Jake

That was for yesterday.

I like the hot hitting version of Rios.

PK continuing to look hopeless against changeups

On the bright side, Q doesn't seem to get rattled by anything. Keeps attacking...he must not know how unimpressive his stuff is

When you pound guys with fastballs every single batter on the outside part of the plate....the one that misses a couple inches over the plate gets hit really hard.

Why does Cobb suck? Are we saying this because of his weird repertoire or does he not have much of a track record?

That went really far for just a flick of the wrist, lol Tough inning...ADA hit the ball hard, Gordon really failed us, Dunn not a bad AB but fly ball doesn't do anything for us with 2 outs

That changeup is going to be tough for lefties to hit

Gordon forgetting how to hit fastballs again

Strikeout > ground ball here

Hard hit ball, no luck

Hawk loves when every offensive player on the field is black...must mean "good speed"

This Cobb has a nice change (albeit too fast) but he doesn't set it up well at all. The way he's using it, it may as well just be a sinker. He has to use his curveball more and take advantage of his fastball appearing much faster due to the changeups that he features.

QUOTE (Quinarvy @ May 30, 2012 -> 12:29 PM) Minor league free agent. Hard to believe he threw his first AA inning this year. From a look at his numbers, the Yanks were stupid not to promote him to a higher level. Couldn't have predicted he'd be an MLB player, but it's been clear for years that he has mastered A ball.

DV gives no f***s

I'll say, Rios hasn't exactly been racking up a bunch of cheap hits. This is a nice, hard ~.280

1-0!

QUOTE (chw42 @ May 30, 2012 -> 11:36 AM) His change is also 5 MPH slower than his fastball, which is very odd. QUOTE (Steve9347 @ May 30, 2012 -> 11:53 AM) If by odd you mean bad, you would be correct. He should get slaughtered. I have inserted Dayan Viciedo into the lineup for this one in fantasyland. 5 is generally not enough differential, but you occasionally see it work. I've seen Buehrle on periodic days only have about that much differential between fast-change and do just fine. Other things like arm action, movement, etc. can make the differential less important QUOTE (southsidepride15 @ May 30, 2012 -> 11:58 AM) That's what I was going to say, I think 10-12 MPH difference is what you look for, with 13 MPH difference being "ideal". I guess we shall see...hoping the Sox get on em early and SWEEEEP!! 13mph is generally considered way too much differential. The point of the changeup is that it appears to be a fastball...when the differential is too much, the hitter can recognize that something funny is going on because it looks so different from the fastball. There are probably examples of pitchers that do okay with that much differential, but it isn't the norm. I'll look for it but there is a chart somewhere with MLB batting averages vs changeups by the differential from fastball. The lowest batting average by quite a bit is when the changeup is 9mph off, 8 and 10 being a little less effective but still very effective. Rapidly diminishing returns when the differential is higher or lower

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ May 30, 2012 -> 10:10 AM) And the counter-argument will always be, what did Brian Anderson or Josh Fields or Joe Borchard or whoever do after they left the White Sox? If Ozzie ruined them so easily, what does that say about their mental fortitude to make it as big league ballplayers? Wouldn't at least some of those guys be able to make an impact, if only in a Ryan Sweeney-esque, 4th outfielder kind of way? Won't it be argued that BECAUSE Dayan was protected so much from adverse pitching match-ups against tough RHPers, it helped his career somehow? Josh Fields and Joe Borchard really both got pretty legitimate shots to be MLB regulars and floundered in those chances. Fields had a nice run for a while until they found out he couldn't hit a fastball. I feared for a bit that DV may have been having a Fields-esque run with his struggles hitting fastballs for the early part of the season and even the early part of his hot streak. Glad to say Dayan has been covering the fastball well by going the opposite way, something Fields was never capable of. Enough about that though. Those players were clearly too one dimensional to make it once we saw them in the MLB. Anderson was certainly NOT mentally tough. My issue with Ozzie was that (at least with information we have as fans) he didn't develop him properly. Knowing that he was a bit sensitive to the frequent benchings should have motivated Ozzie to give him regular playing time, but Ozzie was insistent on punishing him for poor play. I think Ozzie didn't like how BA spent his free time and that's fine, but he held it against him when it came to playing time. In that important developmental time I would have liked to see a manager literally baby a player like that, so that he can get some success under his belt and possibly deal with adversity in the future. From what we know it seems that Ozzie interacted with him very little and didn't give him any consistent playing time. He needed to do one of those two things. I know this is speculative and that's how it has to be since we are limited in info and we can't predict what would have happened had things changed. What we do know is that Brian hated hitting so much after leaving the White Sox that he became a pitcher. Maybe that type of attitude was unavoidable, but I like to think that a good coach could have at the least kept him from (more or less) leaving baseball. Think of this year so far and how rarely Robin has given time off to Gordon and Brent Morel. Brent was by far the worst player in baseball and wasn't getting benched until he needed to for injury. We are seeing that confidence paying off in the case of Gordon.

