caulfield12

They should just sign that The Freeze guy in Atlanta who races everyone across the warning track after giving them a 50 feet head start and stick him out there in RF just for fun. It really couldn’t be ANY worse, could it?

That was TERRIBLE...he runs like one of the Molina’s. Two base hit?

http://www.thebaseballcube.com/players/profile.asp?ID=151640 1b and 3b his entire minor league career....not many chances behind Zimmermann and Rendon in Washington. Already 28.

Just couldn’t get past recording two outs against Allen...and then couldn’t find a pitch to put away a professional contact hitter in Brantley. Whatever the result, Covey held his own until his defense let him down.

Well, the dude was struggling to put up Engel/Thompson OPS numbers in the minors...including a .169 BA.

Well, between Palka, Delmonico and Skole...we have three of essentially the same player.

Here we go again with the defense. Abreu really should have helped out Gonzalez, he was close enough to call him off and make that play. Skole SHOULD have scooped that ball out of the dirt, it wasn’t an exceedingly difficult ball to catch compared to most.

Covey’s story gets more interesting. Was the #14 pick in the first round for Milwaukee back in 2010. The day of his 18th birthday, when he was celebrating at Six Flags with his friends...and the last day the draft picks were able to sign (and become a multi-millionaire), he was called in from his party by the Brewers to get another physical. The blood work surprisingly diagnosed him with Type 1 diabetes...which he hadn’t even realized he was dealing with his senior year of high school. The Brewers’ offer (not unlike the Brady Aiken situation) was cut from $2.4 million to $1.5 million...at the last minute, he and his parents rejected the money and he went to Univ of San Diego with Kris Bryant. The last three years before the Sox picked him in the Rule 5, he was dealing with oblique strains on BOTH sides...and he was hit by multiple injuries in 2014 as well (hand laceration being one of them). 2016, he pitched in the AFL and even started the championship game but was nevertheless left unprotected. Labored in the majors....bounced around all over the place in the A’s system. When he was drafted again in 2013, he fell into the 4th round and signed for only $370,000 with the A’s, so he lost almost $2 million due to the diabetes diagnosis, but learning how to deal with the illness in college might have actually helped him to become a better pitcher (eventually) in the big leagues, rather than struggling as a “bonus baby” high school pitcher with huge expectations as a high first round draft pick. Has gone on the DL seven times in his career.

Lillian, some of those veteran bullpen contracts were eye-raising numbers this offseason...and those were just set-up guys who weren’t even “elite” in the opinions of most. It does seem like a lot of those relievers were off the board early, whereas the position players got left holding the bag at the end with no suitors. With Andrew Miller’s health concerns, he would seem to be one huge red flag. That means Kimbrel becomes far and away the #1 target, but 5-10 teams will be kicking the tires of him. Wade Davis, Greg Holland, Addison Reed, Morrow (Cubs), Nicasio, Bryan Shaw, Jake McGee, Swarzak, Cishek, Kintzler, Hunter, Neshek all got paid pretty handsomely this offseason.

But how many players have an OBP of above .200 when down 1-2 or 0-2? I’m guessing the list is quite tiny. 2-2 hitters who can be at least .300 or above, that would be interesting as well. Those really aren’t enough at-bats to represent a significant sample size, either. The 2-2 should come up over time, and he’s always going to be a patient hitter who takes more than his fair share of walks and gets ahead in counts as well, although he had a run there where he was swinging on 1st or 2nd pitches in an at-bat. Perhaps part of that was an attempt to find the best pitch to drive early in a PA instead of getting down in the count and ending up K’ing? The K% has definitely come down, even though the batting average and SLG has fallen during the time since his return from the DL.

Lillian, you do realize they have more payroll flexibility than any organization in baseball over the next 2-3 years, right? There’s no way they do this without adding 4-5 veteran players from outside the organization over the next couple of offseasons.

Well, it COULD be India or Bohm, but almost all of the talk has been about drafting a player that plays either SS or 2B...and we haven’t heard India’s name mentioned much or even at all in connection with the Sox recently.

