caulfield12

QUOTE (Hatchetman @ Oct 26, 2015 -> 07:42 AM) I did not know Hostetler was originally a Sox scout. Now I am depressed. Thanks a lot guys. Haha, you're welcome. By the way, the Twins were basically able to cycle through two waves of players from 2001-2010 and remain competitive in the AL Central for nearly a decade. No guarantees it will happen with KC. The Tigers really just had four years, the Royals will probably have a good chance next year to repeat and 50/50 at best in 2017 depending on the eventual fate/s of Ventura, Duffy and Zimmer, to name just three. As far as the Royals go, talking about the 1990s decade of wasted draft picks well before Dayton Moore arrived on the scene is pretty pointless since 1986-2002 has absolutely nothing to do with his regime at all. It's like talking about 1960-1986 when discussing the White Sox and connecting it to KW somehow. Now sure, 1995-1999...okay. From 2004-2007 the Royals were terrible, worst or second worst in the majors. Moore wasn't involved in the draft until 2007 with KC, it was Allard Baird. So he personally was responsible for six Top Eight picks. Including Gordon Beckham, the White Sox will have had four Top Ten picks and are still least two years from the playoffs. Not to mention Courtney Hawkins at 13 and not realistically close to a major league promotion after four seasons. For a high schooler in the top half of the first round, you should be knocking on the door in year five at least.

You can search at chisox.com, wsi.com and any Royals' site in the universe. You won't ever find caulfield12 there. I will bet Greg's house on it.

In the final summary, Schuerholz did have a world of resources behind him when Ewing Kauffman was running the Royals. They had the first or second highest payroll for many of those years from 1976-1985, along with the Yankees of course under Steinbrenner. With the smallest media market in MLB...but they also worked harder than any other team in the majors (along with the Cardinals) to expand their radio and tv networks. Imagine an owner who loved his team and city so much he was willing to do and spend whatever it took to provide fans the best team every year no matter what the cost. The results speak for themselves. Yeah, you can say they were lucky to get the Denkinger call in 1985, but they didn't force the Cards to implode any more than AJ's play running to first against former Sox catcher Josh Paul did. So Schuerholz left for the Braves, Dayton Moore learned everything about talent evaluation and especially the intersection of talent WITH character, Moore learned under him (and also what KC used to be like as a great baseball city) and was recruited to bring that back to KC again after it was lost for so many years. I sincerely hope the four seasons Nick Hostetler spent with the Braves made more of an impression than his time with the White Sox... Schools University of Akron, Youngstown State University Nick Hostetler has been a scout for the Chicago White Sox (2001-2004, 2007- ) and Atlanta Braves (2004-2007). He signed Gordon Beckham, Daniel Hudson, Tyler Lumsden and Jeff Lyman. Hostetler's roots are in the Braves organization, where he learned the methodology that built a 90s juggernaut. While there he also worked closely with Dayton Moore, now the man in charge of the Kansas City Royals. Hostetler values analytics, especially when they prove something that had been just a hunch. "I believe we should incorporate them more and more with what our eyes see." While of course valuing the "best player available," he admits a past proclivity for high school players, an area where the Sox have not had success. He uses social media discreetly to keep up with college rotations, and to check out potential personality issues of prospective picks. http://www.dailyherald.com/article/2015080...orts/150809304/

QUOTE (greg775 @ Oct 25, 2015 -> 01:50 PM) He said that? Caufield? He does appear to like KC but did he say that? Wow. I didn't see that. There are two ways of getting a point across about the current state of the White Sox. One is to follow in the wake of Thad Bosley (including the 35 years line repetitively about JR), or to mirror Lip, Balta (preseason/preparation, etc.,) Flash Tizzle...which gets kind of boring and redundant since that leads to endless nobody can prove quantifiably that Robin Ventura isn't a good manager OR the lack of loyalty from White Sox fans (and not the ineptitude and lack of a clear vision from the front office) endless black holes. So at least I can praise teams that are doing things right because, in and of itself, that's inherently more positive and optimistic (hoping your favorite team will eventually wake up) than endlessly whining. Blind faith, hope and loyalty doesn't cut it for 98% of White Sox fans. Trust has to be earned. If I wouldn't have lived in KC for a decade, it wouldn't have mattered. The whole time I resided there, the White Sox just ran over the Royals, like the Globetrotters and the Washington Generals. So I suppose if it was the 90s Indians, the 2002-2010 Twins or the 2011-2014 Tigers, I rooted against those teams because I hated them for beating the White Sox so consistently and bringing out every frustration possible as a fan. Because the Royals were so terrible, it almost forced you to empathize with them when the Yankees or Red Sox would come to town. KC was flyover territory, irrelevant to everyone on the East and West Coast. As a native Midwesterner, this mentality of pity, disdain and ridicule from afar (pretty much any reference in the movies to Iowa or Kansas is poking fun at you) almost forced one to pull for the underdog against the big, bad bullies. This post has been edited by caulfield12: Yesterday, 08:44 PM This is where I professed my eternal hatred for the White Sox, lol...and somehow what was written has been bent, but what else would one expect?

