nrockway

holy s%*#, did anyone else catch that Soroka's favorite author is the guy that wrote The Art of Seduction? ie the date rapist's manifesto. I know he's not the best looking dude in the world but you'd think being an MLB player would be enough.

deez nuts

It's not that I'm hung up on it, it's that you guys keep writing back to me about the same thing so I'm just trying to respond in unique and novel ways. I'll do it one more time. It seems like you could just as easily say essentially what you wrote. "He's progressing at a faster rate than anticipated. This is good news but there's still a ways to go". I guess I am hung up on the percentages. It's dumb and it makes no sense. Worse than making no sense, it's misleading. So is he 80% healed from the injury and at whatever constitutes 90%, you resume normal activities and this is cited in medical literature? I think they're rushing this guy back is basically my point and using quasi-scientific language to mask the fact that they don't know what they're doing.

normal humans don't talk that way but I would hope my doctor uses objective criteria to measure how my treatment is progressing and not use meaningless and arbitrary shorthand analogies for the sake of 'communication'. There's a difference between "your cancer is 90% cured" and "your cancerous tumor has reduced in size by 90%". So I'll ask again, how does one determine the difference between "he's running at 80%" and "he's running at 90%" in order to make the assessment that Robert is ready to resume normal baseball activities? why is 90% the medically-sound cutoff point and not 93.6%? Yeah medicine isn't an exact science but it also isn't an exercise in writing marketing copy. And yes this is the non-MD manager relaying information to the media, but I think there's a pretty strong basis to question whether or not this team's medical staff isn't just practicing quackery.

I like this. Have some pride even if it's contrived. I like his South Side talk too, I get the impression that he thinks about a baseball team's civic identity, what it might mean to the local community, and I'd support efforts to market the Sox as a neighborhood team rather than as a national or international brand. It might have the effect of international marketing anyway, a South Side Chicago team is objectively cool and everybody should want to imitate it. We have a global identity. I went to China once and met a woman who was obsessed with Lil Durk and less notable Chicago rappers, the South Side exists even in the Eastern imagination. We don't need another documentary about the hat, we need local initiatives. We already had a shooterz night which is a step in a direction, but I'm probably not the guy to ask about marketing.

the Bulls actually have a terrible track record with injuries and rushing guys back. This is the guy who managed a department that called Luol Deng soft and a wimp for not playing through a botched spinal tap that put his life in danger. The Ball reference was clearly a joke considering he hasn't even been in the NBA for a decade, but it's not correct to say that the Bulls manage their players' health effectively. sure, but why not 86.5% or 93.6%? The arbitrariness of it makes it seem pseudo, it doesn't exactly inspire confidence that they know when the right time is, it's essentially just a vibe check. I wonder if they ask LuBob to run to first base then show him a pain chart and ask him to point to the frowny face that best captures his mood.

Any MDs here? Is there some actual way to quantify the difference between "running at 80%" and "running at 90%" or is it arbitrary bro-science that gets players injured and re-injured? Bulls just s%*#-canned their "Director of Performance Health", ostensibly for mismanaging Lonzo Ball's injury for the last decade, maybe the Sox should follow suit.

That seems like a good thing, right? That's a pretty good FIP that's also pretty close to his ERA which might suggest his ERA isn't an outlier (the point of FIP ostensibly, does the ERA make sense?). Even so, Fangraphs' FIP-derived WAR has Fedde at 33rd (and Crochet a spot below). Do we think Fedde will continue to strike out 10 batters per 9? Probably not but I bet his HR rate goes down too. Personally I prefer baseball-reference's WAR calculation for pitchers. It seems more based on what actually happens in a game than however some eggheads weight the relative importance of a strikeout to a groundout to a walk or whatever.

yeah I thought this guy would have a better understanding of baseball than "so Steve what pitch do you think he's gonna throw next?" the response is "well he throws a cutter or a slider so I'd guess one of those" or "he's just thrown 12 fastballs in a row, what do you think?" in fairness to him, he seems to be improving and the chemistry with Stone is certainly better than it was the first week. I think Schriffen should know more about baseball though and it doesn't seem to me that he's doing the prerequisite prep work to understand who players are and what their player profiles are, what teams they used to play for etc. You listen to another team's broadcast and they can tell you a bunch of information about nobody call-ups on other teams, I don't think you get that on Sox broadcasts, and even though I like dogs I don't really need a guy to tell me how much he likes dogs for 3 hours.

Curtis Mead is really rough defensively. Looks like a poor man's Julien.

so we're all in agreement that Fedde would be a shoo-in for the pitching triple crown if there wasn't the "wins" component of it, right?

I think the worst thing about the nationwide jingle is that every single time they're like "oh ha ha that wasn't great we'll do better next time"

Shewmake just needed to shave.

I like this trend that's starting to develop where I get up for a couple of minutes and I come back and the White Sox have scored a run. 2 runs at that. Bizarro Sox or Bizarro D Rays? Both? edit: definitely meant to post this in the game thread.

he got off to a very rough start but has been solid for a couple weeks. No runs given up in his last seven outings, all of his earned runs came before April 9; 3 very rough outings out of 11 total. Excited to see what he can do!

Vaughn going for routine flyballs has me sweating bullets

I love the randomness of baseball. This is how AB's numbers get back to "normal", weird fluky stuff.

I'll say it until I'm blue in the face but there's no logical reason that any American sports team should be privately owned. Are these guys taking on some kind of risk I'm unaware of owning the safest investment imaginable? I don't care if it sounds like communism, they should nationalize the MLB. The sport would be better off for it. The fan experience would be better. It's probably a good source of much needed, and hard to come by, public revenue. There literally is no risk in owning a professional sports franchise, it's one of the safest investments imaginable, yet the public still foots the bill for their capital costs and we don't get an ownership stake.

it was also Flexen! ? I've already posited an adjustment to FIP called "pitched against White Sox" (PWSx) so that fans don't get the wrong idea that the likes of Andrew Abbott and Simeon Woods-Richardson are Cy Young contenders. But now how about a "pitched while Dominic Fletcher played center field behind you while gross, man and that other guy wiped up the corners" (PWDFPCFBYWGMATOGWUTCx).

I'm pleasantly surprised by what guys are doing at every level to be honest. Even after Colson and Thorpe graduate, I think there are some studs, guys who might move up/into top 100 territory. AAA isn't the most impressive level to me. I'm not willing to say it's a "successful" farm, more like let's wait and see. early returns seem positive.

holy cow we're actually winning by a convincing amount. in pham we trust

seems like whenever Fangraphs updates their rankings, Sox will assuredly have a top 10 (they are 12th, right below SDP, before factoring in the Cease trade) system by their rankings. Probably top 5 considering all the graduations coming for the teams above the Sox. Citing Bleacher Report is probably dumb but the farm system seems to be in genuinely OK shape.

That guy would've lost so much money if he had made good on his empty threat to move to St Petersburg. No one is leaving Chicago by choice for a third tier city. I don't think JR has any political capital remaining to get the sort of deal he wants on a ballpark. In any state.

I thought it was pretty candid to say "the people who sell tickets have a tough job right now, please stop screaming at them".

it's amusing that he signed a $5mil contract and Belt is a free agent.