Jake

Davidson has learned to make contact on the high pitch, which he's never been able to lay off of. And his ability to draw a walk is basically his saving grace, because last year he was showing Anderson-esque patience at the plate (though Timmy is no Timmy of old either this year). Davidson can afford to hit less good than he has as long as he continues to draw walks so well.

I'm happy he's at least throwing pitches in the zone but he has to miss some bats. All of his decent starts have tended to go this way where you look later on and he basically never strikes anyone out

Talking about the eye test, I love Abreu. His numbers this year don't jump off the page, but he's come so far from when he first came over. He's really on another level than anyone else on our team in terms of his overall competence at the plate.

Yolmer swings a magic wand just about 100% of the time. He's really become pretty much the guy we hoped he'd be when he was down in W-S and Birmingham.

He's been surprisingly bad this year. I thought it was a no-brainer to keep him over Smith but he's had some issues catching the ball and has had his strikeout rate mysteriously shoot way up.

lol, the burden is on Daniel to show he can square it up consistently with that swing of his. He has stopped topping everything like he did in his first 15 or 20 ABs, which is a positive in that all the hand movement looks nice when it ends up turning into contact. I'm still not sure where to put him in the field, though.

And it's fair to try to make the argument that Cooper has nothing to do with it and in fact it's our front office/scouts who have been able to identify pitching talent. It's a tricky thing to identify without being there and witnessing the coaching and knowing what the people involved were thinking. We have also heard at times that Coop is involved in some of our personnel decisions about pitchers, which blurs the lines even further.

FWIW, Davidson's homer was 109mph off the bat. Palka's subsequent lineout was smashed also: 115.5mph exit velo

Well I think as a general rule pitching coaches don't look good if the pitchers are bad. Of course, it's hard to know how much the success of some of the pitchers — especially the ones who came up through our system — was because of the coaching they received. I think in general the Sox rarely ran out there with the pure pitching talent to justify such excellent output, but that's of course debatable.

I would have guessed pre-season that Fulmer being better than Giolito would have meant that Fulmer had a breakout year, not that they were fighting each other for a spot on the bus to Charlotte

Sox pitching staff MLB rank by WAR and RA9-WAR: 2002: 16 / 15 2003: 5 / 5 2004: 18 / 15 2005: 1 / 1 2006: 4 / 8 2007: 9 / 18 2008: 1 / 6 2009: 4 / 7 2010: 1 / 10 2011: 2 / 8 2012: 12 / 6 2013: 16 / 18 2014: 25 / 25 2015: 9 / 16 2016: 13 / 11 2017: 29 / 23 Somebody deserves credit for that alongside the unmatched health of the staff over that period.

Unfortunately, not only has he lost all of the command that might enable him to be a mid- or back-rotation pitcher, he's lost even more of his stuff such that it's getting hard to see the raw talent to do what he needs to do.

It will be nice to get Rodon back soon, even if he is a reduced version of his former self

I didn't remember last year being all that fun

I really enjoy watching Abreu, Anderson, and Sanchez play (among the players in the game today)

If I was going to revamp my throwing motion to salvage my career, the first thing I'd do is stop with the "spin my torso towards CF" part of it

The extreme badness of the 2 of the 5 guys in the opening day rotation has hurt the Sox on-field product in a way that you'd expect. EDIT: to be clear, the 2 of the 5 are Giolito and Gonzalez. Everyone I think assumed Fulmer might be as bad as he's been...that was baked into the expectations.

I think a lot of folks rightfully expected Giolito to not pitch like a AAA pitcher with sub-AAA stuff. We also assumed Miguel Gonzalez was going to be a reliable 4.50-ish ERA innings eater but instead he was worse than all the other guys.

I see the reverence for Palka's bat as completely unearned. In spite of a large HR total in the minors the accompanying numbers haven't been terribly impressive and that was while generally being a bit old for the levels he's played well in. A whopping .860 OPS this season is what got him called up here — that's after mid .700s OPS in AAA in two seasons previous. I see him as a guy with a similar track record to what Delmonico had last year but with considerably higher risk due to his very poor athleticism and history of strikeout problems. I wouldn't write him off, especially since he's bopped some here in MLB, but he's a guy with warts and is a bad week away from having bad season numbers.

My basic point was that he didn't look like a guy who could run the bases or field and while he can hit a ball hard, he has an ugly swing that doesn't inspire confidence that he can time up offspeed pitches. I'm not writing him off but he has to hit a lot in order to have any value. I certainly wouldn't take any of Davidson's at bats away in favor of Palka.

This is what I'm talking about with Palka

Sox have killed two rallies with bad coaching today

That was...bad

Well what I say about Engel is that he swings like someone who has only heard about baseball swings from reading books but hasn't ever actually seen someone do it.

Man do I love Yolmer.