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The Sox have been completely exposed and embarrassed in this series, and there is no guarantee that Eloy and Robert will be anywhere close to the players they were when they come back...if they come back at all. Is it time to tear things down and get a haul for Lynn and Rodon at the deadline?

Delete this.

For those who think Escobar is meh please be advised that his 15 HR's would currently lead the team. His .743 OPS would currently be 4th on the Sox behind Moncada, Abreu and Anderson and only Moncada is barely above .800 OPS. Moncada's OPS is propped up by his walks. If Moncada get's injured Escobar can replace him at 3rd base. Escobar's Slg % is .455 which would be 1st on the Sox. Abreu 's is .448 Moncada's is .403. Mendick Slg % is .315 . Against RHP his Slg % is .431 which would put him 3d behind Abreu's .569 and Mercedes .524 but since Mercedes can't be counted on anymore might as well say Escobar would be 2nd. A few others with insignificant PA's are higher than Escobar but you get the drift. Against RHP his 10 HR's would be 1st on the Sox. Against LHP his 5 HR's would be tied with 2nd with Vaughn only behind Abreu's 6. Against LHP his Slg. % is .530 which would be 3rd on the Sox behind Vaughn and Abreu . Contrary to popular belief without Eloy, Robert and Madrigal who actually had the Highest Slg Pct against LHP on the Sox (besides Vaughn) when injured, the Sox do not kill LHP anymore. After Vaughn's outstanding .726 Slg. vs. LHP and Abreu is Mercedes and he can't be counted on anymore. After Mercedes is Grandal at .417 . After Grandal not a single regular above .358 . All of this should tell you that if you think Escobar is meh then you should think the whole lineup is meh especially against RHP and yes ,even against LHP. He is definitely better than Mendick and just about anyone on the Sox in an area where the Sox suck and that is power and slugging from both sides of the plate. When your 2 best LHH's OPS are propped up by walks putting Escobar behind our walk machines whether he hits righty or lefty Escobar is a pretty big upgrade.

I wonder who is taking the time to register at random baseball message boards in order to try to make excuses for the Houston Astros cheating. What a weird thing to feel the need to do.

First off, let's talk about 2017. The investigation found that the two people who brought the sign stealing scheme to Houston were Carlos Beltran and assistant coach Alex Cora. Both joined the team for the 2017 season. So they were not cheating before then. If you look at Altuve's stats, he hit .338 the year before in 2016, .313 in 2015, and .341 in 2014. He can just rake. Let's talk a little more about Altuve and the cheating scandal, since many seem to want him to be the face of it. Based on the evidence, Altuve was clean. Look at his home and away batting splits in 2017. At home he hit .311, but on the road he hit .381. Every single stat of his was better on the road. Carlos Correa has said that Altuve did not use the sign stealing scheme, and refused to participate. Here is that interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Waxx9kLqnlc Here's the transcript of Correa in that interview: And the evidence seems to support that admission from Correa. Here is a chart from a guy who plotted every trash can bang he could from the 2017 season. Here is a comparison of Altuve to some others, such as Marwin Gonzales and George Springer: There is a video out there where you can hear a bang when Altuve is up to bat, and he looks at the Astros dugout and looked pissed off. I honestly believe what Correa said is the truth. He has been very candid through the whole thing. Edit: Here is the video of Altuve looking pissed at the dugout after a bang: https://twitter.com/adams_at/status/1402342356456722434?s=21 As for the sign-stealing scheme as a whole, there isn't really any evidence that it worked to begin with. If you look at the stats, the Astros hit .279 at home and .284 on the road. Every stat was better on the road than it was at home. The truth seems to be that the Astros can just flat-out hit. They thought this sign-stealing scheme could make them even better, but in reality at best it seemed to have very little effect at all. I think it's been proven not only in the stats, but also that their team can still absolutely rake even after all this stuff came out.

