caulfield12

QUOTE (fathom @ Aug 17, 2010 -> 06:54 PM) Sunday was pretty bad when it was a Stone solocast Wow. Survival for one inning. No, the ultimate nightmare would be Skowron and Bill Melton with innings 4-6 by Magic and Walton.

Thank god. Of course, the way things have been going, a 3 run bomb is coming next. (PLEASE DON'T HAPPEN, CROSSES FINGERS)

Verlander with 103 pitches through 4 1/3rd. I wonder how long before Leyland pitches his arm off? Great, Danks is a one-pitch pitcher against a fastball-hitting team. And of course it's Mauer who's up.

Double play ball. Thank God Alexei caught it and it didn't go through into CF. Shades of Clayton Richard.

That's 100% NOT the way to start out the inning, Danks. Please don't have a Gavin Floyd start. We need at least ONE ace in our rotation to give us something to believe in.

Alright, we have to shut down the Twins for a couple of innings Danks. This is your time to decide if you're Jon Lester quality or not. You did it before. This might be your most important mulligan ever.

Note to Danks and AJ: Stop hanging pitches over the middle of the plate AND throwing fastball after fastball when they're expecting it. Note #2: Don't speed up Jim Thome's bat.

LOL at Kotsay. Well, hopefully that won't feel the same way it did after Andruw Jones' homer late Sunday to put us down by just 1.

Quentin injured again a bit by a late slide. Well, they have some fight in them, and aren't completely giving up. There's that at least.

Yay! Bobby Jenks is in the dugout. Maybe he was giving AJ and Ozzie helpful advice about pitch selection that inning. Glad he's earning his $7.5 million somehow.

Congrats on your 30th, Paulie. At least you're not laying down and dying like a dog in August. You've earned yourself a nice contract for 2011 from someone.

Well, I hope Ozzie and AJ get into a fight over the pitch selection that inning. Maybe that will light a fire under this team, because it's certainly not going to be the added motivation of playing the Twins.

Why speed up Thome's bat and call a cutter when Danks throws a 91-94 harder version??? STUPID STUPID STUPID AJ. Goodbye, I think we just need to start over next year with a new catcher.

I'm just glad Game 163 was not in Minnesota in 2008. That's all I will say. Their pitchers are getting us out with breaking balls. The Twins have done most of their damage against fastballs. Yet we continue to forget about the scouting report of everyone in the AL that Minnesota is a fastball-hitting team.

Ozzie saw better energy and enthusiasm out of his team today compared to Sunday. Great!!!

Great, Harrelson will blame the entire series on the missed strike call to Orlando Hudson, basically... UGH.

Why do you play Mauer like he's a pull hitter when even the Twins' personnel are actively questioning the White Sox positioning?

Great 2 homers in a week for Hudson. Thigh high, center cut. Hanging change-up. Almost catching up Hudson to Mauer in the homer totals.

What is the reason Ozzie gave for starting Kotsay over Teahen again? FREE VLADIMIR GUERRERO.

Not exactly setting the tone early here. Hmmm...

Or because the Twins choked against the Royals when they could have easily put us down for the count.

I'm sure he mostly meant the last decade before the new stadium and the Mauer mega-contract. They had to shed the salaries of Torii Hunter/Santana and a couple of seasons ago there was a lot of concern about how they could possibly keep Morneau/Mauer in the fold, along with Joe Nathan. It wasn't so long ago their answers were Livan Hernandez, Mike Lamb and Adam Everett. The days of filling in the final 2-3 roster spots with washed up veterans seem to be behind the Twins for now. Look at this way....the Twins have made very very few errors with personnel. David Ortiz, although they simply couldn't get him in shape and working with their hitting system, their one notable failure. Kyle Lohse has ended up doing well outside MINN, although you could say the same thing for Kip Wells, Josh Fogg, Jon Garland, Clayton Richard and Daniel Hudson when they're all in the NL. They really had patience with Young, and I think they would have traded him away the last two off-seasons had Smith been able to find anything bordering on value for Delmon based on his actual ability. I'm still happy they don't have Garza, but we should have drafted Garza anyway, we went before the Twins that year. The Santana trade would have set back most organizations 2-3 years and the Twins didn't miss a beat, competing the last 3 years, and very narrowly taking down the Sox one year before they were expected to be competitive for the ALCD again.

QUOTE (elrockinMT @ Aug 17, 2010 -> 12:55 PM) We should place our own team on a pedestal for a change Gordon Beckham was placed on the biggest pedestal that I can remember last year. The White Sox were walking on water after 2008, and almost nobody was disappointed they fizzled in the playoffs. But you have to do SOMETHING to earn that pedestal head-to-head against your biggest rival, instead of wetting the bed.

With Thome, the best theory I've heard (I think it was Fathom's) was that it was going to be very difficult for Thome to come back as one of the lowest paid members of the team after having been the second or third highest player on the team in 2010. Although I don't know if you'll ever come close to hearing Thome say that was an issue, the guy's made so much money in his career, and he doesn't seem like the type to fritter it away, either. No doubt, in some clubhouses, this would be a huge deal for a veteran to be asked to take a $10 million PLUS paycut and still come back to the same team. I'm not sure how many times that has actually happened in modern baseball history, actually. Perhaps that was Ozzie's thinking process, that it would be sad to see a Hall of Famer who meant so much to the Sox in a diminished role where he'd only get 125-150 at-bats or having to release Thome like the Mariners ended up doing with Griffey as it tore their clubhouse apart. Maybe KW and Ozzie feared the repercussions with the veteran leaders of the team (Buehrle, AJ, Konerko) if they brought back Thome/Dye only to cut them lose. Who knows? And part of that wasn't even KW's fault, he inherited a huge contract from the Phillies and wouldn't have dreamed of taking it on without the subsidy to go with it.

QUOTE (Cali @ Aug 17, 2010 -> 01:31 PM) For comparison sake, what's the first half record? From 2000-2011, the White Sox are something like 5 games over .500 against the Twins in the first half. 2000=3-3 2001=2-11 (oops!) 2002=2-2 2003=7-5 2004=7-3 2005=4-1 2006=5-2 2007=5-7/4-2 (interesting, Ozzie's worst team actually played .500 ball against MINN this season) 2008=7-4/1-6 2009=5-4/1-8 2010=2-3/2-5 OVERALL=49-45 Take out that 2-11 in the disastrous 2001 campaign (14-29 start), it's 47-34. Huge, huge difference on a consistent basis.