chw42

QUOTE (greg775 @ Sep 15, 2010 -> 04:20 PM) Does Hahn have a track record? Does he know what he's doing? I'd boot Kenny. Keep Ozzie but revamp the team back to a plodding home run hitting team to go with our supposed great pitching staff. I'd never bunt to keep Soxtalk happy and tell Ozzie no NL style ball anymore. With all the home run hitters, I'd still put a great defensive team out there somehow as well. Fire Kenny. Keep Ozzie. Pray Hahn is good GM. lol, Ozzie would spit in your face and tell you to go f*** yourself.

QUOTE (JPN366 @ Aug 15, 2010 -> 11:55 AM) MLB 2K8 is the closest thing you can find to MVP 2005. I still play MLB 2K8, in my third year running a parallel franchise to the real life White Sox. I have the injuries turned off, but have the option to force trades turned on. So, when someone gets hurt for real, and I don't have room on one of the minor league rosters, I can trade them to another team until they are active again. Jake Peavy is with the Padres until he's healthy again, I had Teahen with Pittsburgh until he began his rehab. I had to create Vizquel, Threets and Aquino because they had all retired on the game. So did Thome. 2K8 sucks, it got some of the worst reviews and didn't sell at all, which is why 2K9 went back to Visual Concepts. 2K7 was alright, but the Show trumps all of them at this point.

QUOTE (CWSOX45 @ Sep 13, 2010 -> 09:51 PM) I never said WAR hated the Twins. I said they have "replacement players" AAA or 4A players that are called up and take the place of recent departures, and contribute immediately at the big league level, and most of them aren't considered replacement players because they contribute far beyond what they are expected to. Isn't that the definition Fangraphs uses as a "replacement player" a career AAA or 4A player? Just take a look at some of these names: 2002: Bobby Kielty: 2.5, Dustan Mohr: 2.0, 2003: Matthew LeCroy: 1.3, Mike Ryan 1.0, 2004: Lew Ford 3.7 2005: Nick Punto: 3.1, Jason Tyner 1.3 2008: Brendan Harris 1.2 I don't really understand where you disagree with, because I never stated that Fangraphs hated the Twins. I commend the Twins as they do a good job of getting production from "replacement players." They do it all the time, and that's what's so frustrating because we can't. What's even more depressing, is that we will most likely continue to see this continue as well. Nick Punto's actually a pretty valuable little player, mostly due to his defense. I know what you're saying and I even agreed with it to a degree, but in the grand scheme of things, I don't know what this has to do with Jim Thome and using WAR to add and subtract wins to a team. Each WAR is 10 runs and that 10 runs has a meaning. If you were to subtract 10 runs from a team, their Pythagorean W-L goes down by 1 win. So it's not totally incorrect to say that Thome would add 3 wins to the Sox while subtracting 3 from the Twins. Hell, he already killed us on a walk-off home run once and added in here and there in some other games. That doesn't mean he won those games by himself, but he sure had a huge impact in the Twins winning them.

Trevor Cahill is technically a luckier version of Justin Masterson... We get one of these guys every year, but this is an extreme case.

