caulfield12

QUOTE (bbilek1 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 12:14 PM) I thought Chris Sale was the biggest asset on this team... Of the ones they're like to trade (any Sale trade would happen in an offseason), although you can make strong arguments for Rios, Ramirez and perhaps DeAza over Crain. But Crain's reasonable salary and expiring contract make him ideal, too. Nevertheless, if Peavy's able to make 2-3 starts and can throw at normal velocity, he automatically jumps to the top of pack.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 11:03 AM) Don't worry caufield...I too am interested. I want to know if it is anything serious as he is probably our biggest asset. He's gone from 193 pitches (April), to 236 to 240 in June. 669 total this season. The biggest concern is a whopping 186 pitches in 20 days between the 9th and 29th of June. That's a lot, at max effort. In comparison, Addison has 171, 183 and 228. 582 pitches for Reed. Mark Melancon, the MLB hold leader (23) for the Pirates, has 570 pitches so far this season. Crain is 3rd, with 20. Matt Thornton's also in the Top 10 with 17.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 10:39 AM) That, and his .714 OPS in AA. You just had the feeling Short was more likely to end up as a 4th/5th outfielder if everything broke his way. He did have that one season where he was absolutely on fire batting average-wise. Wasn't he even the 9th or 10th prospect in our system one year?

http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/a...wright/2481383/ Argues for the inclusion of Sale and Crain on the roster.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 10:02 AM) It's a joke dude, just giving you s*** I think with marty having disappeared and Greg only doing "hit and run" comments in the middle of the night, there's nobody left to pick on or try to agitate. Haven't even seen much of Dick Allen these days, either.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 09:34 AM) Needs a Jerry Don Gleaton reference SIGH.

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 09:33 AM) It was posted in here http://www.soxtalk.com/forums/index.php?sh...15&start=15 you commented on it a half hour ago YES, I GET THAT. But we don't have a Crain specific thread in terms of his possible injury, and he's kind the most important asset on our team right now, in case you hadn't heard. That twitter update came LAST night, that's why I was wondering if anyone had heard anything TODAY, especially those living in Chicago. Like an MRI, just precautionary, whatever the case happens to be....starting to think whenever something like this happens he's going to be lost for the season with how things went with Floyd and Peavy.

Jesse Crain was unable to come into Tuesday's game against the Orioles due to tightness in his pitching shoulder. Crain felt the tightness while warming up in the bullpen. It's not clear at this point how long he might be sidelined, but it's obviously poor timing for one of the White Sox' most tradeable assets. Crain has been one of the best relievers in baseball this season, boasting a 0.74 ERA, 1.15 WHIP and 46/11 K/BB ratio over 36 2/3 innings. Chuck Garfien, twitter

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 09:13 AM) http://www.mlbtraderumors.com/alex_rios/ All players want to be on a winner and in our situation it has been tough to win. Rios really has a way with words sometimes, he sometimes doesn't come off well, like he's not to blame for anything. Wasn't the situation he was referring to created by the very players themselves?

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 08:56 AM) The 20% didn't make the team better. There's a reason the offseason slogan wasn't "we're giving the injured John Danks a $13.75 million raise, keeping underachieving Gavin Floyd and giving him an extra $2.5 million, and boosting the salaries of Adam by $1 million, an aging Paulie by $1.5 million and an aging Alexei by $2 million." Along with that, we're going to hand out a generous 3 year contract to the relatively unknown Jeff Keppinger and let one of the final fan favorites from 2005 in AJ Pierzynski leave for someone who's likely to hit .220 and strike out 35-40% of the time... About the ONLY thing they did right was saving money on Peavy and bringing in Gillaspie. In retrospect, the tiny $500K gamble on Lindstrom might pay off, too.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 08:51 AM) Cripes...if something happens to Crain that would really suck cause they should be able to get something really really good for him. It would be fitting with how this season has gone. With Floyd, Peavy, Beckham, Konerko...

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 08:32 AM) IIRC all of their guys last year were in that 200 to 300k range. Johan Cruz was $450K.

