Jake

I was never a Gavin Floyd hater, but I bet the way I feel towards Burke is how some of you felt about Gavin Floyd

Baldwin's:

Where Vargas's ball would have left the park:

April 23, 2025 IYKYK

My gut feeling is that the union does not have the mettle to fight the owners hard enough to prevent a salary cap if the owners do indeed push hard for it. They will roll over in exchange for stuff like higher minimum salaries, minor amenities around travel/etc., and a few boosts to minor league life. I hope I'm wrong but they've been getting stomped as of late. Union brought in the best guy possible to help Tony Clark but it seems like the players just aren't buying the anti-cap argument. I think adding minor leaguers to the union will only add to this problem as they can be "bought" easily via concessions that owners don't care about.

Colson...welcome back to Earth

6 whiffs in 11 swings for Taylor

Yeah that seemed like a good time to let Baldwin hit.

That's a pretty interesting find on the Vargas vs. lefty fastballs split. I'm not going to ring the alarm on it just yet (helps that he hit a double on a four-seamer around the time that was posted). He's hitting lefty sinkers well for one so it's not like he's completely unable to hit their velocity. He's also hitting right-handed four seamers well. Some guys end up with reverse splits but it's really unusual for reverse splits to happen because a guy can't hit a straight fastball against oppo-handed pitchers even though he can against same-handed ones.

I can't believe that ball didn't leave the ballpark for Quero.

Colson looks like he's been playing 3B his whole life

Surprised to see Oneil Cruz gets above-average marks from the defensive metrics. Speed is a hell of a weapon for an outfielder. But it won't help if he kills himself out there.

On Yoendrys Gomez: shockingly good numbers for a Charlotte starting pitcher this year. I'm not sure that I buy he's going to give the White Sox value as a starter. Prior to coming to the Sox, I didn't see much to like on the statsheet for Gomez. But Statcast gave a clue what the Sox were looking at: some exceptional movement on his sweeper. The rest of his arsenal didn't seem like anything special but you can go a long way with a great sweeper if you use it right. He also has huge drop on his curveball but that's less of a weapon nowadays. Fastball is pretty average. He has a somewhat unique release point which is something Bannister has mentioned as appealing in some other Sox pickups. In AAA, Gomez is getting an incredible 51% whiff rate on the sweeper. Batters are hitting .040 against it. His four-seamer is performing okay too, maybe because hitters are worried about the offspeed. He's getting 40% whiff rate on his curveball too but some of the contact has been hot against it. He basically only uses the curve against lefties. He's mixing in a changeup and non-sweeper slider but they both appear to be crappy pitches. So I see a glimpse of a guy who could thrive in a bullpen role in which you can protect him from seeing too many lefty hitters and let that sweeper eat. Kind of a Steven Wilson profile although I acknowledge that doesn't sound very exciting.

This is a nice start from Civale, so far.

Well I think Lenyn is very much not pigeon-holed into being at 1B/DH although I agree that he's unlikely to have the mobility for even marginal SS defense anymore. There's definitely some lid on Lenyn's potential because of his approach...he'll never run a high OBP even if he's hitting really well. Think Tim Anderson at his peak running high averages but never walking. In that respect Vargas has a higher ceiling because he takes great at bats. That said, I don't really want to use "Miguel Vargas" and "high ceiling" in the same sentence either (I say this as a Vargas fan). I hope the Sox just assemble a critical mass of MLB-quality players and work out the particulars later. I do have a hunch that Getz may have a pretty specific vision of the kind of player he wants on his team and Lenyn Sosa doesn't fit it. My opinion is you shouldn't let that get in the way of fielding the best team you can, especially given that Getz has already remade the team/organization to not be full of guys who swing at everything anymore. But if Lenyn gets moved, there's no doubt in my mind that it would reflect Getz becoming dogmatic about the archetype of hitter he wants on his team. As a sweetener in a LouBob deal, I think it's a little crazy. By any sort of cost:benefit model Lenyn should be way more valuable than LouBob on the trade market. LouBob is the Lenyn sweetener!

