chitownsportsfan

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Feb 19, 2015 -> 06:07 PM) His speed is not an issue defensively - it does translate that way. I've watched him play in person and the range is very good, saw him make some plays in short right that were tough for most people. And me makes the occasional spectacular play too. His arm is fine for 2B, but isn't strong enough for an outfielder from what I've seen and read. The problem is the glove work, which is very inconsistent. Part of that seems to be mental - a lack of focus on routine plays, and a tendency to try to do too much and force a play. Those are things that can be learned, which is cause for optimism. Doesn't means he WILL fix them, but it means he can, and he's a sharp guy. Thanks for the report I'll readily admit I don't watch these guys film, don't go to the games, I rely on the reports from scouts. It's interesting to me that the problem is with his glove work because usually what you see is that slower guys rush the throws, rush the transfers, rush everything because they don't trust their own ability to get to the ball quickly. Usually guys that are fast in the infield are also slick with the glove just because they have so much time to get a good grip on the ball, a smooth transfer, whatever. Hopefully he just needs more confidence and seasoning. Keeping his legs healthy, much like Eaton, will be key. I have a feeling Micah is another "sports car" type like Eaton, if he isn't fully tuned, he isn't going to be very effective.

Thing is tho NorthSide he isn't "knocking on the door of the majors" with his play in the minors. He's only there by default as the Sox don't have anyone obviously better than him either in MLB or MilB. It's faint praise IMO. I'm not high on guys that can't translate their speed defensively. Speed needs to play not just on the bases but defensively and in getting on base (Eaton is a master of the slap hustle single). Maybe Micah puts it all together this year in AAA and forces his way onto the big club. I just don't expect it. "Middling prospect" was too harsh but I personally have him ranked outside the top 10 in the ORG. As for Rodon, I fully expect him to throw 50-120 innings in the bigs this year, but not more than that. He needs at least 5-10 starts in Charlotte to continue to work on his command and control and pitch sequencing. That means like a late June callup and I expect him to replace whoever is the least effective starter to that point. My money is on Danks. Danks will either be DFA or traded for a bucket of balls before the deadline imo. I don't see much from any of his peripherals or PitchFX data from the last two years that leads to optimism.

The irrational exuberance on Micah Johnson is one of the most inexplicable things I've seen. He can't field 2B. Until he does, he's a 25th man, at best. If he gets 400 PA in Charlotte and goes 300/340/440 with 30 out of 40 SB and the reports on his defense are better -- than fine, pencil him in for 2016. Until then he's just a middling prospect IMO. He's not 22, he's 24, that's a major blow. He's older than Sanchez FFS.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 19, 2015 -> 04:18 PM) He will adjust to having seen pitchers before. He has one hole in his approach and that is junk down. Most hitters have a weakness. Miguel Cabrera likes to chase high heat. Problem for pitchers isn't knowing the weakness, it's not missing the spot. Oh, that fastball missed to Miggy: wasn't that up and wasn't that in, that's a double. That slider to Jose wasn't that down, and wasn't that sharp, that's in the seats or roped out to the gap. I'm not worried about Jose, he's a rock. If anything, worst case, he'll regress down to 280/340/500 and be worth 3-4 WAR instead of 5. Hopefully the team around him picks up the slack.

QUOTE (mmmmmbeeer @ Feb 19, 2015 -> 01:17 AM) Jose is easily a top 3 hitter in the league, imo. He had 10HR last April but, outside the power, he hit under .260 with an OBP just over .300 (and just 1 HR in May). He absolutely dominated after that. Post-ASB he slashed 350/432/513. June, July, and August were just phenomenal months. He's going to eventually find that perfect mix of average and power and I think it'll happen sooner than later. He could legitimately put up prime Miggy numbers this season or next. You look forward to his 4th season and beyond and I don't think it's too much of a stretch that he could draw parallels to prime Big Hurt. As Sox fans who watch a lot of games, we saw that he was adjusting to the league's adjustments extremely quickly. He was a rookie....couldn't speak English....had money for the first time in his life....was working on getting his family here....there are plenty of excuses for him to have failed last season and he overcame them all. As he becomes more comfortable, the league is in trouble. Yea I agree with this, for all the talk of his 2nd half "power outage" is the major story wasn't the lack of power but that he turned into prime Edgar Martinez with the OBP. Frankly, I'd probably take that 350/432/513 line over his 260/300/600ish line from the first half. Yea the power was done, but everything else was way, way up, including the patience. I feel quite confident saying that he is up there with the best hitters in MLB entering his 2nd season. Now, that doesn't mean he'll post the 3rd best wRC+ in baseball like last year (behind only Cutch and Trout) but it does mean that if he says healthy he has a shot to duplicate that success or even surpass it.

