SoxFan562004

QUOTE (elrockinMT @ May 17, 2009 -> 12:44 PM) They are pretty darn good that's for sure They are a very good team and are going to get some SPs back, but the real test is when they start playing the Red Sox, NYY and Rays

this team is just so bad right now. Bad fielding, bad pitching, bad offense and bad decisions. You have one of the toughest pitchers in baseball shaky at the start so you give him an out by trying to steal with JD? Unreal.

QUOTE (Jenks Heat @ May 15, 2009 -> 12:01 PM) Toronto, Texas and Kansas City are all playing as good as anyone in the A.L. right now and the Sox played them 11 of the last 18 games. Harrison for Texas looked good yesterday, real good. I think they take one of the four and hopefully take two. The AL Central is terrible. It was against the Ms but it still made me feel a little better to see him pitch well against another team, often that doesn't happen when the Sox get dominated by an unknown/bad pitcher

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ May 15, 2009 -> 09:08 AM) Sounds about right - that's like $18M per year in gross profit, less in net, which means they are making just a few percentage points in profit. I remember seeing the Sox at something like 1.9% the last year that I looked at Forbes' numbers, and that was better than a lot of teams. This whole conspiracy theory that they are taking money out of the team and going "cheap" on payroll is just manifestly false. They make little money, they have one of the highest payrolls in baseball, and are facing lower ticket sales and rolling sponsorship losses. They aren't juicing the fans, they are doing what everyone has to do right now. And for the love of... Brent Lillibridge is not playing because of salary issues!!!!!! He's the f***ing 4th string option in CF, due to injuries, which by the way no team in baseball would have a good option for. the raise to $23 for parking helps though. The real money in owning a team, unless you have a cash printing machine like the NYY is the value of the investement. Look what the current group paid for the team and how much it's worth now, it was a tremendous investement.

4th inning not kind to Meche tonight

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ May 14, 2009 -> 08:45 PM) Detroit it is. I don't hold out much hope for the Hawks, but I can dream. This is the team that is taylor made to beat Chicago, as they are physical and just as skilled as the Hawks. Let's hope that the boys can come out and steal a game right away to get them going. unfortunately I'm in the same boat as you. The Hawks will have to play their best series and the Wings will have to play an average one. But, as a big fan I am very happy with the progress and am excited to see how the rest of this plays out.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ May 14, 2009 -> 08:46 PM) Historically the Sox don't spend free agent money, especially when they believe they can fill positions internally for minimum wage. I wouldn't be surprised to see some sort of Getz, Beckham, Ramirez infield with the winner of Viciedo and Fields in left. They have added money through trades though, Freddy and reupped with him, Thome (I know Phills sent $$ but Sox still added payroll in that deal, they resigned PK for basically market value, Bartolo and made a run at him, they made a serious run at Torii Hunter and Fukudome. You are right that they usually don't pursue people via FA, so adding on through trades might be something to keep an eye on. We'll see, it will be one of the most interesting off-seasons I can remember.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ May 14, 2009 -> 08:33 PM) So in the NBA are you only subject to drug testing in season or do you have a seperate bylaws that the playres have to follow or something? Cause if I were a player I'd just state that I did it in a country that was legal. I assume the NBA players are only subject to the drug testing policy during the season, unless they have been caught a few times already? I need to find a source on this, but I don't believe the NBA tests for weed, because from what I've heard there wouldn't be much of a league left if they did.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ May 14, 2009 -> 08:30 PM) I'm not comparing Dunn to this years Holliday, rather Dunn to Hollidays' career road OPS. If I'm comparing practically anyone to this years Holliday, I'm taking the other person and that includes players that I'm not particularly big fans of, ie current modern day Thome and Dunn (at the same time I wouldn't have had a problem if the Sox picked up Dunn for the right price this off-season and with the right offensive strategy in mind in Chicago). Obviously I wouldn't take a guy with an empty .279 average over a guy who hit .240 with 40 HR's. I still wouldn't be happy with the guy who hit .240 and would probably try to find a more complete ball player (but I would admit he's a solid ball-player). For example, Jim Thome on his career, f***ing oustanding offensive player. OK, makes sense to me. I know you're not a huge fan, but I think after Thome goes, Dunn would be perfect for the Sox. Just drop him in at DH for the next 5 years and watch him put up consistent numbers. The Sox will always have to deal with the ballpark they play 81 of their games in. It's a bandbox and IMO they need at least one guy who might lack in other areas, but is going to hit a TON of homers

