caulfield12

Yes, this too. And Erik Johnson, to boot.

Andrew Miller and Maybin were a lot better (career-wise) than the Sabathia/LaPorta multi-player deal, for example.

Probably should have added the caveat, modern baseball history. And the Ruth trade was almost purely a financial transaction...not about trading baseball talents for each other, orvtalent evaluation, as the Red Sox already knew what they had in him.

https://theathletic.com/1988018/2020/08/11/dallas-keuchel-calls-out-white-sox-teammates-as-slide-continues/?source=dailyemail Keuchel digressed a few times during his postgame Zoom session. He mentioned that Monday was “one of the first times” in an 8-9 start to the season that he felt like effort and execution were “subpar” across the roster, and that as someone who saw the Astros walk the path from rebuilding laughingstock to World Series champions, he knows the shift in standards is “something that happens on a young team.” But for the most part, he unleashed the kind of intolerance for inconsistency the White Sox front office said the team was excited to add in December. “If you love baseball, show up to the park every day and make sure that you’re ready to go,” Keuchel said. “We got in at 2:30 in the morning, we played a tough ballgame against the Indians. That’s who we’re going to have to beat if we’re going to win this division or we get into the playoffs. It just seemed like we were taking a night off. We can’t afford that with a young core that we have here. We’ve got to show up every day, and even if there’s no fans, we’ve got to make sure that we’re ready to go. And if we’re not ready to go, we’ve got to fake it until we make it.” That Keuchel even suggested that various members of the lineup were sleepwalking through one night in a 60-game season, let alone one where the Tigers pitching tandem Michael Fulmer and Daniel Norris bounced back from a rough start at Sox hitters’ expense, is a fair sight more critical than Renteria typically is of the club’s effort. This is a new tone for internal reactions to White Sox losses. Optimistically, Keuchel’s scorn reflects the sense of urgency necessary to make the leap to playoff contention in a compressed, 60-game format.

The only problem is the Carlos Sanchez one. Be it team joker or prankster or Gatorade dumper, you have to be one of the better players on the team to take on a leadership role...and Yermin will always be one of those AAAA guys who gets an occasional cup of coffee but never afforded a real opportunity to play nearly everyday, and part of it’s simply discrimination against his body frame/physical appearance.

We were being a bit hard on Abreu...when he hits it so hard, sometimes it just looks like an awkward swing and hardly ever graceful. He’s never been an aesthetically pleasing swing, like most lefties with longer swing paths.

He doesn't strike me as the type of guy who would actually enjoy being locked into 162+games of any one team, to be honest.

The acclaimed duo of play-by-play announcer Joe Davis and World Series champion A.J. Pierzynski cover all the action from the San Francisco Giants contest with the Los Angeles Dodgers, immediately prior at 4:00 PM ET. I could have sworn he was on a Twins’ broadcast this year, either radio or tv, but sometimes they have the ESPN or Fox National feeds instead of the local broadcasters on MLB.TV and then I switch to Gameday Audio to at least listen if the feed goes bad or sticks. As it stands, he already has that Fox gig as well as paid baseball ambassador with the White Sox (many former Sox players listed.) It’s also quite possible the White Sox were playing the Twins the same day I was channel surfing through all the feeds looking at different games. Maybe part of the problem is always playing devil’s advocate to get my HS students to think critically, so I end up taking minority positions quite frequently, then ask them to make the opposite argument which is much more difficult for “obedient” Chinese students who are almost programmed not to break uniformity, some would call it conformity, I guess.

Are you making fun of his height, lol?

We're all going to require a fix if this keeps up for another 7-10 days with no light at the end of the tunnel in sight.

Now Keuchel can't ever speak up, because..."he who is without sin may cast the first stone" is the argument? I mean, it's not like Dallas was a hitter, or orchestrated the scheme, or was a part of the front office braintrust that was always looking to exploit any little niche advantage. It's not like he was using a spitball, or nail file, or KY Jelly on the ball. If we're going to condemn him for the rest of his life and disallow him to speak his mind, then we never should have accquired him in the first place. We're not attempting to enter the gates of heaven, after all, we're simply looking for leadership that will finally GET us to the playoffs and maybe even use those past experiences to his benefit when such a situation eventually arises. Purity tests? Really? Maybe we should just recruit a bunch of baseballin' monks from the Sisters of the Poor in Kolkata, India...

