caulfield12

QUOTE (GreatScott82 @ Jun 20, 2013 -> 01:26 PM) Bring him back for one more year. In all honestly, I question Hahn's ability to evaluate talent. I know many blaim KW for his hyper aggressive trades. The trades that depleted the farm system. However, if Hahn was KW's assistant GM, he was ALSO part of that problem. Hahn didn't do much of anything this past winter and I thought that was a small red flag. The time to shed some salary and sell high on a few players in nearing- he better make some long term based trades soon. We can fault him for overvaluing Flowers, or the assessment he was ready to be a full-time catcher. And Keppinger, although he was never designed to be the full-time starter at 2B and there's some evidence he's been playing with an injury. What could he have done, realistically, with the budget constraints coming off the disappointing missed playoff appearance that wouldn't have involved spending more money and going over the payroll limits imposed by JR and the Board? Traded Floyd and Peavy? Traded Viciedo? DeAza? Dunn? Rios? Ramirez? You can't really fault Hahn for what's happened so far...but he will be blamed for making "bad" trades over the next 6 weeks. A lot of posters have been open and honest about their frustration and disappointment with the coaching staff as well, including Harrelson (although he's not aiming at Ventura, apparently). It's impossible to blame Hahn to the same extent you blame Williams, even if he was part of the front office that entire time...if you're going with that logic, then Buddy Bell should be just as much under the gun, yes?

http://news.yahoo.com/chicago-teachers-uni...-051815962.html I know Steve will love this one....this is even funnier, because of her using the example of the Cubs' business model and being a self-professed White Sox fan.

We should be worried for Chris Sale's psyche. 5-6 record now. 2 more errors committed (Gillaspie with his 4th, Gold Glove Beckham with his 4th already), giving the White Sox 49 in 69 games, on pace for 117 for the full season. Third (just barely behind HOU) in errors per game, trailing the Angels, who are in 1st...but worst in overall fielding percentage. Have to be worst in the passed balls category as well. Flowers had yet another ball he should have blocked that he applied the "lazy backhand" move to.

Carl, lol? The NBA ref? Seriously, Crawford had 3 glove-side pucks blast past him (well, only one was a laser beam)...maybe he's been hanging out with Tyler Flowers and Gimenez recently. Lucky to get that one. 3-1 down and they were history. But the Blackhawks still need to win Saturday.

33-51 their last 84 games. 64-98 if you extrapolate that out over a full season, and, considering that we've had the easiest schedule in MLB the first 3 months, you might as well expect or predict it, especially with 3-5 veterans expected to be dealt at the deadline.

Rios ALMOST took the wrong route on that one and course-corrected. Great response by the Blackhawks. Back to Dead Team Walking. Ooops, inning's already over before you can blink. Horrible luck, puck bouncing on top of the net...that sucks.

Great backhand there, Tyler. NOT. You are not so good. Awful, awful, awful. We might as well be watching World War C(hicago), White Sox Zombie Ball. Even that movie has "fast" zombies. We just have Dawn of the Dead zombies, and no Mekhi Phifer or Ving Rhames or even Sarah Polley to cheer for.

Puig with 5 homers, still at .474, taking over NYC and MLB Fan Cave. Added a stolen base and K for good measure. Go Blackhawks. Are we home Saturday night? Can't imagine the attendance for that game.

That's the textbook Gordon Beckham RCF doubles swing. Nice to see that at least. Toews and Kane are awake!!

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 19, 2013 -> 07:35 PM) I can't believe this many people are watching the Sox game! Have Blackhawks on computer with audio and White Sox on free t.v. (here in Quad Cities) with volume off...

7 in a row retired by Correia. Yikes.

QUOTE (fathom @ Jun 19, 2013 -> 07:12 PM) Yep, Astros have a pretty strong starting rotation right now. No reason Sox can't get the worst record in the AL and possibly the 2nd pick in the draft. Nearly impossible to conceive of that with a rotation which started with Harrell and Humber at the beginning of the season...SIGH. The Dodgers and Angels should definitely end up ahead of us. Then you have the Cubs and Brewers. If Braun's suspended, they might be difficult to catch. Hard to imagine the Mets with Wheeler and Harvey not finishing better. No idea which direction the Mariners will end up going the next 90+ games. 3rd, 4th or 5th would be the most realistic bets, probably 4-6, if you had to set parameters for betting. We do have all those games against the Tigers to knock us back another 7-9-11 games in the standings.

Justin Morneau would be a good idea for 1B next year that you can give him an incentive-laden contract, and, if he's really good, you can trade him and get something back...if his power numbers stay down, you've held the position for the next man in. Assuming you strike out with Morales, there are some other secondary targets like an Adam Lind or Carlos Pena who won't embarrass you too much. Well, not sure about playing Lind in the field, he'd probably be the DH with Dunn playing 1B primarily. #7 draft pick position currently...threatening to go 5-16 after the 9-3 run to get back to .500. Well, there's one way to look at this. If Sale's ERA goes up above 3 and he has a 5-6 record (or losing record, in general), getting Jesse Crain into the All-Star Game will up our asking price for him by a notch or two.