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ May 14, 2009 -> 08:16 PM) Yes, you ignore a nice stat called batting average, where Holliday's road average is over 50points higher than Thome's. I don't give a f*** how you want to tell me statistically it doesn't matter, but when you hit .227 you are not valuable. End of story. Holliday got on base .05 points less and the OPS was higher for Thome but I'll take the higher average any day of the week. I hate that there's no tone to writing, so I'm not trying to be a dick here, but why would you take a better BA over Thome's stats? It's a weird mix of sample sizes, but hey, I'm making the argument I'll take the liberty... Last year overall Adam Dunn's BA was .236, nine points higher than Thome's now, but look at his stats and there's no way you wouldn't take Dunn's style of production over Holidays .240 this year. To me BA is an incomplete stat, not a bad one or a wrong one, just incomplete. I want to know when you come up did you make an out and if you didn't what did you do? http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/d/dunnad01.shtml http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/h/hollima01.shtml

QUOTE (BearSox @ May 14, 2009 -> 07:04 PM) He's been a bit inconsistent though since his hot start. This season seems to be shaping out to how his previous seasons used to always start off. Pretty good April, not so great May, and then in June he starts to really mash the ball. Hopefully that's the case this year. Hopefully with all the home games in June, i believe it's june, will help too.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ May 14, 2009 -> 07:33 PM) I still have difficulty believing the Sox would do a full "The Kids can play" segment next year no matter how good the AA team currently is either. The Sox probably have need of 1 OF, but there's several ways to go about that. If you count the AA team, we're several people deep by the end of 2010 at every point other than the OF...it's also possible someone could be moved (Viciedo currently has 7 errors at 3b) or KW could pull off another of his surprise trades to fill that slot. I tend to agree with you and hope it's true. The Sox are a major market team and have had a top 10 payroll the last few years. They have money coming off the books and I hope, and expect, that the Sox have an ongoing evaluation of their club going on constantly and plan to evaluate their own farm system and then plug in quality veterans with some of the money. It's a waste of a resource as a big market club if you don't. It would be silly, and a slap in the face to the fans, to have a complete youth movement while you have payroll flexability. Teams have done a great job, Red Sox for example, of mixing in a strong farm system with a high payroll. There's been two threads about specific players, Holliday and Bay, but the Sox should be in a position to be flexible this offseason and as a fan I fully expect them to look at every FA and any veteran who teams are shopping for a salary dump. This will be a weird year, I just don't see anyone running away with this division, so the Sox probably won't dump at the deadline, but they do have 4 quality picks in the draft. So the Sox have an opportunity to have a strong minor league system to either trade players or groom for the majors with some payroll flexability. IMO, once this year is done, either in September or a dump, the Sox will be in a strong position and it's up to the org to take full advantage of it.

QUOTE (fathom @ May 14, 2009 -> 03:24 PM) It's all about pitching, and I'm pretty sure the Cubs have the most quality starts in baseball this season. Is there a way to find out their opponents ERA? Because it could be ballpark/conditions swayed. I'm not doubting the Cubs are a good team, but I just think they have some flaws this year, and the division might not be as terrible as I thought it would be. Also, pitching is everything, you need to score runs to win games too, and A-Ram will be a big loss for them

QUOTE (fathom @ May 14, 2009 -> 02:59 PM) This Padres team is freaking awful. Poor Adrian Gonzalez. The Cubs are drawing a ton of walks it seems lately. Yeah, it's hard to gauge if the Cubs are getting in a groove or if this Pads team is really that bad, Cubs just came off losing 2 out of 3 to the Crew in Milwaukee. With their injuries and their shaky bullpen, I don't see them running away with this division