Nice job by Colson. I think he's destined to be a strikeout guy, but not all of them are created equal. Some of them are able to adjust to a situation and make contact when it really buys you something

I don't understand the desire to trade Sosa. Would you advocate trading Vargas? Because they are the same age and have the same contract status in terms of time to free agency. I'd be surprised if Getz thought Vargas was so old/close to FA that he should be traded. Not sure why Lenyn would be treated differently. I know Lenyn has a penchant for frustrating mental lapses in the field, but he's also more versatile defensively than Vargas (and just better with the glove in general, other than perhaps 1B where Lenyn seems to have a mental block). There's a non-trivial chance that Lenyn produces more value than any other infielder on this roster in the next 5 seasons. If the thought was that teams wanted to pay a huge cost for Lenyn, maybe you think about it. But I doubt they're banging down the doors. You'd be hoping the return turns into a Lenyn Sosa type of player.

Yeah he's just doing the extreme Chicagoland name thing. Lou-ee Roberts baby!

I'll give the Sox minor league development folks a thumbs-up on Colson's defense. Always nice when a guy is pegged as a question mark with the glove but he ends up being better than advertised. We'll leave discussion of his bat for another day

It's interesting how Tauchman, until this year, has been deployed almost solely as a platoon bat. But he has never had much in the way of bad splits against lefties. Out of necessity, the Sox have let him hit lefties and he's done very well against them.

I can't believe Vargas was able to pull a pitch that far outside all the way over the fence

My suspicion is that once he gets up near full speed he will have to shut back down due to pain or poor recovery. Just my hunch; many guys successfully rehab through these things (at least for a while) but I took his loss of velocity this season as a dark sign when coupled with the pain showing up later.

Are we ready to have a conversation about Yoendrys Gomez?

I'm not too sure what drove Santiago to change the way he described that pitch. But a lot of guys throwing changeups nowadays are essentially throwing screwballs. Hector gripped it like a circle changeup and threw it like one. I find that in youth ball, it isn't often taught the screwball way so a lot of fans don't realize this. But the best changeups are thrown with total wrist pronation, basically like you'd throw a curveball but with your hand facing the opposite direction (and usually gripped differently). This generates side/overspin, but of course due to the fact it's generally harder to pronate than supinate, it comes out harder and with less overspin than a curveball. Some guys can't really do it at all but they tend to have an easier time throwing sliders. Other guys who are natural at spinning the screwgie changeups often can't throw a slider very well. The "changeup" Devin Williams throws is very much an all-time great screwball. As for why fewer curveballs, I think the biggest thing is that "tunneling" is the prevailing theory about pitch mixing nowadays. You want all your pitches to look the same not only during your throwing motion but as long as possible after release too. The idea is that they are all traveling down a common "tunnel" towards home plate until at some late stage they diverge due to different movements. The classic tunneling trio is the four-seam/sinker/cutter. These are all very similar out of hand but the cutter darts gloveside late, the sinker darts armside late, and the four seamer stays a bit straighter and will feel like it's rising relative to the other two. Sliders don't tunnel quite as well but the extra movement is a good tradeoff for a lot of pitchers. Same for changeups which diverge a little earlier (mostly due to the speed difference). Curveballs generally don't tunnel very well because the ball comes up out of the hand, making it look different from the heater and everything else almost immediately to a discerning hitter. One thing I haven't heard an explanation for yet is why it seems en vogue nowadays to attack opposite-handed hitters with curveballs — and not so much with sliders. As best as I can tell, for a long time there has been a reverse platoon split for curveballs (same-handed batters hit them better than oppo-handed batters which goes against conventional wisdom). But this is mostly isolated to early in the count and when the curveball is thrown outside to the oppo-handed hitters. So basically, especially early in counts oppo-handed batters have a hard time judging the backdoor curveball and take it for strikes. Later in counts, they are more aggressive and don't take those pitches and don't whiff on them either. Same-handed hitters have an easier time judging curveballs because they can't be back-doored and the break is so big and slow they have a chance to measure it in a way that is unlike the slider.

Plesac has potential but man his verbal slip-ups have been going wild. By the end of tonight's game Sosa had become "Lean." Good vibes between Schriff and Plesac, though. They're clearly having fun. Sometimes Schriffen and Stone have a good time together but other times it feels like Schriffen is begging Stone to wake up (or lighten up).