caulfield12

QUOTE (Bruce_Blixton @ May 20, 2014 -> 05:08 PM) Shame to see Lindstrom go down with such a rare injury, I found this diagnosis on an orthopaedic surgeon's website: Sounds like we can probably rule Lindstrom out for the rest of the year, it's not a debilitating setback to the team but he could've been a trade piece for a Brandon Jacobs level prospect which is better than nothing. First Crain last year (which really hurt), then Lindstrom. Our off-season idea of flipping relievers for valuable pieces is falling apart a bit. Cleto has negligible value, and Boggs is history. Putnam and Belisario are the veterans performing well right now, but how much would either of them fetch in July? Unless someone makes an outstanding offer for Belisario, Hahn will probably hold onto him and give Webb/Petricka some more time to get their feet wet at the big league level.

Carbonell would be about the equivalent of DeAza when we got him off waivers from the Marlins. Not convinced that's enough of an impact to bid $20-30 million on him, simply because he's an international free agent. I think they'll save their bullets for something they like more. Along with Leonys Martin, Leslie Anderson is another name that comes to mind with this guy.

Rondon and Montas (in particular) have the ability to jump into the Top 10. 1. Hawkins 2. Micah Johnson 3. Davidson 4. Anderson 5. Beck 6. C. Sanchez 7. Danish 8. Ravelo 9. Trey Michalczewski 10. Montas 11. Adolfo 12. Rondon 5-10 drive you crazy. So many question marks with each of those guys. For the moment, decided to move on from believing Thompson will ever put it together.

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/fantasy-roto...-194534462.html Here's one fantasy league guy betting on Belisario because of Webb's control issues (17 bb/24 IP)

QUOTE (HickoryHuskers @ May 20, 2014 -> 01:57 PM) Lineups: Sox: Eaton 8, Beckham 4, Gillaspie 5, Viciedo 9, Dunn 3, Ramirez 6, Konerko DH, De Aza 7, Flowers 2; Rienzo 1 KC: Aoki 9, Escobar 6, Hosmer 3, Butler DH, Gordon 7, Cain 8, Valencia 5, Ciriaco 4, Hayes 2; Ventura 1 Beckham and Viciedo were two of our weaker fastball hitters the last couple of seasons. We'll see if can up with Escobar's stuff quickly enough. Royals with no idea what to do with 3B/2B positions at the moment. Remember when Ciriaco went on a tear for the Red Sox in 2012? Finally, it's always nice to see Salvador Perez out of the line-up when we face them. A bit strange they don't have a Spanish-speaking catcher for Ventura's starts, but maybe Hayes can speak it?

QUOTE (Buehrle>Wood @ May 20, 2014 -> 09:41 AM) Putnam Belisario and Petrika have all been elite out of the bullpen this year, so doesn't really matter. Webb is a better option too, probably. Belisario was terrible and then he's been very solid. I really think Ventura would prefer to leave Putnam and him as the 7th/8th inning guys as that combination has worked quite well together the last 2-3 weeks.

http://obstructedview.net/news-and-rumors/...-carbonell.html He has hit only 9 home runs his entire career in Cuba, so he's definitely not a slugger in the Cespedes/Puig/Abreu mold. His calling card seems to be speed, but he hasn't perfected his stolen base technique or steals aren't as important in Cuban Serie Nacional beisbol. Just from looking at his profile, he seems like a poor man's version of Leonys Martin on the Rangers. Maybe a great fourth outfielder, but doesn't have the looks of a starter....unless he plays defense like F. Gutierrez or the Mets' CF. FWIW, his last name is coming up as Arredondo on a lot of the scouting reports. Cepeda (in Japan now) and Despaigne (maybe in Mexico) are the two guys to look out for, along with Gourriel if he ever leaves Cuba.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ May 20, 2014 -> 09:24 AM) Really nice read. http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/quarterly-r...reu-who-mashes/ This is my favorite point in the entire article because it really sums up who Abreu is and his value to the Sox very well. People get lost in the tape measure shots. I love Abreu, but it is vitally important that he keep hitting and/or improve his plate discipline. I do believe that improved discipline will come with exposure. But it's not out of the realm of possibility that he improves at 1B, given the proper instruction...not unlike Konerko has over the years in terms of digging balls out of the dirt. Part of that is God-given ability, like Juan Uribe's "soft" hands. But it's certainly an area that can and will get better over time. To say that he's peaked defensively in his rookie year in the big leagues is a stretching it, an extrapolation done with tons of future uncertainty.

