caulfield12

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Jun 2, 2013 -> 04:18 PM) What I don't understand is you say the Sox are loaded with bad plyers. Have a lot of players who simply can't hit. Then say the coaches are responsible for the bad record. I really don't know of anyone who can coach bad players to a great result. The problem is that there's ZERO evidence of coaching this year on the defensive side of things. And equally bad base-running. If they were playing the game the RIGHT way and not making 3-4-5 instantly recognizable mistakes that a Little League coach or Tom Emanski could correct...just hustle/effort errors...most here wouldn't have a problem admitting there was a talent issue. But there's a clear talent AND coaching issue right now.

QUOTE (Baron @ Jun 2, 2013 -> 04:16 PM) Its funny how much he's changed. Offensively talented in Atlanta and defensively deficient. Then he comes here and becomes offensively deficient and defensively talented. Now he's just bad in both areas. you mean in their system, as he never was close to Atlanta as a prospect before the trade for Javy

Worse than Flowers was Sale being completely out of position and not backing up home on the throw. It's the first thing you learn in Little Leagues as a pitcher... Sad. Not that it had anything to do with Crisp being safe or not at home.

QUOTE (fathom @ Jun 2, 2013 -> 04:08 PM) What's Sale's velocity been like? Only seen him throw a few pitches today. From the A's broadcast (radio), 91-94. In recent innings, they've mentioned the higher end of that range. Cooper's still hot about the balk call in the 3rd. Another blown call in MIL/PHIL series this week. Houston derailing the Angels' season, just like the Royals vs. Sox last year. Sale wasn't backing up the catcher on the throw. On the LH batter's box side of home on the throw. MORE HORRIBLE SOX FUNDAMENTALS. Gee, there's a surprise. It's like they have all forgotten how to play baseball since August of 2012.

Huge K to get Cespedes. One more pitch from a DP and out of the inning...miraculously.

QUOTE (fathom @ Jun 2, 2013 -> 04:05 PM) He'll just not be brought back with most of this staff after the season, IMO Why would Ventura want to come back next year? Why would anyone want him back?

QUOTE (Marty34 @ Jun 2, 2013 -> 04:00 PM) The problem is we don't have many prospects worth developing. Quintana and Santiago. The rest, Viciedo, Reed, Flowers, and Jones, if the Sox lost any of them, I wouldn't lose sleep over it. There's no reason to trade 3 of those players right now. Absolutely NONE. If you really want to be in White Flag mode though, trading Addison Reed at this point in his career would be the way to go about being controversial for the moment.

Viciedo, at least at this point in his career, seems to be the incredibly streaky type. Eventually, he'll go on another hot streak again, hit 2-3-4 homers in a week with 10 RBI's and "all is well" for the time being. A bit like Carlos Lee (not saying he's going to be that good, just that he's not getting nearly as many RBI's opportunities as Carlos did back in the late 90's)...

QUOTE (Marty34 @ Jun 2, 2013 -> 03:54 PM) I hear he was crushed when Deunte Heath was optioned back to Charlotte, thought it was unfair. Because seeing Blake Tekotte, Jordan Danks, Wise and Wells getting playing time for the SOX should scream to every prospect that they're blocked for a decade, lol. Door/opportunity open...but you have to walk through it. It's not going to be given to you, not even a former 1st round draft pick.

Ackley and Montero sent down in the same week. Justin Smoak a sub 700 OPSing 1B. Michael Saunders. The other players in the Yankees/Pineda deal have disappointed.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 2, 2013 -> 03:47 PM) Let's just be honest, at the very least, Thompson is 1.5 years away, Walker is 2 years away, and Mitchell got his aggressive chance this year and did not succeed. A lot of fans have allowed the Buddy Bell PR/spin machine to help them buy into the kool aid and are feeling burned for believing in our system's progress. I really felt Mitchell had a shot coming into this season...if he could become more consistent and cut down on his K's. Never had a positive feeling about Walker, who got a lot of hype just for being the first player drafted by the Sox that particular year. 75% of it is the startling reverse in Hawkins' fortunes. And we still need Thompson's defense in CF, if he can just hit 675-725 and keep improving, that would be quite valuable. The problem is the more sub 700 OPS guys you have in a line-up, the more pressure you place on Viciedo/Rios/Dunn and the pitching staff, etc.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 2, 2013 -> 03:44 PM) Yes. 2007 was this bad. Jerry Owens and Andy Gonzalez were in it. The bright spot of the entire season was Josh Fields. I'd almost say the 4 months of excitement over Gordon Beckham in 2009 were worth it (suffering through 2007)...ALMOST.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 2, 2013 -> 03:45 PM) Which is obviously why you want to replicate them in every way and would happily grab their struggling young guys while insisting we need to get rid of ours. The only thing you can say about the Royals' approach is that it was sounder than what the Mariners have done. At least they were following a strategy/formula/plan in KC.

