caulfield12

Well, the one thing that can't measure is how many pitchers' heads we got into, how many walks, how many grooved fastballs, errors by the catcher or middle infielders caused by putting pressure on the other team... Obviously in years past, we wouldn't have those huge caught stealing numbers...but we still made plenty of outs on the basepaths in 2009 without being anything resembling a fast or athletically-inclined team. At least this year, we can go first to third most of the time and I do feel that the aggressiveness has won more games than it has lost us. I also concur about being annoyed with giving up outs with Pierre on base and bunting him over when he's supposedly one of the top basestealers in the majors.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Aug 11, 2010 -> 09:40 AM) None of the above? It turns out now is the era of free agency and what not and players very rarely stay with the same team their entire career. Its bound happen that they end up on another team and have a big moment or two. Secondly, if the Sox are gonna lose, I would rather it be Thome, Buerhle, or Konerko, guys I like, making the big play, instead of getting beat by a d-bag like Pettite, A-Rod, Youkilis, etc. That being said, how is Nick Swisher not on this list? Losing in the ALCS on a walk-off homer by Dirty 30 would piss me off way more than losing to a guy I enjoyed watching play for many years. I don't know if I would qualify Swisher beating us as "gut wrenching," that's more of the "irritating/annoying/p$$$ing off" category to me. Orlando Cabrera was vilified by many, yet his winning the ALCD with the Twins last year hardly registered as a blip on the radar, and that was largely or likely because we were sort of dead in the water coming down the stretch and there weren't really any huge "make or break" games with the Twins in August/September like in years past.

Since I'm in a mood for self-pity today...thinking of, well, it could be worse scenarios. AND FOR THE RECORD, not bringing back Thome was FINE, it's just that we didn't adequately replace him or have a back-up plan in place better than the one that's haunted us for most of the season and become the biggest broken record since the "Brian Anderson is a burgeoning superstar who is being held back by Ozzie's unfair and mean-spirited vendetta" conspiracy theory. I should have added a couple more possibilities....of Guillen and/or Kenny Williams being part of organizations that beat the Sox in the future.

Anything is possible in baseball. We've seen it this year. Of course, the ONE thing you don't want to see is a three game sweep by your rivals on your home field, where you just established such dominance for the last 2 months. (I think if the White Sox were swept at home and then still managed to come back and win the ALCD, then Ozzie would be justified in writing his book, getting a team up off the deck twice in one season like that would be pretty miraculous). That said, with the way this season has gone, you can't count anybody out. We saw the same thing happen in 2008, the Twins (although it was in Minnesota) just demolished the White Sox psychologically, there was the infamous Jenks/Carlos Gomez debacle (to be compared to this year's Sunday No Out Massacre), your heart was torn out and ripped in two by the Twins at that point. And yet we still came back to win. I'm not saying the SAME thing will happen again, but there's no reason why it can't. Of course, Twins fans can say that they don't need Morneau to win (they won something like 16 of their last 21 without him last year and are seemingly fine again without his presence in the line-up), that their offensive depth and bullpen can make up for any deficiencies in the starting rotation.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Aug 11, 2010 -> 08:36 AM) Worth noting that the Sox are now 4-5 since this rant got out? Historically, Ozzie rants have deflected attention away from individidual players or poor overall team play, but I guess this one just came at a time when the White Sox were due to cool off...that level of play wasn't going to continue forever, just like the good luck with Garcia holding up as well. In some ways, you have to be proud of how they reversed 9 1/2 games in the standings to go up by 4 1/2 (after beating the Twins the Thursday after the ASB), but unfortunately we've given up 5 1/2 games in the last month ourselves. Such a bi-polar season. 14 game shift, but the recent negative 5 1/2 game shift seems almost as demoraralizing as the positive run back into the lead a month ago was uplifting. Still, basing your happiness about the season based on the last three games is ridiculous, so we just have to hope the offense can get things figured out quickly. At home, you'd like to think they at least have a chance to win 2 in a row over the Twins, but it's hard to believe in that happening right now. Still, if you were a Twins' fan one month ago and your team had just lost that first game and you were 4 1/2 games back, it was even more depressing, since they'd blown such a huge lead already and the season seemed to be getting away from them. Still, I'm not going to put a Danks/Perkins match-up in the "automatic win" column, we tried to do that with some of our Baltimore match-ups. Just want to see some signs of life, fight and competitiveness. It's really amazing how much the 2003 season influences the feelings of Sox fans on the Twins. We got plastered by them in 2001-2004 and fell off in the second half of 2006, but we did manage to miraculously hold them off in 2008. It's interesting to conjecture how much gloomier and doomier things would feel around here had the Twins won in 2008, that would have given them 6 division championships out 8, and the Sox only 1 (especially considering the way they came back to track down the Tigers in 2006 and 2009). 2 versus 5 (with the World Series) or even 3 versus 5 (going back to 2000) doesn't seem QUITE so bad...even writing these words, it feels like a defeatist, Cubs-like mentality, the idea that "at least we don't have to watch our team get plastered in the first round of the playoffs year after year" when almost all of us feel the starting pitching on this team could easily get us another championship if not for the other egregious flaws in the blueprint.

