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2006 FS Interview: Matt Enuco Interview Conducted by Josh Wolff FutureSox.com The White Sox selected Matt Enuco in the 36th round of the 2006 draft. In his senior season at Division III, Rowan University, Matt batted .363 with 16 doubles, 2 triples, 3 home runs, 39 RBIs and 21 stolen bases. The Following is a transcript of the Q&A conducted with Matt: Bold Font: Josh Wolff Regular Font: Matt Enuco What are your initial impressions of minor league baseball so far? Pretty much it’s kind of how I expected, a little more intense than I originally anticipated. But it’s really just getting here, learning the system of how the White Sox work and working on getting better so you can move up the system. I am excited about it. As a four year college player, do you feel you have an advantage over guys who have not been playing competitive baseball as long as you? Yeah, I think I do have a little bit of an advantage over high school players that come straight out of high school. I have found out that a lot of the philosophies and ways we play the situations here [bristol] are the same as the way I played them in college. And I think I also have learned a lot more about who I am, how to deal with situations in college and I think that really gives me a pretty good advantage here. In college, your numbers improved every season in just about every category, what do you attribute to that feat? I think I attribute it to becoming more of a complete player, more of a mature player and going away to good summer leagues. Progressively through college, I went to better summer leagues. I was in the NYCBL (New York Collegiate Baseball League) after my sophomore year and then I went to Coastal Plains League last year. I think you just learn how to adapt and adjust better. In High School, you were a three sport athlete, in football, baseball and swimming. Most baseball players don't have a swimming background, how do you think swimming has helped you in baseball? I think it’s actually really given me a good physical base with a good combination of strength and flexibility. I think I’m pretty flexible and it’s really given me a good strength base. You currently are playing second base, what other positions can you play and what position do you see yourself at in the future? Well, that’s another thing I learned in college, I am not a one position player. I hadn’t even played second base until I got here [bristol]. I can play short stop. I can play third. I like the outfield. Pretty much I don’t really see myself as a one position guy. If the organization sees me as a second baseman, that’s cool, but I pretty much feel I can play anywhere they want me to play. And I do feel pretty comfortable at second base right now. What do you feel your strengths are? I think I have good speed. I think I can hit for occasional power, surprising power. My arms, my hands, I guess I would say just the whole package. I’m not really great at anything, but I am good at everything. If I had to pick one thing, I’d say it was my hands. What do you feel like you need to improve upon? Everything really. I have a lot of the physical things down, but I think a lot of its going to be mental. Going out there everyday, having mental toughness to go to the plate if you’re in a 0 for 10 or 0 for 15 slump. Being able to come out the next day and mentally focus and get ready to play. Or come back from an error. So, I think the big adjustment where I really need to work on is maintaining my physical qualities and then gaining a mental toughness. What do you do in your down time? Sleep (chuckles,) really not much. Right after the game, we pretty much just get something to eat and it’s to bed. Really, we just hang. I hang out of with a lot of guys. I live with eight other players. We just kind of hang around, trade stories and find out things about where each other is from and that’s about it. We go out sometimes, but it’s usually nothing big at all. Favorite Sports Team (besides the White Sox): Philadelphia Phillies Favorite Athlete growing up: Darryl Strawberry Favorite TV show: 24 Favorite Movie: Man, that’s tough, probably That Thing You Do Favorite Food: Pasta Favorite Artist: Stereophonics Future Sox.com would like to thank Matt tremendously for taking part in the interview and we wish him the best of luck on the rest of the season and in the future.

Defensively Stewart is superior to anything we've had at the major league level in a few years (Olivo is the only guy with the defensive abilities similar to Stewart but obviously he struggled in the game calling area). Stewart is going to be a good backup but he's not much of a hitter, however, he has made some serious strides offensively.

