Balta1701

Not with a steroid suspension.

That doesn’t clear a 40 man roster spot, only an active 26 man roster spot. Gio would need to move to the 60 day IL to clear a 40 man slot.

Leury moves back to hitting 3rd.

Oh come on I turn on some Star Trek thinking Graveman is in and this?

That was also fast.

Apparently the white Sox are 6-11 in their last 17 against KC

The same thing happens if you hit Vaughn 4th. Except this way, Vaughn gets fewer chances to hit and fewer RBI chances. It might work once. This is dumb enough to be an extra loss if he does it a few times.

There were some whispers that they might not be in the best financial shape during the off-season. But then they still signed Story so?

Now the black hole just gets more at bats because they hit earlier and can kill a rally earlier.

By the way, the White Sox are currently tied in "days players have spent on the IL" for 7th most in MLB, matching the Dodgers, who somehow are as banged up as the White Sox and yet are really good.

https://www.mlb.com/whitesox/video/luis-robert-s-2-run-homer That one was his most recent and it was pretty darn good, against Boston.

I think it was obvious that the White Sox were likely to be banged up this season, but to put numbers on this - right now, the White Sox are 42 runs behind the Twins in run differential. If no one got hurt, are they 5 WAR better right now? If Lynn was here and Keuchel wasn't, that's 1 WAR. Moncada over Burger, that's 1 WAR. Maybe a half of one for Giolito being out a couple times. You're still behind the Twins - in the race for the Central, but the Twins are still outplaying the White Sox, with an imaginary team that is almost completely healthy (which again, the White Sox were never going to be).

On its own it isn't, but it's getting close to being so. Is 50 games enough? That's Memorial day, give or take, and yeah people start thinking that they know what their team is made of by that point. If this were the NFL, right now is 4 games - if you're 2-2 after 4 games, having been blown out twice and having narrowly won two sloppy games on field goals at the end against teams that missed the playoffs the year before, you don't hate yourself, you're not out of the race by any means, but you might have a team meeting and say "we either play better or we miss the playoffs because those 3 teams that are 4-0 are really going to be tough to catch". In short, I'm not ready to write this off as a 3rd place team yet, but they better show something soon because this isn't a small fix. This isn't one player needing to play better. It's systematic and everywhere, and the clock is ticking.

We still really don’t know what they meant when they said his contract was pro-rated, whether that was the entire contract somehow or just “he loses money until he’s called up”. If it’s the former, and there is a legal contract structure that pays him $4 million prorated to how long he’s on the big league roster, then calling him up and figuring things out later is fine.

It's a combined effort but the answer is - they need to beat up a few teams over the next 2 weeks. They can't squeak by the Royals for 2 wins this week then get blown out by the Yankees twice next weekend. The weather is no longer an excuse, Moncada is back and actually killing the ball for now, Vaughn is back. There should be offensive ability here on paper, and there is clearly pitching ability although it has underperformed as well. We need to put together some complete games. Score 7 and give up 2 runs a few times. We also see this in the bullpen - people were talking over the weekend about how Graveman and Hendriks were on pace for like 80 appearances and that was why LaRussa wouldn't use them on Friday? Why is that happening? Because they get days off when the White Sox get blown out, but every time the White Sox win it's a close game, and that means the bullpen main guys are in demand every time as without using those guys they probably lose. Quite simply, they need to get their act together in every way. The offense stands out the most because people are paying attention to it, but the pitching is way worse than it was supposed to be in both the rotation and the bullpen, and the defense has been the worst in baseball. The Dodgers are at +70. The Astros are at +40. If Abreu and Grandal were hitting normally, would they have scored 70 more runs in a month, to keep Up with legit contenders? Naw. Quite simply, they need to play better in every aspect of the game. One guy hitting better is not enough to dig out of this hole.

Have been watching this for a while and have to take the bus today because of weather so let’s write this. A solid predictor of future performance and team quality is run differential. If teams are winning close games but getting blown out in losses, they will have a record better than their run differential and often that means their record will correct eventually with a batch of losses in close games. The White Sox are at -30 this year. That is 24th in baseball, between the Rockies and the Orioles. This is legitimately bad. They are way worse than the Cubs or Red Sox on this, they are down with the Tigers. This is a team that has played extremely bad baseball overall, and this is why the fans are pessimistic despite their record - they have played way worse than their record. This is also bad enough that its not something that one player returning from injury will fix. Whatever other metric you attach - strength of schedule or whatever else - doesn’t help this. Context is useful here. Last year the White Sox had a +147 run differential - not the Dodgers or Astros but a legit playoff team. This is a team playing dramatically worse than last year. A few other teams like the Red Sox, Blue Jays, and Reds have similar dramatic drop offs and they are not good teams right now. What about last years’ Braves? In mid May they had a -15 run differential. By June 1 it was back to close to 0, it hung close to 0 throughout June, then they were at +40 by the trade deadline - not a dominant team but a legitimate wild card threat before adding players. That’s what we need to be doing literally right now - winning games solidly and moving that back towards 0 by mid June. Right now this team looks like pretenders because they look like the Orioles or Tigers. In run differential they dropped from 0 during that first losing streak, hovered for a week, and then kept getting worse. If we are talking about a team on Memorial Day that has a -40 run differential, which is what they’re on pace for then they might well be a true 3rd place team.

The last time Rodon had substantial trade value was something like 2016.

It’s not just the hitting. The pitching was a strength all year last year and it’s decidedly middle of the pack however you look at it. And on top of that, they’re the worst defensive team in baseball. Almost no one thought this team would be slugging their way to the division. Especially with all the money dumped into the bullpen, this team isn’t winning a damn thing if they pitch like this.

I don’t know what exactly their hitting coaches are saying, but in the entire statcast era the white Sox are at or near the bottom of baseball in launch angle, and about the only constant players through that time are Leury and Abreu so hitting the ball on the ground too much has been a longterm issue across several coaches.

The last time the Yankees scored 5 runs on 2 hits was 1952.

This guy has 4 appearances, an ERA under 2, and a record of 2-2???? What the hell ?

Dammit come on

Drat.

Yoan is wearing out center field.