Balta1701

There is no greater White Sox postseason tradition than the complete game.

What was the lesson MLB learned? That all their protocols were quaint once a person got it, and a single positive test required them to shut down for 3 days until everyones tests came back clean twice, otherwise they had the Marlins and Cardinals.

So the Titans had a player test positive on Saturday, they played anyway, and by Tuesday they have 3 players and 5 staff who are positive and now the Vikings are at risk also? Did no one learn anything from baseball?

But since he’s a dramatically better player than he was 2 years ago, that “towards the norm” will still be a worthy starting catcher, potentially a better bargain than Grandal.

For his whole career, Rodon's worst ERA in any inning is during inning #1. At least for this year, out of the 3, Cease has the best ERA in innings 1-3, Dunning is ok in those innings, Rodon isn't.

Here in Texas, the governor granted a no-bid contract to a company that couldn't do it for reasons that have never been explained, presumably some sort of corruption that people have been too busy to deal with and will probably never fully investigate. They had no skill at it and haven't done much if anything, but someone got paid. That was only part of the problem - the other part was that once cases shot up, there wasn't enough money or resources to do it effectively. If there's a hundred cases statewide, then you can assign 3 or 4 people per day to each case, find out everyone they contacted for the previous week, call them a dozen times until they pick up, email them, call their neighbors, go to their houses, and get them tested. If there's 10,000 cases a day statewide, then each person who tests positive might get one phone call asking them to list a few close contacts, each of those close contacts might get one phone call, if they don't pick up or they refuse to go get tested you don't have time to spend on them because you have 9000 other cases to get through that day. There might have been some national steps that could have been taken, such as developing a full tracing app in cooperation with tech companies that would have dramatically expanded the ability to do that, but that would have taken national leadership. That's why other countries (South Korea in particular) were able to do that and we couldn't, because we have no national leadership. And finally, having the resources to track and trace and test everyone...costs money. Our local health department stopped reporting numbers in the same way in August because they were out of money to keep compiling them. Edit: oh and it's only useful anyway if you can get test results quickly. If a person shows symptoms and their positive test doesn't come back for 8 days, then contact tracing is pointless since they've already done all the spreading they are going to do and it's on 2 generations down the road. In June/July when cases were surging nationwide, the average test for anyone not in MLB was taking 4-5 days to come back, and there's almost no use in tracing with that long of a wait.

With Madrigals ability to control the bat and put the ball in play there’s almost no reason for him to ever sacrifice bunt. If he swings away he’ll get hits what, 1/3 of the time, and most of the other times he will have a good chance of making a productive out.

So first, I hope someone reading this appreciates the irony of you defending restaurant visits on a Baseball forum and also talking about personal responsibility in the same post, where the last issue with restaurants in MLB was a team banishing 2 players to the minors and trading one because they went to a restaurant after a game and the team judged that such an outrageous betrayal that they would not play with those players again. Second, this is a damned lethal, dreadfully harmful virus. 300,000 Americans will die of it in 2020, maybe more if we keep opening more things up. Please tell me how on earth the binary “this is bad” is the wrong thing. Is a good middle ground more dead Americans than that? Come on. We are witnessing the worst mass casualty event for Americans in a single year since the civil war right now. You want to complain about me being an absolutist about literally hundreds of thousands dead and millions seriously damaged where they will be affected for who knows how many years being awful and something we should not just be ok with? Go ahead. This is awful and that is my binary position. Argue that I’m being too absolute about that. Third...going to a restaurant or a bar, you are not being personally responsible. The Cleveland Indians recognized that. You are relying on everyone else being responsible and keeping masks on, not going out if exposed. If they don’t do that, you could do everything right and still get it. You literally added the “unless they are taking a drink” exception to your post, and if a person has it, that’s plenty to infect you in that enclosed building. And then you become a transmission vector. You kept your mask on, but someone else took a drink and now you got it, so where were you irresponsible? When you went out in the first place, which you just excused and justified to defend your favorite winery. That’s the horrible part of this. If you want to be personally responsible then you can do nothing. You cannot visit your favorite bar, because you already made a risky choice. And if even one of your relatives or neighbors does the irresponsible thing of going to a bar or restaurant, your personal responsibility lecture does nothing, because they can get you. And that’s where the contradiction comes in. You are so used to blaming people for their failures with the personal responsibility trope that there’s no context for a problem that only is fixed if we all do the right thing. You need communal responsibility. You need someone else to do the right thing. If you only care about what you want to lecture about, your individual responsibility, then going out is a mistake. We can demonstrate this statistically that people going to restaurants get sick. And there is the problem. I don’t want your favorite restaurant to die, but I also don’t want another 14,000 Texans to die this year from it. Restaurants are not safe if there is uncontrollable transmission. Every time someone else gets it, that is another reason for me to not visit any site as a high risk individual. My money can help keep these places open but I havent had restaurant food in 7 months. The right answer was the same one in April. You love a restaurant? They are not a safe place to be during uncontrolled transmission. They have to close. Even outdoors is a risk. But keeping them from failing is now a community responsibility. People die when they open and I hope you are not seriously going to try to justify those deaths as some middle ground. So restaurants have to rely on takeout and the government has to spend money to keep them from failing completely. That keeps being included in the bill Democrats want passed, but Republicans specifically are blocking aid to restaurants. Is it a binary to note that Democrats passed that aid in May and nothing has happened because the Republicans don’t care? End uncontrolled transmission then you have a shot at keeping those places open, but again that requires far more work and far greater restrictions, and the idea that we need to control this is just labeled an “extreme position”, so this person with a compromised immune system will continue being as responsible as they can be and hope that they can leave this community before they get him sick. And if your restaurant fails...well you can’t lecture me about personal responsibility. So in the end, Texas has opened stuff up again, half their restaurants will fail anyway because a lot of people are being responsible and there is no support, and we will hear lectures about personal responsibility when that trope means everyone must stay inside until community transmission stops. So ironically, you get to choose. Which is important to you. Do you want to lecture people about personal responsibility, or do you want every public gathering and restaurant to shut down? Because just like for the Cleveland Indians, that's the binary you set up. If you're ready to accept that this is a communal, nationwide problem that we all have to solve together then we have a way out. Get case loads down to a reasonable number where every one can be tracked and traced. Create a legitimate tracking and tracing program where opening new things doesn't lead to new transmission. When cases pop up, treat every one as a challenge. Isolate people who are sick and provide them available health care. Pay to keep businesses from failing while we develop this system. Or alternatively, lecture people about personal responsibility while trying somehow to justify behavior that is demonstrably irresponsible, and just look the other way as the body count climbs...like we're doing right now. I hope that this isn't the middle ground you want..