QUOTE(Zoogz @ Jul 20, 2006 -> 02:15 PM) Quick note from the Tigers fan... You guys realize that the Sox outscored the Tigers through this series, right? That the final game, this one, was a one-run game that could have legitimately went either way as one-run games often do? I saw much the same talk from Tigers fans after the Tigers started 0-5 against the Sox who all said that the Tigers just could not compete. This is a small sample size. Even smaller than a playoff series. And anything can happen. While I understand that losing sucks, I am still petrified of your team far more than of the streaking Yankees or the Twins. In all seriousness, you guys should be proud of a team that is, in July, doing as well as the Sox are (and have proven themselves winners). As you may have noticed, the Tigers offense is horrid too. The Yankees have an outfield of stiffs and a pitching staff barely held together. The Twins consist of two great pitchers and two great position players. EVERY team has holes, and in all honesty the White Sox' holes are pretty miniscule compared to those teams. I have no clue which way this season will go, but I am still looking forward to an awesome stretch run and fully expecting the Sox to not only heat up but to make a major run. And hey, I hope it happens anyway, as the AL East has been in the playoffs far too long for my tastes anyway. Feel free to direct any additional flames you have my way, I don't mind. Awesome post and enjoy the ride. You guys deserve it and I know I'll be pulling for the Tigers to get into the playoffs (obviously not at the expense of the Sox) but both teams are well built and deserving and if they take care of business down the stretch I'll be looking forward to a nice matchup in October.

QUOTE(JimH @ Jul 20, 2006 -> 02:38 PM) Great news. I have always wanted to see a game there and see the city. Looks like I have a nice window of time to cross that off my to-do list. It's good to have stable affiliate relationships. I'm sure the Sox are always interested in moving closer to the other affiliates but they got too good of a thing going with the city of Birmingham and the team. And yep, its really nice to have stability. I know if I ever get in the area I definately want to check out the Met and also make a drive to the old stadium that they play in once a year (Rickwood or something).

By the way, I think enough's been discussed here and I'm going to close this thread before it gets ridiculous and people start calling people out. Lets just remember one thing..this is a message board, don't come here to be angry, don't come here to piss other people off...come here to have fun talking about the White Sox or anything else for that matter. Sure, we'll have the ocassional downer periods where the team is playing well and you can always get positive discussion out of talking about whats wrong and ways to make the taem better...but lets not ever get to the point where we need 5 threads saying how some guy is a piece of spiff. Instead say he needs to improve, what he needs to do or that we need to get someone else and this guy would help out. If we all are accountable for our own posts...this site will as amazing as ever and will be one of the premiere sites on the web because we truly have a whole lot of intelligent and creative people on this board.

Yep 4 year extension. The Barons and the Sox have a very good relationship so I would have been shocked had they parted ways.

QUOTE(SleepyWhiteSox @ Jul 20, 2006 -> 02:27 PM) I like realistic pessimists...just not the overly-negative pessimists spewing their hopeless doom-and-gloom bullspiff over and over and over again... Hell one of my favorite posters on this site is Fathom. He sees things a little differently than me but at the same time the posts he make are very intelligent and give you the other side of the spectrum.

QUOTE(Jordan4life_2006 @ Jul 20, 2006 -> 02:21 PM) Preach, Jason. And I think you make a damn good point in that we should be very encouraged by our starting pitching in this series. Other than one inning, we shut down a very good offense for 3 games. Will it continue? Will obviously find out. But it's something to build on. And its exactly whats needed, now we see if Garcia and Buehrle can strart to straighten things out because if the pitching can build off these first three starts and start to feed off each other we'll see this losing streak during into a huge stretch of winning baseball where we can close the gap with the Tigers or anyone else in a hurry. Is it a gaurantee that it will happen, no, but I think its something that you got to be encouraged with. Sure I'd have liked to win the series, but if two months from now we find out our rotation went gang busters from here on out I'd say this was a monumental series because it started the mojo. We could have played awful and won the series (we've done that a few times this year) instead we played pretty damn good, fell a bit short cause they played better, but appear to be heading in the right direction. People can call me an optimist, but I call things like I see em. When everyone was bashing the offense last year I continued to say it was an offense well built for the post-season and it turns out it really was. The way our guys would battle good pitchers and find ways to get things done. The offense does that and more this year and the pitching needs to pick things up for a stretch and we'll see what happens these next few weeks but I got a good feeling we are going to be seeing a serious run of strong starting pitching out of our guys.

