caulfield12

It's going to be interesting to see whether those "new/er" radar gun readings in the low 90's stand up. Wonder if the White Sox were adjusting their gun up for the tv audience? Of course, it doesn't matter, as any organization truly interested in Danks would have had their owns scouts/radar in the park. It's quite a paradox in that he was lit up in that start where he was supposedly throwing harder than he has all season...so not sure what to take from that. That he can pitch more effectively now in the 80's? Or that the Astros just have his number career-wise? Or both? We all have heard from the beginning of time about needing to have a 10+ mph differential on fastball to change/off-speed pitch. Seems like any pitcher who spends 85% of their time pitching at varying speeds in the 80's without the command of Mark Buehrle is going to get lit up unless they play at PetCo, Safeco or in SF.

QUOTE (raBBit @ Jul 22, 2014 -> 12:51 PM) It's scary thinking about the payroll without Danks. Hahn would have basically a clean slate to work with. The Sox have their three insane values in Sale/Abreu/Quitnana (15.667 M), Alexei (10 M) and and a whole bunch of rookie contracts/arbitration guys. If the Sox trade Danks in the next 9 days the team will go into the offseason with their fourth highest paid player (after Alexei, Abreu and Sale) being Jeff Keppinger. Assuming Beckham, DeAza and Viciedo are all gone...

QUOTE (Bigsoxhurt35 @ Jul 21, 2014 -> 08:11 PM) Damn flowers almost went yard You're doing the wrong thread trick like I always do flipping back and forth between minors and game thread, haha.

QUOTE (woods of ypres @ Jul 14, 2014 -> 08:50 PM) 44 year old first time dad, eh? Not bad. My dad was 38 when I was born. And congrats. Yeah, the weird thing is my mom was 40 1/2 when she had me (married for first time at 38, which was super unusual back in 1967) and my father 33 when I was born. (My father's brother was a lifelong bachelor...so it's just one cousin and myself to carry on the family name, haha). My mom tried to have a baby (girl) 2-3 years later but I think she had a miscarriage, so I ended up the only child. Now I have to try to find the engagement rings thread...trying to decide between 4 ("harmony") and 6 point (traditional/classic) settings. Tiffany's is incredibly expensive here in China, so I'm going to try to find a ring in Chicago or the Quad-Cities.

QUOTE (greg775 @ Jul 21, 2014 -> 08:15 PM) Yes it's painful to listen to the KC crew. Although Lefebvre is OK. Hudler, Physioc and Steve Stewart and such homers it's simply unbelievable. They're not as bad as Harrelson, by a long shot. Hudler was 10X more cocky and annoying when he did the Angels games. He's been humbled quite a bit.

Flowers hitting .222 against RHP on the season, Gordon .202.

QUOTE (Y2JImmy0 @ Jul 21, 2014 -> 08:06 PM) The Boras Story was posted in here. Easy to read. A pretty good plan too. LDF and Caulfield both said they did not read the article that was easily posted in here and very clearly readable. Then they both posted information that wasn't in the article and asked questions about things that could have been read. I love Soxtalk. Well, that's true....but I read that thread on my Samsung Galaxy chat phone, and here in China I couldn't get the article to open. Recently, google.hk hasn't even been working. The only reason I was able to find all the Aiken articles was because I was in Thailand from the 12th-20th.

QUOTE (winninguglyin83 @ Jul 21, 2014 -> 07:46 PM) hope we see a regime change and Micah at second base no later than september. And if they can dump Dunn, give Wilkins a look too. All depends on whether they believe Ramirez can be replaced by Semien or Sanchez. Otherwise, you've got to make Semien the jack-of-all-trades McEwing/Oquendo player and let Sanchez/Micah Johnson fight it out for 2B. Would be pretty shocked to see Johnson moved to LF, but apparently they're not ruling it out. Just don't think a line-up with Eaton/Johnson/Sanchez is going to have enough pop. We'll find out soon enough.