QUOTE (CWSOX45 @ Sep 13, 2010 -> 05:23 PM) Jesus christ, enough with the Wins Above Replacement jargon. We can sit here and beat this to death all day. I'm not saying that WAR isn't a good metric to measure overall talent of a player, but it has its flaws, and simply saying that adding Jim Thome to our roster would equate in 3 plus wins and taking away 3 wins from the Twins is a ridiculous hypothetical assumption. Especially when all the Twins do is produce what Fangraphs would define as "Replacement Level Players." I swear to god we've been beat by career AAA, and AAAA+ Twins players for the last 10+ years. The Twins have been the same team they have been for the past decade, regardless of who is on that roster they play the game the right way. They execute in critical situations, they do the little things like driving a man in on 3rd with less than 2 outs. (Something we have really struggled with in the past and present.) They get bunts down, they don't run themselves out of innings, and most importantly each and every hitter has a plan when they step up to the plate. They also play sound defense, they don't beat themselves. You have to beat them. You want to know why the Sox aren't in first this year and the Twins are? Look at the god d**mn records against Central Division foes. The Twins beat Central Division teams, they beat them early, they beat them late, and they beat them often. We didn't, and we still don't as recently as last week. Pinning this all on not bringing back Thome is ridiculous. There are so many variables that come into effect with this. We didn't start playing baseball until June, the bullpen was atrocious in the month of August, and most importantly the major difference between us and the Twins is simple baseball execution. The bottom line is statistics have their spot in the game, but it's insane to simply just suggest that adding one player immediately adds 3 plus wins to our team. If we had kept Thome, would we have been better on paper? Yes absolutely, but does Jim put up the exact pace of production that he has with the Twins? Who knows....my gut feeling tells me no, but at the same time he would easily would have surpassed Kotsay's production, there's no doubt about that. Again let me just reiterate that I like WAR, wOBA, and other statistics to measure performance, but using WAR in an instance like this just doesn't work for me. It's the same thing with Fangraphs pitch values. People read those values and automatically think their highest rated pitch value is their best pitch, when in actuality its the furthest thing from the truth. Tim Lincecum is a good example, last I checked his highest rated pitch was his change-up...why? Because he records outs with that pitch, strikeouts, ground outs, whatever. However what fangraphs doesn't take into consideration is that they don't reward his fastball enough that helps set up that change-up. Without that fastball the change-up is not nearly as effective, and it's value is not nearly as high. It just goes back to the age old rule of thumb, the best pitch is a well located fastball, regardless of what these "ratings" suggest. The bottom line is that sabermetrics don't always translate and carry over to reality, and specifically in this instance they're just hypothetical explanations on what could have been. All of them have their flaws, UZR, WAR, etc. and shouldn't always be "the final answer." After speaking with old time scouts and "stat heads" both sides seem to think their way is the concrete way to evaluate talent, when the fact of the matter is the best way to do this is to have a good balance of both. Sorry I got carried away...back to Thome. Not having Jim Thome didn't cost us the division, but it had a hand in it. To me we are six back because we did not execute and we did not beat the teams in our own division. That isn't true at all... Twins team WAR since 2002 2002: 26.9 (4th in AL, Sox were 6th) 2003: 24.7 (3rd in AL, Sox were 4th) 2004: 18.4 (10th in AL, Sox were 4th) 2005: 15.2 (12th in AL, Sox were 10th) 2006: 23.8 (3rd in AL, Sox were 7th) 2007: 14.2 (11th in AL, Sox were last) 2008: 18.5 (9th in AL, Sox were 8th) 2009: 22.4 (5th in AL, Sox were 13th) 2010: 28.6 (2nd in AL, Sox are 9th) Outside of 2004 and 2005, the Twins had more productive players in every single season. WAR doesn't hate the Twins and their so said "replacement level players". They might have produced only one good year and fell out of oblivion (Jason Tyner and Lew Ford?), but when they did play, they hurt everybody, not just the White Sox.

QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Sep 13, 2010 -> 09:25 AM) As I thought about it more last night. Here's what I came up with: The rule is dumb. It was obvious to everyone he clearly had possession. Given the rule as it stands, the ruling was right. You cant "prove" he had possession of the ball with his one hand. His hand and the ball could have been falling at the same rate, therefore not a completed catch In summery, right call, DUMB rule The more I thought about it, the more it made sense actually. I came up with an analogous play. Say a receiver catches a ball in the endzone, falls to the ground and as he's making contact with the ground, the ball pops out, that's not a catch. I think in one way or another, the play yesterday is somewhat similar to that.

Wow, good to see Quade actually uses some sort of numbers...

QUOTE (greg775 @ Sep 13, 2010 -> 01:51 PM) If Ankiel could stay healthy, would he be the cheap answer for DH? If we get Ankiel, he'll be like next year's version of Mark Teahen. I'm sure you'll like that.

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Sep 13, 2010 -> 11:30 AM) I think if Thome is playing 90% of the time at DH, other players like Paulie might not be having seasons as good as this one. Either way, f*** it, I still love Jim, and I'll pull for him to get a ring if the Twins do indeed hold us off. Why? If Thome hit 5th, don't you think he'd be acting as better protection for Konerko?

QUOTE (greg775 @ Sep 13, 2010 -> 01:46 AM) Still at the break we were in the race. We could have added a suitable bat. We didn't. Thome didn't lead the Twins to any advantage at the break over us. We were in the race. Sox f***ed up by not adding a bat. Paulie, Oz, KW said they didn't need one. That's cause he didn't play as much.

I think people are taking the word "fluke" the wrong way. If you go look at the Pythagorean record of that team, they overachieved by 8 games. That team's WAR was around the middle of the league, yet they won the second most games in all of baseball. You can't call it a fluke in a bad way, they won a World Series. But you can certainly say the team overachieved, which is not a bad thing.