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ May 14, 2009 -> 01:00 PM) Walker had pretty little to do with Borchard. In terms of the other high picks, lets look at the organizations track record when it comes to first round picks the last 10 or so years. It's pretty much pathetic. In terms of Swishers poor production, I believe he's been slumping as of late in New York but I would be the first to admit that if you wanted to point blame at walker stinking, Swisher would be the guy I'd use as bait as he had a solid major league career prior to coming to the Sox where he absolutely was f***ing terrible. Swisher still has a 147 ops+ this year, so he's due to come back a little, hell probably end up around his career numbers, which are that of a good player, especially with his OBP and his ability to take a ton of pitches, something this lineup lacks. Yeah, it's hard to say what the ultimate effect of the hitting coach is, I just hate the approach of many of our hitters the last few years and I'm scapegoating Walker. Look, you're going to get a chance for your argument to be right because Walker is going nowhere, so we'll just have to agree to disagree and as a Sox fan, I hope you're right. (Edit: God, my spelling and simple grammar is even worse than it normally is today!)

QUOTE (3E8 @ May 14, 2009 -> 12:53 PM) I searched pitch type and plate discipline on FanGraphs for all players with at least 100 PAs. Only Getz sees a higher percentage of fastballs than Fields (and it's less than 1% more) in terms of White Sox players. This is because Josh Fields cannot hit a fastball. If you were to only look at the percentage of fastballs for "power hitters", Fields would be near the top of this list. Fields is 4th worst in either league in terms of how often he makes contact with pitches which are in the strike zone. Fields only makes contact with 72% of pitches in the strike zone (this is quite low for a major league hitter), the next lowest on the White Sox is Jim Thome at 80%. Keep in mind Thome sees much fewer fastballs than Fields does. Fields' lack of contact is due to all the extra movement in his hands before the swing, his hitch. The hitch decreases his bat control and makes hitting fastballs belt-high or above more difficult. I expect pitchers to expoit this weakness more and more until Josh makes some kind of adjustment Interesting... in a best case scenario then he feasts for a bit when he makes some adjustments and the advance scouting catches up.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ May 14, 2009 -> 12:32 PM) From what I've always been told and consistent with what I've read in the paper and heard on the radio, Walker is one of the hardest working batting coaches in all of baseball. He puts in hour after hour personally with the players and does his job. You have to remember that its been a long time since the Sox called up a big time hitting prospect (and no, Josh Fields, is not a big time hitting prospect). Ie, a consensus top 25 prospect in all of baseball. Really, if you look at the Sox, Joe Borchard was the last consensus top offensive prospect that they called up and everyone knew his swing had some adjustments to be made. Anderson was a highly rated prospect as well, who had a long swing and was rated where he was based upon pure potential and well the Sox have really worked hard on him and it shows (his swing is better, but its still not there). Crede and Rowand were the last two solid prospects the club had and Walker did good things with both of them. Quentin didn't come through the system but you have to give Walker some sort of credit as Quentin had his best season (he was also healthy until punchin the bat which helped) in the majors. Walker worked hard with Ramirez last year and it paid off too and he's working hard with him again and it seems like just recently things might have been fixed. Swisher didn't really listen as the Sox had evidently identified exactly what was wrong or at least thats what was always reported. Konerko, Dye, Thome have all been relatively fine with Walker. Konerko's struggles last year were due to health. Thome is getting older so we should expect to see his numbers decline a bit and Dye has been steady. I have no problem handing over our next crop of players to Mr. Walker. well with a few guys in the minors now and see what they draft in June he'll certainly have his chance. We'll see. To me the team is too pitchable to still. The Harrisson (sp?) guy from the Rangers was not pitching as well as his results IMO, they were still trying to pull everything from what I saw, they had some bad ABs against him that are indicitive of struggles they often have, vets included. I'm a big believer in never confusing the amount of work with results... Is he as bad as I or other make him out to be on the board? Probably not, no. I understand he's given specific players with specific skill sets. My main gripe with the offense of this team is that they're pull happy and they seemingly make adjustments to certain types of pitchers. Borchard, Anderson and Fields were high picks, and so far they've gotten very little to nothing from them at the plate outside Fields first extended stint, and i haven't seen that hitter this year. Those are big indictments to me of Walker, as is Swisher. He had an OPS+ of over 120 his last to years with the A's, comes here has an OPS in the low 90's and then with the NYY is above his career average. Maybe the problem isn't Swisher wouldn't listen, but Walker is bad at communicating his ideas

