Jake

I guess Grant probably isn't available with just a day of rest following a 35 pitch outing. I don't think Will really has any good options for this game.

Don't really want to walk Kurtz because I worry about him walking Soderstrom. But you don't want to lose to Kurtz here either.

Oakland learning not to challenge this White Sox defense

I guess all roads lead to Bryan Hudson anyway. Is Grant Taylor not rested? We saving him for something?

FWIW, even though he has a couple soft hits, Antonacci has clearly hit into some hard luck as well.

Who will we see for innings 8 and 9?

Leasure is a pretty good reliever but not the kind of guy I'd want to bring in knowing he's going to see two power-hitting lefties. Of course there aren't a lot of good options to cover all three of the remaining innings. Is Taylor available?

Top is Sherm Lollar with 32 WAR. About halfway to HoF really. Fisk doesn't get credit for his youthful indiscretions with the carmines. I'm thinking more in the Abreu-Konerko-Lemon tier.

My (somewhat?) hot take is that Teel will retire as the Sox franchise leader in catcher WAR

I'd probably slot into the relatively positive fan camp but my frequent absences from Soxtalk can't be totally blamed on the White Sox. I can only read the same conversations about Chris Getz and the various rushes to judgment about every player and other Sox-related person so many times

Caleb's at 26% K-rate. Not alarming but don't want it any higher either. I wouldn't promote him if it was any higher almost regardless of the rest of the production.

Soft singles stink but more often than not when they turn into a run, there's a walk mixed in there

I like him. Fun player to watch and old school in a good way.

Vargas has been murdering the ball over his last ~10 plate appearances and he finally got something out of it

Not sure what Hill was thinking there. I guess he thought they were going to throw through to third but uh, not a good read.

Bad news: Kay's xERA starts with a 7. Okayish news: expected stats aren't as predictive for pitchers as they are for hitters Back to bad news: FIP, xFIP, SIERA all start with a 5 too. But it's early and the stuff does look good.

Doesn't count as bad luck as Edgar really didn't hit that hard enough to get away with lofting it so much. Would have been a nice way to even the scales though.

I think the tag is there but they probably won't overturn as it's too uncertain.

Yandy isn't hitting 40 homers a year but every time I see him he's an absolute menace to deal with. Takes great ABs and makes a lot of hard contact.

Main thing is when you have a guy making such loud outs, you need the coaching staff to make it clear to him that he's doing everything right and the only mistake he can make is trying to change what he's doing. Sometimes guys get into "fake" slumps where they just have bad batted ball luck but it turns into a real one as they start messing with their swings/approach trying to get different results.

Brutal luck for our hitters in that inning. Should probably have a couple runs on the board.

I think it is most likely that Quero would actually benefit from time in AAA against easier competition and with fewer eyes on him. He's tried to make some adjustments to be less of a defensive hitter but so far it has made him lose the benefits of being defensive (hard to strike out, good swing decisions) and none of the benefits of being aggressive (power hitting). The truth is probably that he was mildly overmatched in AAA last season but he was able to slap his way into some production and rode that wave to the majors. But he was once a player who could hit a few homers and I think if he wants to be that guy again he would probably do well to go back down and work on stuff.

I saw last season Venable being questioned about the batting order and his response was essentially that he couldn't explain the reasoning as it was produced by numbers crunchers. As best as I can remember, this was more about the order than the personnel. I actually think it's probably good to have sabermetrics people having heavy input into that kind of thing but man if I was hired as a manager I'd want to make it my mission to understand the process producing those recommendations. And I took it as a sign that today's big league managers must be able to check their egos a good bit considering how many things they are being asked to delegate to other people.

As we speculate about what would happen if Acuna does not get released and instead is a regular for the rest of the season, worth considering the fact he had played over 100 MLB games before this season and was an above-replacement player (on the strength of defense and baserunning). Might need to allow for the possibility that he will not have a .400 OPS forever (expected stats indicate that his deserved offense so far is more "normal bad" than "horribad")

Kyle Lodise has a very strange set of statistics so far... 126 wRC+: good, well above league average production .693 OPS: huh, league and park adjustments must be going crazy to turn this OPS into a 126 wRC+ .161 AVG: hmm, must really be slugging it .258 SLG: what??