QUOTE (Jose Abreu @ Feb 16, 2015 -> 11:47 AM) Looks like we can forget about the scheduled reporting dates. 25 players, including Abreu, are already there with more arriving today. Yea I'm sure these guys are chomping at the bit to get going. Bit of a late start this year, last year the first game was on the 28th of February.

QUOTE (lasttriptotulsa @ Feb 16, 2015 -> 01:25 PM) I think if Robin would have played in this day and age with the way we look at advanced stats, he would be a superstar. The guy played great defense, had good power, struck out at better than average rates, walked a ton, and during his peak hit roughly 25% better than league average and was a 5.5 fWAR player. That would make him roughly a top 10-15 position player in all of baseball. He def would have been more celebrated. He is a lot like Donaldson in that he plays good defense, gets on base, and has some pop at a relatively premium defensive position. If he hadn't torn up his foot he might have had a HOF case, after the injury he just wasn't the same bat speed wise.

Robin was a helluva player. HOVG for sure. Never had the peak required for a serious HOF case but was a good player for the better part of a decade and a useful player almost his entire career.

QUOTE (Bigsoxhurt35 @ Feb 14, 2015 -> 06:59 PM) That was a bad interview. Just ungodly bias. Beckham sucks. I really hope that this is Hawk's last year. He's literally losing his mind and if you look at some of the video of him during the ice bucket challenge it's obvious his body is frail and not up to the rigors of following the team for 162 games. It's in his own interests to scale back and I just hope he doesn't have to be forced out of the booth or turn into a situation like Harry Carry at the end.

QUOTE (oldsox @ Feb 4, 2015 -> 08:45 PM) Are you telling me that the Sox are not on the hook for Viciedo's salary? yes. exactly, has been reported for months now. They paid him like 700k. I poured through the CBA, or what I could find of it online, looking for the clause that allows for only partially guaranteed contract. Closest thing I could find is that 1 year deals are subject to a clause where if a player is cut before certain days during the season he is only due a partial salary. Doesn't apply to guys that accepted arb or anyone on a multi year deal. Maybe someone here could elaborate further.

I was a huge DV fan back when he was coming up through the system. Put up some really good numbers in the minors and the first time I saw him in Baltimore he was playing 3B for the Sox and held his own that night while absolutely scorching a couple "tough luck" line drives. Thought the kid was the real deal based on his minor league stats and bat speed -- never translated. Actually regressed as a hitter in his time as a Sox and also never improved one iota as a defender. "Power" isn't really any more valuable than it's ever been (might be harder to find, but that doesn't mean it's more valuable when talking about individual players) but defense is now properly valued and that kills guys like Viciedo. Not really that surprised nobody wanted to give up anything for him as the Sox had no leverage, any team that really wants him can now just entice him with playing time and it costs nothing via trade. That said, in spring last year he seemed like a good team mate, signed a lot of autographs, was always laughing with the other players in warmups that kinda thing. Tough for his career but he's made decent money already and even if he never signs another deal if he spent his money well he should be fairly well set for life. His kids won't be, but he should.

