue with the 2010s was all sports at once realizing some longheld strategies were now outdated, maybe due to technology or analytics or new voices or what. Now all the leagues FOs are aligned and want to be competitive. It's going to be an awesome sports decade. Yeah Hockey might be bad not sure.

I was about to say, now that the omicron wave passed, NBA is pretty dope.

NBA seems to be doing well.

I was thinking the same thing this morning listening to talk radio talk about the Blackhawks.

Seeing all the high ceiling talent they passed on for low ceiling college guys is enough to make you puke.