White Sox director of amateur scouting Nick Hostetler already knows who he wants to select with the team's top pick at No. 4 when the 2018 MLB Draft begins on June 4. "Yeah, I do," said Hostetler, who is now stationed in Chicago leading up to the Draft. "I have a pretty good feel on who I would like to take. I have a pretty good feel on everybody as a whole. All of our staff, [general manager] Rick [Hahn], [executive vice president] Kenny [Williams], [assistant general manager] Jeremy [Haber], [director of player development Chris Getz], guys who have seen players. "I feel pretty good about where we are at with it. The way I look at this is our order, what our order is. It's only four picks. So I have a pretty good feel of what our order is going to be barring anything crazy happening in the next 10 days. I'm pretty confident." "Pitcher or hitter is irrelevant at this point. Position is irrelevant at this point," Hostetler said. "Doesn't matter if we have it in the big leagues. Doesn't matter if we have a wealth in the Minors. Doesn't matter if we just drafted it. We are going to take the best guy regardless of position." https://www.mlb.com/whitesox/news/white-sox-pick-fourth-overall-in-2018-draft/c-278524954

Chicago White Sox have their eye on OSU's Madrigal http://www.dailyherald.com/sports/20180526/chicago-white-sox-have-their-eye-on-osus-madrigal Sox amateur scouting director Nick Hostetler is very familiar with the 21-year-old All-American, and general manager Rick Hahn traveled to Los Angeles last weekend to watch Madrigal and Oregon State play Southern California. There is no doubt the White Sox can envision Madrigal's bat in the lineup as soon as next season, but what about his position? Madrigal is playing second base for the Beavers this year, but has also played shortstop. Yoan Moncada is entrenched as the Sox's starter at second base while Tim Anderson is still trying to prove he can be the everyday shortstop. Could Madrigal play short in the major leagues? "We're at a point right now, due to the fact that he's played second base all year, we have to go back and look through our notes and back to what we saw in high school, what we saw with Team USA, what we saw prior to him getting moved over to second base at Oregon State," Hostetler said. Cadyn Grenier is the main reason Madrigal is playing second base for the Beavers this season. "(Grenier) is a terrific defensive shortstop," Hostetler said. If Madrigal is available at No. 4 and the Sox pick the Elk Grove, Calif., product, expect immediate questions about his defensive position in professional baseball. The White Sox are used to the scrutiny. When they drafted Zack Collins No. 10 overall in 2016, skeptics said he'd never cut it as a catcher. There were similar sentiments last year, when the Sox drafted Jake Burger with the No. 11 overall pick. The third baseman tore his Achilles tendon for the second time in early May and is expected to be out 12 months. The White Sox seem open to having Madrigal play shortstop. "It's going to be something that is part of the evaluation," Hostetler said. "I think you're going to have some guys that feel he can play shortstop and there are going to be some guys that feel he can't. "It's all splitting hairs. Whether it's Nick or any other player we take, we're going to try to put them in the best position to help maximize their value. I think Nick's a guy … ultimately some teams that do pick Nick will probably put him at shortstop."

Someone is dividing K's by at-bats (outs), versus ALL plate appearances (including walks, hbp, etc.)

You really think Paul's going to be able to play at even 75%? Just really hard to imagine (especially after CLE winning) that it's possible for G.S. to not be their opponent. From a fan perspective, CLE vs. Houston at least opens up the possibility that the Cavaliers could actually win...though.

“That Is What Power Looks Like”: As Trump Prepares for 2020, Democrats Are Losing the Only Fight That Matters Even in an era of historic media fragmentation, Donald Trump dominates our attention universe to the point where he blocks out the sun. Is it any wonder that people don’t have any idea what Democrats stand for? Trump has mastered attention capture. As Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu writes in his book The Attention Merchants, Trump “cannot be avoided or ignored and his ideas are never hard to understand. He offers simple slogans, repeated a thousandfold, and he always speaks as a commander rather than a petitioner, satisfying those who dislike nuance. With his continuous access to the minds of the public, the president has made almost all political thought either a reflection, rejection, or at least a reaction to his ideas. That is what power looks like.” “The way to dis-empower Trump is to ignore him, but it’s too hard even for his opponents to do it,” Wu told me over the phone recently. “It has to be a pure attention battle. If you were another network and Trump was I Love Lucy, what do you do? You can’t necessarily spend all your time criticizing I Love Lucy because that will just build it up. You need your own programming and to develop your own characters and celebrities who have to be as interesting and compelling. You need to have your own show. And I don’t think Democrats have their own show other than the ‘I Hate Trump’ show.”

Just imagine the 76ers had selected Tatum instead of Fultz...they might be the favorites instead, especially if they could add one more big-time FA to their current mix.

They tried....they put Jiang Wen and Donnie Yuen in ROGUE ONE and it still didn't resonate. Pandering to the audiences by shooting a significant number of scenes (and Chinese product placements for showings here) works to an extent, but that's even waning because everyone has gotten over the initial excitement of seeing someone like Angelababy in Independence Day for about 10 minutes, or Fan Bing Bing in X-Men or Li Bing Bing in Transfomers. Some things DO work...thinking Warcraft (because of popularity of the game) OR Pacific Rim 1 (because of all the Chinese/Hong Kong tie-ins.) In all honesty, I'm not even sure an ALL CHINESE/ASIAN cast would work for a Star Wars story, but I guess we'll find out. Whatever they're doing hasn't worked YET.

