Feeky Magee

QUOTE (raBBit @ Feb 2, 2014 -> 01:49 PM) Cool stuff Feeky. My mom's family is from County Kerry and I feel they would be hard pressed to find a White Sox fan up there. Amazing that you can still show dedication to the team with everything being against you in terms of time zones. I am sure this thread will attract the eyes of all of the White Sox fans outside of Chicagoland (And mods if this is inappropriate my apologies and obviously feel free to delete my post) so I should say, I have been using this site when I am away from home. It's called vipbox. tv but no spaces in the URL. It's a foreign server that hosts just about every sports game it can. The feeds are not always perfect but it's surely better than nothing. I watch UFCs, NFL Redzone and Sox games when I am at class during a game. Makes watching game a lot easier when TV is not an option. I hope some of you can reap the benefits from this wonderful site. Whereabouts? My father's family are from Kerry. Yep, vipbox is exactly what I use. There's other ones that have better streams but vip is reliable to have the Sox on 9 times out of 10.

QUOTE (jamesdiego @ Feb 1, 2014 -> 12:37 PM) Good read. Like hearing about foreign fans and their take on our sports. Not sure if you'll get alot of replies from other foreigners as I'm not sure there are a ton of white sox fans. Interesting that 10-15% of your friends like our Football. And very interesting that Hurling over there is completely amateur. That they play for their home areas is pretty cool and must make rivalries crazy with pride. Saw some videos on youtube, looks intense. My grandpa was a fan, he was born in Ireland. From the southwest, I think Galway Yeah I'm heading to a Superbowl party tomorrow night, should be about 20 people there. Hurling is an incredible sport. If anyone is looking for footage to initiate them, last year's All-Ireland final is a good place to start, considered one of the greatest of all-time, between my Clare and the county I'm living in now, Cork. The first match was dramatic enough (brilliant finish for a draw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-UiOnVMCC8) but the replay was something else, here it is in its entirety in HD for anyone who's interested: It was a privilege to be there. Galway had a bad year. QUOTE (Jake @ Feb 1, 2014 -> 04:49 PM) A line of my family traces its roots back to Newmarket in County Cork where they farmed about 100 acres of land it seems until the 1860s. From what we can tell, they had lived in Garrison (now on the border to N. Ireland) until somebody in the family stole a horse and the rest of the family got the hell out of there. After Newmarket, most of the family moved to Cappamore near Limerick. From there, my great-great-grandfather moved to Chicago to become a lightweight prize fighter. There are some official records of how he did, but they are bafflingly contradictory. Two newspapers would report opposite results. We have a picture of him wearing a belt, but we are unsure of the significance. We don't think, at least by the time he finished, that he very far over .500. He did it to make a living. His son played for the White Sox's farm teams for a while back in the 1930s. We have a picture of him playing for the big club's Spring Training team somewhere. He had been invited to stay on as the big league backup, but the time in Pasadena made him very homesick and he came back to Chicago and played in local leagues before quitting entirely. Sadly, I'm told, this part of the family was entirely Cubs-oriented. Newmarket is less than an hour from me. A fine town. Used to go out with a girl from there. You'll be proud to know that the fine tradition of horse-stealing continues to this day in Limerick!

QUOTE (Chilihead90 @ Feb 1, 2014 -> 04:38 AM) Very cool stuff. I love hearing about how people from non-baseball areas come to find our sport, and ESPECIALLY our team, since we are not even big in our own country (or city, really). I think we now have 2 Irish lads here, the other being Jolly. Or Joxer? I can't remember exact right now, but he's been around here over the past year. Not to go off topic, but my heritage is very Irish, I had family living there, and I've visited before, so it's extra cool to see fans from Ireland on these boards. Anyway, carry on. Nice, what part?

