caulfield12

QUOTE (Chicago White Sox @ Mar 12, 2013 -> 06:36 PM) Personally, if Danks looks good this year, I'm sticking with a 1-2-3 of Sale-Peavy-Danks for the next two or three years and seeing where that gets me. With Floyd likely gone, we should be able to afford them with Quintana/Santiago and possibly Johnson/Snodgress/Rienzo/Castro at the backend of the rotation. If we're actually trading Ramirez, then getting cost savings by putting Santiago into the rotation for Danks would also make sense. In that case, you're pretty much resigned to also jettisoning Thornton, Crain and looking to move DeAza, Rios, Dunn and Konerko if you can get anything of value back (or just simply cost savings in the case of all those players except for DeAza and Konerko, and also co-dependent on the continued progress of Thompson/Mitchell/Walker/Hawkins). Keppinger's a nice veteran "glue" utility player who would seem to fit even if we went into that drastic rebuilding mode because you always need to have some veterans to teach the young infield prospects how to play the game right, kind of like a younger Omar Vizquel role.

We can talk about "opportunity cost" all we want right now...investing the $27 million of theoretical savings into signing DR talent and Venezuelans and Asians, BUT.... what's the cost of 1) punting on the season and White Flagging it by trading Ramirez and plugging in someone who's not yet ready and will definitely struggle and, 2) messing up Sanchez's natural development in the first place and possibly destroying him as a prospect 3) putting even more pressure on Keppinger and Beckham defensively 4) making Peavy on this roster pointless and a waste of money, since we DEFINITELY won't win the AL Central in 2013 with just any random player at SS? 5) back to point 1, what god-awful attendance and revenue numbers would result if the FO takes that position?

QUOTE (Marty34 @ Mar 12, 2013 -> 10:49 AM) I don't think there is a plan B for Beckham this year unless he's injured. I'd like Sanchez to stay at short because if he can play there it makes him more valuable and there's a replacement in in the unlikely event they are able to move Ramirez next offseason. It's not unlikely. It's a heckuva lot MORE likely than moving John Danks, Rios or Dunn, that's for sure. Second, of course there's a plan B. Sanchez will stay at short because it's a lot easier to move to 2B eventually...if need be, than to make the opposite switch, and his value is higher at that position, because more power is needed from 2B these days. But the organization can't be too optimistic at this point about Beckham going forward. DeMichele, Angel Sanchez or Keppinger could both play 2B as well...in the next couple of years. But those are just stopgaps or placeholders. Which is more likely? For Beckham to have over a 700 OPS in 2013, or Ramirez? History shows Ramirez, because he's done it 4/5 years. Whereas Beckham has had three consecutive bad offensive seasons and is also starting to get overpaid for his value/production.

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Mar 12, 2013 -> 02:21 PM) This is actually about right - save De Aza. He should be ok. Except for the fact that Latin players, especially speed-based ones, have been playing professionally since they were 16 and often times before that due to lying about their ages in order to sign quickly and get money to their families and agents. So you get the Pods/Chone Figgins/Juan Pierre falling off a cliff in their early 30's due to the wear and tear of playing so much....and DeAza has definitely had more than his share of injuries, including the 2012 season. Meaning you can't expect him to ever return to how good he was in 2011.

What gives ANYONE a right to believe that Carlos Sanchez is going to put up over a 700 OPS? He might never do that in a single major league season....so we're campaigning to dump Alexei Ramirez, save a little bit of money that may or may not be reinvested in the future, and then what? For salary relief? And that type of trade has worked so well for the White Sox WHEN??? We're going to just give up on the 2013 season before it even begins? If we accept this hypothesis about Ramirez, then you also have to believe that Beckham will never return to 2009 form, Flowers is likely to flop and that Dunn/Konerko/Rios/DeAza are well past their prime or past their prime and won't do anything but go downhill. If that's the belief of the organization, then why in God's name would they have re-signed Peavy, signed Danks, extended Chris Sale and kept Crain/Thornton and added Lindstrom? You can just see the future. CUE fans complaining about Ramirez being better than Carlos Sanchez defensively and at least being able to put up 15-18 homers a season and 70+ RBI's.

QUOTE (Marty34 @ Mar 11, 2013 -> 07:40 AM) You left an out in case you were called on it. You're still a coward. Gee. Maybe I'll start my own sympathetic thread here about being the victim of personal attacks, lol.