Kippers for Breakfast Aunt Helga? @Imyellinganyway “Keuchel's comments after the game are so concerning, he's coming from two of the most forward-thinking organizations (cheating aside w/ the Astros) and its taken him like a month to see what a shitshow we're running here. Don't think this team can ever eclipse mediocre with Hahn.“ Points for creativity with those two monikers...especially the first. Kippers? Too funny. Sounds like ingredients for Ted Danson Celebrity Sandwich on Curb Your Enthusiasm.

He’s 6’3 1/2” right now, Passan even rounds it up to 6’4” at least once in his article.

Because the player who signed and the player who emerged weeks later (after the trade) in Arizona were two entirely different players. It's why everyone in the world flipped out about how Keith Law ranked him in the Top 10 out of seemingly nowhere. It's because the word quickly got out around the scouting world. Everyone was talking about him, just like the baseball world is now fascinated with Luis Robert's immense potential as well.

Well, this is a HUGE issue for baseball, because Bellinger, Trout, Tatis and Betts are arguably the four best young players in baseball and all located within 108 miles of each on on the West Coast where weeknight games usually begin at 9/10 p.m. CST/EST.

This is very MUCH not true. He grew from 5'11 to 6'3 1/2" during that time, but still gained strength, running speed and velocity on his throws. If you look at that previous generation of SS's, the Ripkens, the Jeters/A-Rods/Nomars/Tejadas....to today, there's never been one (other than A-Rod, who we can't really accurately discuss due to the PEDs issue) player of that height who became MORE athletic. Almost always, shortstops need to be moved off the position usually to 3rd or 2nd base.

"The chaos centers Tatis Jr. Surrounded by his family, this is the one place where he doesn't have to be on -- where he's Bebo and not El Niño, the nickname baseball bestowed on him. The league recognizes Tatis as an anachronism: the marketable baseball player. Young, talented, handsome, bilingual, bursting with personality -- a unicorn. One of Tatis' agents, Dan Lozano of MVP Sports Group, has booked well over $1 billion in contracts representing Albert Pujols, Joey Votto, Manny Machado, Josh Donaldson and Jimmy Rollins. Never, he says, has he seen someone so ready-made for stardom, so simultaneously relatable and magnetic." Here's the answer to those who say he's TOO COCKY. Those same fans complain that Mike Trout is too "plain vanilla/aw shucks" and basically boring. Heck, Manfred called out Trout for not being marketable enough. Of course, it's the job of MLB to market their best players, not to expect them to change in a way that makes them more marketable. It's a double-edged sword for a game that's become increasingly regional.

They would make the same arguments though about our 3 young core players in Robert, Jimenez and Moncada. I'm not even 100% convinced he couldn't have played the entire second half, think 50% of it was tanking for draft position after they got buried in the playoff race. There was never an actual X-ray provided. He's obviously swinging the bat exactly the same as last season, maybe even more violently. Also had a badly injured thumb from sliding (just like Robert) at the minor league level in 2018. That said, anytime Moncada runs at full bore, Jimenez has a defensive play of any kind that forces him to move more than 15-20 feet and Robert is threatening to run into every single player other than the catcher...injury is one of the unfortunate words that can come to mind. FWIW, cocky also has been used to describe Moncada and Robert. That's a label that gets thrown out more often than not to describe minority athletes in most major sports. Like it's a bad thing that Tom Brady is the most confident player on any football field, but, that's just leadership/moxie/character, right? If you've watched him play more than a few times, though, cocky really isn't the best word to describe him.

Missing the swagger of Kopech on the mound also has had a huge impact. If he was pitching like a Wheeler right now for us and flashing TOR stuff, there wouldn't be so much concern. Now, with what amounts to a 3 year layoff, there's a legitimate debate that he might never return to previous form, for a number of reasons, both personal/psychological and physical.