At least Eaton seems to be coming around now, that's a big plus....IF IF IF he can stay healthy.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jul 21, 2014 -> 07:15 PM) Exactly. Or they could form some type of 5, 7 or 9 member "medical committee" mutually-agreed upon by MLB and the Player's Association to attempt to objectively assess risk in pre-draft physical examinations (for let's say the Top 250 players) and pass those results down to the teams, players and advisors. Maybe teams wouldn't be allowed to offer anything less than 10% below slot if a player had a majority (3/5, 4/7, 5/9, etc.) vote that had cleared his physical and declared him to be physically fit to play. Teams would also have access to the "dissenting" opinions, almost like a S.C. case.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Jul 21, 2014 -> 07:10 PM) I thought Boras, that the most you could bid was the cap amount (or what the agreed upon bid was). You couldn't ever go past that, so you were tied to the slotting system. This just meant if a team wasn't willing to pay slot because of an injury risk, the player could go out and find another team who would pay that value. The team that didn't want to pay is restored by getting their draft pick and the player, who was going to be forced to take less money or re-enter the process, was made whole by going to another organization who paid. In terms of southsiders post, he was referring to the fact that under the Boras scenario, the maximum bid, was $6.5M (which I believe was the agreed upon offer prior to the physical) and thus since the player couldn't reach an agreement after the physical, they would become a free agent and no team could offer more then 6.5M (but could offer less). However, in this case, southsider is assuming, every team in baseball would offer the maximum, which then poses the question, do you leave it up to the player to then pick the team or is there another process to determine when similar teams have same bid? Aha. Got it. I guess the simplest way to resolve that would be to do it like waiver claims, where you go in order from worst to first, although that's done by leagues and not for all of MLB sequentially by reverse winning percentage. Of course, this would also lead to the possibility of even more teams intentionally tanking in order to position themselves for either a rebuild or quick 1-2 year turnaround....where a veteran team like the Phillies, for example, started off slowly and just decided as an intentional strategy not to be concerned about their May results, considering the season already lost. And of course that wouldn't be "fair" to contending teams. And it would take quite a bit of time to "unwind" all the different permutations with each player in the first 3-5 rounds, so those players wouldn't be able to join their short-season teams until as late as the second week of July.

Not to mention they tried to mitigate that risk by allocating it across three players...which seemed logical, but not when you take into consideration that Aiken and Nix were friends/UCLA commits and advised by the same "agent" in Close, one of the best in the business. There were even rumors that Marshall was going in a package deal to UCLA along with Nix and Aiken and was going back on his earlier LSU commit. In that situation, Nix and Aiken were always going to be at cross-purposes. Less money to Aiken was what got Nix to $1.5 million, but cost Brady. $6.5-8.0 million to Aiken, and there's no way that the Astros can offer Nix and Marshall, so they would have been forced to sign at slot or under.

QUOTE (LDF @ Jul 21, 2014 -> 02:09 PM) I know what you wrote, but I need some help in understanding what it means. sorry Didn't read the Boras article, but I'm assuming he meant that all 29 other MLB teams would bid a minimum of $6.5 million (sort of like a signing bonus, but not quite) for the rights to Aiken. So then you would still be left with the problem of sorting out who gets him. In the end, this kind of an arrangement would massively favor the large market teams unless there were hard caps on total dollars, because the Yankees would just game the system and take the majority of talent and the era of semi-parity would be over, to the agents' favor.

Along with the what is/was wrong with Semien/Davidson/Erik Johnson storyline, you can add what happened to the Webb who threw 96-98 consistently versus the one throwing 95 mph "get me over, straight down the pike to ASG Jeter" fastballs?

Game really doesn't matter much except for Danks' trade value declining. Maybe the Indians today had a brief glimmer of hope they could really press the Tigers with a 4 game sweep but that didn't happen. With that said, the White Sox and the rest of the division (except the Royals with Shields and Butler on the way out) really need to be ready to compete with the Tigers beginning next season. Anyone taking Victor Martinez away from them, as well as Scherzer, would help matters greatly.

QUOTE (The Baconator @ Jul 20, 2014 -> 08:52 PM) I went to see Edge of Tomorrow today. First 20 minutes, I said "that makes no f***ing sense" 3 times. Then the next hour I was like "this is awesome!", followed up 3 Picard-esque WTFs towards the end. Just an up and down love/hate movie. So, a Tom Cruise movie. But really, just throw the third Matrix, Tom Cruise, 50 First Dates, and a boat-load of money in to a blender and there you go. That's probably unfair because all of those things individually is pretty awful, but somehow it adds up to a decent flick. Then you have that Groundhog Day/Memento thing going on as well...it's to the point where it's getting a bit tiresome and then the movie takes off again in a different direction with Blunt and Cruise together on a Cormac McCarthy-esque apocalyptic journey.