QUOTE (Chicago White Sox @ Jun 2, 2013 -> 03:39 PM) I will say this, if we decide to punt this season, Danks should be in the lineup everyday one way or the other. While I don't think he'll ever become a regular, he has put up big numbers the last two years in AAA. He's the type of guy you take a look at in a wasted season. Until you acquire other outfielders by trade or Mitchell/Walker/Thompson have justified getting an opportunity, it's hard to disagree. Although 90% odds are he's merely a 4th/5th outfielder on a playoff team.

QUOTE (Chicago White Sox @ Jun 2, 2013 -> 03:36 PM) Balta, remember you never develop LFs, too easy to fill the position. However, finding a cheap 1B is near impossible so you have to try developing them. That's why they drafted Barnum, lol. With all the minor leaguers outfield prospects, one would have assumed the KW "big board" had Viciedo getting moved to 1B/DH if 2 of those 3 upper level guys (Mitchell, Walker, Thompson) kept progressing. And they had to suspect Konerko's time was nearing an end...if not before the season, they do now. By the way, Thompson's a perfect example of a kid who could just "get it" and become a star with his set of physical tools...but there are no guarantees. You bring in 3-4 Thompson's per draft/international signing period, eventually you'll hit one of them on the head.

QUOTE (Chicago White Sox @ Jun 2, 2013 -> 03:33 PM) Obviously an .853 OPS from Viciedo as a 22 year old in AAA doesn't qualify. And no matter what minor league numbers or pedigree, there's always the Alex Gordon example. Heck, you can look at tons of guys like Raul Ibanez, Jose Bautista, Michael Morse, etc., that didn't figure things out until their late 20's or early 30's. It's the Trout/Machado/Cabrera/Harper/Griffey, Jr. Effect. If a prospect is not a major league star at age 19-20-21, he's a bust.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 2, 2013 -> 03:31 PM) I see. So you're plenty willing to give time to develop to cheap trash from other teams with great minor league numbers, just not ones from the White Sox. Guys from the White Sox struggle, they need immediately replaced. Guys from the Royals struggle...hey, they're one swing away from turning it around! Great minor league numbers, at best, are only 1/4th or 1/3rd of the story with most legitimate top prospects. There's many things the casual fans don't pick up on that are signs of progress...happening behind the scenes...like with the Phegley situation, assuredly.

This line-up would struggle to win games in Charlotte. Well, KW's chickens have come home to roost, but to say Josh Phegley isn't being promoted to protect Jared Mitchell is equally ridiculous. How many rookie pitchers did we use last season? 11? There are plenty of opportunities for young players in this system...but you don't groom someone as a potential starter for 2-3 years and just give up unless you're 100% sure the next player in is ready and will be better. Clearly, if they keep losing game after game and fall out of contention, everything's up for discussion. As long as DET and CLE keep us within that 4-6 GB range, though, it's pretty hard to justify punting on the entire season when there's no reason not to at least wait until July with the way the schedule for this month is set up.

53 pitches....a bit high for Sale. Still has the consecutive scoreless streak alive.

http://www.nextmovie.com/blog/will-jaden-s...w-weird-quotes/ Will Smith getting the Tom Cruise treatment by some writers these days...we seem to love to knock celebrities off their mountaintops, only to have them redeem themselves again (see Robert Downey, Jr., or Ben Affleck).

