southsider2k5

It wasn't even that drastic of a difference in play, except we gave away so many defensive plays that this game looks like a blow out. Take those out and this is a pretty even game.

Another wasted out there by not tossing that ball to 2nd or running to second.

Holy crap, how do you not throw the ball to 2nd. It is RIGHT in front of you. That's just dumb baseball.

There is no easy high fly ball today.

And instead of giving the Cubs a free baserunner, they got him out. Today is much better.

Not once, but twice.

Now Nicky gets a hit..

The winds are just crazy today.

Fair. I mean we even have a kid we could play for a week at 1B to see what we have for the first time in years. We can't even use the "what would replace him" excuse that we could use for a lot of this team. Even if Eklo bombs in regular playing time, call Vaughn back up in 10 days.

Literally nothing right now.

This is the stuff I am talking about. No matter what happens, Vaughn starts essentially every day, somewhere in the middle of the line up. If he was uncoachable and/or lazy, why spend good money to bring him back? Why keep him on the major league roster after the fact? Give him a few days off. Give him a trip to AAA. Give him a phantom IL trip. Do something different to get his attention. But running him out 5 days a week in the middle of the line up at 1B is the same thing we have done with him for years now, with no results.

It is so hard to keep up with all of these changes...

Nothing like a windy day at Wrigley.

Then why is he still with the major league club if he won't listen?

And there goes Gilbert

Ok, so for all of the talk about how proactive the Sox are with Colson Montgomery and identifying a problem and taking action to fix it, why do we absolutely refuse to do anything different with Andrew Vaughn?

Smith recovered very nicely after he got out of that big inning. Will be interesting to see how long his stuff lasts this year, as he is another who doesn't have much of an innings history underneath him. He's already over halfway to a career high for IP in a season.

When it comes to line up construction and playing time one of two things happened. Either they found a Pedro clone, or Getz was highly involved with both managers in these aspects, because nothing has changed.

I will be honest, seeing as literally nothing has changed with line up management and roster usage, it tells me that a lot of these things are happening above the field manager. When it comes to Venable, I would look to better defense and smarter base running as ways to measure what he is actually responsible for.

He got years to figure it out, because he isn't getting fired anytime soon.

I am also going to say this zone is TINY for Smith. He isn't even getting the black right now.

Let me be fully aggressive there. While Rick Hahn and Kenny Williams own their fair share of responsibility here, the fact that the guy who ran one of the worst productive farm systems in baseball got a promotion, instead of his pink slip, is laughable. That's without even getting started on Jerry blocking Rick on hiring a real manager, and blocking them on bringing in actual high end MLB players to compliment the rebuild.

5 outs in an inning will do that.

Or if Vaughn could throw. Or if the Sox play DP depth.

Smith could have been out of that inning with literally zero.