caulfield12

QUOTE (fathom @ May 13, 2014 -> 10:41 PM) Golden sombrero for Semien...thankfully he's been clutch this year to make up for his disappointing season. Let's just hope this season doesn't totally get away from the Sox in the next two weeks. The attendance numbers/revenues are going to start to have a bit of an effect on who we can sign in the off-season, so it would be nice to stay in the wild card race until at least the trading deadline.

Who's our next option on the starting pitching front? Johnson's not 100% ready, even though his AAA K/BB rates are decent. You can't run him out there at 88-90. Paulino's obviously not going to cut it. Leesman is pitching well again but probably won't get another opportunity. Beck's a long ways off, but it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to see what would happen, depending on the opponent and stadium.

QUOTE (ron883 @ May 13, 2014 -> 09:33 PM) The sox have a lot of infield prospects. Micah Johnson will be ready for 2nd base at some this season hopefully. Semien should be adequate at shortstop defensively while posting above average offensive numbers IMO. Given the complete lack of pitching prospects, the sox should fetch the best pitching prospect they can for alexei. If either Semien or Carlos Sanchez could do that, they would have no problem trading Ramirez. But that's a HUGE assumption to make at this point. And trying to replace a SS is incredibly difficult if you have to go outside your organization and bid against the rest of the teams needing one...and give up young talent from your organization as well. It's not like signing Stephen Drew would solve any problems for the near future.

Mitch Moreland was supposedly throwing an easy 95. Where is Casper Wells these days?

QUOTE (greg775 @ May 13, 2014 -> 10:23 PM) When a good team DFA's a player you have to figure he's probably no good. Like Jenks and Sergio Santos?

QUOTE (South Side Fireworks Man @ May 13, 2014 -> 08:13 PM) At least it took six pitches to get him out. Maybe they can trade a couple of those IF prospects for a good outfielder. At some point, even that's not going to be enough. He battled back and made the pitcher work, but he's unable to put the ball into play and use his speed. If he could just put the ball to the left side of the infield, he could pick up some cheap hits like Eaton gets frequently.

46 K's in 142 AB's (not PA's) for Semien...whether Keppinger's 100% ready or not, they need to give Marcus a breather and a chance to rebuild some confidence in Charlotte. The problem is you have four middle infielders there now with Saladino, Sanchez and Micah. 45 in 159 AB's for Abreu. Not the most promising of starts. LOL.

http://espn.go.com/mlb/stats/batting/_/sort/OPS/order/true Puig 7th now in OPS. Trout and Cabrera in the low 20's. Tulo far and away #1. Stanton a clear 2nd as best NL player.

QUOTE (qwerty @ May 13, 2014 -> 07:48 PM) Caulfield... is Aamir Khan the best actor in the world? Damn man is a chameleon in my eyes. Which movie did you see him in just now? Yeah, he's definitely in my Top 5. For India, surely #1. I tried to slog my way through "God's Not Dead" and barely made it. Watching Kevin Sorbo as an atheist philosophy professor was entertainment in and of itself, along with Dean Cain playing playing himself in real life, essentially. That was priceless. If only there was a Teri Hatcher sighting.

The one in that Bond series that really doesn't fit was actually one of the better ones that very few have seen...the one with George Lazenby (On Her Majesty's Secret Service) where he's briefly married.

It's depressing that we're going to be stuck cutting DeAza or buying out his contract instead of getting ANYTHING in return. Keeping DeAza still makes sense, because he was insurance for any injury in the outfield (and we've had two now), but the fact that he's not a better option than Sierra or Leury Garcia against LHP is telling. You can guarantee in Oakland that SOMETHING will happen with Garcia out there in CF. It's Oakland. Expect fog banks to roll in.

in other news, Gallo has 14 homers... Hawkins' OPS finally fell below 900 for the first time all year yesterday. 7 doubles and 9 homers is quite nice, though, for this time in the season. I don't think anyone projected him to be a .280-.300 hitter at this point in his career. It's when/if he falls below .220 that you start to worry a bit.

QUOTE (Quinarvy @ May 13, 2014 -> 02:55 PM) His middle name is Dariel, not Daniel. And Hawk seems to like El Cañón Okay, then I blame that on poor Spanish pronunciation by one of the Sox opponent's announcing teams, haha. Sure sounded like he said Daniel on air. Oh, well.