Thought it'd be fun to have a thread for the non-American Sox fans, to share experiences of following the Pale Hose outside of the States. I got into baseball and the White Sox through a mixture of insomnia and football (soccer). I always found myself awake at 4am when there was nothing happening in my time zone. Baseball had a reputation of being boring from what little I had discussed of it with friends and the couple of times I'd seen it I'd been fairly perplexed by the rules. However my nocturnalism forced my hand and I started watching more of it, not regularly though, and without a team there was no hook. This was in 2011 and my football team, Manchester United, were on a pre-season tour of America. I was watching MUTV and they showed club captain Gary Neville throwing the first pitch at the Cell ( ). I watched the game that night and the Sox beat the A's 9-4 behind Mark Buehrle, with home-runs from Adam Dunn (hitting .178 at the time) and Paul Konerko (.318). I loved the way Buehrle pitched, and I was hooked. Living in Ireland, there wasn't many places selling baseball stuff. My first Sox purchase was from eBay, a baseball signed by Adam Dunn. This was a mixture of economics (I was a poorly student and for aforementioned reasons Dunn stuff was dirt cheap) and feelings of pity for Dunn, who was getting booed at the time. I was actually a little disappointed when Dunn fell something like 4 plate appearances short of qualifying for the batting title and therefore officially the worst offensive season in modern baseball, it would have been a kind of morbidly cool tribute! I later got a second-hand Sox pinstripe jersey, on eBay too. Next on my wishlist for when I have a bit more money is this bad-boy: http://shop.mlb.com/product/index.jsp?productId=23867366 Watching the Sox is 99% internet streams, I used to get the odd game (usually versus the Yankees or Red Sox) on ESPN America, which came free with our TV package at home at the time, but not anymore. Very occasionally now when there's a Sox game on ESPN America and I'm in a bar which has it and nobody else is watching anything, I can get them to put it on. Unlike American football, there is little or no baseball following in Ireland. I'd say about 10-15% of my friends have an American football team, but the only baseball fans I know here were either born in America or have family there. I keep in touch with baseball through the internet and podcasts (Baseball America, White Sox Weekly, Up And In (Baseball Prospectus, sadly discontinued), Effectively Wild (also Baseball Prospectus)). I've gotten really into the world of the draft, which doesn't happen in sports over here, and prospects, which is a much more interesting area in baseball than in sports over here. I'm also fascinated by concepts like service time, arbitration, free agency etc. which also don't apply. For example, my two main sports are football (soccer) and hurling (brilliant Irish game involving sticks, a small ball, and carnage). In football, straight swaps of players are rare and sides usually buy players for cash. Although players are frequently accused of greed, it'd be funny to see what it'd be if it was like it is in baseball, where as far as I can see the player usually takes the biggest contract, regardless of how close the team are to winning. In football, the best players aspire to be on the teams who can win soon, although often (but not always) they'll also be the teams paying most. In hurling, every player is amateur and plays for the county (equivalent of state) they are from. So Mike Trout would play for New Jersey for his whole career and also not be paid. I haven't been to a game yet but I'll be starting a new college course in September, allowing me to get a student visa to the US for the summer of 2015 where hopefully I'll be able to get to a game or ten for the pennant-contending White Sox! So, foreign White Sox fans, how did you get into baseball/the White Sox? How do you follow the sport/watch the games? Have you attended a game/do you hope to? What's your experience like in general of following the Sox from abroad? P.S. This board has also been a great help in following the White Sox, between this, Twitter and the excellent writing on SouthSideSox, all my needs are covered, and I'm grateful.

QUOTE (Jose Abreu @ Jan 30, 2014 -> 10:10 PM) I'm relatively new here. I'm not sure if you can. I've seen others do it. Ah well.

QUOTE (Jose Abreu @ Jan 30, 2014 -> 09:53 PM) I remember those- don't post the message board tailored link, just copy and paste the link on the top of your screen. How do I imbed the video though, rather than just link to it?

QUOTE (Feeky Magee @ Jan 30, 2014 -> 09:49 PM) First proper year as a White Sox fan was 2012. The two moments that come to mind straight away for me where I went crazy (obviously I have had a lot less time than everyone else so they won't stand out was much) were Dunn's 3-run homer in the 8th against the Indians that kept the Sox one game up in late September: Your browser does not support iframes. and Viciedo's 3-run homer in the 9th against the Yankees earlier that year: Your browser does not support iframes. From 2013 there was obviously no moment as exciting as that, but I loved Chris Sale's 1 hit, no walk performance versus the Angels: Feck it. Can anyone help me out here?

First proper year as a White Sox fan was 2012. The two moments that come to mind straight away for me where I went crazy (obviously I have had a lot less time than everyone else so they won't stand out was much) were Dunn's 3-run homer in the 8th against the Indians that kept the Sox one game up in late September: http://mlb.mlb.com/shared/video/embed/embe...ent_id=25061697 and Viciedo's 3-run homer in the 9th against the Yankees earlier that year: http://m.mlb.com/shared/video/embed/embed....opic_id=8878818 From 2013 there was obviously no moment as exciting as that, but I loved Chris Sale's 1 hit, no walk performance versus the Angels: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvpTvxro3FA

QUOTE (Marty34 @ Jan 27, 2014 -> 08:06 PM) I could not give one damn about WAR and contracts. As stated earlier in the thread, some bootleg WAR related formula told me the Sox got a fair deal when they signed Dunn. What. WAR is not a predictive stat. If you want a stat that predicts a player's slugging percentage going from .536 to .277 in one year then I'd say you're out of luck. fWAR, by the way, had Dunn at an average of 1.5 WAR for his last 3 years in before the White Sox, so it's not like WAR was saying Dunn was an amazing bargain at $14m per. It's one level of dumb to judge a statistic based on one player, it's another level to completely misconstrue what the statistic says before doing so.