QUOTE(JimH @ Jul 20, 2006 -> 02:20 PM) Personally I wish you'd stop speaking for Sox fans as a group, as if you have some sort of omniprescent knowledge. Sox fans are as diverse a group as fans of any team ... tuned negatively, tuned positively, and in the middle. So for you to say Sox fans are defined that way is, in your words, unrealistic, irresponsible, and ridiculous. And I agree with Ribbie about the large downturn in baseball discussion here. Points are beaten to death, how many more times do we need to read "Sox hitters are purposely trying to pull the outside pitch and hit a homer", I think we get it after the millionth time. The one poster got into the game thread and talked about how it was 65% Widger bashing. Talk about seeking attention, "let's see who can come up with the most clever Widger insult". This site has become "take out your frustrations here" instead of talking about baseball. And I get a big kick out of people calling themselves pessimists and walking around with it like it's a badge of honor. Nice. But that's certainly your right, I won't debate that. Just as it's other people's right to speak up about it. Oh well. I think in general when you have a site with as many posts per day as this one your going to get all kinds of discussion for all kinds of posters. Certain fans want one thing, others want another but our goal it create a happy medium that encourages intelligent discussion and all the different cursing, name calling, and use of one smilie was absolutley ruining that. We hope that by enforcing our new policies to a T that we'll be able to put an end to that drivel which in turn will put an emphasis on intelligent baseball discusion. Last nights game thread had some great discussion about Vazquez, you had people talking about the positives of his start and others talking about the negatives and some great counter points in between. Some of the trade threads have also had some outstanding discussion. One thread in particular involved you and Flash discussing some of the different things/ways you'd like to see the organization go about draft and developing players. As a whole this site is filled with all kinds of intelligent, bright posters and we are going to do what we can to encourage that type of discussion.

Since people are asking about it, this topic has now been pinned, but also locked. The logic behind the decisions are explained in this thread. If people are here just to curse profoundly than my recommendation is to find another site cause the great part about being a Sox fan is there are a couple other options out there. This place was built upon intelligent discussion and we are going to do what we can to ensure that we put together and enivornment that encourages exactly that.

QUOTE(Steff @ Jul 20, 2006 -> 02:15 PM) Oh God forbid the fans hold some faith.. the same thing we did. PS.. Where the hell is the rolleyes smiley??? Long gone...just like the profanity words. They've all been filtered out because too many people failed to show other posters respect. Its became too hard to possibly moderate every little thing on the site so the hope is that people will see this and realize if they want to keep trying to push the envelope they'll be doing it on another site (and the beauty of being a Sox fan on the net is that if you don't fit in at one site there are two others that have certain niche's that you could very well fit in on). I'm not about to say were the best site on the Web, but I'm confident in what teh site has to offer and I think it provides a great service to Sox fans. Hopefully that makes some sense Steff as to why some stuff has dissapeared and the same goes to anyone else thats wondering why you may have seen a few smilies go away or see some words that get typed in now becoming a new word.

Stick around Ribbie...sure a few people are over-reacting, even if it is the vast majority. We are a good team and if they don't accomplish things this year it will be a dissapointment but hey we won last year and if things don't work out this year (and the odds of us winning it all, while they are good, they are obviously far from a lock) I'm confident in our staff to make thing even better for next year. I don't get it. We get a great pitching performance and aside from one inning in this series it was 3 strong pitching performances. We may have lost the series but I'm a lot less concerned today than I was entering the series, I'll tell you that much. The Tigers are a good team and the Twins/Yanks are good teams that are close to us in the Wild Card, but the Sox still have all the talent in the world and i'm not going to let a little losing streak discourage me. If people want to be ridiculous and put up choke avatars and the such fine, but I don't see how the hell this team is choking. They play hard and they never quit, if they fail they fail, but it won't be because our team didn't try.

Count...shut em down and go out and give us the 2nd really good start of the series and a series victory. LETS GO SOX

Javier Vazquez can not pitch out of the pen. Why you ask? Because he can't pitch with runners on. When he goes into the stretch he shortens his leg kick and this gives him all kinds of troubles with his arm not being where it needs to be and its why his breaking pitches flatten out and the big inning erupts. Sure, he may be coming in without anyone on from time to time and thats fine, but I am not about to bring him out with runners on. I'd prefer Coop to continue working with Javy (and I hope Javy is responding and listening and being very attentive) on coming up with a routine of how to pitch with runners on (I'm not talking about pitch selection, rather something he can think everytime he is pitching from the stretch so that it reminds him to calm down after giving up a couple hits and to make sure with the lower leg kick that he works extra hard to keep his arm in the proper spot. Both of these things will prevent him from overthrowing and flattening his breaking balls.

