witesoxfan

QUOTE(lostfan @ Mar 27, 2008 -> 12:45 PM) In the very first sentence I said I wasn't saying he should be a starter. 25 doubles really isn't terrible especially if you're getting on base a lot. 10 triples in the Cell is some pretty high expectations IMO. Any better than that and you're talking about a fringe All-Star. Not with Owens speed 10 triples shouldn't be that much. That's 10 balls to the right field corner or the right center wall a year. He should be able to do that with a bit of power and his speed.

The stats tend to agree with both of you. Ozzie was 7th in the AL in stealing in 1989 with 36, but he was among the league leaders in caught stealing from 88-91, and is 83rd all time in being caught stealing at 108. He also had more doubles than walks in his career, and he wasn't exactly a gap-to-gap hitter either, which tells you a little about how he went about his game. I don't remember much about the 90s Sox, but I remember Ozzie pretty well. I always enjoyed him, and I even have a recollection of him throwing Deion Sanders, in one of his comebacks with the Reds, out at the plate; I remember it because a player flew out to Ozzie at deep short, and Deion tried to tag up at 3rd. That's the first and only time I ever recall a player trying to tag up on a flyball that was that shallow, and Deion almost made it too.

QUOTE(Pants Rowland @ Mar 27, 2008 -> 11:45 AM) I know he was a few years younger at the start of his career, but he sounds like an early career version of Lance Johnson (http://www.baseball-reference.com/j/johnsla03.shtml). Lots of speed, no arm, needs work in CF, punch and judy hitter, no power, lots of singles, high amount of triples, not as many doubles as you would like. I think he could be as good, if not a better player than old One Dog. I'd thought about that comparison before, but even then, One-Dog always showed a bit more power than Owens ever has. And that was 15 years or so ago, when power wasn't nearly as big of an issue. In 1992, Lance Johnson put up an OPS of .681, and that was an OPS+ of 92. Last year, Danny Richar put up an OPS of .695; that was an OPS+ of 78. Owens could put up identical numbers to Lance Johnson, but in today's game, you need more production than that, either in the form of OBP or SLG.

QUOTE(The Ginger Kid @ Mar 27, 2008 -> 12:08 PM) Ozzie did not suck as a shortstop. Not a great hitter, but an extremely good fielder. Yeah, that's fine. Once his range disappeared, he was out of the league though.

QUOTE(heirdog @ Mar 27, 2008 -> 12:02 PM) I found this part of the article particularly funny: "The rest of the infield was an abomination. Greg Walker and Fred Manrique formed a punchless right side, and Ozzie Guillen and Steve Lyons were out machines biding their time until building far more successful post-retirement careers." Ah yes, let's get that "punchless" guy to be our hitting coach and how about we have the "out machine" preach to our players about getting on base and giving good at-bats by working counts. It's ironic, if anything. LaRussa sucked at baseball though too and he's turned out to be a hell of a manager.

QUOTE(lostfan @ Mar 27, 2008 -> 08:21 AM) You know something, I'm not suggesting Owens start in this packed OF the Sox have, but y'all DO know he was still an overmatched rookie last year right? He's basically played one half of MLB baseball. So to say things like "well, if you remove September" isn't even fair because that is only leaving 2 1/2 other months, and those are his first real months at the MLB level. I do realize that he only had 9 doubles last year and many times got on base only because of his legs but in all honesty it's not because he's so physically weak that he literally can't hit the ball out of the infield. There is no healthy adult male that's actually that weak, it's got as much to do with the fact that he had to adjust to superior MLB pitching than it does with his actual physical frame. If he ever gets to a point where he is not overmatched by MLB pitching and has to overcompensate on his swing to make contact it's actually not that unreasonable to believe that he could hit 20-25 doubles if he had a full season of ABs. He's never going to be known for hitting frozen ropes into the gaps but it's not like he's going to be completely worthless either. Just asking for a little objectivity here, the anti-Jerry Owens opinions are getting beyond extreme. 25 doubles? I'd want that to be 35 doubles with 10 triples at the very least before I'd consider him a decent player or even potentially a starter. Jerry Owens screams 4th outfielder; that's fine and dandy, but when he's starting, it's a pain in the ass because then he's getting in the way of more talented players.