Probably just a clerical error, but check it out: http://mshop.mlb.com/family/index.jsp?cate...mp;doVSearch=no

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jan 10, 2014 -> 09:03 AM) Thanks everyone - we're happy to have these out there. We have previously done monthly hot/cold reports, or sometimes even weekly. In terms of videos, we'll push them onto the channel as we get them during the season (or even this offseason, if we dig up some more from 2013 that we missed). One new thing to watch for in 2014 - for the first time, we're going to have daily recaps on the site during the season. We have a poster here who volunteered to do this. So there will be content on FS every day, during the season. This is in addition to all the feature, draft, news, rankings, interviews, etc. we already do. ETA: We've rarely ever done the podcast type thing you discuss here, but it is an interesting idea. Two of us live in the same suburb of Chicago. The other current writers are in Tennessee, and the UK. I would definitely listen to a FutureSox podcast.

I see, thanks guys. What about defensive WAR?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Dec 19, 2013 -> 07:19 PM) CF we will see much better defense out of I've seen this said quite a bit - worth noting that per Fangraphs, Alejandro De Aza had a defensive WAR of -3.2 in 153 games (7.7 in 2011, 0.2 in 2012) whilst Adam Eaton's was -11.2 in 66 games. (UZR/150 in CF in 2013, De Aza: -4.1, Eaton: -46.2.

With the (hopefully) drastic improvement in position players, I've been thinking about how the rotation could improve for 2014. I can dream on Tanaka but likely we're set with what we have right now. It'd be a bit greedy to expect much more from Sale and Quintana, 2 of Johnson/Paulino/Rienzo probably figure to about replicate our 4 and 5 production from last year, so the real key to any potential improvement is John Danks. So do we think we see a Danks closer to the 2008-2011 John Danks or the 2012-2013 John Danks?

QUOTE (Feeky Magee @ Dec 12, 2013 -> 07:55 AM) Audio feed is up on mlb.com now with a dude who doesn't appear to know he's going out live. Aw, nuts, they cut it off.

Audio feed is up on mlb.com now with a dude who doesn't appear to know he's going out live.

Surely he takes a pay cut? Right?

There we go.

Before starting, I'd just like to say that I recognise that this is not going to happen for the Sox. If both of these proposals happened, the Sox could put up $20m and if the Marlins and the Astros didn't, get exclusive negotiating rights with Tanaka. I think he's going to be a minimum 4-win pitcher straight away, so if the price was something similar to Darvish's 6/$60 (less of a reputation but the lower posting fee would drive it up), I'd be all over that, even with the gap between our pitching and our hitting. Sale-Tanaka would be a hell of a 1-2 punch for years to come and you'd then feel a lot better about letting Q and/or Hector go for some offense.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 18, 2013 -> 08:44 PM) They totally screwed with Santiago this year and that really impacted him esp in the 2nd half, remember that. And if Keppinger isn't the worst player in history again, a Gillaspe/Keppinger has a shot at putting up similar numbers to Headley if he's not te ridiculous 2012 version of himself. At best again maybe there's another 2 WAR or so over that platoon, but giving up a player and over $10 million for that for only 1 year is a terrible move. Gotcha. Learning every day.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 18, 2013 -> 07:46 PM) The other thing to remember is that the white sox already have a strong, cheap starting rotation. If he added 4 War great, but if he's replacing a rookie who could give 2 WAR next year and 3 the next couple afterwards, that's a terrible move unless the white sox can get a great trade for that pitcher. Also, I think Santiago is more likely to improve than regress if he's not bounced back and forth To the pen and he already got some innings built up last year. That's the case if he's traded too, I think we hid a real value in the pen last year. Well in my scenario he was moved along with Beckham for Headley who you'd think would turn out the same or more WAR and also plug a hole, but then of course you're paying Headley way more than Santiago. I didn't consider salary enough with regards replacing Santiago. I was talking to my buddy, a Tigers fan, about the Sox. He said he'd looked at Santiago's numbers in-depth and it looked to him like he was a strong candidate for regression. Then again, I heard the same thing said about Quintana before last season.