QUOTE (balfanman @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 08:17 AM) I know this is kind of a longshot, but if I had to pick one player that J. T. could help the most with hitting I would pick.........drum roll please..... Jordan Danks. Again, nothing factual, just a guess. Would prefer it be Dayan...unfortunately, they have something in common, taking massive, 110% power cuts at pitches. And being a lefty, perhaps he can help Conor with his power stroke, although I don't think you should mess too much with how he's approaching at-bats right now, as he has perhaps the best, most compact swing on the major league team right now.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 07:54 AM) And outside of Konerko hitting the wall, this is what has killed us this year. It's game after game after game. The pitching staff would look a ton better in the stats if the mental mistakes were happening at the same rate they happened last year, and this was something that I don't know how any GM could have predicted in the offseason. This team plays with the level of focus and discipline they had last year, this team is looking to add players in the next month and not subtract, so no, don't tell me "This team in the offseason wasn't set up to compete". I'll concede they might be around .500, +/- 1 or 2 games, but with the caveat being that version of "within striking distance" would feel more like 1997 than 2003. And you didn't take into account Ventura "regressing" as a manager instead of taking a step forward...and how much the positives were more attributable to Ozzie's absence and the end of the KW/Guillen feud than anything that Ventura was specifically doing well.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 07:54 AM) I think all this year has verified for us is that Johnson can hang. Next year is going to be far more important. He's put up better numbers at an older age and a lower level than Brandon Short. Short has become a non-prospect. Injuries, and the fact that's just not ever going to be a true power hitter, really derailed his prospect status.

QUOTE (KyYlE23 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 07:07 AM) I have read a few DM2 reviews that said it is a good movie, not as good as the first, but still fun. I have yet to read any reviews that destroyed it Destroyed perhaps isn't the right adjective. Just disappointed and let down, as the first one was so clever, especially the interplay with the girls and GRU as the movie wore on...it was totally different approach that had never been done in quite that same way before (and yes, Megamind kind of was a copy of that concept). So it would be more fair to put it under that same category as Cars 2 and Kung Fu Panda 2, not box offices failures or financial disasters (like the Lone Ranger movie will likely be)...but critical/creative disappointments. Gru, the bald and beetle-browed rascal hero of Despicable Me 2, is an infectious imp — as voiced by Steve Carell, he’s like Uncle Fester with the personality of Nikita Khrushchev. But in the first Despicable Me (2010), he was a supervillain with a grand plan (he wanted to steal the moon), and in the surprisingly toothless sequel, he has been neutered into a boring nice guy. The co-directors, Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, create a seductively tactile computer-animated landscape in which gentle slapstick rules the day. For some reason, though, they have mostly left out the flashes of egomaniacal dastardliness that even a movie for kids can thrive on (e.g., the far superior Will Ferrell animation Megamind). Kristen Wiig voices Lucy, the Anti-Villain League agent who has a crush on Gru and recruits him to be a spy. You keep waiting for Wiig to display some of her flaked-out inspiration, but she, too, has been given almost nothing to play but sweetness and light. The best thing in the movie is the army of chattery yellow minions who are injected with a serum that transforms them into gnashing purple beasties. By the end, every child in the audience will want his or her own monster-minion toy. Adults will just regret the way that Despicable Me 2 betrays the original film’s devotion to bad-guy gaiety. C www.ew.com

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 07:36 AM) Like I said, this white sox team could very readily have been competitive this year even with Flowers not putting up AJ's numbers last year. They were a disaster at 3b last year. Keppinger was supposed to improve on that. Their pitching has been better than last year (same ERA with a much worse defense). A lot of things have gone bad, injuries and guys not developing, but the combination of the defense/pathetically embarrasing sloppy play and Konerko finally getting old are the 2 that I point to as really killing this team. If you put those 2 things back where they were last year, IMO this team has a winning record right now and is hoping Peavy comes back to make a solid run to push them into contention. And the way Conor Gillaspie has recovered and started showing some more punch, there might be a 75-100 point shift in favor of the 3B production this year overall compared to last year. You have to add the fact that despite missing 2-3 weeks, Viciedo's going to come nowhere close to 25 homers. He might end up with 15-18. A ton of it's not easily measured in stats or box scores but just that general category of mental/physical mistakes and extra outs given up that other teams are taking advantage of.