QUOTE (Buehrle>Wood @ May 20, 2014 -> 08:58 AM) This may be a good thing. Usually it takes multiple blown saves to remove a closer. Now we have an excuse without blowing all those. Except who exactly are we going to put in his place? I'd honestly trust Putnam right now more than Webb, who needs a bit more refinement but is coming along nicely.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ May 20, 2014 -> 09:06 AM) The rule of 2014 is anybody important to the future or possible trade bait this season must spend time on the DL. You just jinxed Alexei Ramirez, perhaps the most durable Sox player of the last five or six years.

Jason Vargas, Salvador Perez and a changeup that wasn’t working May 20 BY LEE JUDGE The Kansas City Star According to Fangraphs, Jason Vargas throws a fastball, a slider, a cutter, a curve and a changeup. So if one of his pitches isn’t working, it seems like Jason’s got some alternatives. Monday night it looked like Jason Vargas’ changeup wasn’t working. Alexei Ramirez hit a third-inning home run on a changeup, Dayan Viciedo hit a fourth-inning home run on a changeup and Paul Konerko hit a fifth-inning home run on a changeup. That’s over a thousand feet of home runs on changeups. After I noticed all the home runs had been hit on changeups, I checked the other hits Vargas gave up; four of them were on changeups. When six of the eight hits you give up come on changeups, maybe you need to throw something else. After the game both Ned Yost and Jason Vargas said the changeups were up in the zone. Some nights that happens—you just don’t have command of a pitch. But when a pitcher doesn’t have a pitch, you’ve got to figure out a way around it. Throw something else, or throw it in a spot where it won’t hurt you. Salvador Perez and Jason Vargas didn’t do that; they continued to throw changeups and paid the price—and so did their team. A slider-speed bat I wrote this way back on Opening Day when the Royals got beat by an Alex Gonzalez walk-off single. Gonzalez is 37-years-old and the pitch he hit that day was a slider. I’ve been waiting for another older hitter to beat the Royals on an off-speed pitch and the 38-year-old Paul Konerko did that on Monday night. "He’s got a slider-speed bat." That’s that they say about a guy who can’t get around on a good fastball anymore. Ask if there are any hitters in their late thirties who still have good bat speed and the list is short—heck, there may not be enough old hitters with good bat speed to make anything resembling a list. That being the case, if a guy is getting older you probably don’t want to give him anything off-speed in the strike zone. You can show it to him, that might keep him from cheating on a fastball, but keep it out of the zone—beat the older hitter with fastballs. Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2014/05/20/50340...l#storylink=cpy