QUOTE (Eminor3rd @ Oct 18, 2013 -> 06:03 PM) It's a good team, but that would be insane if we landed both Abreu and Tanaka. JR is obviously letting the budget go a bit on international stuff, but I cannot see him throw $50m at an NPB team just to sign another pitcher. Also, I think $100m is probably our absolute ceiling for next year, and I don't necessarily think it shouldn't be. When you throw so many guys together at once, sometimes it take them a bit to get used to playing with each other -- that's a ton of money to risk without having a clue if it's going to pay off. For example, is Abreu legit? I'm not sure I'd commit all that money if I wasn't sure if I was going to be a bat short or not. Third, I'm not sure why everyone seems to think the Padres would trade Headley for Beckham and Santiago. Beckham is practically worthless, and while Santiago should have some solid value, don't you think someone would best that offer? If that's the best they can do, I'd have to believe they'd hold onto him and hope he could re-establish value at the deadline. But, I like the thought process. I'd make all of those transactions in a vacuum, I just don't think they're really realistic. Also, are you non-tendering Beckham or trading him? Yeah it's not packed with realism. Reading up on Tanaka and comparing his numbers to others who've made the switch I'd be pretty confident he could provide 4-5 WAR per year which would make him a bargain if he went for anything near what I've said. Of course then you have to talk about if those wins matter in terms of are they just improving a bad team or making a decent team a contender. Just looking at the farm system, what you'd pay for a pitcher as good as that already in MLB, Santiago's possible regression etc., I think it'd be, like Abreu, a risk worth taking. But obviously it'd be insane and it won't happen, particularly with all the teams in on him. As regards Beckham, yeah my mistake, haha. You can actually see I edited my post, that was me non-tendering Beckham, forgetting I'd already traded him. This is what the White Sox get for hiring an Irishman as the GM.

Right so first of all, I'm nowhere near a baseball expert, I'm relatively new to the sport but I thought this would be a fun challenge to try to get myself used to payroll stuff, WAR, evaluating talent etc. So I did some reading, here and elsewhere, on free agent talent/potential trade talent/what potential signings might be paid, and came up with this plan, presuming Abreu is done and dusted. (Bear in mind that I have little or no clue on batting order and who you should bat where.) - Sign Tanaka for 6/$54m + $35m posting fee. - Trade Santiago and Beckham for Headley, sign him to 5/$75m. - Sign Saltalamacchia to 3/$36m. - Non-tender Gordon Beckham. 1. De Aza, CF 2. Ramirez, SS 3. Dunn, DH 4. Abreu, 1B 5. A. Garcia, RF 6. Headley, 3B 7. Viciedo, LF 8. Semien, 2B 9. Saltalamacchia, C Sale Tanaka Quintana Johnson Danks Payroll 2014 (assuming all new contracts are equally spaced, like Danks'): Dunn - 15 Headley - 15 Danks - 14.25 Saltalamacchia - 12 Arb players - approx 12 from what I can make out Ramirez - 9.5 Tanaka - 9 (almost 15 if you factor in his posting fee over the course of his contract) Quintana/Johnson/bullpen/utility player minimum - 8 (based on what seems to be the standard $500k for pre-arb players + Lindstrom's buyout) Keppinger - 4 Sale - 3.5 So that'd be a little over $101m, or $107m if you counted Tanaka's posting fee as $6m per year. That'd leave room of $18m/$12m on last year's $119m payroll which you could spend some or all of it on bullpen free agents/trying to upgrade maybe De Aza or Viciedo. But even as it is above, compared to last year's roster I think you'd be talking almost certainly (large) upgrades at 1B, C and 3B, with strong potential upgrades at 2B (I like Semien over Beckham) and second starter (I like Tanaka to have a better ERA than Peavy anyway). And then, depending on your viewpoint, a possible downgrade with Johnson over Santiago (though I really like Erik). From what I read it seems as though a lot of Saltalamacchia's improvement is down to BABIP and so he probably seems due for a regression. I'd much rather McCann (even though he seems to be roughly set in a pretty solid decline year on year), but obviously considering my plan has two more big salary splashes after Abreu that'd be off the table, or even Pierzynski, but given his age and the likelihood of the Sox competing straight away it's probably not wise. Even if Saltalamacchia regressed and wasn't quite worth his contract in terms of WAR, it should be a distinct upgrade from the catastrophe at catcher this season. I know the title says realistic and this probably isn't really realistic since the thought seems to be that Abreu was the big free agency splash (I saw Merkin saying something along those lines), as well as the doubt that the Sox would spend so much money on a starting pitcher, given how the starting pitching is seen as the least of the team's worries. But I certainly think it's a heavy improvement on last year (I would say all 5 of the new hitters over last year's pre-trade deadline regular line-up would be place to hit better, and I think the rotation could outperform what last year's did before Peavy was traded. That'd leave the bullpen to sort out, with the extra dollars from last year's payroll, I haven't really read up too much about bullpen options. I guess the alternative would be to avoid plugging a hole for the sake of it and to wait until free agency next year, again I haven't really read too much on 2014 free agents. I'm most likely talking s*** overall and have probably left stuff out in terms of salary, but overall thoughts, fellas?

Why do the White Sox hate walks so?

The Sox need hitters with a good recognition of the strike zone who can take a walk more than they need guys who outwardly express their desire to win.