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Mar 12, 2013 -> 12:52 PM) I am busy at work and didn't get to this ASAP. But thankfully Marty has access to that new-fangled Google website. And that's not just a decline - it's a DRASTIC decline. Look at it month by month. He showed tremendous improvement after the first two atrocious months....then tailed off with the rest of the offense in September. If he was declining based on age, his first half would have been strong and he would have faded from June-September, like Rios in 2010, but that was certainly not the case. Nor was that kind of season indicative of any type of future performance for Rios, other than his weird "bad year/good year" thing repeating itself. How many AL shortstops drove in 70+ runs hitting from the bottom 3 of the order for more than half the season? I bet the answer to that is 0.

What has given anyone reason to believe that Beckham has turned the corner?

QUOTE (TomSeaverFan @ Mar 11, 2013 -> 11:06 PM) I was on the road and watched a movie on HBO the other night in a hotel. It was called "Wanderlust" I believe with Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd. It's about two people in the rat race who become hippies in a commune. I would give it a D or one star. Has anybody seen it? I don't even think Aniston looked that hot. I thought she looked GREAT in Horrible Bosses. Yep, bad bad movie. Paul Rudd's in a bit of a slump....I thought Malin Ackerman was good, though.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Mar 11, 2013 -> 02:43 PM) I thought Silver Linings was the best of the bunch. Depressed Dirty Dancing...?? Very good, but not quite great, either.

Carlos Sanchez at 2B, Ramirez at SS, Keppinger at 3B. Plan C/D/E is Morel starting anywhere besides Charlotte.

QUOTE (baseball17 @ Mar 11, 2013 -> 06:26 PM) Isn't Septimo out of options? Not sure. Theoretically, Santos Rodriguez profiles very similarly, so with Thornton and Santiago, they're probably not super worried. In fact, in a sense, they have "double insurance" with Veal. Reed Thornton Crain/Lindstrom Jones Santiago/Veal Will always remember Septimo for that Boston backbreaking homer he gave up to Adrian Gonzalez...pitching in a situation he wasn't really accustomed to, certainly not under that type of pressure.

Or Aparicio, Chico Carrasquel....Uribe

QUOTE (Marty34 @ Mar 11, 2013 -> 06:40 AM) You left an out in case you were called on it. You're still a coward. Yet somehow giving up on the next two seasons before they're even played isn't, it is actually quite courageous?

QUOTE (Marty34 @ Mar 9, 2013 -> 02:50 PM) To build a case that someone is a racist and not directly call them one is a very cowardly thing to do. I built a case that you are selectively biased, but not necessarily racist. Those two particular words are commonly confused or interchanged, but definitely not synonyms by any stretch of the imagination. In this particular thread, I wasn't the one who opened up that particular discussion, nor your Horatio Alger/Ayn Randish-defense to begin the other thread.

QUOTE (Chicago White Sox @ Mar 10, 2013 -> 06:36 PM) I'm with you, I think Amour was the best of the nine nominees, but there wasn't that one amazing movie this year. Life of Pi and Silver Linings Playbook were both great and worthy nominees, but neither seem like a true Best Picture winner to me. Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty were the two movies I had really high expectations for but failed to meet them. Zero Dark Thirty was very entertaining, but it didn't wow me by any means. I was blown away by the Hurt Locker and for some reason I didn't get that same reaction with Zero Dark Thirty, probably because I knew how it was going to play out. As for Lincoln, for some reason I was completely disappointed. Daniel Day-Lewis was unbelievable in his role, but I felt the movie was slow at times and quite frankly I was expecting a more comprehensive tale of the man. The movie should have been called "The 13th Amendment" instead, since that was the basis of the entire movie. The strategy of going with one snippet or episode of his life was definitely strategic...instead of going with the Gandhi "life chronology" method of story telling. I would have enjoyed seeing the Lincoln movie capturing every moment of his life until the 1860 presidential election, particularly the Lincoln/Douglas debates and his many epic failures in both his professional and political careers. That would have been a lot more inspirational. It could also track his evolution over time on the issue of slavery in a more interesting fashion. In some ways, it was more like a "period piece" version of The West Wing or, more recently, House of Cards. Most movie-goers aren't patient or interested enough in the minutae of a bill and behind-the-scenes political machinations of any bill getting passed, even one as important as the 13th....and then they played around with the actual facts to make it more interesting and dramatic, which also detracted from it.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Mar 10, 2013 -> 04:13 PM) That's what I thought from the spelling. Like Eddie Cicotte, from the 1917 Black Sox.

