caulfield12

McHugh entered the game with a 5.5ish ERA and is looking like Cy Chen/Guthrie. Dangerous game where one swing of the bat can change the whole complexion of the game, especially after "losing" that homer in the 1st, they must feel a little bit snake-bitten and kind of waiting around for something bad to happen after the last week. Luckily, there's Chris Sale to counteract that by force of will alone. Also, when you take Lawrie out the line-up, some of his energy and enthusiasm goes with him.

The bad news is the worst bullpen in modern history has the game in Cincy because their starter went out with an injury. Jesus, Tomlin has 2 hits tonight and was something like 5 for 8 coming into the game as a hitter. Just doubled.

What happened? Reds/Votto homer...tied it at 2-2. Someone robbed a homer? Guess it was Springer in RF. Well, that's why they have 8 feet walls instead of 10 in most MLB parks.

What about Warren Harding and Grant? Just inept? I can't claim to be a big investigator of their presidencies, but they have always been rated in the Bottom 5. There was definitely corruption/cronyism with the Grant years. Saw where there was SOME talk about Sanders running under the Green Party banner, which would guarantee him ballot access in at least 20 key states. That should be a sign to Debbie Wasserman-Schulz, along with the letter defending the actions of his supporters in NV...they better figure out some way to placate him or this will get really nasty, especially if the Clinton campaign starts to completely ignore him going into states like NJ and California that will embarrass her campaign if she keeps losing them in the face of a strengthening/consolidating Trump.

Has AustinIllini changed his name?

Simply making a pitcher's age as the PRIMARY argument doesn't make a whole lotta sense...because you have lots of guys like Esteban Loaiza, Matt Thornton or Jose Contreras that had their best years with the White Sox (well) past 31. Phil Humber, off the top of my head, was another guy who became serviceable well after his expiration date as a prospect. That said, I have a hard time believing Mr. Guerra would be putting up the same exact statistics as a starter with the White Sox in the AL Central. If we don't make it to the playoffs, letting him go will be about reason #59 for us not getting there.

Third for White Sox...1906/1917.

Indians not letting up. Thankfully they have to play at Boston this weekend. Reds really imploding...hopefully that makes Bruce available sooner rather than later. They're 14 games behind the Cubs already.

Hopefully something racial doesn't come out with the Cubs' fans and Heyward (see Fukudome, although that was a t-shirt in the beginning)...as much as it's nice to see the Cubs miss one (so far) in such a big way, it's never a good thing in real life to see a player subjected to verbal abuse/epithets.

At least Ventura realizes he needs better contact in the 2 hole. Some will argue that Rollins should be out of the line-up, and/or that you shouldn't give so many plate appearances to your weakest hitters (Sanchez/Rollins/Saladino) that far up in the order. If we could have an Eaton clone hitting 2nd, we'd be fine. Unfortunately, we just don't have a good one on the roster. Melky Cabrera is arguably the best, but you need to keep him behind Frazier (arguably) or they'll just walk Todd to face Avi/Lawrie.

Wow, that Fowler ball ALMOST went out. Would have been pandemonium. Eucker thought it was gone. Good thing Heyward here and not Bryant. At least the Cubs have only gained 2 games on the White Sox the past 10-11 days (yes, this isn't a REAL thing any more than the "Attendance Cup," but last Monday they were 18 games over .500 and we were 13 over). They're not playing particularly well recently, either.

