Balta1701

I believe he sat for the second game of one of the double headers in April.

April.

If Sosa is up for a week, the thing they’re burning on him is a minor league option. Maybe this doesn’t matter. But then we burn an option this year, we burn an option next year to send him to AAA, and then either he struggles in his first big league year or gets hurt, now you have to decide whether to DFA him. Probably this doesn’t matter, but it’s one of those unnecessary errors that only has to be important once. For 10 years we heard about how it didn’t matter that we were trading prospects because they were never any good…until all of a sudden it mattered a lot! Classic Russian roulette. JD Martinez got called up in 2011 when he was probably supposed to spend most of the year at AA. He struggled in the bigs and got sent down. In 2012 he was used as a near everyday player and struggled. In 2013 they dropped him to a part time player and he got a few minor league at bats. Never got a majority AAA season. After that he was released and Detroit signed him. Oh.

And put him in the starting lineup.

I only read him saying he would "Start a game this weekend", not 2/4. So basically they called him up and added him to the 40 man and burned an option for a spot start, if that's to be believed.

I got to that point with Leury in April.

Cough.

That is true across the entire league though. Right now, across the entire league, xAVG is 0.012 (12 points) higher than actual batting average - there's your ball effect, a significant offset between those numbers. The White Sox's actual batting average is therefore better than you'd expect based on the league's offensive performance this year. League wide, xSLUG is 44 points higher than SLG, again likely your dead ball effect. I'm ok with believing that bad weather cost them a few HR early in the year and that explains the rest of why the White Sox's slugging is low, but that shouldn't be mattering right now in June, they're just not hitting balls that can be extra base hits. Either they're hard on the ground or they're not hard enough.

Here's one that I think has been missed. Has it seemed to anyone else like the White Sox have had an insane number of ground ball and bloop singles lately? Well, they have. As of right now, the White Sox have a BABIP of .366 in June. This is not only the highest in baseball in June, if that number were to hold, it would be the highest monthly BABIP in baseball since the Colorado Rockies in July of 2017. Notably, that's Colorado - a place where the ballpark tends to elevate BABIP. It is 0.045 higher than the next highest team in June - Torotno at .321. While the White Sox have been a traditionally high BABIP team, this number is so high that it seems like it must come down. They previously reached .362 in September/October of 2019, but in 4 of the other 6 months that year their BABIP was in the range .310-.330, and the other month it was .343. Furthermore - that 2019 team had an ISO (isolated slugging) of .195 - which during their highest BABIP month was 10th in MLB. Overall that year they had a .153 ISO, so the team's BABIP shot up during the month when they were hitting more extra base hits. The White Sox have a .132 ISO in June - good for 3rd worst in baseball, only Oakland and Detroit are slugging worse this month. They aren't getting extra hits by bouncing things off the wall. The White Sox's offense right now is literally "all singles, all the time, at a rate that seems difficult to sustain." Tim Anderson is admittedly incredible at hitting singles the other way, as is Vaughn apparently, but good golly this seems way out of whack. All these extra hits have balanced out April and May, but as of right now their batting average and their expected batting average are nearly identical, as is the case with most of the league. It's hard to see how they can keep having this many weak hits fall going forward.

The bad news is - how much of that is specifically the Detroit Tigers? The good news is they should have what, 13 left against Detroit?

Not sure if this made last nights’s game thread or not.

You would have to pay to send Harrison somewhere. He is a DFA candidate if Eloy, Engle, and Moncada do come back. He’s a sweetener in the same sense arsenic is a useful coffee sweetener.

Harrison and Sheets have no real value right now. Engel (sp) just reinjured the same hamstring as last year. You gotta be confident he’s actually healthy first. Giolito is a mess right now. You’re almost better off holding him and hoping he turns things around in the second half or next year.

This would be simply inexcusable for a legit prospect coming up from AA.

I think Romy is hurt. If they’re just calling up a backup it should have been Yolbert.

Fine. You are giving him a day to get comfortable and let the nerves die down. I don’t believe that works at all but blah. You know what doesn’t help nerves? Sitting around on a bench next to a bunch of people he barely knows waiting for his first at bat with no idea when it will come because the manager won’t commit to starting him tomorrow. Maybe he can keep himself awake for 3 nights wondering when it will come, that’ll help nerves!

“The kid was just called up and I don’t want him to be over nervous or too hyped. So, I’m not going to publicly commit to when he’s starting so he doesn’t know when his first at bat will come. Nothing takes away nerves like sitting around alone for days and having no clue when a big event is going to happen.”

This should read “Sosa will start tomorrow”. There was no other acceptable way to put it.

The Jeter kid Boston just called up missed a couple calls from his manager in the morning and almost missed his call up. He not only played that night, but Xander asked into the lineup on what was supposed to be his offday to show support for the kid.

Thats precisely why you put him into a game of baseball today. That's the thing he's used to!

By OAA, Sheets is actually better than Pollock. Vaughn is the worst OF by a good amount.

Naw, we’ve seen Vaughn and Sheets at both corner OF spots already.

Because they don’t need the roster spot yet. They can get one via Eloy so no need yet.

Drat about Mendick. But on the bright side, if Eloy comes back they can move Mendick to the 60 man.