How did both of you end up spelling condescending wrong for shame

Abreu is hitting .251/.330/.404 vs RHP with a 105 wRC+. That's not going to get it done.

Yermin shouldn't DH against a righty. Maybe you throw him in there against a soft tossing lefty, but he's totally unable to handle ML pitching right now. If you have to, send him down to AAA to figure it out, cause having him hit .150 in the majors isn't helping anyone. Lamb should DH vs. righties as much as possible, but stop putting him in the 2 spot. He's a total liability on defense and really shouldn't be put in OF, especially if you plan on playing Goodwin in CF. The combination of Goodwin, Vaughn, and Lamb might be the worst defensive OF in baseball. Play Engel as much as possible. We need him to anchor the defense in CF and he's hitting well enough against RHP that he shouldn't strictly be a platoon player. Especially when your other options in CF are Goodwin and Leury. Against RHP, I'd go Lamb at DH, Goodwin in LF, Engel in CF, and Leury in RF. You can even give Collins ABs at DH and have Lamb in LF if we don't have a fly ball heavy starter on the mound. Against LHP, Vaughn needs to be in the top 5 of the lineup. I don't care if it's 2, 3, or even 5, he belongs in there against lefties. He's one of our only guys who's had success against high velocity this year.

You have been completely exposed and embarrassed.

The thread in question.

You'd better look again @ Vaughns slugging vs RHP: Vaughns Splits Vaughn ain't slugging an otherworldly .726 vs. RHP. Hes slugging a putrid, anemic, NL pitcher-level .242 vs R as R. That's NOT his batting average. That's NOT his OBP. He's slugging a shitty .242 vs. RHP. If Leury were doing that, people would be losing their fucking shit over it on these boards. And thats one reason why Vaughn has to be sent down. He sucks out loud vs. RHP at an almost-entirely offensive position. While burning through his controllable years, and not really learning anything. This org has asked Vaughn to do the impossible, and its perfectly fine to admit that he's just not yet ready. Especially, in a "Win Now" season. Now, insofar as Escobar goes, I'd take him. He's even played LF in the past, so if you'd want to put him there, fine. He'd fucking be better than Andrew Vaughn is right now vs the ~75% or so MLB pitchers that are RHP.

Tim Beckham has served his suspension per a White Sox source. He could be added to the roster whenever.

You're special They're in first place. You're insinuating that they're 5 under .500 and in 3rd. They got swept by a good team. The 2005 team got swept 4 times . Fucking relax dude

Reinsdorf will get them no help when it can make the biggest impact. Then predictably they swoon which Reinsdorf will use as an excuse not to do anything. Wash, Rinse, Repeat for 40 years. If anything, Hahn will be selling. He works for an owner who admitted to being P.T. Barnum 2.0.

I'd give up either of them before Ramos or Rodriquez.

Welcome to the Jack Parkman Panic Attack Fan Club.

Ya don't say???

Ron needs to be sent down. This wasn't even a good attempt. He's just going through the troll motions now.

even I wouldn't post this

The other red flag is that the Astros' almost never look really fooled on a pitch.

Those are all just nonsense allegations from some guy selling a book. I mean, vibrating Band-Aids? C’mon. P.S., Codebreaker was simply a computer program that would crack the catcher’s signs. Every team in the league had a guy in the back doing it by hand. They would watch the catcher and try to figure out the signs and relay it to the rest of the team so that when they got a runner on second, the runner could alert the batter. Every team in the league does this. The only difference is that the Astros had the help of a computer program to crack the signs instead of just a guy figuring it out on his own. It had nothing to do with the trash can banging in 2017.

You can tell the first one was a copied pre-formatted response withe the extra spacing in it. It's someone who is closely following Houston and adding these responses as more of a PR campaign. Personally I feel like posters on Soxtalk deserve to know that this isn't regular message board content.

I only watched a little this weekend, but Benetti “interviewing” his color guy gets a little old for me. I’d rather he just call the game and let the color guy comment. A little bit of silence and ambient sound isn’t the end of the world on a baseball TV broadcast.