Josh Bell has been really playing well so far in ST...wonder how sustainable it is. With Gillaspie, Angel Sanchez, Wise/Tekotte/Danks and the back-up catcher, there's not really any space for him on the roster. Kind of the same numbers game that caught up with Dan Johnson last year. Bell and Gillespie would both be options to replace Konerko at 1B next year...assuming Viciedo doesn't move to 1B with either Mitchell/Thompson/Walker making the progression to full-time starter in 2014.

AMOUR really should have been the movie of the year, but there's just not enough people who have sat through it....it would have been another version of THE ARTIST and that's terrible for Academy Award tv ratings, lol. But yeah, there were no GREAT movies. Lincoln, Django, Zero Dark Thirty, Life of Pi, Silver Linings, even Flight was one of the nominees, LES MIZ...having watched all of them, there wasn't a standout. There were a lot of GREAT individual performances, clearly, but not one great movie, overall.

Has anyone seen KILLER JOE? That movie is pretty much insane. There's a good reason for the NC-17 rating. Gina Gershon has some guts to do that scene with Matthew McConaughey. Emile Hirsch was good too, along with Thomas Hayden Church....whose career hasn't really taken off after the success of Sideways with Giamatti. SIDE EFFECTS?

Identify Theft isn't a bad little flick, although it's success is more a product of the dearth of competing product out there. Heck, THE LAST STAND with Arnie looks like Oscar material compared to a lot of the dreck from the first two months....or Mama. Not that it should come as a surprise, it's an annual happening to dump bad movies there. This is 40 has one of my favorite actors in Paul Rudd, it has Megan Fox for eye candy, but there's something so depressing about it (I'm 43 and don't have a wife anymore and no kids), it's almost enough to scare you away from having them....normally, movies are about escaping reality, this is from the Reservation Road school of dousing you in overreality and overacted drama that comes across as too cleverly written. Apatow has been struggling a bit recently to get back to what made his movies hugely popular to mainstream audiences in the first place.

We've been down this road before. You can say that he has advocated trading for the likes or BJ Upton and Juan Pierre. OTOH, Marty has spent 80% of his time the last couple of years advocating that Ramirez and Viciedo be traded, and that KW was a bad GM. Still, he has defended Ozzie Guillen, so he's apparently not against all Hispanics, although he's been very quiet about Alex Rios. Maybe it's Marty's version of a backhand compliment that he realizes both Ramirez and Viciedo have more trade value than pretty much anyone on the Sox not named Chris Sale. It just gets to seem like a pattern/trend because he's ceaselessly picking on Ramirez earning just $7.5 million this season when the likes of Dunn, Konerko and John Danks are earning considerably more... Or perhaps it comes off as an anti-Cuban bias, who knows. So I would ask the opposite. Has he ever said anything positive about a Cuban player on the Sox?

When you go "all in" and under the most optimal circumstances still likely not break 85 wins that is sad. So Marty, even though 2012 was not "all in" and nothing approaching "optimal circumstances" with a manager at the helm with no experience....why would you have believed the "sad" performance of 2011 would be bettered in 2012 since you obviously supported Ozzie Guillen more than Ventura/Williams??? What's your argument heading into 2012 for why they would contend? Not seeing it at all.

This one was a personal favorite of mine. Ichiro is a free-agent after next year and the Sox will have traded Viciedo for BJ Upton in June anyhow. Marty34 Looks like we don't have either player on our roster. The blame has quietly moved from Kenny Williams to JR, though...but he's never once thought trading Paul Konerko would be a good idea, even though, in his estimation, the team won't be contending until 2015.

We have zero incentive to trade Alexei Ramirez today. Or tmrw. 3-4 months from now, sure, maybe....same with anyone on our roster like Rios or Konerko, if the price is right. Carlos Sanchez, at his best, will be more of a complementary piece, an Iguchi with more speed and less power. We're not talking 2008/2009 Gordon Beckham here. If they're wrong about Keppinger, Beckham, Viciedo and Flowers, it won't matter anyway..we will have no choice but to rebuild (the line-up, but most importantly, not the pitching staff), but we've definitely go the pieces to fix the outfield in the next 2-3 years. And there's a danger to having a 2B/SS/3B at USCF where perhaps those three positions will give you no more than 20 homers combined. If you're going to have two slick fielding middle infielders, then you need some power from 3B, not just OBP. Plus, Ramirez consistently improved hitting-wise throughout the season. If he was getting old, then wouldn't he start out hot and fade the entire second half? The entire offense choked/collapsed in September, are they all done, too, like Mr. Dunn? Ramirez OPS April 498 (usual cold start) May 581 June 678 July 806 (typical hot/warm weather Alexei) Aug 801 (see above) SEP 562 (entire offense collapses/chokes)