Balta1701

Ok y’all want some irony? The White Sox have a manager vehemently opposed to the idea of framing, so much so that they traded away Narvaez and declared him awful defensively and then with 2 years of actual coaching he was the best framing catcher in baseball. To solve that, the white Sox bring in a catcher already good at framing. Yay we have improved on framing! The white Sox deservedly fire the manager who hated framing. But, that manager also was totally ok with defensive shifting, and the guy they brought in to replace him believes defensive positioning is the tool of the antichrist, so we fixed one problem and then created another!

Yes.

This. Bummer is supposed to get ground balls. If the manager says “no stand over here so you don’t field them”, Bummer can only do so much.

Hard to win with a rookie CF, a catcher who is a worse hitter than many pitchers, a banged up RF, your league batting champ with 1 hit in 2 games, and with your best starter sidelined the whole year for TJS.

Madrigal is a very divisive player. Having one important tool that is so weak almost guaranteed that. I get people liking him, but I was thrilled to get the best reliever in the game for him. Oops.

Because there were no AL games affected by a manager refusing to pull his starter?

The White Sox had a 71% chance of winning the game up 4-2 is a pretty good response to the “it’s only the players the manager is blameless” stuff.

Why would you burn your bench there at all? It was leading off an inning right? Your suggestion makes more sense than the foolishness that was done, but there was no reason to use the bench there at all.

I think there’s a strong chance they will be trying to save Kopech today, or at least not having him be the first man out.

This lunatic covered about 12 miles in Letchworth State Park today.

An expensive veteran who they didn’t scout well enough and who therefore implodes as soon as he gets to the White Sox? That sounds like the Rick and Kenny show to me.

And while they never tried it, LaRussa still used that as an excuse yesterday, which is infuriating but expected since it was shifting blame away from him.

Fwiw, I see. I reason to think that pitching the 9th would somehow solve Kimbrel’s problems, so there’s plenty of blame to go around for that.

I can remember one pitching the 8th inning. Friday October 8. Wasn’t really needed but Dusty Baker wanted to step on his opponents throat to make sure they were out.

Oh we would have done all that and Ruiz would have been out of the pen after Crochet.

Brian Goodwin could have been batting cleanup.

This might not have been the worst managed Sox game since September started. No way it’s the worst one this year. It just mattered more.

That looks like the 10th most pitches he threw in an outing this year.

I was in the middle of a presentation that convinced my 2 bosses/advisors that we have enough to put together a brief paper to submit to Nature (big deal for a scientist), I had Gameday open on my phone, and I silently said “oh boy here it is I knew it wouldn’t take long for a baffling bullpen move” to myself before he even gave up the hit. It took no focus at all to realize he had blown it.

At least he pitched.

I think the need for bullpen help was obvious and so adding a top flight arm even after Tepera made sense to me. Clears them to move Kopech to a starting role the last 2 months, and now you have 4 starters in the playoffs even if Rodon can’t go. But not only did we not do that, but Kopech isn’t even allowed to pitch. Add in the horrible job by the big league scouts and coaches assessing him beforehand…and yeah, this wasn’t good.

Half a Chris Sale for a guy being saved for game 6.

You can’t possibly complain about the pitching staff. They’re well rested, it’s fine.

Yes, being right here is to the letter what some of us have been warning about all year.

Fwiw I agree with this. The risk of Kimbrel being unmovable is too high.