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Oct 25, 2015 -> 09:46 AM) Dayton Moore is so awesome. He took over as GM in 2006. 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 they wee horrible. Decent in 2013 , WC in 2014. So it took him 8.5 seasons to reach the playoffs. KW gets ripped for not reaching them in 7. Their first division crown in his 9th season. Amazing how that works. 6.5 seasons to be ten games over .500. Realistically, we could say six since it's impossible to turn around a season for a losing organization with no resources committed when you're hired in the middle of the year. Interesting math system there. 7.5 seasons for the WC and World Series. 8.5 seasons for the division and World Series. Best record in the AL from 2013-2015 and two consecutive playoff and World Series appearances, something the White Sox have never done in franchise history. All this coming from MLB's smallest media market and with a very limited payroll until Glass approved adding James Shields. By the end of the World Series, more playoff/postseason games in two years than the White Sox have had in the past 55. The White Sox had 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16...which is 8 years MAYBE getting back to .500 in Year Eight (and Year 2 of some plan or another) but right now even that's highly unlikely to most. If the White Sox made it to the World Series in both 2017 and 2018 they'd still be behind schedule. I don't think anyone will take that bet, though. Last year it was luck or a fluke in the WC game...this year it was the umpiring. What will it be next season as the excuse? If Ned Yost is worse than Ventura and Moore isn't that good either, why haven't the White Sox with exponentially more resources been able to pull off the same seemingly easy feat?

QUOTE (Chicago White Sox @ Oct 25, 2015 -> 09:57 AM) Not necessarily directed at you, but when did buying starting pitching on the free agent market become attractive? I've seen this idea thrown out a lot in Cubs-related discussions as if it's a no-brainer. Sure, teams sitting on tons of cash can go out and sign a top starter to a monster deal, but how often have those signings worked out for the club? IMO, there's nothing riskier than signing a frontline starter in free agency and most organizations know this. Doesn't mean they're betting giving up half their system for a cost-controlled alternative, but it does clearly demonstrate why a guy like Quintana is so valuable. It's tricky. With the Red Sox, Masterson, Porcello, Sandoval and Hanley all flopped and it cost Ben Cherington his job. Two years before that, almost all of their offseason moves turned out perfectly. In the end, teams like the Dodgers, Cubs, Rangers and Red Sox do have surpluses at both the major and minor league levels. Dombrowski is likely to be aggressive. We'll see if Hahn does the most obvious thing in trading Q.

Rios That said, Zobrist and Morales were huge additions. Young vs. Matz (lhp) in Game 4 will be key, if they don't use Medlen or Duffy instead. Young is a bit more predictable, and a bigger change of pace from three hard throwers in a row. Blanton and Medlen essentially replaced Jason Vargas. Even if Familia=Davis, the Mets don't have anyone as good as Herrera or even Madson. Defensively, the Mets are a tick or two above average but nowhere close to KC.

QUOTE (Thad Bosley @ Oct 25, 2015 -> 08:20 AM) How much nicer would it be to be reading about Mr. Reinsdorf talking about how it felt to be hugging the William Harridge trophy AGAIN cuz he won the pennant AGAIN, and how electrified the Sox fan base was as a result. TV ratings and attendance going through the roof down there in KC. Wouldn't you rather be hearing the Chairman waxing eloquent about that same phenomenon going on with the Sox rather than him sharing his uninteresting point of view on whether the '05 WS had more of an impact on the city than the '85 Bears Super Bowl championship. Who the heck cares about any of that! LOL - win, darn you!! WIN! Start winning and talking about that already!!!!! Enough of the fluff! And Glass was more hated/reviled/despised than Reinsdorf ever was in Chicago. At least JR had Michael, Scottie and Phil to fall back on. Glass was basically Darth Vader. He was basically accused of bringing a Wal-Mart "cheap/maximizing profits" approach for at least a decade. He followed Ewing Kauffman, who was even more beloved in KC than Bill Veeck could ever be in Chicago because he gave KC all those great teams from 1976-85...but he was finally willing to admit they needed to bring in someone from an organization like the Braves who knew how to properly evaluate both talent and character. That he needed to hire experts to build things correctly from the ground up instead of extrapolating Wal-Mart systems methodologies to the operations of a professional baseball franchise without the advantage of economies of scale in the smallest media market in MLB.

The Red Sox won't have to give up that talent for Quintana when they can buy it on the FA market without wiping out 1/3rd or 1/4th of their top prospects.