not worthy :notworthy

QUOTE(DBAH0 @ Mar 26, 2008 -> 05:23 PM) bearsox, ST is not the end all to be all. Just because Dye struggles in ST, doesn't mean he's going to suck this season. Post ASB last season, his OPS was above .900 last season IIRC. He has shown what he's capable of when he's fully healthy. He's argubly our best hitter when he's in form. I'd never say that's arguable; perhaps the best right handed hitter, or the best non-left handed hitter, but there's no way anyone will ever convince me that, with every player at top form, Jim Thome is not the best hitter on this team. He put up a .975 OPS last year and didn't seem fully healthy all year. QUOTE(chisoxt @ Mar 26, 2008 -> 09:16 PM) I agree with you on about every point. Kenny is a poor GM with a lifetime contract. I do not understand how most people can favor a trade for Swisher for top prospects, while many of these same people project the Sox as a .500 team at best and out of contention. At some point, your farm system will run out of players. Then what? Because you have Swisher locked up through 2012. That's 5 years of atleast an .850 bat in the middle of the lineup. If you are lucky, Ryan Sweeney would have given you 2 years of that, and it likely would take until 2010 or 2011 for him to do that. Gio Gonzalez will, in my mind, make the trade look bad for the White Sox, but I also imagine his ERA would be over a point higher at the Cell, and perhaps more. DLS still seems like he's destined for the bullpen when it's all said and done, and even if he's a fantastic reliever, it's still only about 70-80 innings. I think the Swisher trade is one that will work out very well for both teams.

QUOTE(jenks45monster @ Mar 27, 2008 -> 12:22 AM) I agree with what you said -- Fields being sent down doesn't bother me much either. On another note it does because he loses another year of not doing what he should be doing --being our starting 3rd baseman. Wouldn't it be a b*t*h if the Sox traded Fields and resigned Crudy? I said it before, trading Fields at the given moment would be the worst move KW has ever made.

Got belligerently drunk. Was at a house I've never been to before nor after, and I didn't know anyone there (but didn't care). Ended up going to some other house, and I don't remember anybody I talked to, I just remember that I was stupid and annoying as hell. I kept asking people if they had weed, and finally one dude did. He rolled a fat joint, I shared it with 3 other people, including some German dude, and the Audioslave song "Original Fire" was on - I still can't stand the song to this day, but that's more because it's a terrible song and less because of this incident. Anyways, to cut the story short, I smoked the joint, remember everything slowing down, and beyond that, I don't remember much. I remember puking on my lap, and then being outside. I think people tried to walk me home but I started puking outside too. I'm pretty sure I hit my head on the brick on the side of the house. I fell to the ground and hit my head there too. I was puking pretty heavily in the toilet, some Samoan (or Pacific descent anyways) dude was telling me I needed to go to the emergency room and I told him it was just because I smoked weed. He kept making me drink water, and that just kept making me puke. After I think like an hour or so of that, I passed out by the toilet and they put me on a couch. I woke up at 2 the next day, walked home from the house (and I still don't know where it was), and cleaned up. It might not win, but that's definitely the dumbest thing I ever want to do.

QUOTE(lostfan @ Mar 26, 2008 -> 11:38 PM) Bonds was a legit first-ballot HOFer and 5-tool beast even before he started juicing. Absolutely. With PEDs, he was the most dominant player the game has ever seen.

Not big news, but f*** Rotoworld Bulls***. He's a University of South Dakota alum. Saying he's from NDSU is a slap in my face.

The addition of Bedard is looking crazy good for Seattle right now. It wasn't long ago that that division was pretty damn tough. Now it looks like a division the Sox would have a half-ass decent shot at winning.

QUOTE(Vance Law @ Mar 26, 2008 -> 04:58 PM) Where do you know that from? mlb4u

QUOTE(BearSox @ Mar 26, 2008 -> 04:54 PM) When he has been healthy, Dye has preformed. If you call down him being always injured, I guess his career was up and down. He wasn't injured last year however, and last time I checked, having super slow bat speed is not an injury. Really, Dye wasn't injured last year? That explains why he played in 138 games and missed 10 days from June 22nd to July 2nd. I seem to remember that Dye was pretty banged up the entire first half with some type of hip injury, but he was playing through it because the Sox other option was Ryan Sweeney, who put up a massive .598 OPS in 50 PAs.

QUOTE(Balta1701 @ Mar 26, 2008 -> 03:08 PM) How certain are we that he'll get enough Plate appearances to make his option vest? I don't think it has to vest. Philadelphia is paying for $5.5 mill of it, and it's worth $13 mill; there's no one on earth who is going to convince me Jim Thome isn't worth $7.5 million on a one year committment, barring a pretty substantial injury.

QUOTE(BearSox @ Mar 26, 2008 -> 04:36 PM) I fail to see how's that possible now since Dye is signed to a fairly large contract for 2 more years after this season... and Dye has regressed more so then any other player in baseball over the past year. So, if has the type of year I see him having, it's gonna be a tough to unload him. And are you seriously gonna sit there and tell me the Giants will not give anything for either Crede or Uribe, when they are going to have players from a-ball to start for them. Kenny Williams has some sick dillusion that Crede and Uribe are actually worth something more via trade. There is no reason why we should have pulled Uribe back from waivers. The other team would take on his 4.5 million dollar contract, that is incentive enough to let him go bye-bye. Not being extreme there are at all. I don't understand why you have so much angst against players over 30. The Sox have replacements in house for many of them (Fields for Crede, Richar for Uribe, Ramirez for Cabrera, Quentin for Dye, Swisher for Thome), and the said players over 30, Crede and Uribe not included (in my mind), are all better than their younger counterparts. I also don't understand why you suddenly think Dye is going to fall off the face of the planet. A 200 point drop in OPS is nothing to scoff at, but it's not like it should be used for the sole reason he should not have been kept. He did put up an OPS over 1.000 in 2006, and he put up a .947 OPS in the second half of last year. What's to say he's not healthy and he won't put up a .900 OPS? What's to say he doesn't just merely put up his average .825-.850ish season? Dye takes a lot of flak around here from some people, and that's one thing I really don't understand. He was horrendous in the first half of last year, but I don't think a lot of people realize that he actually ended last year extremely well.