A metaphysical question, with a slight twist: If a baseball game is played and no one can see it on TV, does the baseball game really count? The standings say yes. The statistics agree. And yet to the greater Los Angeles area, 70 percent of whom cannot watch the Dodgers in the comfort of their homes, they might as well not exist. The most expensive team money can buy is also the most expensive mistake in the short history of wildly overpriced, patently absurd local-television-rights deals. For an estimated $8.3 billion, Time Warner Cable bought the rights to the Dodgers and created SportsNet LA. Time Warner then suggested to cable and satellite providers that they pay at least $4 a month to carry the channel, a fee they would pass along to subscribers. Every one of them kindly told Time Warner to suck a lemon, and so here we are, with the most popular baseball team in the game's second-biggest media market practically blacking itself out on account of its own efforts to fatten its pockets. And let's not twist this any other way: This is a Dodgers issue and a Time Warner issue, and any effort to spin it otherwise is revisionism. When you have a product like the TV rights to a baseball team, and the value of those TV rights is an ever-moving and nebulous dollar amount, it is incumbent on the parties paying those dollars and receiving those dollars to ensure they will recoup those dollars one way or another. Everybody in the television business agrees: DirecTV, the satellite giant, sets the standard with sports programming – and should continue to do so even after its purchase by AT&T over the weekend. When it agrees to a carriage deal, the rest of the providers fall in line and do the same. For Time Warner to promise the Dodgers an average of more than $330 million a season for the next 25 years without even a soft carriage agreement in place with DirecTV is malpractice, a monster bet on an audience it clearly did not understand. Were cancellation orders flowing in on account of the Dodgers' invisibility, surely DirecTV would reconsider its tack, much as it did when the Lakers launched their own network and fans cried foul at its absence on satellite. More than a quarter of the 2014 baseball season has passed, and DirecTV is firm as ever in its stand, which is frightening for the Dodgers, because it reinforces a troublesome truth: By chasing every last dollar and choosing Time Warner, a direct competitor to DirecTV and other providers, they failed to protect their greatest asset. Not a TV contract but a team. Naturally, the buck-passing is starting, cracks in the unified Dodgers-Time Warner front apparent. Peter Guber, one of the Dodgers' co-owners, recently told the Los Angeles Times: "We sold the rights to a gigantic corporation, it's their job to market the rights and get the distribution. We are not happy that they haven't been able to get the full distribution in our own market that they promised. That's their job. They made the bet." Actually, this bet was two-fold. The Dodgers bet on Time Warner to fulfill its duties, fully aware that an inability to do so would render them mute in a Los Angeles sports scene that thrives on noise. Of course, maybe that's a good thing, consider just how disappointing the … 10. Los Angeles Dodgers possess: an endless cauldron of money into which they can dip, filling every obvious problem with a flash of the wallet. It's really quite impressive, and it's what the Dodgers figured their next quarter century would resemble. Sure would be nice if the fans didn't have to drive to Dodger Stadium to see it. Even at 23-22, the Dodgers are a hot ticket. The infusion of excitement from getting to watch them on TV every day – to see the narrative of a season build instead of trying to piece one together from now-and-again trips to the stadium – matters to the modern consumer. There's a reason local-TV deals have fetched billions. Because in those cases, demand dictated the price of the sale. The tail wagged the dog with the Dodgers, and maybe the AT&T-DirecTV merger will force the issue instead of seeing the Dodgers go on the public-relations offensive while DirecTV continues to make the same reasonable point: Why charge everyone $4 for a channel not all of them watch? It's a salient point, one that strikes right at the heart of the TV-rights system that continues to move toward a-la-carte programming. If you want SportsNet LA, you should have it. If not, you shouldn't. Simple enough. And yet because past TV deals have forced consumers into buying products they don't want, the Dodgers want to argue precedent holds. So it shall, from now until whenever the lawyers say the Los Angeles Invisibles can return to television and remind people what they were missing in the first place. http://sports.yahoo.com/news/10-degrees--d...-053835872.html

QUOTE (raBBit @ May 19, 2014 -> 11:50 PM) Birmingham scored 3x as many runs as they had in their previous six. Every starter got an base at least twice. You'd be hard-pressed with Micah Johnson gone to name one of the Barons' current starters that has a good chance at being a major league regular in the future. Perhaps Ravelo, but he's got to prove himself over a full-season, show a bit more pop and also stay 100% healthy.

QUOTE (greg775 @ May 19, 2014 -> 10:03 PM) The pickoff by Petricka was huge, not to mention the home run by Paulie. After the bunt and the injury it certainly looked bleak. Royals fans are furious. They are blaming Yost for taking out Aoki for Dyson on the basepaths. I don't see how Yost can ever trust Dyson again after the blunder which definitely cost KC the game. Great win. Definitely helps make up for some of the lousy losses Sox have had in Kauffman past few years. Paulie's home run was pretty damn impressive. To center in a pitcher's park. He isn't finished yet. He has two home runs; Dunn six. Dunn has double the at bats. I won't be negative tonight, though. Great comeback win. p.s. There's really no reason to pitch Carroll again. Got to try somebody else. He's not MLB caliber. http://espn.go.com/mlb/stats/batting/_/sort/OPS/order/true Dunn is still 29th in all of MLB in OPS. That would mean he's leading 9 other teams, including the Royals, in this category.