While We're Young is an excellent film. Noah Baumbach is on a roll. Ben Stiller, Naomi Watts, Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried. Reminiscent of This is 40 but much better. This one was way out there but uniquely compelling. "The Tribe" Director: Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy Cast: Grigory Fesenko, Yana Novikova, Rosa Babiy Synopsis: A shy boy arrives at a boarding school for the deaf. There he tries to find his place in the hierarchy of the school community, which operates like a Mafiosi group ungoverned by the outside world. Verdict: We need more bold, purely cinematic films like “The Tribe.” Playing like an even more disturbing combination of “City of God” and “Lord of the Flies,” debut Ukrainian director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy takes a potentially gimmicky conceit — all dialogue is spoken through sign language with no subtitles — and infuses it with dread, political subversion (it directly comments on current Ukrainian politics) and incredible filmmaking bravado. Nearly all scenes play out in impeccably choreographed long takes, with a camera that rarely stops moving — its style is akin to Michael Haneke’s “Code Unknown” and features a similar foreboding, disquieting sense that things are going to end badly. And what's so impressive is that although its formalism is so rigid, it rises well above gimmick to become a truly great, unique piece of cinema (and a very fine crime movie to boot), conjuring its own world, commenting on ours and giving the audience something actually, palpably new. Our Review: Jess' A grade Cannes review Release Date: Will play Sundance prior to a theatrical release and VOD via Drafthouse. http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/the...y-seen-20150107

There you have it. Greg just presented the World Series to the Royals on a golden platter. https://sports.yahoo.com/news/the-royals-ar...-100548685.html

http://www.kansascity.com/sports/spt-colum...le41341293.html Maybe Thad Bosley can use his persistence to deliver this column to JR before it's too late...

http://espn.go.com/mlb/playoffs2015/story/...sas-city-royals Kurkjian of EsPn picks Royals in 7...provides five compelling plot points for the series. It will be Cueto and Ventura at home and then Volquez in Game 3 in NYC. Mets are going Harvey, deGrom, Snydegaard and then presumably Matz. Royals will choose from Young, Medlen and Duffy for Game 4.

Unfortunately the best are loyal to Mozeliak, with Luhnow in Houston or no longer viable due to their connection to the hacking/FBI scandal with Houston. They did bring in Hostetler from the Braves' organization to basically replace Laumann at least.

QUOTE (SouthSideSale @ Oct 24, 2015 -> 09:31 PM) Sure it does. But that's how teams get really good talents for the most part. Astros wouldn't have gotten Coreia at like 10. They were 3? Happens. Sucking so bad will get ya top talent. No matter the sport. I was really happy with Rodon. Very lucky The main point is you're expected to hit more often than not on Top Ten picks. When they can consistently get yearly positive results from lower rounds (Buehrle, Reed, Nate Jones, Petricka, Santiago, etc.) like the Cardinals do, that's the hallmark of great scouting and development. A high standard, but no choice since they can't spend their way out and aren't developing any position players that we can project to be above replacement level starters with a few exceptions.

Unfortunately, the nationwide expansion of Steve Jobs isn't panning out as expected. After two successful weeks in platform release, the strongly reviewed film earned just $2.43 million on Friday from 2,493 theaters. To put that into perspective, it falls below the $2.6 million opening day of the Ashton Kutcher-led Jobs back in August 2013. With the aforementioned critical response (86 percent) and positive early reactions from audiences (81 percent), it's clear that demand for yet another film about the tech icon just wasn't there among most paying customers despite a strong ensemble cast led by Michael Fassbender. The film's buzz could create some back-loading as it still hopes to contend during awards season, but it will need some help from casual audiences going forward. Universal itself is projecting close to a $7.1 million weekend. Boxoffice.com So two movies that were early critical favorites, The Walk and now Jobs, are bombing. Wonder how much that has to do with earlier incantations (the Ashton Kutcher Jobs actually outgrossed this version) have to do with that, because Sorkin's an excellent writer. Jobs and Apple burnout? On the other hand, The Martian was great. Not as visually exciting and thrilling and preposterous as Gravity, but just a very solid movie that I enjoyed much more than Interstellar. Reminiscent of Castaway and The Life of Pi in many ways. Damon really carried this picture. Daniels and Chastain were good in supporting roles, but this was a Damon tour de force.

Sure, but having three consecutive Top Ten picks tends to help as well. The proof will be in what we eventually get out of Beck, Johnson, Danish, Montas, Adams, Fulmer and about 3-4 others. They pretty much lucked into Rodon because of Kolek and Aiken both going in front of him. Carson Fulmer has more risk attached to him in terms of his delivery. For Carlos, the biggest issues will always be control and the development of his change-up.

QUOTE (SouthSideSale @ Oct 24, 2015 -> 08:56 PM) There's a couple options offensively. Anderson next season. He's as close to a sure thing as we've had. 3B Trey M is a good young prospect but is probably 2-3 years away. That third sentence speaks volumes for how far our minor league rebuild still has left to go.