QUOTE (CaliSoxFanViaSWside @ May 13, 2014 -> 04:42 PM) ADA seems to express how he doesnt like playing Cf and now doesn't like leading off. He doesn't seem to like sliding very much either considering he planted his face into the ground on an attempted steal of 2nd and planted his spike into the ground and flipped himself over without even a play on him at home plate. For a guy who's career may depend on him being more versatile he certainly is being a whiny pain in the ass ( and his own face). Wasn't DeAza also leading off at least part-time his first 2-3 months of playing with the White Sox, when he put up a 900+ OPS? Or the following season? He was also fine in CF then, more or less. So what happened?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ May 13, 2014 -> 01:16 PM) Only if you make it go in circles. The team is much better so far this year. The are either at, or exceeding the expectations that were put upon this team for ideal conditions, and that is without factoring in some very big adversity this year including losing their #1, #2, and #4 starters, their top set up guy, their starting 2B, 3B, CF, RF, and other assorted small injuries. Firing Ventura now would be a Steinbrenner type move, not a Reinsdorf one. If the Sox had the Cubs record, it might be a different story, but this team being around .500 right now is a minor miracle. Personally I think Ventura is closing to being a manager of the year candidate than an unemployment candidate. If the team collapses down the stretch after getting healthy I might change my tune, but as of today, there is zero chance that Robin Ventura is getting fired any time soon. I don't even see it as a possibility in this organization. If anyone really believes that Johnson and Paulino weren't 4 and 5, they're crazy. You could have made an argument that Johnson for one month pitched better than Danks, and that Johnson was a 3 starter coming into the season, but that's more a testament to how mediocre Danks was coming off his injury, which was expected/predicted. Or maybe it's indicative of the general weakness of the starting rotation coming into 2014. Or the lack of top prospects in our minor league system, that Johnson was so highly-rated and is now one of the biggest question marks going forward in less than a month.

QUOTE (Eminor3rd @ May 13, 2014 -> 01:11 PM) Your capacity to misunderstand (or at least pretend to misunderstand) the difference between "no such thing" and "not predictive" is baffling. If you don't believe something, fine, but stop misrepresenting what others say by twisting arguments into dumbed-down nonsense. .364 .364 .545 .909 -0.1 We can play the same game with Sierra. 8/22 so far with the White Sox. LOL at the WAR because of his terrible defense, even at a corner.

QUOTE (Charlie Haeger's Knuckles @ May 13, 2014 -> 01:07 PM) I was really wondering if they intended on making the bullpen a little more flat. I mean, some of these guys are pretty round. If being in shape is so important, I suppose round is a shape though, right? See Bartolo Colon, Terry Forster, John Kruk, Tony Gwynn, pre-dramatic weight loss Pablo Sandoval, Prince Fielder and CC Sabathia.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ May 13, 2014 -> 01:04 PM) If Ventura wants to manage this team, he will be, unless the team takes a major step backwards when it shouldn't. If he was going to be fired, he would have been last year, and not given an extension. The fact that this is about a .500 team with all of the injury problems this year will go a long way towards securing that. What do you think the team's record would be right now without Abreu? And what do you think Viciedo/Ramirez/Flowers would be hitting without his presence in the line-up and the hiring of Steverson? It's an argument that will go round and round in circles. That said, you can't judge the results this season...but you can look at some of the micro-managerial decisions and how he holds the team together in periods of adversity. Obviously, with Erik Johnson pitching how he was projected to, with Eaton healthy for the first 40 games as well as Garcia (which means a LOT less of DeAza/Danks/Sierra), Chris Sale, a real bullpen with a better LHR than Downs and a healthy Nate Jones...it would also be a different story.

LOL at Paulino's ERA heading into tonight's game. He's actually getting worse at the minor league level.

