caulfield12

If you decide to pitch to Cuddyer, you simply don't come right at him with a first-pitch fastball right over the heart of the plate. He actually didn't take a great pass at it, but still wonder what AJ and Gavin were thinking there.

Why was Ramirez assuming that was a HR? He didn't even bother to cover 2B. Sheez. You've got to be kidding, Gavin. Fastball right down the middle with no movement to Cuddyer. You have to be more careful, he has been their best hitter the last month.

QUOTE (SoxAce @ Jul 8, 2011 -> 07:03 PM) Well thats why this thread is "what trades you would make" which obviously most of the moves won't happen (hell I agreed with nite about a firesale, and that is NOT my M.O.) And Christian just doesn't have a spot to play yet (which couldn't be said with Cook when there was like 3 spots open with players not hitting) Like i said though, I view Danks very, very highly. Thought he was a stud prospect back in the DVD days in Texas. Unless he wants 80+ million, you move him, but if he makes Buehrle money, I'd keep him. And s***, totally forgot about Sale. Yea.. you keep him too. So you would give Danks $75-80 million and 5 years without blinking? That's just a notch above Mark's current salary.

No short-season games???? SLACKER!!! Viciedo 1 for 2 so far. Keenyn Walker's debut...either tonight or probably tomorrow's game. He was supposed to fly from Salt Lake City to Big Sky Country Friday morning.

ARLINGTON - Josh Hamilton could hear six-year-old Cooper Stone screaming for his dad after the man tumbled over an outfield railing and fell 20 feet onto the concrete below. Firefighter Shannon Stone had called out to Hamilton for a foul ball in the second inning of Thursday night's game. Hamilton tossed it to him, but Stone fell as he reached for it and died an hour later of blunt force trauma. Hamilton says he remembers the man's fall "like it happened in slow motion." He also remembers the screams of the little boy who came to the game with his dad in hopes of catching a ball. Hamilton says he can't stop praying enough for Stone's family. The reining AL MVP is playing in Texas' game against Oakland tonight.

SoxAce, you can't keep Danks around and pay him superstar money....not with Dunn, Peavy and Rios still on the payroll. This is going to have to be a return to the pre-2005 thinking again. How can they split/allocate resources so you can get 4-8 players to contribute for the same amount of money you'd pay Buehrle and/or Danks. You've also got to make a decision about trading Carlos Quentin to free up more salary room, because he's one of the most tradeable assets in the current market for power hitters. Reed better have some totally nasty, dominating stuff that you would project him over Santos at this point. 17/20 save conversion rate is about as good as Bobby Jenks ever put up for us. But yeah, if you build around the core of Konerko, Beckham, Ramirez and Viciedo, that's a pretty good start. And we've got some new pitching assets in Humber and possibly even Hector Santiago, along with Sale. Christian Marrero seems doomed to the same fate as David Cook and Maurice Gartrell with our organization.

QUOTE (Wanne @ Jul 8, 2011 -> 05:33 PM) Personally I'd love to see him catch fire 10 days or so before the trading deadline...I mean go on an absolute tear!!! Even if he hit 8 homers in 10 games, nobody in MLB would be willing to take his contract until/unless he proves he's fully back over at least a 2 month timespan. And we'd still have to find another LH power hitter. Not like they grow on trees.

F--- Derek Jeter and A-Rod for skipping the All-Star game. This is the one big chance for MLB to really capitalize on the national spotlight and his chase for 3,000 hits and he'd rather "rest" with Minka Kelly. If he's healthy enough to play all the games this weekend (tonight's already a rainout), what's the excuse? What's the point of even having the fans vote if the players don't show up if they don't feel like it? C'mon boys! Reverse the curse, TRY to do SOMETHING differently, at least.

And the fans are supposed to buy into the fact that removing Cora will make any difference? I can't think of one "Fire Cora" thread or "Fire Baines" thread in the history of SoxTalk. If they do replace Joey Cora, it better be someone like Robin Ventura...although I doubt he's ready for a full-time role. Probably Buddy Bell, yikes! McEwing?

According to Phil Rogers, we could have gotten Granderson for Jordan Danks.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sports/texas-ran...ers-tragedy.ece Jeff Passan already has a good feature article up at yahoo sports as well.

AJ should really be hitting higher in the line-up than Rios. Don't get that. What have we seen from him in the last 5-7 games that makes Ozzie think he's going to drive in a run. He's got like 20 RBI's so far on the season, making Alexei look like Hank Greenberg.