QUOTE (fathom @ Jun 19, 2013 -> 06:56 PM) Sale overthrowing tonight. The fundamentals on this team are so terrible. Just frustration. Trying to carry the whole team on his shoulders. Cooper and Ventura are going to have to sit him down and have a talk. This season's basically over, and you can never ask Chris Sale not to compete, but he needs to dial it down or he's going to hurt himself out of irritation with the offense and defense (or lack thereof).

Well, Sale was throwing 95-98 but he obviously wasn't 100% comfortable after getting spiked there by Florimon. Figures. Blackhawks and Sox both going south at the same time.

More great defense. Poor Sale. "It is what is," you're right Harrelson. Hopefully he doesn't demand a trade, lol, like Mike Stanton. Pitches out of it. Great job.

4th lead-off homer of the season, 8th of his career. Can't believe Sale's only 5-5 with that stat line. The last loss was a microcosm of the entire season, though. Last time we faced this guy, Dunn and Viciedo went deep, FWIW.

QUOTE (Eminor3rd @ Jun 19, 2013 -> 03:52 PM) I like the idea of Olt. I think he has been substantially overrated and I think the Rangers know that, so I think he might actually be attainable. A ton of his value comes from his solid defense at third, which would be great for us but is useless to the Rangers as long as Beltre is around. The bat doesn't play at first. There's a lot of concern he'll end up something of a hybrid of Brandon Wood/Pedro Alvarez at the big league level in terms of actual performance. OTOH, he's attainable now...but losing value fast.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Jun 18, 2013 -> 05:34 PM) Watched ZDT over the weekend, literally fell asleep for a few minutes at one point. Boring movie, there really wasn't a story there. Isn't that a chemical used during the Vietnam Era, lol? As for the Superman comments, ended up enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. Didn't buy the chemistry with Adams/Cavill, but he acquitted himself very well and there's no doubt he will be a part of the next movie. This is kind of like his Tobey Maguire moment after the first Spider Man, and he has a good shot to end up much more successful than Andrew Garfield (just an opinion) career-wise. IMO, they've run a very successful marketing campaign all around the world, although it's not going to end up with the international numbers of F&F, Avengers, Iron Man quite yet. (My biggest complaint would be the endless fighting scenes that destroyed half the planet...seemed to go on about 5-10 minutes too long, but those are in there for the kids/teens mostly, and to utilize the special effects/CGI teams). Because of the mounting negative reviews, my expectations were lowered a bit, so I found myself enjoying it almost as much as Iron Man 1/3 and Avengers. To me, it was better than Thor and on par with Captain America and X-Men: First Class. Perhaps having Michael Shannon, Costner, Diane Lane and Crowe in it pushed it a notch above those last two, but Jennifer Lawrence was just beginning to emerge as a future star at the time of the last X-Men. BTW, saw the Tina Fey/Paul Rudd movie Admission, it was decent, but not great. Didn't find Fey's character likable (hard for her to do) and Rudd was playing the same role he almost always plays, either the do-gooder or sarcastic/witty/acerbic midlife crisis guy. Next up...The Place Beyond the Pines and Now You See Me.

Isn't the weakness of Adams more than he might be another platoon or split time player, rather than a surefire, everyday, "pencil him permanently into X-Y-Z" spot of the line-up? What have his minor league splits been, up til now?

Michael Jordan would never deliberately defer to another player down the stretch unless he was double or triple-teamed. Even then, doubtful. Spoelstra has a difficult situation, dealing with an aging/deteriorating Wade who still feels he's a Top 5-10 player in the league when his skills have slipped. Not like Larry Johnson, but more of a gradual erosion over time. OTOH, you just don't see him benching Wade for significant periods of time to spread out the floor and let James operate more as the general of the offense, drawing coverage by penetrating and then kicking it out to the perimeter.

