shysocks

QUOTE (SoxPride18 @ May 20, 2015 -> 10:29 PM) Doesn't matter, Harper still shouldn't of gotten thrown out in the 3rd inning because he didn't get in the box quick enough. I saw the replays and it looked like once Harper stepped back in he made a hand motion to show the ump how low the pitch was. If that is in fact what he did, then it doesn't matter what happened before, he deserved to be thrown out.

These guys should start a law firm and exclusively take cases suing the Chicago White Sox. Bruce Chen will provide the capital. They will fill the associate roster with all the garbage pitchers who the Sox have turned into nasty pitching craftsmen over the years. Jeremy Guthrie will be a senior partner. Who else should MLM hire? Seriously though, last night's loss was a mild embarrassment. I know this problem is not unique to the Sox but I wish somebody would research the number of times a starter with an ERA x% above league average compiled a game score of >y against z team in the last ten years. I bet we'd be near the top of the leaderboard. I'm worried the offense is going into another deep freeze.

Hey, perhaps let's beat up on a guy who essentially hasn't pitched in the majors in 2 years, hmm?

QUOTE (pettie4sox @ May 19, 2015 -> 10:17 AM) FWIW didn't you see two Noesi starts? That's not an excuse, not that he's using it as one. I've been to two Danks starts and am still unblemished.

QUOTE (SoxPride18 @ May 19, 2015 -> 01:55 PM) Sonny Gray. A rotation of Sale, Samardzija, Quintana, Gray and Rodon with Danks as the long man would have me giddy. I'd trade Danish, Montas, Hawkins and Micah or Sanchez for him. Gray will stay in Oakland for a while, they have no reason to move him.

Nick Hundley is a decent cheap catcher whose salary I don't think Colorado would mind unloading, though they did just sign him this offseason and trading him might be a bad look.

QUOTE (raBBit @ May 19, 2015 -> 09:21 AM) Sox are 11-5 at home. I am 0-4 this year at USCF. I am going Wednesday and Saturday. I'm 4-0 and also going Saturday. We're gonna find out whose juju is stronger.

QUOTE (Special K @ May 19, 2015 -> 08:54 AM) Maybe baseball has changed, but, I think in a 1-1 game in extra innings, where the Sox only run came from stealing home, at least 1 manager in baseball might think it's a good idea to lay a bunt down in the bottom of the 10th with runners on 1st and 2nd and nobody out, when you have a hitter who is 0-3 at the plate, rather than gamble and let Alexi swing away. It was a bad decision. And as for hindsight, the entire landscape of the game changes if it's 2nd and 3rd with one out. Soto may be intentionally walked instead, and he may change his hitting approach at the plate. I promise you 9 out of 10 managers will bunt in that situation. Just don't want to lose that way in the future. Plenty of guys would bunt there but we know Alexei is bad at it, and then we'd be screaming that Robin made a guy do something he couldn't do. So you'd have to lift him, and pinch hitting to lay down a bunt would be pretty unconventional. It all worked out fine, and as somebody who is always on alert for tactical errors by Robin, I was fine with the way he managed that inning.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ May 19, 2015 -> 08:45 AM) No manager would have yanked Alexei there. That's what it boils down to. Stretch!

That was an awesome win. Over .500 feels oh so good. Couple observations. 1) The scoring play by Eaton was really not that different than a lot of the "dumb" attempts the Sox have made on the bases this year. A lot of people pointed out that the baserunning luck would turn around a little, and that was an example. 2) Alexei Ramirez has officially made it to my s*** list. He is a double play machine. He has murdered an astonishing number of rallies this year and is on pace for the 4th worst single-season WPA in the last ten years. His pitches per PA is the lowest since his rookie year and at this point if he sees a hitter's count it is a minor miracle. I'm waiting for the hot streak but until it comes, he annoys me. He could also use a day off this week. 3) Sale's fine. Shocking.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ May 18, 2015 -> 01:19 AM) Oakland's in such a terrible funk that it's very hard to draw any conclusions from that series....any more than you could draw them from KC and Minnesota sweeping us when we were playing terrible baseball. I agree with this. I'm super excited that we're back to .500, but Oakland did everything they could to give us those games. The good news is that we were happy to take them, and that perhaps the monkey of that putrid road record is off our back. There were also some strong individual performances from that series, which others have done a good job noting. Let's keep it rolling!

Very curious to see how we handle Kluber coming off his 18K outing. Might be a lot of swings early in the count. No reason, just a hunch.

He wasn't that bad, but there was a portion of Sunday's game where I wasn't even sure his mic was on. You couldn't hear him over the stupid drumming. It was refreshing just because Hawk was a little more energetic working with somebody he likes (saying nothing of who's to blame between Hawk and Stone). You could tell he wanted Rowand to do well.

QUOTE (Soxfest @ May 15, 2015 -> 02:19 PM) This should be a good matchup for Rodon. It's true. The only team worse than Oakland against left-handed pitching is the Sox!

While the rest of Oakland's rotation has been competent, the nice thing is we'll miss Sonny Gray, who has been hyper-competent.