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 07:39 AM) Isn't left field a little more than 60 yards away from the 1B stands? Watch the video of that catch and tell me how many yards or feet you think he covered from start to finish... And yes, he's going to be playing RF sometimes until they can figure out what to do with Crawford and Ethier. They're minting money out there, so who knows, maybe they won't even trade Ethier or try to add a SS and shift Hanley Ramirez back to 3B. (And Uribe's been playing much better recently with Kemp and Hanley back, probably not a coincidence). The best alignment's Kemp in CF, Crawford in LF and Puig in RF, IMO.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 07:31 AM) There's a very good set of reasons why the White Sox shouldn't be mixing in other guys getting starts. They have a number of guys on the big league roster who need innings. Santiago, Quintana, Danks all absolutely need innings. Like him or not, Axelrod could benefit from more MLB level work as well. All of those guys could use additional innings this year to get stretched out and prepared for next year. Sale, yes we have to be careful with him, I totally agree, but if we want him to turn into a 200 inning+ a year pitcher, he's going to have to pitch some innings too. Don't want to cut him back too much; his arm needs to get used to a good workload. I was under the assumption we'd be blowing another spot in the rotation by trading Jake Peavy before the deadline. Maybe Hahn holds onto him and they TRY to market 2014 as a competitive season, we'll see. And I'm going to have to disagree about needing to see anything more out of Axelrod. We're unlikely to get much of anything in return or trade (kind of like Viciedo at this point), but he might need to be an innings eater next year if Peavy/Santiago/Quintana/Danks are traded and/or Erik Johnson proves not to be ready. There's always a 25% chance they can trade Danks instead of Peavy, and we should be all for that.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 07:33 AM) Maybe he is a long-lost son from another mother? That's starting to sound like a bad Adam Sandler screenplay that somehow gets produced simply because Sandler's involved and nobody has the courage to say no to his face...

QUOTE (ptatc @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 06:46 AM) I wasn't implying he would win the ROY or MVP. I was saying that the start of the seasons were similar with the fantastic stats. He needs to show it over a much longer period of time. How many teams has he even seen twice let alone three or four times. I'll just say this, and I've watched about 50% of his ab's now. The adjustment by the league to him has been to throw him sliders and cutters down and away, getting him to fish out of the zone and preying upon his aggressiveness/impatience (4 walks still) and lack of strike zone command. With that said, he's adjusted right back. Six of his eight homers have been to the opposite field. He has moved a BIT closer to the plate than when he first came up, but that's the only difference I've noticed. On one of his GW-RBI's, he still was able to yank/get around a slider low and away off the plate and actually pull it on the ground between 3B and SS. Even with shorter arms for someone of his height, he has the frame to cover even five inches outside if he needs to. Basically, he's the anti-Dunn. The shift other teams have been using is to play him like a LH pull hitter. Eventually, they'll take the other track and bust him inside with fastballs, once again, off the plate, and see what damage he does there...as his stroke has been that inside-out opposite field one, except for hanging offspeed stuff over the plate that he's lift-pulled to left.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 07:22 AM) Puig's BABIP currently stands at .513. If he sustains that, maybe he is Roberto Clemente Jr. That would be bad. Both of his sons were pretty much terrible ballplayers, although they've both done a ton of work for charity and the Roberto Clemente Sports City in San Juan.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 07:25 AM) I tell you what, you give me 20% of your yearly earnings and I'll agree that $20 million+ payroll is just a semantic difference. But your argument sounds like a Chris Rongey "spin" argument, not one that most Sox fans would bite on.

Since this thing's basically over, there's no reason they shouldn't give Rienzo and Simon Castro some spot stats in July/August, and Erik Johnson in September, unless they decide his workload's been increased too much and shut him down.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jul 3, 2013 -> 06:39 AM) They upped the payroll by more than $20 million over last season. Semantics, Balta. A lot of automatic salary increases kicked in, like John Danks or Alexei Ramirez, for example. If you walked around the stadium and asked 1000 fans randomly did the White Sox improve themselves, what would they have said? Well, we added that Jeff Keppinger fellow (he's not even really a starter, is he?) and we re-upped Jake Peavy to a fair salary (lower than before) and finally, we didn't want to pay AJ at his age and coming for the anomalous 2012 season so we finally decided it was right and fair to give Tyler Flowers a shot.... Well, we can go player by player and look at WHY the payroll increased, but nobody believed the talent or the ability to compete vis a vis the Tigers had increased, and that's the only thing that really matters, perception.