Well I guess it’s a good thing I went out and mowed rather than watching this.

This ball better be put in play

If we had Lance Lynn everything would be fixed!

That could not possibly have been more on purpose.

Stone did the same sort of stuff last year except he was ranting about the fans at the time. The White Sox clearly are ok with that type of behavior. https://www.soxmachine.com/2019/07/23/steve-stone-fans-complaining/

2012 was straight up exhaustion. Sale and Quintana were so far over their previous innings highs that they just had nothing left to give.

They’re doing a full bubble starting in round 2 and I think by now most teams have figured out that you need an effective bubble anyway. No restaurants, limited outside contact. The Cleveland thing where people were banished from the team for going to restaurants was probably a good part of that lesson.

That’s the literal point! To the letter! We signed 4 guys in 2015 in that range and 3 busted! We did the same thing this year and have busts! They aren’t all busts but a lot are! You are repeating my words back at me!

The numbers on the middle part of the FA market were TERRIBLE in 2015-2018. In 2018, out of about 20 guys who got salaries between $10 and $20 million a year, there were 2 guys you’d have resigned to the same deal a year later, everyone else underperformed their contract. The numbers improved marginally in 2019 after the whole FA market collapsed, but here in 2020 we are right back to the 50% bust, 25% success, 25% iffy rate we saw in 2015 and 2016. Next offseason has a chance of being a nightmare for even good free agents because of the revenue losses, so on that who knows? But the rule to me is the same aside from that. If you have a 95 win team before you hit the Middle part of the FA market, you spend $50 million next year and you are a 97 or 98 win team. You are a 72 win team on talent, you spend that money and you win 74 games. You might fill one hole, but you spend money and find yourself with 3 holes still remaining.

Balta: says the phrase “occasional success” Caulfield: cites the one success out of several signings this year by name as though it’s an exception. Dude, what do you think that phrase meant?!

I can pick the things I like about baseball. I love it when a guy I’m cheering for hits a big home run and is pumped up about it. Have some fun when you win. You don’t want a guy to show you up, beat him.

The long term rule is, if you’re playing the middle part of the free agent market, you find the occasional success and a majority of busts. We saw this over and over again this decade. If you aren’t willing to spend with the top guys...some of your signings will work, but most of them won’t, so your team will be about as good as it was beforehand.

The 2019 White Sox made a big deal of how throwing at a guy for having too much fun was stupid. They were right!!!!

Tim Anderson better not flip a bat this series otherwise it’s open season on him. Good thing he’s not popular in the clubhouse and no one in this org has made a big deal about those unwritten rules in the last 2 years.

I keep saying this...the middle part of the free agent market is the absolute worst. You sign 4 guys, you get 1 guy who is really good and 2 who are busts. It’s inherent in that part of the market. Guys who teams think will perform well don’t reach free agency, the bust rate in that range from year to year is 50 to 75 percent.

You don’t want the guy to show you up? I have a solution. Get him out. Failing that, come back tomorrow, hit the first pitch 425, and do the same damn thing. He was better than our pitcher. Our response? Waaaaaaa he was mean about it. Show him up on the field.