Also ask yourself why Nightengale...

So you define good and bad only by win/loss record without considering strength of opponents? The White Sox, then, are worse than the Giants and Dodgers...? Comparing the NL West with the AL Central is not very instructive. The West is currently on track to have three playoff teams, with LAD and SDP playing in a single elimination wild card game. At any rate, every year for the past eleven seasons, the Indians and Twins and previously Tigers and Royals were just luckier than the Sox apparently. So tired about hearing this “good/bad” luck argument when we are consistently out managed with superior talent over the last two decades, with the obvious exception of 2005. Plesac and Bieber were certainly not pitching badly. And, if the White Sox can win four out of seven (a full NLCS or World Series) against the Dodgers, happy to retract.

what a fucking bizarre hill to die on lmao

Escobar reminds me of the kind of guy who comes here and falls off a cliff offensively

There is zero chance they upgrade. JR spent money on a FA for RF. Unless Eaton is out for the season he is going to be out there. We trotted out a terrible OF into the playoffs last year. He will do the same this year.

There is absolutely zero evidence that Altuve or anyone was wearing any sort of electronic device. That was completely made up out of thin air by Jomboy on Twitter, and because there was a fervor of Astros hate at a fever-pitch, everyone ran with it without a single shred of evidence. I mean, just think about it. If Altuve wasn't even willing to have anyone bang on a trash can while he was batting, do you really think he'd put some kind of wire on? And if the players were wearing a wire, do you really think they'd try to rip his shirt off? It makes absolutely zero sense, and is one of the sillier conspiracy theories in sports. Astros players would sometimes rip the shirt off of a player who had a walk-off hit. Altuve didn't want them to do that after having a walk-off homer to send them to the World Series on national television. That's all it was.

He hit a walkoff home run. His teammates tried to rip his jersey off. As he rounded third to the team pile he signaled them to not rip it off. As he hit the walkoff, of course Rosenthal wanted to interview him after the game. He had to first run to the clubhouse and change into a t shirt and then took the interview. When asked about taking his jersey off or whatever, he asked Rosenthal to repeat the question - something liars do when thinking of an answer. He then said he was shy and his wife wouldn't want him to have his shirt off. There were dozens of pictures of him shirtless posted on his social media. Something was very sketchy there.

Thing is though and I think most of us know this. Parkman wouldn't mind this. He thinks the season is a lost cause anyway. That's just not even operating like a small market. That's being reactionary and acting like an idiot.

And what about the evidence that suggests that Altuve was wearing a wire? Remember when he grabbed his shirt, for fear that his teammates would tear it off, while celebrating a walk off homer?

This is exactly the point I was trying to make after Madrigal got injured. The Sox farm is pretty barren at the moment and if they have no intention of re-signing either guy they should at least listen. Kopech could slide into the rotation once healthy and they wouldn't be missing much.

Escobar would be a nice add. I have zero interest in trading Crochet or really anyone at the major league level to go get a major piece. Moving forward beyond 2021, our only real hole in the lineup RF. No reason to ship Crochet out of town for someone like Gallo or Frazier.

Yuck. If this is our big trade we’re screwed. I don’t have any faith in this front office making more moves that potentially add more payroll.

He isn’t catching up to the fastballs and is expanding the zone more so than ever swinging at breaking balls way outside. Hope he can turn it around.

adam frazier or bust

I don't mind getting some power out of the 2B spot....he just doesn't seem good at anything else. It would be very meh for me, which hopefully is the cost of Escobar as well....just a meh prospect.