QUOTE(max power @ Mar 26, 2008 -> 03:26 PM) Well he will be cheap so we can use the money for the next big guy to come out. Now who could that be? CC

QUOTE(BearSox @ Mar 26, 2008 -> 02:17 PM) so, doing some looking ahead: Is this Thome's last year with the White Sox? no, next year will be

The only reason I wish I were 10 years older is so that I could see Frank Thomas hit in his prime.

I heard Obama is from Illinois, is that true? If so, it really puts him in a bad light, because everyone from Illinois is evil. I also heard he pronounces Illinois "Ill-i-noise," making the 's' sound at the end.

QUOTE(Steve9347 @ Mar 26, 2008 -> 01:34 PM) Personally, I think if A-Rod had actually done what Canseco says, it would have been in his first book. Canseco just wants another payday. He has his reasons for not naming him. from the deadspin... If hating him and potentially muddying what the book says is a legit reason, that's his reason. QUOTE(jenks45monster @ Mar 26, 2008 -> 01:46 PM) Canseco's new book will definitely be an interesting read. Can any of you guys really take him as a credible source though? Just because he juiced doesn't mean he knows of every juicer in the past 10-15 years. Sounds like some crap to me that A-Rod was on the roids. Next he's gonna tell us that Ichiro and Jeter on on the juice - complete crap. Yeah; what does Canseco have to lose? He had a pretty damn good accuracy rate in the first book, and I tend to doubt he's just throwing s*** at a dartboard. He admittedly won't know everyone that's juiced, but he was as big a reason the craze started as any. Who else was doing steroids way back in the late 80s other than Canseco and possibly McGwire? Click on "As it Happened" Tom House admitted some people used steroids, and that it didn't work so hot. The next person up is Jose Canseco, and his name is mentioned 4 more times throughout the entire list. He had a pretty damn good idea of what was going on throughout the leauge regarding steroids. To say he knew everything would probably be wrong, but not necessarily wrong. To say he knew almost everything that was going on would be pretty accurate.

QUOTE(Rowand44 @ Mar 26, 2008 -> 06:59 AM) Well I think my drunken grammar is better than heads. And I get to do a keg race on Saturday, that should be fun. How many people involved?

QUOTE(elrockinMT @ Mar 26, 2008 -> 10:35 AM) I like the moves the Sox made and I think we will be very competitive in our division. The Uribe situation is the only thing that puzzles me. Maybe they were trying to work out a trade with the Orioles for Roberts? I don't know and obviously it's all speculation. I don't see that Uribe is a bad option though. I have said before that it seems we value our own players so little and are willing to dump them for a class A prospect at the drop of a hat. It amazes me that the feeling seems to be that such a band of 25-40 misfits can't even compete against a group of high school kids. Let's just sit back and support the team and enjoy baseball 2008. I think KW has done the best he can without just giving away players for nothing in return. We are not in a rebuilding phase and have a lot of real high caliber talent. When people say that for Josh Fields or Carlos Quentin or whoever else, sure. Hell, even Joe Crede. When it comes to Juan Uribe, you apparently still don't understand how bad of a ball player he was. As I recall, he was one of the worst 5 regular offensive players in the league last year. A .678 OPS over the course of a full season, and one of the few players who was worse than him - Omar Vizquel - is like 42 and was another potential candidate at one time to take over SS for the White Sox (more trivial information than anything). Juan Uribe is bad and he should be gone. QUOTE(SoxWS05 @ Mar 26, 2008 -> 11:13 AM) Yeah, I guess everyone's complaints get thrown out the window when opening day comes and you sit and watch the first game saying "maybe this team is good, maybe I was getting all worked up over nothing. I'm sorry KW, you're smarter then me." No, it's because White Sox baseball is f***ing awesome and there's no better feeling in the world than cracking open a beer and watching opening day, regardless of whether the team is going to be terrible or amazing. It has nothing to do with KW.

QUOTE(Dick Allen @ Mar 26, 2008 -> 07:06 AM) "My groin isn't where we want it to be," Owens said before undergoing tests. Don't we all have this problem. Well, I guess it depends on how you want to interpret the quote. As Jerry stated it, it sounds like his groin might be lodged somewhere between his shoulder blade and his spinal cord.