QUOTE (G&T @ May 12, 2009 -> 08:45 AM) Furthermore, the legislature believes that the probative value of letters such as this (particularly in mob cases) outweighs the prejudicial effect. This is likely because the reader of the letters can be cross examined as to their impression of the sincerity of the letter. If, for example, Savios did nothing to try to help her, then the defense will claim that the letters were meaningless. just giving this some quick thought, this is what the strongest attack should be on. I imagine they'll just hammer that even though they can bring the argument you make about asking the family member why they didn't help, the prejudicial effect of having the victims words read outloud by a potentially emotional family member who is allowed to add their own stress to specific words, probably "coached" by the prosecution, is too unfair. To me it will be like having the prosecution writing a script for the victim to say on the stand.

QUOTE (SoxFan101 @ May 13, 2009 -> 03:09 PM) Actually eye witnesses are some of the least reliable evidence in court cases today, all about forensics and motive. Kind of depends on so many factors. How good is the defense attorney at cross? How good is the prosecuting attorney at direct? How does the eyewitness come across to the jury? Who's on the jury? How good of a look did the eyewitness get? What evidence can be brought in to support or discredit the witness, ie lighting of the scene? Is the eyewitness a co-defendant who struck a deal or an ordinary citizen? Forensics is strong, but again, it's not there in every case. Motive can be good, but a good defense attorney should be able to do a solid job of putting reasonable doubt on motive in many cases. Murder cases, or any criminal case, is a set of facts specific to the individual crime. You have to go beyond the set of individual facts to look at the judge you're in front of, the strength of the prosecuting attorney, the jury pool you're selecting from, the actual jury once it's seated and many other factors.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ May 14, 2009 -> 12:06 PM) I don't think that is what is happening. I think he handles offspeed stuff well, fastballs if they are low and/or out and not too fast. So they started giving him a combo of high heat and breakers outside his swing plane. His adjustment, at first, was to try to swing harder to catch up to the inner half / up heat, but that makes it worse, AND it looks like he is trying to hit the left field foul pole. Its that pre-swing bat load that is killing him, mostly. I've seen him tinker with it the last few games, to no avail yet. This is where Walker could be of help, and hopefully is. yeah, could be, but it looks like we all agree that it's starting at the load up, which hopfeully means it's something that can be fixed and hopefully Walker will actually do it because Fields doesn't have any baseball cards I can look at the back of, so I guess that means the hitting coach is actually suppose to help him.

QUOTE (SoxFan101 @ May 13, 2009 -> 03:09 PM) Actually eye witnesses are some of the least reliable evidence in court cases today, all about forensics and motive. which can be a problem for prosecutors. People watch shows on TV and want to see exactly what they see on TV, when it's not realistic that it will exist for every case.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ May 14, 2009 -> 11:51 AM) Well since it was brought up, here is the latest... http://blogs.suntimes.com/whitesox/2009/05..._fields_vs.html so basically he waited to write this article when Fields was struggling and Crede is on a hot streak? I honestly think there must be research that Sox fans will listen/read negative news and Cubs fans will only listen to positive news, because that's what sports radio and the papers do in this town. Again, best of luck to Joe, but his back was a huge question mark and the Twins and he can have the biggest lovefest they want, but if he holds up Boras will have him out of there so fast after this year.

QUOTE (fathom @ May 14, 2009 -> 12:05 AM) Sorry, Ozzie gets no credit for this. My grandma could tell Lillibridge sucks. Ozzie keeps putting him into the lineup instead of trying to get creative. Would putting Alexei in CF for a week for the sake of the team hurt his development at SS? Hell no, if anything, it could give you more options down the road. Good post. The Sox basically have a NL lineup when he's playing. He has had little to no chance of making solid contact.

I would be more intrigued by a line where he gave up a few ERs but walked 0.

the thing that has frustrated me the most is he is now just attempting to pull EVERYTHING. The HR in Baltimore should have been a good sign for his future. Maybe he won't be a great pull hitter, but he can hit it over 400 feet to right center, so he should have an approach where he's trying to take it all over the field. Apparently that approach doesn't fly on this team and now he's trying to yank everything with a ridiculously long swing that is starting at a blatant hand drop in his setup