QUOTE (Jose Abreu @ May 19, 2014 -> 09:55 PM) I wouldn't say we have it better than most. I think we're about on par with the rest of the league. Up until the Floyd/Danks/Crain issues in the last couple of years, we had the best record with pitching for the last decade (in terms of days on the DL) of any team in baseball, and one of the top 2-3 overall in terms of times missed for all players. Someone had the fangraphs.com article up about it recently, about this particular anomaly being one of our unique competitive advantages.

QUOTE (winninguglyin83 @ May 19, 2014 -> 09:46 PM) Is Kevan Smith still considered a prospect? Hitting for a decent average, but minimal power. About a month from 26th birthday and still in AA ball. My guess is probably not? Marginal. He's not on very many organizational Top 20-25 lists out there. Maybe 20-30, in that range.

Sale said the White Sox have to do something else to rid themselves of this rash of injuries. If they continue to occur the two-time All-Star might be open to hiring a witch doctor or sacrificing a live chicken, anything to rid the White Sox of this epidemic. [RELATED - White Sox Chris Sale sore from start but elbow is fine] “We have to disinfect the clubhouse,” said Sale, who is nearing a return. “We’re getting bit by the bug. Something’s going on. But you look around baseball and we’re doing a little better than most. You look around baseball — there’s freakish things happening around baseball for some reason, with pitchers and guys on field with obliques. Be thankful it’s not more.” Dan Hayes, www.csnchicago.com

QUOTE (Jose Abreu @ May 19, 2014 -> 09:36 PM) But Hanson (your suggestion) is 2-4, 4.60 I know that, but they have nothing to lose with him....he's a veteran MLB starter and placeholder. The last thing you want to do is run Johnson out there against teams like the Yankees and have him get his brains beaten in.

QUOTE (JohnCangelosi @ May 19, 2014 -> 08:09 PM) Maybe I am being too sensitive here, but isn't there a concern within the organization of trading away Alexei at this point given the fact that he's a fellow Cuban to our star player now? Not sure if that would affect things at all and if that should even be a concern. Obviously from a business perspective it makes sense to deal Alexei if we can fill a few holes going forward. And yes, I agree there is no way we see Semien as a SS now. The problem is I am not sure if we even have someone remotely ready to take over. I wouldn't be stoked if our starting SS next year was Leury Garcia. That's not progress IMO. From everything you read out there, Carlos Sanchez is the only one who can handle the position at above-average major league ability. But then you're looking at a low 600's OPS out of him, so that's a huge offensive drop-off from what Ramirez has been producing this season.

QUOTE (fathom @ May 19, 2014 -> 07:07 PM) I have more faith in Quintana being a #2 or 3 than Gausman going forward though. Unfortunately, Johnson and Davidson being awful so far makes the rebuilding seem more difficult than it did 2 months ago. Don't forget Semien, too. Those are three key pieces going backwards, along with Avisail's injury.

QUOTE (Jose Abreu @ May 19, 2014 -> 09:34 PM) I think it's time to replace Carroll with Erik Johnson. He has a 3.38 ERA in 4 starts. On paper, his stats look okay. But the numbers are a bit misleading. And his velocity is still way down in the upper 80's for most of his fastballs.

Oh, here I was about to congratulate Ventura for having the guts to take out Lindstrom in the middle of a save situation. What happened to Matty Ice? Looking at what happened, it's almost incredible to believe Downs and Petricka escaped that inning without being scored upon. Don't forget the Konerko heroics!!! And Dayan's still hovering around the .300 mark. Guerra or De Los Santos for the Lindstrom spot? Hanson to replace Carroll? No idea.

QUOTE (South Side Fireworks Man @ May 19, 2014 -> 08:29 PM) Another hit for the best SS in baseball. Well, except for that kid in Colorado...what's his name, Stone Pony?

More problems on the basepaths. Was there any way for Dunn at his size and lack of foot speed to avoid getting doubled off there? Just a bad break? Beckham hit a ball hard that inning too, right? Whose ball did Cain catch to save a run? Sierra? Semien? I can't follow Gameday clearly.

That's probably the end of Flowers being a .300 hitter this season. FWIW, Zach Putnam continues to be one of Hahn's most overlooked signings.