QUOTE (Jordan4life @ Sep 13, 2010 -> 12:26 AM) Vance Law just went Kalapse on Ace. How about CQ for Hunter Pence straight up? Pence is one of the most underrated players in baseball. I love him. And I know the Astros would forfeit their franchise before making such a deal. Pence would be dreamy if he got on base more. Even at his current state, I would definitely make that deal.

QUOTE (Quinarvy @ Sep 13, 2010 -> 12:16 AM) Number wise: Thome has been worth 3.3 WAR this year. Subtract 3 wins from Twins and they're 82-61. Add 3 to us and we're 82-61. Round up to 4 wins and they're 81-62 and we're 83-60. I think the 4 wins prediction is more accurate, since our DHs have had negative value this year. When you see s*** like this, it just makes you shake your head.

QUOTE (Jenksy Cat @ Sep 13, 2010 -> 12:12 AM) We barely scratched 19 points against...the lions. The Detroit lions. The 0-21 on the road Detroit Lions. And "won" because of a stupid rule and a injury to their QB. We had the ball 6 inches away from the endzone and could not score against the Detroit Lions This team is going to be brutal against real opponents, don't be fooled. Take 3 of those turnovers away and they score at least 29 points instead of 19.

QUOTE (ChWRoCk2 @ Sep 12, 2010 -> 05:25 PM) Lol, we'll see how optimistic you are after the Cowboys game tonight. Even with the turnovers it is not like the Bears were moving the ball on a crappy Lions pass defense. The Lions are half the offensive team the Cowboys are. 372 yards passing...I would call that moving the ball.

QUOTE (scenario @ Sep 12, 2010 -> 04:33 PM) Something really strange... My connection on mlb.com is actually about 5 seconds ahead of Comcast. I don't ever think I've seen the game on computer actually ahead of the game on TV. Same here. Felix always b****ed about this in chat.

QUOTE (11and1 @ Sep 12, 2010 -> 04:13 PM) Any idea what that % was at the ASB? 49%

QUOTE (J.Reedfan8 @ Sep 12, 2010 -> 04:16 PM) The funny thing is... people usually rip Lovie for not having any balls and always kicking FG when were down on the one/end zone, yet most of the time... that decision he should not be faulted on (come on your on the freaking one yard line). However, Stafford was not in the game, Detroit could not move the ball to get a first down since Stafford was in, and it was still about 6 minutes left in the game. I agree with nitetrain, I agree with his choice all in all and the Bears still won. If the Bears actually remembered Calvin Johnson needs triple coverage, maybe there wouldn't even be a cause for such a cheap win. I know, except he picked a really bad time to prove otherwise. It reminded me of two years ago, when we had the ball on the 1 in Minnesota and didn't score. The Vikings ended up getting a 97 yard touch down on the ensuing play. Thank god this was the Lions and not a better team.

QUOTE (Buehrle>Wood @ Sep 12, 2010 -> 02:26 PM) greg, how do you manage to make every thread on this board so awful? It's really impressive. Trolling is an art.

QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Sep 12, 2010 -> 04:09 PM) Detroit was robbed. But hey, people from Detroit are used to getting robbed.

QUOTE (CaliSoxFanViaSWside @ Sep 12, 2010 -> 04:08 PM) I'm in till they're mathematically eliminated. Mathematically speaking... http://www.coolstandings.com/baseball_standings.asp?i=1 I think I've realized that the Twins are just too good and that we're just what I thought we were supposed to be at the beginning of the year: a 88-90 win team. It's too bad, because if somebody told you the Sox would be on track to win 89 games at the start of the year, you'd think we'd have a great shot at the playoffs.

3 years $36 million?

QUOTE (11and1 @ Sep 12, 2010 -> 03:57 PM) So here's the question. Do I let myself get drawn back into this? Being a Sox fan is like having an abusive parent Cookie...SLAP....cookie....SLAP....cookie....SLAP..... Ah well, live by the math, die by the math. Thank god they're off tomorrow..... No... Unless they sweep the Twins, there's literally no chance. Even if they do sweep the Twins, the chances are probably around 20%.

QUOTE (Jenksy Cat @ Sep 12, 2010 -> 03:56 PM) god i hate lubbie Our town has such stubborn coaching personalities.

QUOTE (CaliSoxFanViaSWside @ Sep 12, 2010 -> 03:56 PM) I'll say it right now. Andruw should be in the lineup every day . He's a run producer , a very good fielder and we desperately need that. He's actually in one of his hot streaks right now. He should be playing regularly.