http://mlb.si.com/2013/05/28/dustin-ackley...trics-mariners/ Not sure aligning ourselves through Harrelson with the likes of the Mariners or Royals (lowest walk rate in baseball) is doing any favors. At least the Astros seem to have an approach and system in place. The Mariners seems to be internally at odds with each other, not unlike a scene from Moneyball with the scouts and "eggheads" who've never played baseball but attended Ivy League MBA programs. Dave Cameron/ussmariner.com Eric Wedge Thinks Dustin Ackley is Our Fault Dave · May 28, 2013 at 12:20 pm · Filed Under Mariners The man just keeps getting better and better. Here’s a quote from Wedge on Dustin Ackley‘s struggles, as published on MLB.com. Wedge was talking about Ackley’s demotion to Triple-A and his mental approach, and he intimated that Ackley might have been too concerned with pitch selectivity and high on-base percentage, leading to a one-liner that hit on one of baseball’s most intriguing ongoing philosophical battles. “It’s the new generation. It’s all this sabermetrics stuff, for lack of a better term, you know what I mean?” Wedge said. “People who haven’t played since they were 9 years old think they have it figured out. It gets in these kids’ heads.” Hear that, everyone? We’ve gotten in Dustin Ackley’s head. His struggles over the last year and a half? Sabermetrics is to blame, what with all of our promoting “on base percentage” and “swinging at strikes”. Dustin Ackley’s failure is because all these new age ideas have gotten in his head. Which, of course, perfectly explains why Ackley is posting the lowest walk rate of his career this season. His focus on drawing walks and getting on base has caused him to not draw walks nor get on base. We’re ruining everything! Except, you know, here’s a thing Mathew Carruth wrote about Dustin Ackley on FanGraphs last summer. On the other hand, when it comes to called strikeouts, Ackley has had a tougher go. His patience at the plate, some might deem it passiveness, has seen him post higher than average called strikeout rates at every level, ballooning somewhat in his years in the Majors. Dustin is no Drew Stubbs (10% of Stubbs’ PAs have ended in a called strikeout), but Ackley’s rate was 7.5% last year and is 6.4% this year whereas the average is about 4.5%. Having visually watched Dustin Ackley for a little over a year now, that is not surprising either. The most vexing problem has been watching him take, and get called, on the so-called lefty strike repeatedly. Ackley has seemed a bit obstinate in accepting that, though technically not a strike by the book, the rule book isn’t the meaningful arbiter, the home plate umpire is. … As pitchers got to know Ackley, it appears that he may have developed a reputation that he had a weak spot there and he began to see more and more pitches in that location. It dipped back at the beginning of this season, but quickly climbed back up and has stayed above average for the rest of the season. Pitchers were, intentionally or not, exploiting Ackley’s weakness. Using “sabermetrics”, Carruth (among many others) noted that Ackley takes a ton of called strikes on the outer half of the plate, and wrote that to be successful, Ackley would have to start swinging at these pitches more often. Yes, a sabermetric nerd suggested that Dustin Ackley was too passive at the plate. Huh. What do you know? The idea that “all these people who haven’t played since they were 9 years old” have gotten in Dustin Ackley’s head by telling him to not swing at strikes is hilarious. We’ve been writing about Ackley’s weaknesses on the outer half of the plate for quite a while. I’m pretty sure that you won’t find any sabermetric thinkers who believe that taking called strikes in the same location over and over is a good offensive philosophy. If you want to sum up the philosophy of “sabermetric thinking”, it’s basically take pitches out of the strike zone and swing at pitches in the strike zone. A lot of hitters swing too often, chasing pitches they have no chance of hitting with any authority. We would tell them all to try and be more selective. Some hitters don’t swing often enough, taking pitches down the middle in hitters counts when they should be trying to hit the crap out of meatballs. We would tell them all to try and be less selective. You can probably make a pretty good case that Ackley has been too passive, though perhaps that’s the symptom and not the cause. Ackley’s swing has progressively become very pull-oriented, and he no longer covers the outer half of the plate very well. Perhaps Ackley isn’t swinging at pitches on the outer half because he knows he can’t hit them particularly well with his current swing. In that case, swinging more often wouldn’t be the solution; that would require an adjustment to his swing to get better coverage of the outer half of the plate. But, what do I know, I haven’t played the game competitively since I was nine years old 18-years-old. Everyone knows that the only people capable of offering any kind of intelligent analysis of baseball players are those who have Major League experience. You know, like Eric Wedge. That’s what’s made him such a successful Major League manager, with his career record of 725 wins and 784 losses. And, you know, clearly Wedge knows how to develop young talent, since he helped all those young players turn into superstars in Cleveland. Oh, wait, Cleveland’s young players didn’t develop as well as they were expected, and Wedge has had two winning seasons in 10 years as a big league manager. Hmm. Maybe experience isn’t the only thing that matters after all? Eric Wedge is going to be fired in the not too distant future. That move, in and of itself, won’t turn around the Mariners franchise. But it won’t hurt. And no, before you ask, I don’t think I could do a better job of managing a baseball team than Eric Wedge. His job is hard, and I’m not qualified to do it. But there are a lot of other people in baseball who are, and who know more about the game than Eric Wedge. The Mariners would be better off with someone who has actually learned something about the sport in the last 30 years rather than someone who thinks that all this new age numbers crap is getting into the heads of his hitters.

You know it's a bad year when Chris Carter is having more of an offensive impact than Konerko or Dunn.

QUOTE (fathom @ Jun 1, 2013 -> 10:54 PM) Trouble with the Curve is a bad movie Even when Hector Santiago turns out to be a better prospect than Bryce Harper errrr Joe Borchard, lol?

QUOTE (fathom @ Jun 1, 2013 -> 07:54 PM) I never said that, and I don't think he is. I would take him over Peavy. That said, give me the Cubs offense over this Sox offense. Their offense is putting up huge numbers right now. http://espn.go.com/mlb/stats/team/_/stat/b...ed-2/order/true Cubs with 53 more XB hits than the White Sox, Top 4-5 in MLB in that category. White Sox 28th, ahead of only the Dodgers and Marlins (last in AL).