The lost players have been slightly more impactful for the White Sox, but the Astros have had 60% more games spent on the IL by players than the White Sox. The White Sox have had 471 man-games spent on the IL, the Padres have had 1106. https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/disabled-list/cumulative-team/

He's actually never been at 2400 before this year, on average, because that's right in the middle of what he has come out as. He was at 2300 in 2017-2018, 2450 to 2500 in 2019-2020, and was at 2500 earlier this season before dropping down now. There's a now reasonably supported hypothesis that 2300 is his "clean grip spin rate on his fastball" and 2500 is whatever he was using, and for him that's the difference between an ERA of ~4 and an ERA of 3.25. He has a good arm, he's probably not going to fall completely off the face of the earth without the stuff, but this is the first solid explanation I've gotten for how he cut his walk rate 20% and raised his K rate 20% starting in 2019 compared to his career numbers. In the offseason we were just saying some vague version of "he changed what he's doing".

Yes - one bad series while the Sox are missing 3 of their best handful of players - and I think we should tear it all down. Fire sale. Start over. Maybe we'll be relevant again by 2027!

Maybe from your bench guys, but not your starting 1B MVP 3 hole/cleanup hitter. Nope.

Fun to play GM. I'll bite: 1. DH platoon - Vaughn vs LHP and either Lamb, Grandal or Collins vs RH pitching Vaughn sits on the bench against RH pitching. 2. LF : platoon - Leury, Goodwin, Lamb 3. CF: Engel . occasional starts by Goodwin. 4. RF: Leury and Lamb until Eaton returns. 5. Eloy plays LF when he returns. 6. Robert back to Center, unless he is not running at 100%. Then I would leave Engel in CF and at least temporarily play Robert in RF where there is less ground to cover. That could also minimize re-injury. 7. Minimize inning killing double plays. Three innings were killed in the last game with DPs. I don't care if they hit and run, attempt steals or even bunt. Almost anything is better than those double plays. 8. Our Relievers have to throw strikes early in the count. They are getting behind too often and surrendering to hitters when they have to throw a strike. 9. Hitting coach has to have a more coherent plan for our hitters depending on the starter we are facing. Personally, I am not in favor of first ball fastball hunting. 10. Mendick and Leury platoon at second is fine for the moment.

Have some respect. He has 17.9k followers on twitter.

Id look into it if we can get insane value

Look, getting a ~90ish wrc+ vs RHP shouldn't be that hard to find. At least, at LF. But right now, Vaughn is a problem. And waiting on him to figure it out may or may not work for this season. He's worse right now than other players in the roster, let alone some random rental that shouldn't cost that much. Someday, he'll be a big part of this team. But this team is in free-fall, in part, because this offense is seriously flawed.

No

The problem is who are you replacing Vaughn with? Do you think starting Leury against RHP everyday is much better? If we had other options, I’d love to give Andrew some development time in Charlotte and to claw back an extra year of team control, but I think we need to find a way to get him going or the offense is going to have too many holes to fill.

Oh we have another Hahn catch phrase to throw around : “We’ve talked all along about making sure the juice is worth the squeeze. The juice this year may be a team that’s capable of winning it all. That’s pretty big juice. Is the squeeze going to be worth it to increase those chances?” Is the juice worth the squeeze ? Definitely. As my old man used to say " Who does he think he is kidding" or "You can't bullshit a bullshitter". I find it highly unlikely that they went through the rebuild only to decide at every trade deadline that they won't do anything. Of course they proved me wrong last year by not doing anything and surprisingly fans bought it as "we weren't ready" . This is the biggest carrying water for management BS I have ever seen. There is no excuse not to make every effort to improve a playoff caliber team into a World Series type team or at least at capable of advancing a round or 2. I'll always wonder how much more Texas was asking before the trade deadline last year and what they eventually settled on for Lynn. The Sox have needs in the BP and on the field . The only thing stopping the Sox from making deals would be Reinsdorf. The starting pitching staff is the best and cheapest it will ever be. This year is possibly the Sox best chance to win the World Series in the window because we are already nearly halfway there. Get the pieces you need and quit screwing around with the fans heads and pocketbooks.

I think it is more that Sox fans watch the sox and don’t realize how shit the league is offensively this year.