Does anyone have the exact quotes from Ozzie this time? At ESPN, Ozzie's complaining about all the media attention the Twins are getting for coming to town, there's a quote from his wife wondering about whether Ozzie's "dating someone from Minnesota"...and then comments about the White Sox not getting enough respect and "not feeling the support" in Chicago. And then he is considering writing a book about this season and the miraculous comeback to contention behind his managerial style (this last line is my own hyperbolic comments, don't jump on Ozzie yet).

Why would you DREAM of throwing him a fastball in that situation?

QUOTE (Bhay99 @ Aug 10, 2010 -> 08:16 PM) everyone was crying too hard to actually watch the replay and see that he was easily back. No big deal though....guy getting picked off first to start an inning doesn't kill a rally or anything. Well, for one thing, he was leaning the wrong direction. Don't even put the ump in a position to call you out. And it just killed that inning, we had a 3-1 count on Vizquel and Baker was struggling with his command. You can't have a 70-75% success rate as a basestealer if that's one of the two assets you have as a ballplayer.

Well, let's just say we were due for a bad string after playing so well for so long. The only question is how long will it take for us to recover...it seems like this is going to be the time we have to switch Teahen for Kotsay.

I don't know if it's quitting, it just feels that way because of the offense. We got 2 runs yesterday in the 9th...it's just that we've rarely had comeback victories this season, the early series against the Mariners was one of the main exceptions in 2010. We're definitely not a comeback team, and it's no surprise with our offense having stretches of being completely anemic.

If we can't beat the Twins at least 2/3 at home, we don't deserve to make the playoffs anyway. It's not like the pitching is really letting us down, it's mostly the offense and mental/physical errors, like Viciedo and Konerko last inning.

Don't think it was a great idea to write that the Orioles' pitcher would be throwing batting practice tonight. Any soft-tosssing lefty, especially in a game away from USCF...has the capability of beating this White Sox team.

Well, time to man up. Everyone could see this inning coming a mile away after we failed to score in the top of the 6th. Interesting stat of the day. The Orioles haven't won two series in a row since July, 2009.

1. The team has played terrible baseball and have shown few signs of improvement as the year went on. 2. Ken Griffey Jr became unhappy with Wakamatsu and actively spread his discontent around the clubhouse. You can talk about bullpen usage, line-ups, or whatever other things you personally didn’t like about Wak, but those things didn’t matter all that much. Every manager has his idiosyncrasies, and as we saw last year, the things that Wak did that might have annoyed you don’t prevent the Mariners from being a winning ballclub. They’re minor issues that had little impact on today’s decision. The first issue is the big one, obviously. If the team was winning, things would be very different. The frustration that has surfaced has been magnified as the losses pile up, and what should be small problems have turned into big ones as people stew after another loss. However, the second issue is almost certainly the root of why Wak was dismissed. Pretty much anyone that has access to how the players feel about their former manager will report that it’s not good, and it hasn’t been good since May. When Wak made the (correct) decision that Ken Griffey Jr just shouldn’t play anymore, it caused some serious friction between the guys on the field and the coaching staff. The guys loved Junior, and they’re not rational about his abilities to help the team win. They just saw an icon in the game being shoved out the door. Griffey did absolutely nothing to discourage these feelings, offering no support for Wak or acknowledging the fact that he was no longer cut out to play Major League Baseball. Even after he took his meager bat and went home, he helped fuel the belief that it was Wakamatsu that was to blame for the entire situation. At that point, most of the club turned on their manager. There was nothing Wak could do to get them back on his side. He was now the guy responsible for running Griffey out of Seattle. And he should have never been put in that position. Plain and simple – the front office screwed up when they brought Griffey back for 2010. Everyone involved with that decision made a mistake, and they perpetuated that mistake by not having a plan in place to remove Griffey from the roster once it was clear that he could no longer function as a Major League player and would not be happy with a reduced role, as he had publicly claimed. The Mariners were more than willing to make up injuries for Mike Sweeney and Ryan Rowland-Smith when they wanted to get those guys off the roster – they should have been willing to do the same with Griffey at the end of April. Instead, the organization left it up to Wak to play the bad guy, and the situation poisoned his relationship with the rest of the guys on the team. It devolved into a point where the relationships probably couldn’t be saved, and because the Mariners can’t get rid of the entire roster, Wak is the one to leave. I’m pretty confident that he’ll get another gig, and be a pretty successful major league manager once he gets that second chance. More likely than not, his next team won’t stick him with a broken down former star who will become disgruntled once he stops getting his name penciled into the line-up. That will help. www.ussmariner.com

They already had Willie Bloomquist and Alberto Callaspo, not to mention Chris Getz. LOL.

