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Said no one ever

I think his leap last year three fold. #1 this is the best line up he has ever been in. #2, all of these kids he has been recruiting to the team are now here, and started making him look bad, so he took his off season to the next level and worked his tail off to get into the best shape of his life. I think he is feeding off of the energy and friendly competition within the organization. #3 with all of the hitters around him, he doens't have to press anymore. There are tons of other guys who can beat you, so he doesn't have to expand his zone to try to go out of his comfort zone.

I expect Jose to get to that 1.8 WAR based on his games at Wrigley alone this year

Brock Holt!

Lucroy has a composite 0.1 fWAR the last 4 seasons. If you think his neck surgery is going to return him to his former self at age 34, I love your optimism, but don't share it.

Probably because they have Madrigal at 42 or something stupid.

The Law write-up on the sox was full of excellent info today. I'm sorry to the large group that can only handle counting top 100 rankings and will miss out learning about our system.

The whole idea behind "cancel culture" is dumb. The same people who are screaming this in response to things like being a racist and committing treason against the nation are the same ones who cancelled Colin Kaepernik and the Dixie Chicks. They had noooooo problem costing people their incomes then, so what changed? The party of "personal responsibility" and "fuck your feelings" is the party losing their minds here. Maybe they should take a hardy helping of their own advice? And please no one on Soxtalk give me the "Freedom of Speech" line or i really will lose it.

I wonder who posted this thread...

I’d rather have Lynn and Rodon than Odorizzi and Dunning.

Does the site have auto correct for usernames?

Ill get right on that Jack

I listened to a lot of old timers when Hank Aaron passed away and some interviews with him about advice he got as a hitter. They told him ,knock in runs and scoring runs were the most important. You knock them in you're doing great , you score them and you're getting on base.

Tex: I'm wearing two scarves these days, long underwear under the jeans and double socks. Despite the precautions, Greg still caught a moderately nasty cold and cough. Reminds me of being a kid during winter time, and walking from 103rd St and Homan to Queen of Martyrs church, stopping in there to thaw for 2-3 minutes, then continuing the trek through St. Xavier grounds, onto Brother Rice property, entering Brother Rice in the early a.m. for my first class of the day -- Swimming! Brrrr.

It cracks me up when people have a point of view like this, yet spend hour after hour invested in these teams. If you really feel this way, why are you letting the man continue to violate you? Man up and walk away. Quit letting Jerry Reinsdorf live in your head rent free.

He turned down an extension offer? Why was he even given an extension offer?

Hamilton is a good example of why young guys should think long and hard before turning down a fair extension offer. Bad stuff can happen to anyone.

Darn near 100k shots given in Illinois today.

Minor leaguers to get raises good news.

I think the most likely outcome is that Lucroy spends the year on the taxi squad and filling in when needed. He's a guy that can at the very least come in and competently catch a game here and there without getting regular playing time as a backup or in AAA.

My point was to say that declaring anyone has no chance to become a star is wrong. Sure, players with certain body types are probably less likely, but good players unexpectedly grow into stars all of the time. Law puts no value on the high floor/perceived low ceiling hit tool first prospects. There are examples of players like that growing beyond their perceived ceiling and becoming stars.

It also is a minors deal so it doesn't mean he is the primary backup but more minor league depth

It’s just funny to remember how AB was basically untradeable for so many years

When lived down there in the 80's that's wasn't an unusual thing. It was more of a practical decision for some. Why invest in something that happens once every decade at that cost when they had more immediate needs? It is like air conditioning in Alaska.

Wouldn't that be fun? Hopefully he can find his game again.

He's an example of teams getting too carried away with combine numbers and forgetting what a guy does on tape. He was phenomenal at Oklahoma and had lots of first round buzz, but after testing poorly, started to be considered a mid-round pick. And yet here we are, Brown is a Pro Bowl OT on an incredibly affordable contract (for now). And if they trade him, they'll get a haul. You can't forget athletic traits completely, but it never made sense to me why Brown fell so far on team's draft boards.