Marcus Semien is halfway there. (Just kidding.) And yeah, you're right. I've maintained all along that the greatest risk was NOT non-performance or falling off like a Puig, but getting injured (last year, the back and leg muscle from stretching for a throw like Jean Claude Van Damme at second) because of the reckless abandon with which he plays the game, runs the bases, etc. In the Passan video, it leads off with a story from when he was just 8 and did a back flip off the roof of his house in the Dominican and fractured his leg on landing.

First player in MLB history to 30 homers and 20 stolen bases...100 games into his career. That's a startling one. Let it be said for the record that I didn't start this particular thread, and kept the Jeff Passan/ESPN Special Column and Video in the MLB Catch-All, because surely reading and watching that would be even more inciting/provocative, if that's the right word. That said, he's so good and so fun to watch, it's almost impossible not want to watch him as a fan of the sport of baseball....captured so well by Passan in both pieces.

And why would we expect ANY of those things to change? The ONLY way it happens is if one of his advisors convinces Trump that doing so is the key to winning re-election...that's just not happening, certainly not on a sustained basis. For today's purposes, Priority #1 involves going back and forth between utilizing the WHITE HOUSE or GETTYSBURG NATIONAL MILITARY PARK as the setting for his RNC speech on the 27th of AUG.

And just think, that 2013 "malaise" was coming off a near playoff appearance in a season where they led the division a good percentage of the year until finishing something like 4-11 the last 15 games of the season and being overtaken by the Tigers. At least the general mood heading into 2013 was a positive one. Of course, little did we know Jeff Keppinger would be the first of many misfires. I made a joke in the gamethread about bringing in one of the Cuban National Baseball Team coaches, but it seems like they're close to needing to do something to shake things up. They get another 7-10 days with Tim Anderson back, but if they continue to stumble and it looks like they're blowing their playoff shot, then they seriously need to reassess whether these coaches and Rick Hahn are the right guys to make the final "finishing touch" moves to complete the rebuild. Neither Renteria nor Hahn has been an integral part of setting a winning culture while in charge of an entire organization as field manager or as GM...that's concerning enough. There was just no sense of it being a playoff type game last night. You could clearly see that the players were just not giving it their all, except for Keuchel, McCann, Engel, Mendick, maybe a couple more exceptions. Everyone looked like they were in a stupor, or sleep-walking around out there in slow motion. Even if you're the most talented team in baseball, you still need to push yourself to improve and treat each and every opponent with respect. Maybe the accolades provided by overwhelmingly positive early media coverage of the offense and guys like Robert, Moncada and Jimenez got to their heads a little bit, no idea. It has definitely seemed like our season completely fell off the rails when Jimenez fell over the wall into the netting and couldn't extricate himself quickly enough to prevent Yelich from scoring on an inside-the-parker. Something needs to change, and it has to happen in the next 2-3 weeks. We can't just wait around for Madrigal or even Tim Anderson to BRING that change from the bottom-up, it has to come from the top-down as well, in CONCERT.

I thought that was KyLe...

Says Dallas Keuchel... White Sox record, 8-9, three game losing streak CURRENT Playoff Odds (FG) 6. Astros 79.1 7. White Sox 65.2 8. Tigers 37.8 9. Red Sox 36.6 10. Angels 33.9 11. Blue Jays 24.3 12. Rangers 21.5 Interestingly enough, it was exactly 4 years and 3 months since the infamous May 10th Massacre in Texas, 13-11, when the White Sox were 23-10 and leading the ALCD. https://www.southsidesox.com/2016/8/20/12567556/fortunes-changed-one-crazy-night-in-arlington-sent-the-white-sox-and This thread is all about comments/leadership from teammates (like tonight from Dallas) setting expectations/tone for a winning, playoff baseball culture. So anything related to managers, coaches, JR, KW, RH, etc. Just want to kind of keep an eye on this and see how things turn out from this point onwards, especially with Tim Anderson also coming back to the team tomorrow. Normally, team meetings and "calling out teammates" doesn't work out that well, at least historically. Time will tell whether it lights a fire under them or not. Obviously, with all the injuries, it's not going to be an EASY road, but we're still, at least at this juncture of the season, in the driver's seat for one of the final two playoff spots in the field. Anything outside that would be mighty disappointing. With just 5 from each league, not making it would have been understandable. But that's no longer the case.