DJ and Farmer only called him Trayce Thompson once during the broadcast. Maybe they'll come around if he sticks long enough on the roster.

Thinking it's more and more likely that Wilkins will get some opportunities in August and September to see if he can stick as Dunn's replacement. The odds aren't that great, but he at least deserves a shot over someone like Danks as a DH replacement, if only as part of a platoon/DH by committee option.

QUOTE (southsideirish71 @ Jul 20, 2014 -> 01:53 PM) What if Abreu gets hit in the head by an acorn while walking through the park by a wayward squirrel and forgets who he is. What if Sale slips on a banana and hurts his right asscheek. Aiken has a smaller UCL and is still throwing 97 mph and is not injured. The common sense people wanted to take a bad season and turn it into something that will help the team for years. There were 3 pitchers that everyone had spun up as 1a, 1b, and 1c. There is risk in everything. Keep sticking your head in the sand with the "draft lovers" statements. Its these cartoon-like statements that have people dismissing just about everything you type. To be fair, three months ago, Jeff Hoffman was even the favorite, so you could say 1d quite accurately.

QUOTE (greg775 @ Jul 20, 2014 -> 01:09 PM) Why do so many people hate Danks? He's having a great year for a guy coming off an injury. He's performed pretty well this season. So what if he makes a ton of cash. It's not our money. It's not like Sox would do anything with the extra cash if they didn't have to pay Danks. Because he's just not going to be anything close to the pitcher he was in 2008-10. As far as having a great year, it has been pretty good, maybe a bit better than expected in terms of quality starts. The peripheral statistics don't match up with the standard numbers, so there's a lot of room for regression to the mean based on his homers and elevated walk/lower K totals. Remember, this is his second season after the surgery, so it was reasonable to expect better results. Of course, with shoulder injuries, it's a different situation than Tommy John.

Danks 0-3, 7.71 career ERA against the Astros coming into today's game. Jitters facing a team from his home state? Hard to explain. Maybe they're better at adjusting to change-ups?

http://www.crawfishboxes.com/2014/7/19/591...ign-brady-aiken Close the real loser in this situation...interesting take

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/sports/ast...ros-5633418.php Controversy has knack for seeking out Astros The revelations that Luhnow was out of town for much of last week on a family vacation in Mexico doesn't look very good, either.

QUOTE (Brian @ Jul 19, 2014 -> 05:00 PM) "Wish I Was Here" not getting good reviews but the ones I read seem to be the same. Melodramatic and nothing new. Still want to see it since I liked Garden State so much. Is that the movie he largely funded through Kickstarter money?

http://www.astroscounty.com/p/you-are-jeff-luhnow.html Adventure Games with Aiken, you are Jeff Luhnow. TRY TO NEGOTIATE ALL THE STEPS WITHOUT DYING OF DYSENTERY. http://www.astroscounty.com/p/page-24.html You are agent Casey Close..."King of the World" *Jeff Luhnow calls back immediately* "Hey, I think we got disconn-." *Close hangs up* "Who was it," asks Brady Aiken. "Nobody," says Casey Close. "What did you do that for?" Aiken asks. "Well, Brady, have a seat." *Aiken sits on Close's knee* "The Astros think you could possibly get injured, and they would like to give you - and me, don't forget that part ha ha ha - less money because of that risk. They say you have an abnormally small UCL. And that's ridiculous. You're an elite pitcher. They're the ones who took you with the #1 overall pick. You're the first high school pitcher to be drafted first overall since 1991. There are inherent risks. They knew those risks. You're an elite pitcher. Hell, Jeff Luhnow said you were the most advanced high school pitcher he'd ever seen. Why would he not bet on you?" Aiken thinks, "To be clear, I am not injured. But the Astros think I could be at some point down the road, and so they have decided to cut their offer by the amount they're paying Jesse Crain to not pitch for them." "Correct," Close replies. "Screw them."