QUOTE (Thad Bosley @ Jul 8, 2011 -> 01:05 PM) An interesting story about hitting coaches to sort of compare and contrast to the situation with the White Sox involves none other than my namesake here, (former Sox outfielder) Thad Bosley. Bosley was named hitting coach of the Texas Rangers over the winter, but on June 8th, after only two months on the job, he was fired from his position. Fired, despite the fact that the Rangers were the 3rd most productive team, offensively, in the league. So from a distance, the firing seemed somewhat odd not only because it only happend two months into the job, but because it appeared that Bosley had the results to back up the work he was doing. However, upon reading several players' accounts on their experience with Bosley from spring training through those first two months, it appears the Rangers attained those impressive offensive results in spite of Bosley's presence. In other words, the players were apparently not buying into Bosley's philosophy on hitting and thus pretty much just rejected and ignored him and did their own thing. Rangers management quickly detected the disconnect between the coach and the players and their collective rejection of his philosophy, and quickly moved to remove Bosley from his post. I bring this story up as it sort of seems to be the flip of what might be going on with the Sox. You really never hear publicly (or at least I cannot recall such a case) where any of the Sox players have stated having an issue with Walker. In fact, if anything, you've heard the direct opposite, as for example, I've seen Konerko go on record a few times saying very complimentary things about Walker's approach and philosophy. So is it possible then, if not probable, that the flaw in the Sox' overall offensive process isn't their hitting coach's philosophy about hitting, or the drills and exercises he has the players run through in batting practice, or his review and analysis of video with the players, etc., but simply this particular set of players ability (or inability) to execute? It certainly could be both, but I think by now, and especially with the way the offense has struggled, that there would have been some sort of player revolt against Walker. Heck, it only took the Rangers two months to run Bosley out of town down there in Texas. But the lack of such a revolt by the Sox players leads me to believe our problem is more about the pupils rather than the teacher. I'll attribute it to the close-knit, insular nature of the way our organization operates and way Ozzie surrounds himself with "Sox insiders." Very few players have ever turned against them and survived. Look what happened to Javy, Swisher and Cabrera for their independence. Even Jon Garland, to an extent. I remember when KW would meet with the players (Konerko/Thome/Dye) at mid-season and they'd tell him "they're fine as is...they don't need to add another piece." Maybe trying to be independent is what got the likes of Brian Anderson, Fields and Getz in trouble with the organization. Who knows? Ozzie's never appeared to be a huge Beckham fan, and you wonder where that came from...or what Beckham did to give off the wrong impression back in 2009. You'd hear things like BA likes to party too much, likes the ladies, yada yada and you wonder if that was a legit beef the organization had or just Ozzie/Oney trying to set them up to make them look bad, as plenty of players in the past managed to live an Epicurean lifestyle away from the park while still being successful between the foul lines. With veteran teams comprised of very few single players and more of a "family atmosphere," it seems like a very hard clubhouse to break into. All speculation, obviously.

QUOTE (bmags @ Jul 7, 2011 -> 03:57 PM) As someone who dates a very funny woman, i quite liked seeing them in a role more than props to get f***ed over (in every way) by doofus male characters, or the "men are stupid, women comment on it" roles. I hope we do see more films like this. I'm sure we'll see about 10-15 copycat movies put into the pipeline, half from Apatow's production team alone. With Bridesmaids and Bad Teacher (not sure why they're being compared, except for the fact they have female leads)...yet another "niche" they'll try to exploit. As long as the material's good, it will work. Not so much movies like "Something Borrowed" with Kate Hudson and Ginnifer Goodwin. Movies like Monte Carlo with Selena Gomez are all over the place, because they're targeted at teenagers...but there's not so much product out there aimed at women post-college through let's say age 45. And the Hollywood mantra has always been leading actresses become "one-dimensional mom characters" in their late 30's/early 40's. Oh, by the way, Larry Crowne was "pretty good" but not quite the quality I expected with Hanks and Roberts...probably better as a rental/discount theatre adventure.

QUOTE (danman31 @ Jul 8, 2011 -> 04:00 PM) Really? He could get sued for that? I would hope any judge would laugh that out of court. I think with all the money the Rangers Foundation is giving privately, the fundraisers they're doing in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area (including all the games this weekend)...and I'm sure some of the players like Hamilton and his wife will also get involved, they're hoping to head it off at the pass. They're even wearing black armbands as well. And you can bet they'll let that kid throw out the first pitch and spend a lot of time around those ballplayers and Nolan Ryan, former President Bush and Laura Bush, etc. The main argument they could make was that the gap was covered before...but it was removed when it became such a nuisance with fans jumping/falling onto it going after home run balls. Surely those fans couldn't have been kicked out of the game, since they wouldn't have been interefering with a ball in play. So the argument will be did the "nuisance to the Rangers" of fans constantly jumping/falling onto the cover override the safety concerns of falling onto a concrete area filled with metal poles/scoreboard stanchions? He died from "blunt force head trauma," largely because of the concrete under there I'm sure.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sports/texas-ran...ark-history.ece http://www.dallasnews.com/sports/texas-ran...he-is-dead_.ece Ziegler's reaction...btw, I'm pretty sure those A's announcers feel terrible too, they're going to get hate mail because of all the people watching the video on youtube, etc., and not understanding that they had zero idea what was actually going on behind the scenes, it's just such an unusual circumstance with a 20 foot fall killing someone Apparently the Josh Hamilton "press conference" is happening right now, 4 pm CST. Weird they're selling the tickets (those 2 seats) for tonight's game, but cover that gap area again with a tarp. A little bit morbid to sit in those seats after what happened. I don't know what you do, actually. Seems it was covered before, but too many fans were falling onto it going after home run balls so they removed it. http://rangersblog.dallasnews.com/archives...-where-fan.html