nathan sucks jeez forget sabermetrics just watch him pitch 4 or 5 times in a row. Tigers fans hate him.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Jan 30, 2015 -> 04:35 PM) You are correct in your interpretation of linear regression model. The take home message from this is that none of the models predict the actual number of wins very well. For example I do the linear regressions yearly on trying to predict how our graduate will perform on the license exam. I use admisson aswell as program variable and I can get a r2 vaule of around 75% Which pretty good. From my reading of Nassim Taleb part of this is just the inherent problems in using regression to model a complex, multivariate system -- MLB team win totals. Making a prediction of a player's stats is child's play compared to trying to model league win totals.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Jan 30, 2015 -> 04:25 PM) On a sidenote, when I look at the models and what it spits out and go through the list of players, I basically come to the conclusion that on paper, they are wrong about the White Sox. I'd say on paper this is around an 85 win team (+ / 7 or so games). If all goes well, it can win a few more games and if it doesn't go well, they might drop into that 78 win category. I also think if this team makes the playoffs, their odds improve as they are pretty well built for the post-season, with what looks to be a strong back-end of the pen and a strong front-end of the rotation, surrounded by a pretty strong top of the order. Team defense is still the piece that makes you go yuck and may end up hindering the effectiveness of our top 3 in the rotation (as well as the back-end of the pen). Ironically if you plugged in Rodon and Bonifacio instead of Sanchez and Noesi, you'd probably gain 2 wins in most projection systems. I too peg this team at about 85 wins. They can slide down to 80 with a big injury to star, but you can say that about most teams. Other than the Nationals, I don't see a "super team" out there this year that could sustain multiple long-term injuries to their top handful of guys.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Jan 30, 2015 -> 04:15 PM) Their are inherent biases in the algorithm which will tend to favor certain teams, thus making where you fall, relatively biased based upon the team you have. I'd tell you right now...in my line of work, which is heavily focused on plan & analysis, I'd be pretty flipping pissed off if I consistently saw the plan vs. actual results that these models have historically predicted for our Sox and to be frank, I'd probably be without a job. Note: I'm not saying they are biased against the Sox, rather, biased against certain types of rosters, etc (and I'd argue the Sox have a lot of guys who historically fall into some of these scales which drive this). The fact that your metrics can consistently be so wrong on specific teams is pretty alarming as well. Hard to confirm overall validity when you have such wide disparities and almost consistently. The statistic significance of the data becomes far more limited when you look at the deviations from the predictive model and realize you have some pretty extensive deviations (on both sides of the equation; Both in # (Total Win Variations) and in count (e.g., # of teams who have significant deviations). Look at these r2 values: http://www.hardballtimes.com/evaluating-th...ection-systems/ ZIPS 0.330 Steamer 0.316 PECOTA 0.304 Oliver 0.307 Marcel 0.240 Average 0.318 Nothing to write home about, that's for sure. Basically (in my limited stats 101 knowledge) the r2 is simply "the variance explained in the model".

PECOTA seems heavily regressed to the mean, and while that might make statistical sense, what we are interested in as fans isn't the mean case, but the outlier case(s). What is interesting is the breakouts, both at the team level and player level. I haven't seen where PECOTA predicts outliers any better than ZIPS, or even the Diamond Mind sim predictions. Plus, the Sox have a lot of guys without a lot of data on them, or bad data due to injury. Garcia and Eaton (his bad 2013) fall into the injury related cases, and Jose Abreu is a 28 year old that had the 3rd highest wRC+ in baseball last year. Projections are going to put him down for a regression, but many scouts (and us fans) might be putting him down to actually IMPROVE, based on the fact that now he knows the grind of the season, many of the pitchers, how they plan to get him out, etc. I wouldn't guarantee it, but with Jose, there just isn't a lot of data for the projections to look at, in this instance scouting might be better informed. And of course playing time projections are often inaccurate. I'm not completely arguing to "throw out the projections, including PECOTA" but it's been proven time and time again that their predictive value is mixed, at best. Yea I'd rather the Sox were projected for 100 wins, but it's not the end of the world to see 78 either. I don't think Hahn or us fans think this is a 78 win team. I think it's closer to 85 but that's just my opinion.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Jan 28, 2015 -> 11:27 PM) They will not do a strict platoon with any players. Just my feeling from comments but Ventura will play this new bench more but it will not be a strict platoon. It's def Robin's make or break year IMO. If he doesn't do SABER style things like play the platoon advantage (backed up by splits, not just some gut feeling) then he's going to be second guess both in the media and the FO imo. Hahn doesn't seem like he's expecting anything other than 85-90 wins this year. If Robin doesn't deliver the axe will fall, as it should, again, imo.

