caulfield12

That was an 86 MPH??? No clue. Too fast for a change...ugly. Overthrown slider, I guess. High pitch count coming into play for both guys. Hanging slider got yanked into LF through the hole, yikes!!!

Semien had him played too close to RF/1B...couldn't quite get back there in time. Lucky to have a single with a 2-0 count against Car-Go. Garcia might have had him had he been able to get rid of the ball right away instead of crow-hopping and double-clutching.

QUOTE (Charlie Haeger's Knuckles @ Apr 9, 2014 -> 02:11 PM) Rienzo has been pitching well at AAA. I wonder how long Johnson's leash is? 3 starts? 4 starts? At least until the middle of the May, but it's a judgement call. They'll want to at least wait until they see 2-3 starts in decent weather so they can make a better assessment of how his breaking stuff will play. The velocity drop COULD be explained by a dead arm period or there might be something physically wrong...or he's just pressing and out of sorts mechanically and it's messing up his rhythm and arm speed. Anything is possible. Maybe he's just feeling a little pressure/stress of making a big league rotation for the first time in his career.

I'm starting to think Uribe and Viciedo are the same hitter. Except for the lack of Uribe's HR follow-through and dropping the bat quickly.

This Blackmon kid looks like the real deal. Such a pretty swing...Helton-esque. Although almost every lefty but Dunn can look picturesque. Good job by Semien taking the throw on the 3B side and getting it across the bag without losing it or hurrying too much. Everything T-Flow is doing, for now, is coming up roses.

QUOTE (The Mighty Mite @ Apr 9, 2014 -> 01:42 PM) I'm probably one of the few senior citizens on this site and have been a Sox fan since the early 50s and have seen some great years and some bad years. Growing up in the 50s and 60s I did not witness a losing season until 1968 after 17 straight winning seasons plus a trip to the 59 World Series, the Sox were the number one team in the city as far as Chicago baseball goes, but even back then the neighborhood always came up as a problem and when things went bad in the late 60s and mid 70s the Sox almost moved. I don't know what things are going to be like around 35th and Shields when the stadium deal is over but so many fans especially out of towers will not make the trip to the Cell because of a fear of the neighborhood. If you put JR and the other owners on a lie detector machine I'm sure it would come out that to a man they wanted the new stadium somewhere else. So many things have happened through the years that have made us the almost forgotten baseball team in Chicago, I'm sure we all know what they are, it still pains me that the Cubs outdrew us in our great Championship year of 2005 and again in 2006 when most teams experience great attendence bumps after a Championship. Ownership down through the years has always been a problem, never able to make the post- season 2 years in a row, that's sad. We did have around 3 million that year...but the bump for winning a World Series is gone by Year 5. The Cubs also had fun/entertaining teams at that time, coming off the 2003 disappointment. It's not like those teams felt like the last three years on the Northside. In the case of the White Sox, 2007 and 2009 really killed all the forward momentum. This whole situation is well-documented...Harry Caray, Sportsvision, erosion of the neighborhood in 70's and 80's, the almost opposite trendiness of the Northside simultaneously, the stadium, the lack of activities and nightlife in the area. There are a million reasons.

QUOTE (chitownsportsfan @ Apr 9, 2014 -> 01:48 PM) Yea I'm not a huge believer in reading the tea leaves of body language but he just seems to not be mentally into the game. He's clearly a bit rattled right now. The blown double play, the bunt attempt. He needs to have some solid 1-2-3 innings where they don't feast on his fastball and he can get ahead in counts or it's going to be a long, bullpen-redundant day.

Eaton gets the job done there, somehow.

Now, if we could ONLY get Viciedo and Beckham to get back to that RCF stroke. Abreu/Garcia are having an influence on Flowers there, you can see it clearly with an at-bat that would have been a K in 2013.

Ramirez almost single-handedly killed that inning with that dumb play...not sliding.

Garcia's going to be much more dangerous if he can show better plate discipline than Viciedo. As he starts to hit more homers, they're going to be much more careful and try to go after the bottom of the line-up. Of course, right now Flowers/Ramirez are 5th/6th in AL OPS. That won't last.