20 games? It's 9-27 since May 20th, 2009. I'm not even questioning whether Guillen was a good manager in those years (2004-2008). The question has now turned to what has happened to him as a manager since then, and what can (or can't) be done about it. Not only Guillen, but also Williams and the entire minor league system.

Greg, it doesn't matter what we "think," it only matters what happens on the playing field. For MOST of the past decade, there was ZERO argument from most Sox fans that we were the more talented team than the Twins, collectively. Sure, they had their superstars in Hunter, Morneau, Mauer, Santana, Nathan...but, top to bottom, 1-25, we had the better overall talent and depth. Until last season. I could pull the list of all the players who've suited up for the Twins this year and half of the roto geeks out there wouldn't recognize the majority of those names. Baseball is a game of momentum. The Tribe just hasn't won all those games in the last couple of innings (and numerous walkoffs) by accident. They believe in themselves now, that whole "team of destiny" thing. These aren't the 2003 Royals that are doing it with smoke and mirrors. They have a number of players like Sizemore, Choo and Santana that haven't even come close to putting up the overall numbers expected of them, and yet they're still in first and growing more and more confident by the day. It did look like DET would overtake them, but now I'm not so sure.

Greg, the Twins would be 14 games under .500 if we'd just played them decently, considering they're without.....let's see, only Jason Kubel, Justin Morneau, Denard Span and Delmon Young. The only reason they're going to make a run at DET and CLE is because of us. If you remove 2005 and 2006 from Ozzie's managerial career, all those numbers will be well below .500 against the Central or Twins or Gardenhire. Do you really consider that successful when we've had the highest or second highest payroll in the division for a decade now (either us or Detroit)??? It's like the University of Illinois basketball team losing 20 out of 25 times to the Iowa Hawkeyes. It just shouldn't happen. You can't even make the argument that the Twins are more talented/dominant in 2011. Last year, it was clear. This year, they've used over half their AAA Rochester roster. Greg, let's say you are looking for someone to manage your retirement accounts. The manager was one of the top quintile or quartile for 4 out of 5 years (2007 the exception). But he's been very very average the last 3 years and all your peers are getting 15-25% rates of return and you're barely keeping up with inflation. Do you go into your broker's office and applaud him for doing a solid job half a decade ago or are you more concerned about his recent performance, especially when many of his peers are outperforming him?

http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/baseb...0,3830330.story Phil Rogers is having a field day with already predicting "regressions" for Dunn and Rios based on their second half trends in recent years. And, oh, by the way, surely Dave Dombrowski would have accepted Jordan Danks for Curtis Granderson!!!! Just give it a rest. We get it, Granderson's having a great season, he's a Chicago native and we'd be leading the majors in wins if we had him instead of Alex Rios in CF. What is most amusing is that supposedly Greg Walker identified a flaw in an opponent's swing path....and yet he can't do that for our own players. You would think they would have consulted with him about Dunn and Rios, just like they supposedly always do with Don Cooper about pitchers they're looking to acquire.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/rosen...0,635246.column Where is KW?

It's funny, for the life of me, I remembered it as a Freddy Garcia start, but it was actually Colon. Then I looked it up at B-R. Still don't even recognize THAT Bartolo as the same pitcher we're seeing with the Yankees the first two months of 2011. He was a sad approximation of the 2003 Colon with the Sox. Do the Twins play the White Sox in August at USCF? In order to fully lift the curse, I must return to the scene of the crime. Stuck here in Manila in a monsoon...at least I have a week in Bali to look forward to soon, then ORD on the 29th. Anyone want to hang out and watch the White Sox beat the Twins and Dayan win AL Player of the Month?

We have the starting pitching (if Humber holds up and Peavy gets his fastball back), bullpen and overall good enough defense that it will be very difficult for us to fall completely out of the division race. We'll see.

I think the Sale conversion-to-starter thing is far from a done deal at this point. That's clearly where he has the most value to the White Sox, and after Royce Ring and Aaron Poreda in the first round, it would certainly be much better for the future of the White Sox if he could stand up to the wear-and-tear of starting.

I would even drink V-8 and Tang for a year if we could go 11-7 against the Twins.