I'm sorry, I think Gibbons was a total prick about this. I heard a guy talking about how things went down on Cold Pizza this morning nad Gibbons was yelling at Hilly threatening to fight him, etc and Hilly just stood there. Gibbons than told him to go home and Hilly stayed in the clubhouse and eventually got word that he was gone.

QUOTE(Flash Tizzle @ Jul 19, 2006 -> 11:38 PM) Is their business aspects involved with this? Such as, if the site is cleaned its value increases. I could be way off -- I'm not exactly a business student -- but I know personally you couldn't care less. Didn't want to leave this out there un-answered and I can answer it really quickly, I have no intentions of selling Soxtalk. I've turned down numerous offers over the years. This place opened up as a way to discuss Sox stuff and in all reality its turned into so much more than just that. And Flash like I said I completely respect your opinion and realize these type of comments show that you guys care about this site and I think thats what makes Soxtalk so special.

Snakes on a Plane's debut is getting closer

I'll make one response to this recent change. The change was made because "you can write a legitimate post without using a four letter word". I realize we've always been loose on languange and while we aren't about to get all strict there are places where the line has to be drawn. More and more we are getting younger and younger members and while I realize people will see and use these sort of words in there everyday life, it doesn't necessarily need to be an everyday reality on Soxtalk. I think we are all capable of getting our point across without using *f*ck*, *sh*t* or *b*tch*. However, in instances where it needs to be said, its still tolerated..sure it will be prettied up a bit with a fish, spiff or beach but the meaning will still be there. I've long said this site isn't about catering to the White Sox or the media. We have our own writers here, and our own media hookups (in terms of FutureSox) and the bottom line is that Sox fans and the membesr of this site come first. They always have and they always will. This site wouldn't be what it is today without posters like you, flash, and everyone else and I'll never forget that. But I truly believe this policy in addition to the removal of a few smilies (which were consistently used to degrade other members: roll eye smilies, puke smilie, etc) will help create a healthy and inciteful environment that encourages intelligent baseball discussion and debate.

QUOTE(Rowand44 @ Jul 19, 2006 -> 10:05 PM) To be honest, he's probably just trying to stick up for his staff. I think he realizes they're pitching like spiff. Your probably right and my guess is the last thing they need to do is hear it from someone else. They all know they've pitched like spiff, now its just a matter for them to go out and start getting better one start at a time.

QUOTE(MHizzle85 @ Jul 19, 2006 -> 10:00 PM) ^^^^^^ Lovin the sig...brings back old memories Haha...give Rowand and Greasy the credit...it was there work. They found it and randomly got the idea to give it to me as my sig.

Interesting by Coop but I do think we'll see Javy turn the corner. I'm actually cautiously optimistic for some stupid reason. Maybe its just cause I'm in a really good mood.

QUOTE(TitoMB345 @ Jul 19, 2006 -> 09:28 PM) Im not against getting Rowand back either, but thast trade is totally unbalanced. We get an older Tom Gordon and a CFer that we already decided was expendable earlier this offseason, and we give up our best starting pitching "prospect" in B-Mac and our top prospect in Fields. I laughed when I read the quote and the following replies that said it was a solid deal. Ya, in terms of what that post said we'd be giving up...awful. I wouldn't trade Bmac for both of em. If I deal Bmac its to get a guy that helps us now and 5 years from now (that means a player thats not only going to be good today, but 5 years from today as well).

Just put it up as my background (usually I use the calendar during the season) and it looks really snazzy on my computer. Great work as always.

QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Jul 19, 2006 -> 09:22 PM) Translation:

ROFL at Sammy. The guy seems to think he can pick and choose and that teams will just jump over him. Yes, I'm bias because I think he's a real tool, but I've never been one to doubt his ability (even if it was steroid inflated) and he was one of the savior's of baseball in 1998.