QUOTE (Buehrle>Wood @ May 13, 2014 -> 12:54 PM) Yes, I believe he will be managing in 2017. He isn't ozzie, his mouth won't cost him. He's a White Sox legend; JR won't approve of any firing I don't think. I guess it's two quite different questions. Should be managing, as in the very best option to lead the Sox to the playoffs? Will be managing, in terms of how much rope he has if the next two seasons were to go south in similar fashion to 2013...which is unlikely to happen with Abreu's presence alone unless Sale were to be on the shelf for an extended time. Then all bets would be off. But having Rodon could make up for that, as well. And whatever players we can bring in as FA's. Healthy Avisail for the entire season, etc.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ May 13, 2014 -> 12:44 PM) Sigh. If you are supposed to look at the back of their baseball cards, how come you didn't do it? Leury was hitting .357 vs. LHP with 3 doubles when he went to the plate. That's really your argument? Can we say limited sample size? I'm guessing most of those lefties didn't have nearly the stuff that Doolittle does. Nor were those situations where he came up against lefties anything like the most important at-bat of the game, they were at garbage time (primarily). I can do the same thing, lol. RHP vs. LHP (650 projected PA) | Leury Garcia PA AB R HR RBI SB AVG OBP SLG OPS $ vs. RHP 650 599 61 6 50 34 0.225 0.271 0.308 0.579 4.0 vs. LHP 650 615 58 5 50 24 0.236 0.271 0.307 0.578 -0.5 It's not like the time he refused to walk Sal Perez in order to go after Moustakas, who was in the worst hitters in MLB at that time, but it wasn't one of his better decisions, either.

So you guys honestly believe he will still be managing the White Sox in 2016 and 2017? I'm not seeing it. I think he's more of a transitional manager like Torborg or Manuel and we bring in a more experienced guy at some point to get them over the top. It's an interesting debate though...I don't think there's any argument that a lot of areas of managing (bullpen use/line-up construction, having that knack for making the right move at the right time) that haven't shown as much improvement as you'd like. Then you have 2012 as the counter-argument....with the counter-argument to that argument being almost anyone would have been better than Ozzie, that the defense and fundamentals have fallen off a cliff since the last two weeks of 2012 and that he basically "lost" last year's team before it was torn apart by all the mid-season trades. Balta and Fathom would certainly give you strong answers here. Having his "own" team without Dunn and Konerko on next year's roster will give us a more "objective" opportunity to properly evaluate. A healthy Avisail Garcia and more/better options than guys like Sierra/Leury Garcia/Nieto/DeAza will help as well. Same thing with the bullpen. Hahn's done Ventura no favors with guys like Cleto, Downs, Paulino and Keppinger. Ventura did a great job with that rookie-filled pen in 2012, but has looked lost/clueless at lots of points since then. Having Noesi/Carroll/Rienzo as the back of your rotation doesn't help, either.

You know what's going to happen....Jackson will be that one high school hitter that becomes the "next Mauer" and all three pitchers at the top of the draft will be flops. We've seen all the stories about David Clyde, Van Poppel, comparisons to Clemens/Nolan Ryan. It's going to be nearly impossible to justify passing on Kolek...but it's also scary to me that we have to "project" Aiken to grow into his body or start throwing harder than he already is at 18 in order to be successful at the next level. The White Sox have never been successful projecting any young high school pitchers...and haven't even attempted to incubate one, since Honel and Jason Stumm.

I still don't understand, today, why you wouldn't prefer to have either Semien or Sierra hitting there (yes, I understand he already pinch ran, but that was completely unnecessary to take Dunn out at that moment as he wasn't even the tying run...Ramirez was, and he was able to steal 2nd on his own)? Are you telling me that you can't read the back of their baseball cards or simply go to thebaseballcube.com? If Semien's now expected to strike out when he came into the season as your system's best combination of patience and relatively decent/high contact rates, what does it say that he has already fallen so low in the eyes of the manager in terms of trustworthiness, even though he's had huge hits at least 4-5 times already this year in similar situations?

QUOTE (Chicago White Sox @ May 13, 2014 -> 11:53 AM) HS pitchers typically have the highest bust rates of 1st round picks, but if Rodon is gone I'm not sure how you justify passing on Aiken or Kolek when there is such a disparity in talent between and the next tier of college arms. Regardless of your risk tolerance for HS arms in general, the decision seems like a no-brainer to me if Rodon is off the board when we pick. With all the system-wide issues developing hitters, and concerns about guys like Hawkins/Thompson/Barnum that have started out younger at 18, etc., does anyone really believe they would select Jackson?