QUOTE (SCCWS @ May 15, 2015 -> 09:28 AM) Not sure what you are talking about. He tore up AAA in April. Sanchez is 10/45 in May for a .222 BA w no walks. His average in May has dropped from .407 to .344 in two weeks. http://www.fangraphs.com/statsd.aspx?playe...-13&season= Sanchez is 19 for 57 in May (.352). He had nine hits in the first two games. I think maybe you're looking at a "Last 10" split or something. It ultimately doesn't make that much of a difference.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ May 14, 2015 -> 12:38 PM) Ok to call this a complete an example of failure of the white sox policy of aggressively pushing prospects up to the big leagues as fast as possible and an admission of that failure/attempt to correct it? Yes.

QUOTE (southside hitman @ May 14, 2015 -> 12:19 PM) Wow! Surprised by this but probably the right call by correcting their earlier mistake. Hope Johnson takes this well and works his ass off in Charlotte. ^^^ I have nothing to add.

Sure, it's obvious they pulled him to be careful. But a guy with 113 pitches and a perfect game going into the 9th would never be pulled and I'm surprised this wasn't treated the same way. 20 K's is rarer than a perfecto, after all.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ May 13, 2015 -> 06:06 PM) Melky Cabrera has a lower SLG than OBP. Ooops. Along with Melky, we've got Flowers, Ramirez, Micah, Alexei (moving up) and Eaton all in the bottom quartile of everyday hitters OPS-wise. Gillaspie (despite the horrid defense) looks practically good compared to the rest of the bottom-dwellers statistically. Then you've got Avi's BABIP thing and LaRoche's can't hit lefties thing and Jose's impossible bar or standard to live up to (he needs to be a Top 10 hitter in MLB for the White Sox to compete, not 40-50ish). You can't mention Avi's "BABIP thing" without mentioning Eaton, Melky, and Alexei's BABIP things.

Cleveland pulled Kluber after 8 innings, 113 (?) pitches, and 18 K's. He had a shot at the record and they pulled him!!!

QUOTE (Buehrle>Wood @ May 13, 2015 -> 04:27 PM) How could we have the second best 7th hitter? Gordon, Alexei and connor have all killed it there but they're all still shy of a .800 ops there http://www.baseball-reference.com/play-ind...5%7Cbat%7CAB%7C Looks like a couple good games by the catchers have pulled it up.

QUOTE (ptatc @ May 13, 2015 -> 11:50 AM) I guess you can look at it that way. My point was that the Hawks always draw good attendance regardless of record. I just disagree that their attendance went down very much. It definitely did not go down to the extent the Sox do. If capacity isn't the point then the sox actually draw almost as well as the Hawks do so there is no discussion of attendance. The Hawks drew 22,000, the Sox draw 20,000. The amount that each team draws during non-winning seasons is the issue. The trends are that the Hawks do not have as much trouble drawing fans to the stadium during non-winning seasons. The fan base is much more likely to go to games when the team has losing seasons. NHL teams have 41 home dates against 81 for MLB. In 2014 the NHL as a league drew at 95% capacity, MLB at 70%. In 2006, the "valley" for the Blackhawks, so to speak, when they were down around 60%, the NHL was at 91%. In that context, Blackhawks attendance looks just as pathetic as the Sox, if not more. QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ May 13, 2015 -> 12:07 PM) So basically the White Sox need to spend a five to seven year period as the best team in baseball to get fans to show up. That's my point exactly. Sox fans will always have an excuse. If they old ones don't work, they move the bar to a new one. Now Sox fans need a dyntasy type period to show up, as measly playoff births aren't good enough. Nah, I don't see why anyone would think Sox fans are fickle. So you read "if the Sox won as consistently as the Chicago Blackhawks or Detroit Tigers, or even with a fraction of their consistency, their attendance would have gone up" and came up with they need to be the best team in baseball for five to seven years. I don't know if you really don't understand the difference in those statements or you're just setting up a straw man, but either way it's annoying. I've already said I have no interest in making excuses for other people. I've also said that a correlation between winning and attendance is very common to sports franchises and I haven't seen anybody refute that.

QUOTE (ptatc @ May 13, 2015 -> 11:26 AM) I think capacity is the key point. The 60% was only for a year or two most of the time it is around 70-75%. It does decrease but not by much. If the Sox attendance only decreased by this amount, people wouldn't have this conversation. Also some of it is in perspective. It is pretty easy to make the playoffs in hockey compared to baseball. So the concept of "winning" is different. If the Sox made the playoffs nearly every year (if half the tams made the playoffs) it may be different. Once again, capacity is not the key point. I made the point, so I get to determine what the key is. Capacity is a red herring, a side track. I am saying the trends are the key.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ May 13, 2015 -> 11:20 AM) So the idea is that if the MLB sent over half of its teams to the playoffs annually like the NHL, Sox Park would have been filled most years during the 90's and 00's? Dear God people, why is this so difficult to understand? The idea is that another team in Chicago (which you brought up as one that sells out all the time despite ticket price, which I mentioned was because they have been extremely successful at the sport they play) saw attendance fall when their win % did, and then the opposite happened. I have stated that if the Sox won as consistently as the Chicago Blackhawks or Detroit Tigers, or even with a fraction of their consistency, their attendance would have gone up from 2011 to 2014, not down. I think that is an impossible claim to refute, but it's also unfortunately impossible to prove. It has nothing to do with stadium capacity, or number of teams allowed in the postseason, or anything like that.