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*****"

Really not sure there's any reason to move off of Roch, but if the scouts determine Lackey is BPA I don't think current positional need should factor into the decision whether to draft him. A lot of things can happen in the couple years (minimum) before he comes up. Teel might already be off catcher by then; he might be ready to move off; he might be hurt, he might be a bust.

Venable's Amenables

Yes, and you clearly care far too little to type the post you just typed. I've said it before and I'll say it again: every cross-town rival in every sport across the world "cares about" the team across town. It would be bizarre if they didn't. They share the same city and the same potential fanbase. The main difference I've detected in the fanbases in Chicago is that Sox fans treat it like a normal rivalry, and Cub fans have developed this weird, passive-aggressive coping mechanism where they spend their entire lives screeching about how little they care.

I always remarked to my son that he looked like the saddest White Sox player. He looked anguished at the plate. In seriousness, I have to think the ride from hyped draft pick down to struggling journeyman must be uniquely challenging psychologically. Hope he puts it together on the field and, if not, that he finds a good life after baseball and remembers that, in the grand scheme of things, it's pretty damn cool to be able to say you were a big league ballplayer for the rest of your life.

"Will Venable was dismissed as manager of the Chicago White Sox effective immediately. Despite the team playing wildly beyond expectations and increasing attendance and excitement around the team significantly, he reportedly asked a newly-promoted slap hitter to bunt in a regular season game. It is unclear whether he will face criminal charges, and his family has asked for privacy at this difficult time."

I just did a little survey, and every single mock draft/draft prospect ranking I could find (ESPN, NY Times, Bleacher Report, MLB.com, Sports Illustrated, Baseball America, Perfect Game, Bleacher Nation, and several others) had Cholowsky as their #1. It's not a Soxtalk phenomenon. Now maybe a "slam dunk 1-1" has to mean "nobody has entertained any doubts about his status whatsoever," (in which case I don't think any such prospect exists), but I don't remember a much stronger consensus building behind any #1 in recent memory.

She did nothing wrong. She's a fan. PCA does "suck." She was clearly posting that she was "just enjoying her engagement party" with a nod and a wink to the fact that she was visibly giving it to PCA. It was on TV and she had undoubtedly heard from her friends that millions of people watched the whole thing by the time she posted. She wasn't trying to hide anything. Unpopular take nowadays, but I think heckling is an increasingly lost art form and that the decline in fan heckling of opposing players is a shame. The creative outfield heckling I used to hear as a kid was a factor of ten more intense than anything I hear these days. It was also just tremendously entertaining, you rarely hear it now, and way too many fans seem anxious to (to use the term from above) "white knight" for these guys who could care less about them rather than enjoy the wit of their fellow fans on a day at the ballpark. These guys get paid millions to play a child's game and they are just going to have to deal with a lady making fun of them when they blow a catch. Yes, there are varying degrees of quality in heckling, and some heckling (aimed at kids, family, race, etc.) is out of line. But this is a story about modern players going soft, not modern fans going wrong.

He also has the disadvantage of being big. A lot of folks still have a mental image of shortstops as 5'9 speedsters (regardless of the developments at the position over the last couple decades) and just assume big Colson is destined for a corner spot.

As far as I can tell just about every coach/manager that just got done pounding another team has said something like "that's a damn fine team over there." (Except in the case of like a hated rival or something.) Did he correctly predict that we'd "give110%" and "play the right way" too? 😄 That just standard sports platitudes. (And any snide skepticism is directed at Garfien, btw, not the Soxtalk poster.)