QUOTE (Baron @ Apr 9, 2014 -> 01:38 PM) Anyone want to guess what Boggs ERA is in AAA? (Dont look) Well aware.

Johnson's slider just doesn't look very good. To the naked eye, he actually seems to be telegraphing it just a little...his motion is a bit slower on that pitch. Of course we can't judge him until May comes around and he's not pitching in Colorado, but there's no way he's going to get away with pitching in the low 90's with his lack of command/confidence and secondary stuff. Let's just hope he's going through the typical dead arm period out of the spring and his better velocity comes back or he's going to be in a lot of trouble.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 9, 2014 -> 01:32 PM) It also pokes a hole into the whole "disrespected because of draft position" thing. Axe was a 30th round pick, and signed by the Sox as a minor league free agent. And Johan Santana was a Rule 5 draft pick. Doesn't mean he was handled well. Buehrle came from what round...? Part of the issue was the same with Mike Trout. Players from New Jersey aren't well-scouted.

QUOTE (Jake @ Apr 9, 2014 -> 12:13 PM) In 2011, he learns the screwball. It propels him through the minors, making him an incredibly effective starter. He even comes up to the MLB team and looks pretty damn good while throwing lots of screwballs - 31% of his pitches were screwgies. In 2012, we put him in the bullpen. He quits throwing them. He says multiple times that he needs an extended warmup to find the release on the pitch. He does learn a changeup because he says it is much easier to warm up with it. The changeup sucks, but he adapted. Finishes 2012 having thrown 6.3% of his pitches as screwballs. 2013 - we put him in the f***ing bullpen again because of DYLAN AXELROD! Yep, no more screwballs. Changeup use becomes more prominent. 4.2% screwballs. So you have a guy whose rise from organizational fodder to potential key cog of the starting rotation was precipitated in large part by his learning the screwball. We put him in the bullpen and he can't warm up with it, especially because he just learned the pitch. It's actually quite impressive that he learned yet another pitch and got by without the pitch that seemed to play the biggest role in him becoming a useful baseball player. At this point, it seems he's just never going to throw the screwball again because it is too much of a risk to try to re-learn it. There's no way you can say that the Sox putting him in the bullpen isn't the reason that that happened. Anyway, it's not a big deal. Even if Hector turns into a good starter, which he very well may, we got what we wanted out of that trade. Eaton is awesome. Who cares? Hector's a great guy and I wish him the best. His control may make him marginal for his entire career or he may put things together and be pretty darn good. The fact alone that they gave Axelrod more of an opportunity than Santiago shows the fault in their plan/s. Why couldn't we trade Dylan for a starting CFer for the next six seasons? It's one thing if it is someone like Johnson or Beck. But it wasn't. For most of last season, he had one of the Top 15-25 MLB strikeout/IP ratios in the game. That alone is a testament to his ability, because all of the other names on that list were aces/superstars/All-Star/1-2 starters.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 9, 2014 -> 08:13 AM) Not really, no. I think Hector was his worst enemy. The Sox look for guys with big stuff, but they also look for guys to throw strikes and keep pitch counts down. Hector wasn't that guy, and they probably got to the point where they figured he wasn't going to be that guy. Then they got a starting CF for the next six years for him, so it worked out fine. Rarely works out that way. We'll see. A year ago, the DBacks thought Eaton was going to be their CFer for a decade. Now it's Pollock. Things can change quickly. Or look at Carlos Quentin and how quickly he fell out of favor. If Avisail Garcia, Davidson and Eaton are all here and starting six years from now...it would be amazing.

QUOTE (Buehrle>Wood @ Apr 9, 2014 -> 08:02 AM) I think most people even panned that trade at the time and those people were right. Not unlike the Marquez trade...with the Yankees. They tried to hype him up, but it didn't work. Also, Zach Stewart comes to mind. Three pretty bad pitchers...especially Molina. And nothing to show for Jackson and Santos, most importantly. OTOH, between Contreras/Loaiza and stealing Quintana, we've done fairly well overall with the Yankees, haha.

