35thstreetswarm

"The 2005 White Sox lost the best player in franchise history for the season. How are they going to replace that?" 😄

That's terrible as I was really counting on spending a lot of my future free time and money hanging around a slag heap in Indiana outside gametime

I'm definitely starting to adjust expectations upwards from "I think this team can be fun and watchable this season, and that's way more than I expected," which is where I was during May. This season has been such a great reminder of three principles that baseball reinforces over and over (but nonetheless don't seem to make any better as a prognosticator): 1) baseball is weird; 2) progress and regression are not linear; and 3) it's hard for pretty much everybody--fans, media--to recognize and react to an emerging phenomenon in real time rather than falling into the trap of replaying past seasons in their heads and expecting future results to match. These are why I really hate the common offseason analysis of starting with last year's season as a baseline and adding or subtracting based on personnel moves. In that analysis, "this is basically a 60-win team plus Murakami -- even if he's great he doesn't get you to more than 6-7 wins, so this is at best a 70-win team." Every season is a unique animal with wide ranges of progress/regression for individual players, intangibles, team cohesion, etc. at play. That's the beauty of watching the season actually play out. Basically: "that's why they play the games."

The Cubs season continues to be extremely entertaining. https://www.bleachernation.com/cubs/2026/06/10/cubs-miserable-season/

We don't know that yet at all. June 10, 2021 the White Sox were 14 games over .500 and firing on all cylinders. They were coming off a playoff appearance and headed for a division championship. People were wearing Hahn t-shirts at the Rate. The debate was whether the WS window extended to 2024 or 2025, not fretting over the batting champ's imminent nosedive out of baseball. Take a time machine back five years and there was at least as much excitement around the team as there is now. I obviously hope this rebuild goes better, and that the current crop doesn't flame out like the last one did (it would be pretty hard to flame out harder), but there's a lot of hindsight bias floating around Sox fandom these days.

Never seen anyone whose social media persona is more mismatched to his real-life persona than Steve Stone. Online Stone is a stone-cold weirdo 😄

Can someone please rename this thread "SoxtalkTalk"? And then perhaps all SoxtalkTalk from other threads can be automatically routed to/confined to this thread? Thanks!

Speak for yourself - I for one woke up today excited to spend my week tuning in to the posts about the posts about the posts about Braden Montgomery! Here's hoping my favorite Soxtalk posters' posts about posters will be vindicated and I can tell my kids I got to see them see it all happen. What a great time to be a White Sox fan fan fan.

That little roundhouse kick at the end of every pitch -- never saw that before

No, not at all. What you're envisioning lives in a totally different sphere of the human experience. Taking the "athlete," and the physical activity, out of athletics removes the central aspect of athletics that has appealed to humankind for generations.

Are we sure Cleveland isn't "going on a tear" right now? I mean, they've been doing nothing but win lately, are already on a 93-win pace, just beat the Yankees...if they keep playing the way they are they could well end up with one of the best records in the AL.

Sox Fan Girl, a dead fish floating atop a steaming Bubbly Creek, the Nashville skyline, an Amtrak railyard, a crumbling nursing home, and Colson Montgomery wearing a 1b mitt

False. You can't think a thing, and then also another thing. It's science

The 2026 White Sox: "Suck My D*** You F***ing B*****"