I guess I jinxed this game by starting the Saturday game thread and not following up, haha... I work up around 1:30 a.m. late Sunday night (China time) and realized it was too late. So you can blame me for the loss if it makes you feel better. Nevertheless, my 1-1 record is still significantly better than the team's overall winning percentage this year! And it's also better than Benetti's terrible jokes and puns. Worst of all, it's Stone Pony's fault!!! We don't need them to be the "best of pals." MINNEAPOLIS — It took five minutes. In that time, Jason Benetti heard enough plays on words, clever turns of phrase and quick-witted cultural references from his dinner companion that he knew it in his bones: He wanted in. In with the White Sox, the team he grew up in Homewood rooting for, as a TV play-by-play man. And in with Steve Stone as a partner in parlance, an ally in articulation — a bosom buddy, if you will, in baseball banter. “I thought, Geez, not only do I want this job,” Benetti recalled, “but I really, really, really want to work with this guy because we can do something special.” https://chicago.suntimes.com/sports/what-age-gap-white-sox-tv-teammates-jason-benetti-steve-stone-are-best-of-pals/

https://www.yahoo.com/news/china-approves-5-trademarks-ivanka-034212866.html Ivanka Trump just had 5 new trademarks approved. Then there's the $1 billion in loans for the Indonesian development. Which leads to a ZTE deal being worked out behind the backs of Congress by Trump personally intervening. Where are the Republicans (besides Marco Rubio) to stand up to all of this? When is enough...enough? Former drug industry lobbyist helps steer Trump drug plan Many health policy watchers say even if Joe Grogan’s actions on drug policy have been legal, his role is still troubling. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/27/trump-drug-plan-lobbyist-joe-grogan-609170

They probably made a mistake releasing this movie 4-5 months after the regular Star Wars films and it was just too close to Deadpool 2 and Avengers to break out...especially with the relatively unknown cast members in a stand-alone film without the Skywalkers. There's also the fact that we already KNOW the eventual fate of the character, so that takes away from it a LITTLE bit. Personally, I enjoyed it...well enough, but it's also an imminently forgettable movie, in that the stakes never seemed very high or dramatic. If nothing else, the two leads did as well as could possibly be expected given the pressure/s placed upon them from the fanbase. Disney's also taking a lot of criticism for their overly "multicultural" casting, but that wasn't really an issue here. They're also running into a brick wall trying to get Chinese audiences to accept this series....$10.1 million for opening weekend is an embarrassment. Disney will only get back $2.5 million in profits for that, which is well less than Joakim Soria makes pitching for one of the worst teams in MLB, lol.

Has fallen from a 923 OPS on April 26th to a still decent 782 in the last month. .163 BA and 478 OPS vs. lefties, .286 and 916 OPS vs. RPH Strikeout percentage down to 32.5%, although the last couple of games haven't helped in that area. 29 walks vs. 74 K's 659 OPS and .228 BA in the month of May (that felt kind of like a worst-case scenario season result in April) I will stay with what I said at the beginning of April when he was struggling out of the gate. Will be happy with an OPS between 750 and 787.5 for 2018 (age 23 season) and between 787.5 and 825 for 2019 (age 24 season) That gives you those prime years starting in 2021 when he needs to be an All-Star caliber 2B. Obviously, he has shown tantalizing glimpses of that so far this year.

Konerko was a great fastball hitter until injuries started to take their toll...maybe the best fastball hitter of the last 20 years for the White Sox. That's almost always the FIRST thing to go, bat speed (of course, along with pure foot speed and athleticism). The poster child for a 30's decline is probably Albert Pujols, but there's always been the scent of steroids around him because of how his body has seemingly broken down, and how precipitous his decline has been (exacerbated by advanced stats/metrics, because his traditional numbers alone like HR's and RBI's don't look terrible at all).

http://www.espn.com/blog/buster-olney/insider/post/_/id/18519/olney-hitters-who-cant-beat-the-heat-getting-left-behind Details (midway through the article) some of the struggles that veteran hitters (Goldschmidt is the prime example, hasn’t had a hit on a single mid 90’s fastball and above YET this year)...are having with the threefold increase in high velocity pitches, especially as most starters are only going through line-ups twice and relievers are throwing harder and harder. So BAA fastballs (two and four seamers) is going to be one of the strongest indicators for Abreu losing (something) from his previous fastball dominating self.