Jake

I don't get the pessimism with Soria. He's had one bad year ever and that year was hardly a total s***show by White Sox standards. We're going to get something much nicer than Jake Peter in return for him at the deadline.

The problem with evaluating a single team's draft picks in the NBA is that a huge proportion of all the players drafted in the first round are just totally s***ty and never contribute

The Sox did well on their players because they were signed to cheap contracts. You can't get top talent in exchange for a $300M player on a $300M contract.

It's really something to hear a pro sports commissioner get really fired up like that.

Unless the Sox are very confident among their pro scouts that Avi's 2017 was a fluke, it makes little sense to trade him now

QUOTE (flavum @ Dec 14, 2017 -> 09:46 PM) Anyone else hate the nickname Gio for Giolito? I can’t be the only one. I had to click the tweet to even get it to register that that is who it was referring to.

Here's a question. Are these two ideas compatible? 1. Police officers can be afforded some leeway, in the words of several posters here, given that use of deadly force is very possibly warranted in their day-to-day work and would be warranted much more frequently than the justifiable uses of force are for typical civilians. 2. Police officers, as an important part of the criminal justice system, should be expected to give the benefit of the doubt to the people they confront even if it entails risk of bodily harm to the officer. This is because the least desirable outcome of an encounter between a citizen and police is a death, regardless of how innocent or guilty the citizen is because that cannot be known definitively until the other arms of the justice system have decided. This is also not to suggest that cops shouldn't defend themselves, sometimes with deadly force, when there is no margin for a benefit of the doubt.

I'm fond of the term "1st basement." Makes me think of end-of-career Paul Konerko.

I would hate running a minor league franchise where good players are always taken away without my having any say in it. It's like how do you convince anyone that the winning and losing matters?

This idea is no different than the rule allowing a runner to run through 1st base, which was not always the rule. And it requires judgment in the same way—does the runner intentionally leave the base or not? The reason you would want to alter the rules to let the runner sprint past 1st is because the game is way better that way. So the question I ask is whether it's consistent with the spirit of the game to change the rules in this way? My first instinct is yes, it is totally consistent with the design of the game. It's all about getting to the base before the tag without (when it's not 1st base) running so hard that you go past the base.

Crazy. I had just been talking to a friend about how I'd like the Sox to give him another shot—he had a ton of talent and seemed to have struggled a bit after his mother's death before the eventual elbow issue.

Ventura's first season was a bit of a curse. That team wasn't that good, but the fact it almost made the playoffs kept the franchise half-assing an attempt at competing for years after despite never having a team that had much of a chance to make the playoffs without a lot of luck. Give him better talent or lower expectations and he can be an adequate manager. Mets probably would like a calming influence.

Avi clearly has a ton of power. You can measure that, you know, and he hits the ball as hard as anyone on this team. Whether he will hit a bunch of home runs is another question.

QUOTE (Sox-35th @ Sep 24, 2017 -> 10:23 AM) Stolen bases are overrated as a stat. They're nice, but an out is a lot of risk. Sure, but the difference between 5-10 stolen base player and 40-50 stolen base player is a lot of value. And coming from a power hitter who takes a lot of walks may affect the way pitchers try to pitch to him

Interesting thing with Lopez is he's been without his best offspeed (breaking ball) the whole time he's been up. I'm looking forward to seeing him work through the lumps like so many young starters have to do. The raw talent is great and it looks like he's got a good head on his shoulders.

I noticed a strange gait as he trotted around the bases either tonight or last night. I thought he had to be hurt.

Moncada just oozes competence and confidence at the plate. He doesn't always get the result, but between his demeanor and his physical tools it's hard not to be optimistic.

I think main thing with Fulmer is getting to spend a month with Coop

Am I crazy or does Zack Collins get a ton of days off?

Kind of odd how bad it got. Went from "lost my edge without it and felt dreadful" to "I gotta go to rehab" really quick. I've taken prescription amphetamines since I was in my early 20s and it would suck to get used to not using them again and would probably affect my ability to keep my job. But I don't know what I'd get out of rehab because I'd either have the stuff or I wouldn't. But, of course, I'm not addicted—the drugs are treating an illness, of course I should feel badly without them even after the withdrawal fades. With that said, good for him to deal with whatever happened and get back to baseball. I always wondered what caused him to leave the Brewers like that.

I was thinking it would be best to keep him in AA just to reduce the risk that a bad start or two in AAA before the season ends would hurt his confidence. On the other hand, some players are so focused on moving up the ladder it might be better for him mentally to get the promotion that his production deserves.

To put Giolito ahead of Lopez is absolutely absurd to me.

QUOTE (oldsox @ Aug 11, 2017 -> 08:49 PM) Oh so true. We have to remember, the Yanks are very shrewd. That is, they might have given up on Rutherford as an "elite" prospect. Otherwise, they would not have let him go, possibly. AFL might be very good for him. The other thing about elite talents is they do sometimes go through stretches of just holding their own and then suddenly the stars align and they just start killing it. Eloy didn't do a whole lot in his first couple years in pro ball. Reynaldo Lopez hung around for several years without doing much before just getting it figured out.

There's a fundamental problem that if you care about the lives of South Koreans, you have very little leverage. Seoul is home to 10 million people, with another 15 million living in that metro area. It is about 40 miles from the DMZ. North Korea has conventional (non-nuclear) weapons ready for immediate use that could easily flatten that entire area. The death toll could be higher than World War 1's in a matter of minutes without a single nuclear weapon. We have an important responsibility to not play around with these people's lives just in the service of assuring everyone how tough and manly we are. What does NK want? They want legitimacy and security. To them, the nukes ensure security because one does not attack nuclear states. Though they are not perfectly rational actors, they understand how ruinous it would be to use nukes offensively. But they know there's no ground war to be had in Korea when their defensive capacity is so deadly. That means the regime survives, which is priority number 1. Legitimacy means they don't want to be treated like a pariah state. They rarely elaborate since we so rarely have serious negotiations, but the big starting ask of us from NK is always an "end to hostility" which presumably entails an elimination of economic and diplomatic sanctions, thereby further enhancing the longevity of the regime. That's not unfathomable even if maybe we don't feel they deserve that. But it isn't clear that there is anything they'd trade the nukes away for now. The question is whether we're willing to negotiate without a promise that the nukes eventually get traded away rather than a suspension of certain programs. Compared to Iran, this regime is less trustworthy, less sensitive to internal pressure from its citizens in response to sanctions, and has more leverage thanks to the credible threats they pose to our allies, especially Seoul.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Aug 10, 2017 -> 11:56 AM) Shockingly, Republicans in Indiana are suppressing the vote in Democratic areas and expanding it in Republican areas http://www.indystar.com/story/news/2017/08...olls/435450001/ Came here to post this. What a clever way to do it, too. It seems nice and bipartisan to have one member of each party on the boards...and the Dems will always vote to expand voting access. Republicans will vote to expand voting access when it's likely to earn them votes, but then can shut down voting access in all the places where they are likely to be hurt by it. So instead of, say, a system in which early voting is just stalled in general due to Republicans, this system expands early voting in Republican areas while halting/reducing it in Democratic areas.