Jake

QUOTE (chitownsportsfan @ May 14, 2014 -> 11:26 PM) gillaspie has a wRC+ of 134 verse RHB and a wRC+ of 40 against LHP. He and Semian should be in a strict platoon. Semien's future might well be as a utility player so I see no harm in getting him innings at 3B as much as possible, even if it hurts this year's team a bit. You're practically guaranteeing his future as a bench player if you restrict him to occasional starts against LHP

For f***'s sake Davidson. I'm a pretty optimistic guy, but can you please not be like every other promising offensive player the White Sox get who always play worse than they ever have?

If nothing else, it puts a player on the field who is worth watching just due to his talent level. Eaton, Abreu, Viciedo, Semien, (at one point Avisail Garcia) are all guys that make you tune in just because you want to watch their development.

I'm not going to bother moving Thibs unless he's forcing my hand

I love Trea Turner. He'd make sense as a "save money" pick, but I'd rather he fall to the second round by some miracle. He's had a great finish to the year, now leads his team in homers. Jose Reyes ceiling

The alarms were sounding is because things have to happen right now or else we won't be able to deal with the consequences much later. This is a great test of one of humanity's greatest weaknesses. We suck at making short-term sacrifices for long-term gains, even when we are perfectly capable of understanding how dumb the thing we're doing is. It's like the classic study where they tell the kid that if they don't eat the marshmallow in front of them for 15 minutes, they'll get to eat two marshallows. Those motherf***ers always eat the marshmallow before 15 minutes passes

For all we know, it's Hahn that is in love with Ventura and JR who doesn't give a s*** who manages

ADA has certainly not made it easy to like him. I also have a feeling that L Garcia was playing CF because ADA doesn't like it, too. I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that ADA was a better hitter than Leury yesterday, either

FWIW, I worked for about 10 years with a House disciple in the Chicago area and he didn't teach a "wrist/elbow snap" slider. For the most part, he didn't teach sliders. He'd teach circle changeup as first offspeed pitch, then curveball, and then reluctantly would teach slider as essentially a variant of the curveball (which is basically what it is). He was a big fan of the knuckle curve, but I never worked with him on that. He started working with that a lot right as I was going out the door.

A lot of managers believe (and, apparently, players too) that guys get out of whack when their batting order position is changed. Given how little the batting order matters to game outcomes, who cares if you put a bad player higher in the order for a few games while you wait for the normal guy to come back? Parent had just said to the media yesterday that ADA felt very uncomfortable hitting leadoff.

Danish was often clocked in the 94-95 range before being drafted. Perfect Game has recorded his velocity in tournaments way back in 2012 where he sat 90-93. I'm going to assume that, over time, we'll see Tyler get back to that. It seems that we have asked him to consciously back it off a little bit.

Johnson and Danish have extremely high ceilings. Johnson has plus speed, good contact rates, high walk rates, a lot of glove potential, and has pretty nice power production thus far for a non-HR hitter. His ceiling is borderline first-tier 2B. Danish has an ace ceiling. There's a reason they said he has Jake Peavy stuff. Those players just happen to have pretty low floors, too.

QUOTE (fathom @ May 12, 2014 -> 11:46 AM) In true Mr. Pessimism form, this has been a bad year for Sox prospects. Two shocking busts so far this year in Davidson and E. Johnson. Use of the word "bust" is debatable. Being bad for a month and some change isn't quite "bust" level, especially given their ages and experience levels. Johnson, in particular, has had a mysterious loss of velocity that I hope is resolved sooner rather than later, even if that means diagnosing him with an injury.

KW is probably our best GM. Himes had one hell of a run, though: Drafted Jack McDowell, Robin Ventura, Frank Thomas, and Alex Fernandez in consecutive first rounds. Got us Wilson Alvarez, Scott Fletcher, Sammy Sosa, and Lance Johnson for old Harold Baines and Jose de Leon. Also drafted James Baldwin, Ray Durham, Jason Bere, Bob Wickman, Joe Borowski.