I think they're saying that if either Collins or Grandal get hurt they need to have someone actually able to catch at a big league level, and I'd expect that to almost certainly happen at some point.

Tex says howdy. Y'all staying warm? It's colder than a cast iron commode here in central Texas.

Signing Lynn to anything beyond 2 additional years with an option for 2024, or using him as leverage...just don’t think JR is going to take that kind of risk with a pitcher in his 30’s with Keuchel already on the books. After all, he’s turning 34 early in this season. An extension for him would be more surprising than Giolito. Even if he has a great season, how many huge long-term contract offers will he get? Could also just give him the one year QO. Then again, he’s a former Cardinal who dates back to TLR. Signing Odorizzi to three years and keeping Dunning would have been more logical, which indicates they were probably happier to give up talent than take on any more additional salary. Shocking, right?

Finally, Mazara does something that will help the White Sox win baseball games.

Seems like more teams are choosing to start at 6:10 or 6:40 for weekday games, Wish the Sox would have done that too. Stickin' with 7:10.

And in the most predictable way possible, #CancelDisneyPlus was trending last night in response to their decision. Because logically, if you are so against cancel culture, the only appropriate action to take is to cancel something else

On MLBN they compared AB to Darin Erstad. So he should be pretty attractive to KW in about 5 years.

Far too often cancel culture is confused with consequences for actions. Carano has lived a very privileged life and this is the first time anyone has ever fired her for being an asshole online, but she has been an asshole online for a while

KC could come on fast. They have a shit ton of pitching on the way. Dayton Moore said he wanted to improve the teams obp. They added Carlos Santana and now Benintendi. It wouldn't surprise me if they added another. JBJ would be a great fit for them.

With a 60-game season that didn't start until deep into the summer, it's hard to justify comparing 2020 to the predictions of a full 2021 season. Many players (like Jose) didn't have the early season slump. Others never experienced a mid-season slump because of the length of the season. There was no cold weather to deal with. And on and on. Still, I wouldn't be surprised to see a WAR drop from Jose, and placing his projection in line with 2019 seems logical. I do think, if 2020 had been a full season, we would have seen better results from Jose. He obviously couldn't have kept up the pace for HRs and RBIs over 162 games, but he looked totally locked in last year. I expect a very good 2021 for Jose and a higher WAR than predicted.

Attached is a chart from BP showing overall over/under projections over a 16 year span. Arizona and Saint Louis were the biggest outliers, with Arizona averaging a projected 4 wins higher than actual, and Saint Louis with 5 actual wins higher than PECOTA projections. The White Sox averaged 1 actual win more than the projection over this period. I believe the PECOTA projections for several of the White Sox players will improve substantially starting in 2022, if their development progresses as expected this season. That said, as I stated earlier in the thread, the lack of prior past performance and full season for the core young players accounts for the conservative projections in 2021. I also think the overconfidence shown by fans using the "eyeball" test is do to last seasons over performance versus expected results due to the absolutely horseshit schedule the White Sox played. There is a reason seven Central teams made the playoffs feasting on the horrid 3 bottom feeders, and all seven were dismissed in quick order.

Agreed. He also knew (for the first time in his career) that he didn’t have to carry the load on offense. His approach was noticeably different, swinging at less pitches out of the zone.

Jose will certainly regress but he’ll be better than what projection models are expecting out of him IMO. He legit was in much better shape last year and put up a xwOBA in the 93rd percentile.

So people who currently aren't a fan of baseball or are on the bubble, would rather see some more hard ground outs and flyouts than home runs? Okay, Manfred.

They're going to deaden the ball when Manfred said it was never juiced. Every word that comes out of that piece of shits mouth is a fuckin lie.

I actually wanted lucroy a few years back. If he can regain something back he's a decent vet to have

Seems like he was hurt last year... trash in 2018 and 2019... but really good before then for quite some time. Wonder if injuries contributed to his decline.

Will he stick around when he's placed with the Knights?

So Collins is gonna have to prove he can ACTUALLY catch. This is a great depth/fallback move.