QUOTE (The Ultimate Champion @ Jun 19, 2013 -> 10:30 AM) Relievers are volatile, but you can't just compare someone like Crain with every other reliever in baseball. Crain has appeared in 527 games & pitched 527 innings, and looking at his peripherals he's never had what you'd really call a horrible season. I think a big part of the volatility of relievers is 1) the injury factor and 2) the fact that most of these guys seem to be 2-pitch power armed pitchers, usually fastball-slider it seems, who really don't have much of chance at long bouts of consistency given the difficulty of having to locate a nasty slider (or whatever else) with regularity to keep the opposition from sitting on the fastball. Crain OTOH has been pretty durable & he certaintly isn't a 2-pitch pitcher. I think he's one of the safer bets out there as far as relievers go, so I don't think it's fair to categorize him with everyone else. Maybe you put him in there with RP who have appeared in at least 250/300+ games and gone for 250/300+ IP. With that said, Crain's having a career year & will likely make himself not only a closer option in the offseason, but maybe a mid-tier one in price as well. But I think if you can trade him for something pretty nice, and then turn around and trade Reed for something really nice, then you think about signing a closer (like Crain) over the offseason, basically using the money you're giving your closer to buy the prospects/young MLB players you get out of Reed. I expect that this sort of thing is going to occur a LOT under the new CBA so I hope the Sox start doing it themselves. I'd only go 3 years tops on any closer though, and I'd much rather pay a little more per year to get a 2 year deal with a team option for a third with a buyout, because then you're potentially positioning yourself to only ask & pay for one good year, then you're looking at trading a guy in the last year of his deal over the following offseason. But aren't you running a big risk of losing some White Sox draft pick/s? I can't even remember the vicissitudes of all the new draft pick/compensation rules, I know it has changed from before when there were Type A/B/C tiers and the White Sox went through this issue with Orlando Cabrera after 2008, "playing Chicken" with each other. Surely, the team trading for Crain's going to offer him arbitration, which he's going to turn down at the rate he's going. I'm leery of paying him semi-closer money simply because he was "Crain Wreck" in Minnesota quite often when placed in high pressure situations...and also going off the example of Matt Thornton, where you had a very valuable asset we never flipped while we had the opportunity and now we're basically going to be fortunate just to dump his salary and not get anything back in return.

QUOTE (Eminor3rd @ Jun 19, 2013 -> 10:12 AM) Where does this come from? You need good players, that's it. Players can contribute to run prevention and run production in a lot of ways. You need a team that can do it all. That doesn't mean you need every player to be the same You need players, if they're not going to hit homers, who can either run, get on base at a 350+ clip, play stellar defense and play the game in a fundamentally sound fashion. You need both, but it SHOULD be easier to find the ones I just described to build around the core or foundation, rather than doing it the other way around. Sanchez MIGHT be a player like that eventually, but there's just never going to be a White Sox team that does anywhere without consistent power at least 3-6 in the line-up. Hopefully Anderson fits in that mold, as well. Walker would be another one, although quite a few people are down on him and saying his ceiling is essentially close to what DeAza is producing right now. We can't even project a line-up beyond this season, at this point. We don't even know that there's more than a 50/50 chance both Beckham and Viciedo are around next year. It's back to Moneyball. You can exploit niches with relievers, players who steal lots of bases and play great defense, high OBP guys at the corners (both infield and outfield), but it's very hard to go out and find impact bats for the 3-4-5-6 spots as well as front-line starting pitching. It's also next to impossible to find impact bats at the catching position that are no defensive zombies, or vice versa.

QUOTE (balfanman @ Jun 19, 2013 -> 06:47 AM) I disagree with this statement. Example 1, 2005 - While that was still a power laden team with home runs responsible for most of that offense, small ball had a large part in building leads. That team had a long streak (30 something I think) of having the lead in games to start the season. I would say that small ball kind of "jump started" that offense and won several games late. While I agree that you don't want a team that can only play small ball, small ball plays a large part in having a good offense, IMHO. That being said, you need good small ball players, not the collection of garbage that the Sox have now. Podsednik, Igutchi, Harris, Ozuna, etc. >>>> DeAza, Ramirez, Beckham, Keppinger, etc. Sometimes I feel the Pods/Iguchi angle gets played up TOO MUCH to correct the notion that we still weren't a homer-oriented team. (And that's true, compared to the 2004 or even 2000-2004 offenses in general). AJ 18 Paulie 40 Iguchi 15 Uribe 16 Crede 22 Rowand 13 Dye 31 Everett 23 Thomas 12 We're not even going to come close to those numbers this year. That wasn't a particularly good offense, and we might be at 60-65% of those homer totals at the end of this season. Obviously, Viciedo and Konerko were expected to produce a lot more. We've lost homers from AJ's spot, 3B (although, as noted, the overall OPS was 600 despite the one hot stretch from Youk in June), Beckham being out, then Ramirez just fell off a cliff with the power numbers, etc. Theoretically, Gillaspie in the end should have 12-15 (he's second in AL homers for rookies with 5 to Aaron Hicks' 6)....

QUOTE (balfanman @ Jun 19, 2013 -> 06:29 AM) Welcome to the board; however, just who are these top prospects that you speak of that were traded away and how many of them have exactly lit the world on fire after their departure? Carter, Morse, Gio, Hudson, Sweeney (lol), Chris Young, McCarthy, that's about the extent of it.