QUOTE (Swingandalongonetoleft @ Apr 9, 2014 -> 07:38 AM) You broke my computer. http://espn.go.com/mlb/statistics Someone needs to do a "screen save" and make it their avatar. Bonifacio with the Cubs, the NL leader (with his Blue Jays cap on).

And right on cue... http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-04...-alexei-ramirez Semien plate patience/quality at-bats article.

QUOTE (TheTruth05 @ Apr 9, 2014 -> 05:33 AM) So basically it's time for me to buy my Tyler Flowers Jersey Nope, much safer with Abreu. On the plus side, he (Tyler) can go 0 for 33 and still be hitting higher than he was last season.

http://www.kansascity.com/2014/04/08/49466...-in-season.html Report on Ventura's start for KC. Was recording 101 MPH late..even with the gun set 2-3 MPH higher (as widely rumored), 98-99 ain't bad. Wil Myers K'd 3 times but was a key part of the winning run scoring late.

QUOTE (Vance Law @ Apr 9, 2014 -> 04:04 AM) Yeah, I'm with you on those as far as their opposite field power. But with guys like Puig, Bo Jackson, Vlad Guerrero, they're super strong guys with (esp. Puig, Vlad) a lot of plate coverage, but when you watch them it looks like they are hacking up there. Some violent slugging. With Abreu on that one it looks like he just places the bat where the ball's going to be and it's gone. Don't want to compare him to people like Cabrera or Frank, but his swing just looks so controlled. Effortless power the other way. http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/gameday/index.jsp?g...ent_id=31929031 Fun to listen to Harrelson/Stone, Farmer and the Spanish announcers giving their calls for each. As mentioned in the game thread, that pitch (1st homer) was something like the 12th in the sequence and also was the first breaking ball. That's at least the second time already this year he's been successful in yanking in his hands. And he muscled that ball out, as he didn't quite get all of it...."as high as it was far" as they described it. The second homer...even if he was looking for location (outside fastball) and guessing, what was most impressive was the plate coverage (it was definitely outside) and the fact that it was high and probably out of the strike zone in terms of heighth of pitch as well. That he was able to take the pitch exactly where it was thrown and go in almost exactly the opposite direction, just haven't seen that very often at all. Of course, it was a 91 MPH fastball, and it wasn't one of their best relievers or starters throwing 95+, but still impressive. It's easy to imagine him doing that quite frequently at USCF from June through August when the ball is jumping out. Garcia's homers were pretty darned awe-inspiring as well, especially the line shot. Confidence...nice to see them feeling it, especially Abreu, Garcia and Eaton.

AL Ranks 1st Runs (50), 1st Hits (84), 1st HR's (12), 1st RBI's (48), 1st AVG (.290), 1st SLG (.472), 1st OPS (.824) 2nd OBP (.353) T7th Walks (25) T6th K's (62) Tyler Flowers 1st in the AL in BA OPS Flowers 5th, Ramirez 6th, Abreu 28th .921, Gillaspie 36th, Miguel Cabrera 37th, Dunn 38th, Avisail Garcia 39th

QUOTE (Vance Law @ Apr 9, 2014 -> 01:17 AM) I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but Abreu just seems to be such a really impressive hitter to me. Look at those 2 home runs- on that first one, he gets the first curveball he's seen on the 12th pitch of the at bat, pulls his arms in and golfs it out of the park. But that second one, who else hits a ball outside like that, and the swing looks so under control, and the ball just jumps out of the park. He's got those 2 swings in his arsenal and they couldn't be more different. He's got a lot of natural talent and obviously strength, but it just looks like he's got this down to a science. Puig. Cabrera. Bo Jackson.

QUOTE (The Baconator @ Apr 8, 2014 -> 07:52 PM) I'm with you. I keep scrolling through pages of DC this or Marvel that. Not interested. I'm just waiting for someone to talk about The Raid 2. Who's excited? I'm excited. http://popwatch.ew.com/2014/04/03/entertai...-action-movies/ The Raid 2 and the Death of Hollywood Action Movies