It's too bad they had to include Bassitt in the Athletics deal but I agree with witesoxfan I think they are fairly high on Beck and hell, by July, even Montas might be pushing for a MLB promotion. They have decent SP depth. They are a top heavy team though. If one of Eaton, Sale or Abreu goes down, they are losing 4-6 wins right there -- but it's better to have stars than not have them.

I think the Sox are gonna try and find "lighting in a bottle" at 2B whoever it may be. It's not a great plan, but it's not a bad one either when you have 2-3 guys that are all hard to destinguish. In a perfect world someone would grab the spot by the horns but I doubt that one of Sanchez, Bonaficio, or Micah will do that so they will play matchups as much as possible unless someone catches fire, doubtful, but maybe Sanchez will hit 280/320/350 in April and May and with that good defense he starts the rest of the year. Same with Micah or even Bonifiacio.

QUOTE (Y2JImmy0 @ Jan 28, 2015 -> 06:06 PM) I want to know how many people that were in favor of Konerko coming back are angry that Beckham is back. Too lazy to go back and look. Other than both being longish tenured Sox, the situations are not analgous at all. Beckham, for whatever value he has, is OBJECTIVELY still in the absolute prime of his career. Konerko was in the dying embers of his career and the White Sox tried to kick the firepit in hopes it flared up a bit. Never happened.

Hahn is def being kind to Tank. If they felt he had a good chance of success (or anyone else did for that matter) then there would be a market for his services. That market doesn't seem to exist.

QUOTE (Hawkfan @ Jan 28, 2015 -> 05:30 PM) You suck Beckham. How the hell did he get 2 million? Is that really the going rate? It is. WAR on the FA market is almost at 8 million per WAR. For a .5 WAR player like Beckham, 2 million is fair value. edit: when you are talking about the 25th man, there is little "opportunity cost". If the 25th man gets more than 150 PA, something went horribly wrong anyways. No team plans on having the 25th man as anything more than plan D.

Bonifacio will be needed to fill in in the OF to give guys days off. Gordon will be the de facto backup utility IF, 25th man.

Not a huge fan of the move but whatever, Gordon will probably be the 25th man. He's better than Tank for that position. Seems they weren't willing to pay Tank's freight via trade, so whatever.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Jan 28, 2015 -> 11:50 AM) Car is needed. Everything is close but not walking close and there isn't good public transportation. That said, if you wanted to just stay in Glendale, you could see plenty of action without needing a car. I think there is pretty much always a game (whether it is a Sox home game or a Dodgers home game) and the minor league fields are always hustling and bustling with activity, including minor league exhibition games as well. Fantastic experience. I might be biased cause I've been to Arizona a ton for spring training but it is 1000% times better than the grape fruit league. Here, the farthest drive is 1.5 hours (Tuscon) and outside of the minimal teams in Tuscon, everyone else is within 30-45 minutes of each other and a lot of stadiums within 10 - 15 minutes of each other. On top of that, the weather is usually fantastic and Phoenix has awesome awesome food. Yep, Spring Training is better in Arizona, things are just closer together and the weather is better imo. South and even mid Florida in March can get pretty steamy. I went on a couple trips down to Florida for college ball spring training (where our DIII team would get whooped by all the JUCO guys aiming to get drafted) and the weather at mid day was often sweltering. Arizona is that nice dry heat and Phoenix area in late February through March is about perfect, a lot of mid 70s. We didn't make it to the new Cubs park (another rain out, literally the only time it rained during ST 2014 was the one day on the one week I was there, but hey what can you do) but I've heard it's very nice. If you're into hiking and recreating Phoenix area is a paradise that time of year as well. On my "must do" for any recreation person is Camelback Mnt in Phoenix. It's a demanding (but short) 1800 foot ascension over about 1.5 miles and at the top you have a commanding view of the entire "Valley of the Sun".