Jake

I'm worried about his strikeouts but let's be frank, Zavala looked so bad when he came up that this is really your only option even if you think it's going to be temporary. Assuming Beef's injury isn't too severe, Collins may have an outside chance at playing Alonso off the roster.

I see it as pretty straightforward: Giolito, Lopez, Kopech, Cease in no particular order and then someone from outside the organization.

He really hadn't been doing very well in AA so it stands to reason they might have just been trying to give him an easy, extended prep by making him the starter rather than planning to have him pitch more than an inning or two. But you have to feel bad for him, this is just a mess. Not a lot of guys have recovered from this kind of thing so I hope he gets some help and figures this out.

Would you do just LaVine for Ball?

What a stupid trade it would be. Would only be justifiable if LaVine is greatly overpaid and it's hard to see how his play last year would have changed the front office's view from "he's worth this contract" to "he's not." The value of moving from 7 to 4 in this draft is very small.

Okay let's settle this (LOL). He finishes with 104 pitches. I can see on Gameday that he threw 11 pitches in the 7th. I'll leave the math to the geeks out there

No, he was at 92.

Honestly I don't see it as some terrible thing that they let Gio start the inning. I don't care about his ERA. I would have liked for him to get a quick 1-2-3 with about 105 pitches for the day.

Appears MLB Pipeline has moved Robert up to 15, Baseball America moved him to 35 (from 49).

I suspect teams don't see Colome a lot differently than they did in the preseason and it's looking like a buyer's market right now. You should listen, but there's no reason for urgency because he may be a big part of a playoff-ready team next year.

For my money I'd rather be patient and see if he can do anything with his defense while he hopefully improves his contact rate by just a tick or two

Eloy is the Giorgi Bezhanishvili of the White Sox

If Delmonico isn't upset with us, seems reasonable to think we might sign him to a minor league deal. He's a good guy, I hope he gets healthy and finds his way back to the show somewhere. I'm kind of intrigued by Despaigne. He's shown an ability to be a competent starter in the past and when I look at his numbers I can't help but wonder if he might be more effective if he simplified his repertoire. He has all these different pitches and some are better than others. With the data available now, he might want to stick with the ones that work.

That team was strange defensively. Had several standouts but also had very bad Konerko, Dye, and (in a small role) Timo who was brutal. Dye hadn't yet become what he'd be in the coming years, which was unplayably bad. For Konerko, his limitations weren't obvious with the eye test. We hyped up Rowand quite a bit but still might not have appreciated how well he was playing.

Yoan is the best and most important player in the organization.

I'm not mad about putting Hererra out there. Have to find spots to let him work through this

Okay, no need to send Reynaldo back out there for the 7th. Don't let him talk you into it.

Seems oddly frequent that guys come through our minor leagues relying on their curveballs and then drop it almost completely upon reaching the majors. That's been true of both Giolito and Lopez.

Probably not much

There's no doubt that even at full health, Yoan is really just not a very good basestealer. We'll always need to pick our spots with him carefully.

Nice step forward for Reynaldo today. I'm glad to see the return of his true curve. Even if it is just a tertiary pitch, it seems to be something he can buy strikes with which is something he needs. Just has to use it enough that batters can have some doubt about what pitch he's going to use in various counts.

The first I heard of it was a tweet from JR Fegan mentioning that he had an ice pack on his knee while interviewing with him. Fegan said there or somewhere else that this was part of the reason he got a day off recently.

It has been reported in the past week or so that Yoan has been nursing a knee issue. The other day he looked like he was in pain scoring on a double.

Twitter randos have a spotty track record on these things, but this is all we've got

I do think there's a train of thought that he's a .700-ish OPS guy and he's going to put up similar numbers at every level so there's no use spinning the wheels waiting for him to perform better than you think he will. The idea being that his numbers won't vary level to level all that much, so once he's locked in at this level of production, just promote him and wait till he gets locked in at the same productivity at the next league, and so on.