1) Seems Duke is always involved in some crazy games. 2) Thanks to GaTech and USC for pushing Iowa up in the rankings...but I have this sneaking suspicion that they will be tripped up at Indiana next week. Jimbo Fisher, you and Nick Saban are everything that's wrong with college football. 3) Poor Nebraska...growing up with Oklahoma as my second team because my dad went to school there, I can for the first time ever say I'm starting to feel sorry and pity for their great fanbase. They definitely deserve better. That program was so good that they were like the Patriots of twenty years ago, and for most of the Osborne years.

There are two ways of getting a point across about the current state of the White Sox. One is to follow in the wake of Thad Bosley (including the 35 years line repetitively about JR), or to mirror Lip, Balta (preseason/preparation, etc.,) Flash Tizzle...which gets kind of boring and redundant since that leads to endless nobody can prove quantifiably that Robin Ventura isn't a good manager OR the lack of loyalty from White Sox fans (and not the ineptitude and lack of a clear vision from the front office) endless black holes. So at least I can praise teams that are doing things right because, in and of itself, that's inherently more positive and optimistic (hoping your favorite team will eventually wake up) than endlessly whining. Blind faith, hope and loyalty doesn't cut it for 98% of White Sox fans. Trust has to be earned. If I wouldn't have lived in KC for a decade, it wouldn't have mattered. The whole time I resided there, the White Sox just ran over the Royals, like the Globetrotters and the Washington Generals. So I suppose if it was the 90s Indians, the 2002-2010 Twins or the 2011-2014 Tigers, I rooted against those teams because I hated them for beating the White Sox so consistently and bringing out every frustration possible as a fan. Because the Royals were so terrible, it almost forced you to empathize with them when the Yankees or Red Sox would come to town. KC was flyover territory, irrelevant to everyone on the East and West Coast. As a native Midwesterner, this mentality of pity, disdain and ridicule from afar (pretty much any reference in the movies to Iowa or Kansas is poking fun at you) almost forced one to pull for the underdog against the big, bad bullies.

So is momentum, keep/ing the line moving and clutch...but try to convince players and managers these concepts don't exist and are just random statistical anomalies or white noise.

QUOTE (raBBit @ Oct 24, 2015 -> 11:00 AM) Yeah, you know how those season ticket holders get when they the WAR projections! I am not one that puts a lot of weight into projections but I think there's reason to believe we can get 25 WAR out of Sale/Quintana/Abreu/Eaton/Rodon. It doesn't help that last year our entire pool of position players sucked away from Abreu/Eaton. There is going to be improvement, and very likely across the board, despite what your doom and gloomers say. Are you willing to guarantee even a .500 team next year? If they can't do that, playoffs or bust in 2017 is a stretch because then we'll also be dealing with the Twins and Indians.

QUOTE (Chicago White Sox @ Oct 24, 2015 -> 01:04 PM) I had to blink three times to confirm this wasn't a caulfield post. Why are you undervaluing Jose Quintana so much? He was 14th in pitching WAR this year, has a strong track record, & is under contract for the next five seasons at $8M per. He's without question one of the most valuable SP assets in baseball. The fact that you think Theo wouldn't trade Javier Baez, a guy who hasn't proved anything in the majors and has a history of contact issues, straight up for Quintana is beyond mind boggling IMO. Are you actually suggesting Baez is the more valuable asset of the two? And are you actually suggesting they might not trade Scwarber or Baez for Sale? If so, wow is all I can say. I'd say that's even more extreme than Schwarber, Baez and Soler for Sale...with the hope of getting Russell included over Baez but it being highly unlikely. The Cubs have to realize they need some pesky contact hitters in that line-up. All or nothing was exposed by the Mets...their inability to manufacture runs via any method but xb hits.

QUOTE (Soxfan90 @ Oct 24, 2015 -> 02:34 PM) I can't see the Royals blowing it this time. I think they need to win this year since the odds will be against them getting back to the World Series next year. Why? Because of Zobrist, Rios, Gordon, Cueto and likely Infante (salary dump) leaving, or mathematical odds/probability going against them? The Blue Jays will have the same one year window before they start losing their core players, and will also have to replace Price and Buehrle, not to mention being careful with Stroman's first full year back in terms of innings. Tulo always manages to get injured, and NY and especially Boston and Baltmore will be motivated to knock them off. In the AL Central, it's hard to imagine Minnesota and Cleveland going after splashy free agents. The Twins were in a difficult financial position largely because they emulated the Sox, signing Erwin Santana, Nolasco and Hughes from that second tier line of starting pitchers.

I'm starting to wish the Cubs had actually made it just to see the existential angst around here with two teams who did rebuilds correctly putting the microscope to what we've so glaringly failed to do. Would you really root for the Cubs over a team from the AL and your own division?