I could be way off, but does anyone think there's a connection with bigger problems in the US (economic setbacks, loss of jobs, loss of the belief that we'll have longer lifespans and higher earnings than our parents) and the seemingly more negative attitude around message boards in general? I'm not going to pick on the Tea Party, that's for the political forum, but has anyone actually tried to read message boards ANYWHERE around cyberspace and come off feeling very concerned about the future? Just about any Yahoo news story comment thread should give one pause...and even if some posters are using hyberbole to be dramatic, are making racist/sexist pronouncements to grab attention, something is seriously going wrong all across the country, and this board is just one mirror of that bigger issue. It's not about right or left though...it's that loss of respect in general that's happened, the loss of belief or faith in public institutions. Some say in began in the 1970's with Watergate, but it has really coalesced in this country, in my opinion, since the first Clinton administration. You really had the feeling that at least 25% of the people in the US hated the president, wouldn't even use that term (POTUS) in referring to him. This happpened to Bush too, there's no doubt in my mind. In fact, if you just look around the media landscape, there's no longer a desire to provide balanced/objective information to anyone in the "middle" of the spectrum, which is supposedly where 70-80% of Americans are...yet CNN is crumbling, replaced by the more polarizing programs of Fox on the right and MSNBC on the left. I can't say what caused this, but there has definitely been a breakdown in respect in terms of on-line communication. People say things to be controversial or get a lot of attention, just like in the "real world," Americans (many) will seemingly now do almost anything to become famous. It's better to be noticed, even if people hate or dislike you, than not to be noticed at all. Reasonableness, however you want to define that characteristic or quality, has almost gone out the window. So I don't know how to prove it quantifiably, but some of these negative traits (attention-seeking, being controversial, pessimism winning out over optimism) are winning out in civic discourse everywhere, and soxtalk might be just one small example in the macro picture.

http://www.baseballamerica.com/statistics/...ds/?pl_id=12050 Let's just say he's not reminding anyone of Sergio Santos, Brooks Kieshnick or Jason Dellaero yet.

But the thing is, this is a reinvigorated team under Showalter finally playing with a sense of direction and urgency. They beat the Angels three in a row and now have won four in a row, total. As we've learned throughout the years, there are no easy opponents down the stretch...teams out of the pennant race tend to play "free and easy," whereas the teams at the top of the standings tend to tighten up. The fact of the matter is that Liriano against an unknown Indians' pitcher, you'd also figure that match-up is hugely favorable for the Twins. There are no longer any "sure wins" at this point in the season.

Not a great start there, Sale. You would think Ozzie would have brought him into a less stressful situation. I think it's a bit early to call him "the left-handed Black Jack McDowell."

120 pitches for Danks...great game. Will be interesting to see who they go with in the 8th.

Got away with one there. The umpires (and stadiums) have really been coming under fire the last couple of weeks around MLB.

Sale and Pena are warming up.

Thought that was going out, dad gummit AJ....did Harrelson call it a homer? Kotsay with a bad jump, he hesitated, it's not 100% because he's slow, although that's undoubtedly part of the problem, too...should have pinch-run Lillibridge there probably. The Orioles are a different team the least 7-10 days under Showalter. We're not going to storm through them, I wouldn't be surprised if we only won 2/4.

It's also notable we are something like 17-20 in games where we don't homer. Even the Detroit radio guys noticed that difference...along with the fact that Carlos Quentin was much more aggressive about trying to go from 1st to 3rd on a single...even though he ended up deciding not to go for 3rd and pulling up, his attitude was different in their estimation. And while the stolen base percentage overall is pretty awful, that team-wide mentality of challenging the other team, forcing them to make mistakes, taking the game to them...it has really paid off (in distracting the pitchers and getting them to make bad pitches, resulting in additional runs, I know that's difficult for me to measure or bring up specific situations where this happened since I can't watch the games). Maybe even some of our hitters are hustling a bit more to first base than in years past, but perhaps that's just my imagination. It's what made those early Twins teams (2002-2004/06) so good, and what has become a hallmark of the Rays and Angels this decade. Nice to see we've added a bit of that component...will be even more exciting if Mitchell can be anything closely resembling Carl Crawford and Jordan Danks can miraculously morph into a better hitter than Brian Anderson.

We'll see if they get anything back for Guillen or not. I think they will get a B/C prospect. Willie Bloomquist was one of those signs that everyone shakes their head, he's sort of their version of Mark Kotsay, albeit younger. Then Gil Meche, he was very good the first 2-3 years of that contract, but once again evidence of the danger of giving out 4-5 year contracts for pitchers in terms of their health/injury problems down the line.