So Eaton missed 5 games with an ankle and will miss something like 2 to 4 weeks with a hamstring injury. This is pretty typical stuff. Not a great start to his White Sox run, but I don't see evidence of an injury prone player. He averaged over 120 games a year in the minors, where not many players get that many games played. While people have wondered if his playing style would cause him injury, his arm injury was throwing-related and what he's dealing with now is somewhere between random occurrence and wear and tear.

QUOTE (scs787 @ May 10, 2014 -> 03:19 PM) A punter!!! Ole! Damn, dude has 4.6 speed and benched 225 23 times as a punter. Thought it was funny that one scouting report knocked him for average athleticism after I saw those combine numbers. That's about as good as it gets for a punter. Not a high bar to clear to improve our punting game. I'm not going to pretend to know whether he'll be any good.

Fales sounds like a player that ought to develop into a very solid backup and could thrive with the coaching and weapons we have in Chicago a la Josh McCown

Will Sutton Ego Ferguson Jay Ratliff Stephen Paea Nate Collins LaMarr Houston Jared Allen Willie Young Israel Idonije David Bass Cornelius Washington Austen Lane Tracy Robertson Trevor Scot

Kolek - elite velocity that has been spotted for over 12 months, was still top .1% for age before that. Great body. Good motion, shows some refinement on the mound. Good looking breaker at two speeds. Sparsely used change. Unbelievable upside but middle relief downside.

How is Eaton injury prone? He never missed a game until he tore his UCL (Tommy John ligament). Near-zero risk of reinjury there for non-pitcher. This is the first concern with legs and it looks like a rather minor injury at that

IMO, you can't say don't draft a G in the first round out of principle, but then say it's a bad idea to pick a CB when there are great S on the board

QUOTE (thxfrthmmrs @ May 8, 2014 -> 10:23 PM) Keppinger started his minor league assignment a week ago... Either way, if he's putting up pathetic numbers against 21-22 year olds, I don't think he will be brought up. You can't put guys on rehab assignment indefinitely. There's a time limit

I love Hawk. Whenever I get stuck watching another team's broadcast, I just feel like muting it. Vin Scully is one of the only other guys who makes it worth listening just for the great way in which the game is broadcasted. While this isn't you flavum, I saw some folks on Twitter last night loving how old and perhaps sickly Hawk looked on TV. These people are f***ing disgusting, cheering an old man to die because he sounds too much like an old timey fan on TV

I skipped some of the conversation, but the key things to think about regarding "clutch" are definitional. If Abreu is a 1.000 OPS hitter in a neutral situation, is he a choker when his OPS is .850 in the clutch? What if he's at 1.000 OPS? If Leury is a .550 OPS hitter normally and .700 OPS in the clutch, is he a really clutch hitter? There's your first problem. When defining clutch, are we measuring a hitter against himself or against the league? Chances are, even if Abreu was "not clutch" insofar as he was a significantly worse hitter than he normally is in clutch situations, he'd still be the best choice in a clutch situation. The other big problem in terms of definitions is deciding what constitutes a clutch situation. Often, "late and close" is used as a surrogate for clutch spots. This means 7th or later, batting team is ahead by one run, tied, or losing by an amount such that the tying run is at least on deck. Of course, you wouldn't say an Abreu strikeout to lead off the 7th of a game when we're losing by 1 constitutes a choke. Sometimes you could argue it was productive if his presence caused the team to use a righty against Dunn. Anyways, we often see that a play becomes clutch after the fact; there was no particular pressure to succeed in this hypothetical situation, but if he hit a bomb we'd probably label it an example of his acumen in the clutch. RISP is another surrogate, but suffers from some of the same pitfalls. Do we start patting Tyler Flowers on the back for a bloop single with nobody out and the bases loaded in the second inning? So clutch! Then again, maybe that is clutch. It's more clutch than most other singles. If you narrow the definition of clutch too much, you end up making all claims about the clutch borderline unfalsifiable. PK is the most clutch hitter in history because he hits grand slams 100% of the time that he bats with the bases loaded in the World Series. You get the idea. You work with unbelievably small sample sizes and you start to fine tune your definition to prove your hypothesis rather than coming up with an idea of clutch and seeing if the data confirms your beliefs or not.

I like Rodon the most. I think I may like Kolek over Aiken, but I recognize that he will need quite a bit more development than Aiken and I haven't yet decided how to weight that in my mind.