Tim Brown, yahoosports on the Astros Rebuilding Process ANAHEIM, Calif. – It was sometime in March, before the slog. Carlos Pena sat in a small locker room in Lakeland, Fla., the season coming, expectations lower than a tugged slider. The Houston Astros had been stripped down for market, then stripped further after they were sold, leaving them with little to defend themselves with in the American League. It didn't look good. Pena turned up his expressive brown eyes and said, "I create my own reality." It's June and the Astros have won 18 games, four of those in the past week. Nobody pitches worse, a frailty that can suck the soul from a ballclub. The Texas Rangers are long, long gone in the AL West. Back at home, fans almost certainly would like to believe in the plans of the new owner, new general manager and new field manager, and yet facts are facts. It's been more than three weeks since the Astros drew as many as 20,000 to Minute Maid Park. If the plan – to make the Astros consistently competitive and somewhat self-sustaining – is going to work, it may not include many of the young men currently wearing the uniform. So, I wondered how Carlos Pena's reality was doing. "You gotta be a little bit crazy," he offered. "You have to ignore what most humans pay attention to. So it's not normal." Two months in, the Astros gamely ignore the hopelessness. So do their T-shirts, which state, "I'm all in," or "Process," or "27 outs," or something about "The vision" and "The grind." So does the gambling wheel, which travels with them, and whose flapper might clack to a stop at "Focus," or "Attitude," or "Astros win." There are two triangles displaying World Series trophies. Just Friday afternoon, bullpen coach Dennis Martinez gave the wheel a flick, watched eagerly, and when it stopped circling he read aloud, "Have fun! Hey, everybody, have fun!" Five hours later, Martinez's curiosity got the best of him, and he gave the wheel another turn. "Commitment!" he shouted. The Astros lead the league in inspirational T-shirts and old-school gaming devices. The rest has been a little choppy. They are, however, riding their second three-game winning streak of the season. They've won eight of 15. And they happen to be the only thing standing between the Los Angeles Angels and a winning record, having beaten the Angels four times in seven games. The focus lately has been on next week's draft, which the Astros will lead off again. At the top of the list: Oklahoma pitcher Jonathan Gray, Stanford pitcher Mark Appel, San Diego third baseman Kris Bryant, North Carolina third baseman Colin Moran. Still, the season trundles along. The plan ages. Meantime, somebody – a bunch of somebodies, actually – is required to go out and play the schedule. They're happy to do it. The fringe benefits are good, the pay is better. A few will survive it. But, on a given night, the future of the Astros is so far from the current Astros that one of those minor-league buses might not get you there in two days. Club management has weighed its long-term responsibility to the organization against its short-term responsibility to the league, and the choice was as simple as it was obvious. The Astros may be good one day, but for now they've been outscored by 92 runs – the worst differential in baseball. But, then, anybody could point out the deficiencies. "You sit there and look at our record, it's easy to get discouraged," Pena said. "So you try not to look at the board. Look at the standings, we're not doing well. But then, the actual question is, how does that reality service us? If it doesn't, you have to dismiss it." They're on their own, too. The system makes it more difficult to rebuild, because of spending limitations in the draft and on the international market. Owner Jim Crane has not yet shown an affinity for free agents. Progress could be slow. That leaves the reality of four months of baseball and many nights – if not all of them – in which they'll be in over their heads. It's a brutal reality in a clubhouse that, by all appearances, chooses to focus elsewhere. They pick a good T-shirt. They give the wheel a spin. They show up, they play, they show up tomorrow. It's been better lately, but it's fragile, because talent is thin and depth is thinner. "If it affects you," said rookie manager Bo Porter, "then you need to look in the mirror and figure out what you're made of as a man." He smiled. He's perfect for them, for this time, for this very reality. It's the only reality they have. "I love baseball," he said. "I love these guys. I love the organization. A lot of times we get caught up in the wins and losses, the expectations, we forget this is a game we've played since we were 5 years old." Maybe that's a cop out. But it's not his fault. Nobody in the clubhouse chose this course. They accepted the uniforms and all that came with them. Some will become quality big leaguers. Others already are. The rest will be casualties of the process, the journey from today's reality to tomorrow's. Pena just happens to be in the middle of it, making the best of it, doing his part. "Any great athlete, anyone who's been great in life, they step out of the perceived reality," he said. "That's when you achieve great things. This, it's the harsh reality of the game. We know that. We ignore the opinions. Maybe one day we'll get the last laugh." Then he nodded his head and went back to the slog.