QUOTE (bmags @ May 19, 2016 -> 10:17 AM) I think that was Keith Law's comparison due to high contact, lack of power? Can't remember. Anderson has me super excited. His default seems to be to try to get to every ball and hit every ball because he largely can, but he has also shown (from reports) an ability to digest coaching and adjust. Sky is the limit for him, especially if we see a power surge in charlotte (likely anyway due to stadium). Dunston as a hitter, MAYBE, although I'm not sure that's a bar/standard you want to set for him (too low) except for the one season they instituted the Shawon-O-Meter at Wrigley that he was raking around .400 for a couple of months. Dunston had one of the top five SS arms that I've ever seen live. Valentin and Uribe were close.

http://espn.go.com/mlb/player/gamelog/_/id...2012/jake-peavy That August 31st game really sticks out. And May 15th. Peavy had four starts against the Tigers that season, and we lost all four of them. You change 0-4 to 1-3, we're probably looking at a playoff appearance. So I should have said, in the year the White Sox DESPERATELY needed an ADDITIONAL victory against the Tigers, 2012, he didn't get it done. 2010, he didn't appear against DET and got hurt. Those were the two best Sox teams of his career here.

Yes, and I noted that earlier when Shields was being discussed. Except the difference was that...or speculation was...that the White Sox would need to get a pretty significant amount of cash subsidy coming back their way to make it work financially (see Jim Thome trade). That subsidy would obviously push up the prospect haul for the Padres. In this thread, someone just said they wanted to add a #3 starter. Assuming we had a list of #3 starters that we could agree upon (let's say Teheran with the Braves was one, or one of the Rays' pitchers), explain how we could acquire both Teheran and Vizcaino without giving up one of Fulmer OR Adams. Sending money to the Braves to help subsidize their deteriorating situation with Hector Olivera? Realistically, do you see THAT happening? And yes, we can go through all those 2012 transactions (Liriano, Hudson, Youkilis and Myers) and argue the only players we really gave up were a really good utility player in Escobar (fringe starter) and a POTENTIAL starting pitcher in Chris The Dragon Devenski...and that neither one of those guys was a Top 10 (Escobar was at one point, much closer to 10 than 1) prospect in our system, Devenski didn't have enough time to make an impact on those lists.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ May 19, 2016 -> 01:39 PM) I'll try to explain it the best I can, but the "individual mandate" isn't about "finding people who can't afford insurance." It's an disincentive/stick for people who would otherwise choose to not have insurance; now, in practice, there's going to be a healthy mix of people who 'choose' not to have health insurance because they can't afford it or could only marginally afford it and choose to spend that money on something else, and then there's a lot of younger, generally healthy people who would just otherwise choose to go without insurance and hope for the best. When you are going to institute regulatory requirements like guaranteed issue that mean you can get insurance regardless of any current or previous illnesses, there's a big economic incentive to not carry insurance until you need it and then purchase it when you do. The problem is that this creates a death spiral in the insurance market place since insurance companies are left without a large pool of insurance premiums being paid by people who don't necessarily need to draw on their insurance. What the law attempts to do is to eliminate or minimize the people who would fall into "can't afford insurance and would be fined" category a few of ways. The first is the massive expansion of Medicaid, which was unfortunately gutted by Roberts in the 2012 Obamacare ruling over the individual mandate. Several million more people who are marginally above the poverty line would have Medicaid coverage today instead of needing to pay for private insurance or pay the fine. The second way to was require parental policies to cover children to the age of 26--this keeps lots of young adults who would be the most likely to voluntarily forego insurance on more affordable employer-sponsored family plans. The third way is through the subsidies available through the federal and state exchanges. This provides an incentive/carrot for people to choose insurance over the fine, even if the insurance is a little more expensive. I'm sure there are better write-ups out there, but that's the basic logic behind the individual mandate. Without that but with the other regulatory improvements, the private insurance market would collapse. This makes a lot of sense, but many would still say it's bending over too far to accommodate the private insurance companies' profit margins...that threat of the private insurance market collapsing has been used as a "threat" for years and year, just like "death panels" as a scare tactic. How did the Romney/Massachusetts plan account for this issue?