That lineup of theirs just isn't real scary. I understand that Maddon is magical or something like that and they're going to play the game the right way....but I just don't see sustained offense coming from that. Maybe a revival from Matsui could change the look of things.

There was a lot of fun to be had back in the days when he had a REALLY beefed up middle of the order. It seemed like back-to-back/back-to-back-to-back bombs were happening every game. I'm not even sure if I noticed back then whether we won or lost, as long as we were hitting longballs. And of course Valentin was always dependable for a back breaking error.

I know Lawrie is very talented and everything...but he seems like such an asshole. I don't know if I could root for him. He's not even a lovable asshole like AJ

QUOTE (pittshoganerkoff @ May 30, 2012 -> 09:21 AM) Beyond silly. It was a lazy, stupid prediction. I think all they looked at was losing Buehrle and Quentin. They didn't factor in their replacements (Sale and Viciedo), nor did they consider any improvements in Dunn, Peavy, and Rios (the Kansas Bums). We can't replace Buehrle and Quentin! Worst system in baseball!!!!

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ May 30, 2012 -> 09:03 AM) There were two "tests" for this team coming into the season. One was, how would the Four Horsemen of Underachievement from 2011 do? Well, Dunn is back to his old self, Rios is doing pretty good, Peavy is doing very good... and Beckham, well, the jury is still out. So 3 out of 4, at this point. That's great. The other is still to come. Peavy, Sale and Humber would all have to dramatically increase their innings pitched from last year, to stay starting all this year. Chances are, one or more will fade, probably starting around August. So... how those three hold up, and how any fill-ins the Sox use (Axelrod, Quintana, Castro, Doyle, whomever) perform. That's the second test, and at this point, that is what will make or break the team's playoff chances, in my view. The nice thing is that Peavy got quite a few innings last year, which was valuable in building a "base" so to speak for this year. I really don't expect him to have problems down the stretch, even if I flinch every time he releases a pitch and does anything but his normal follow through, etc. Humber faded late last year but still racked up quite a few innings...so I expect him to last longer this year/have no issues. The nice thing with his bad outings early in the season is that he's had several outings with very few pitches. Sale is a wildcard. He'd thrown enough innings his last year in college to expect him to get up to ~180-200 innings no problem last year. Since he didn't, who really knows? He may be fine. This weirdness around his elbow soreness is nothing to forget, but it's also hard to interpret. I wouldn't mind us giving starters periodic breaks from a start or two, especially if a guy like Quintana continues pitching well. Could pay off in the end if we're trying to make a playoff run.

Regarding Caulfield's post, I'm going to go ahead and err on the side of Ozzie not having actual vendettas against young players. I think he was just a poor talent evaluator. I'm guessing that his personal philosophy values experience too highly and it made him almost unwittingly hold back young players. The player that I still think he completely f***ed over was Brian Anderson. He had a horrid first half in that first season as a starter, but his second half was getting much better. Ozzie, though, was insistent on playing Rob Mackowiak at least 3 times a week. Anderson spent the entire season never getting more than 2-3 starts in a row and I can only imagine how hard it is to find an offensive rhythm or stay consistent with anything you're working on when you are habitually missing 30% of your at bats. Even so, the kid batted .250 in that second half but never was seen as a real full time option ever again. Now he's 31 which seems crazy because I still think of him as a young guy...