It all depends on how willing you are to trade Fulmer or Adams (young pitching being the most desired asset these days)... Since the odds of trading Anderson go down by the minute. We need to produce our own All-Star caliber player to counter Lindor at the same position. Feel like Timmy is close to untouchable right now. The Teheran and Arodys Vizcaino idea is just as good as any out there, IMO. As far as setting this up for a playoff rotation, that would make sense if there weren't only 3 teams in the major leagues with longer playoff droughts. At this point with Hahn and Ventura, it's all about just surviving and getting there (at least for this season). We always argued 2017 would be the BEST chance, so my only request this year is at least to make it as a wild card team. And we've never had a weaker division to take advantage of...it's a bit reminiscent of that 2007-2009 time period in the division, where there really wasn't one dominant team and it kind of bounced back and forth between the Tigers, Twins (bookended by two really good teams in 2006 and 2010), White Sox and Indians.

In terms of computer projections: The White Sox are 6-0 against the Twins, the Twins I think are even with the Indians so far...so that's expected to even out. Brantley's been hurt for most of this time, whereas the White Sox haven't had any major injuries (again), knock on wood. Kluber's been down, but Salazar is the equivalent of Sale/Quintana (almost) statistically...still don't like the back end of Anderson and Tomlin, but they have a huge wild card in Trevor Bauer that trumps any depth the Sox have (which isn't much). Carrasco's kind of the X-factor there with his health and consistency, and the one they arguably most tried to trade this offseason (along with Bauer). I'm not sure if the computer can project possible trades/additions (probably not until they're made), but they do have some nice pieces to trade from in their minor league system...but not nearly the financial flexibility of the Sox, Royals or Tigers.

http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=15575355

Peavy didn't beat the Tigers once in his entire White Sox career. That's what we he was brought in to do...not beat the Cubs. I still have nightmares about one game we were leading by 5 or 6 runs and collapsed.

QUOTE (fathom @ May 19, 2016 -> 08:27 AM) Jennings has been great this year (2 ERA). 10 days of struggles for a bullpen doesn't make them the worst bullpen ever. Yes, Jennings was great in the Rangers' game (the double play ball was a bit lucky but better lucky than good)...he's been MUCH better than Zach Duke and should probably start taking some of those 7th and 8th inning opportunities against left-hand batters if Duke keeps giving up key hits in those situations. That said, we don't have many true power arms that will line up with some of the better teams' pens, other than Nate Jones.

Once again...I'll take 1 Tim Anderson and you can have 50 Courtney Hawkinses or Gordon Beckhams.

I was talking about BULLPENS. "The Reds may have the worst bullpen in the history of the world." That was the quote. Geez. Before I get bombarded with bullpen stats, yes, I just cited an article that argued the Reds were on the way to being one of the worst bullpens in the history of baseball.

Obviously, I'm being hyperbolic, but Jennings, Putnam, Petricka, Duke and Albers wouldn't exactly be highly coveted at the moment. For the last ten days, we've had far and away the worst bullpen in the majors. http://www.foxsports.com/mlb/story/cincinn...s-rumors-051816

Just shut up and play...then you can talk. We heard so much talk out of Jake Peavy, but he never backed it up on the field. Let your stats speak for you.

Would be much better if Anderson played like Jeter, unlike GordonBeckham, who said he wanted to be Jeter before he'd ever proven a thing in the major leagues. That kind of talk, about being the captain, face of the franchise and future of the organization, I think it took its toll and turned into a burden over time (I saw it happen with Alex Gordon when I lived in Kansas City as well, it was "this guy's going to be the next George Brett" from the day he was drafted out of Nebraska). It also caused some friction because Ozzie didn't like the young/er guys getting too much attention before he felt they deserved it. Of course, lots of White Sox fans to this day blame the Sox for moving him from SS to 3B to 2B and attribute that as part of the reason for his eventual downfall. I think someone else made a comment about Anderson bringing more and more African-American fans to the game...that he would be that kind of electric presence. Well, I hope it's true, but I also hope we don't put too many unrealistic expectations on him early. He sounds like a great kid who's confident but never forgets his roots and won't let being a big leaguer get to his head. Character issues have never come up in any discussion that I've seen about him online, and that's always an added plus.