Leaderboard

TLR making the best team we’ve had in years almost unwatchable. Fuck JR

Let Me Take a Nap No way rookies can help team Leury must be played

Every metric has this team as one of baseball's best. Sure things can go wrong, but about 1/6 of the way this club looks pretty loaded. Even the fringe guys are doing enough, often enough to help the club win. At this point, and once again -- it's early, the greatest worry perhaps to have is that a richer club decides to give Hahn the keys this offseason.

I just stumbled upon a Baseball Reference chart I hadn't seen before. It ranks teams by WAR by position. Sox are: Overall - 3rd, 1.4 All Pitchers - 10th, -.0.7 Starters - 2nd, 0.9 Relievers - 12, -1.7 Non-P - 1st 2.1 C - 9th, -0.3 1B - 7th, 0 2B - 4th, 0.2 3B - 2nd, 0.6 SS - 3rd, 0.5 LF - 9th, -0.3 CF - 6th, 0.3 RF - 2nd, 0.3 OF all - 9th, 0.3" DH - 1st (tied), 0.8 *********** Some observations. 1. Having the starters rank this high is very good, since most people going into the season would have thought our starters were the shakiest part of the team. (And they were the worst group last year.) But with Carlos Rodon pitching lights out, Dylan Cease throwing the first shutout of his life, and Michael Kopech being devastating, the back end of the rotation seems like it may be as good as the front end. So when Giolito, Keuchel and Lynn sharpen up, this could be a devastating staff that can go on some nice winning streaks. Both the 1983 and 2005 Sox 99 win teams were driven by their starters. There is a lot of potential in this group. 2. The bullpen is not going to remain this bad. When they sharpen up, the Sox are likely to move to the top of the overall WAR ranking. 3. Yasmani Grandal is not going to continue hitting .120. He ranked 2nd in the AL in WAR last season. Another area where the Sox will improve. 4. Jose Abreu is not going to finish 7th. He was first last year by a wide margin. 5. Seeing Yoan Moncada 2nd after such a miserable offensive start to his season is impressive. He brought up the rear last year with a 12th place ranking. 6. Tim Anderson is good, but can and will be better. He finished 1st last year. 7. Left field is obviously the biggest hole (other than catcher) in the lineup. We need Engel to be healthy, but by late in the season Eloy's return will fill this hole. (Don't expect him Eloy to DH much when he returns.) 8. This is a surprisingly low ranking for Luis Robert, who has made strong offensive improvement. But he still has Mike Trout ahead of him and Byron Buxton has been having a year for Min. In the end, the rank will matter less than the final WAR number. 9. Adam Eaton has very adequately filled a big hole from the 2020 team. 10. The Yerminator has filled a DH hole the Sox have had for more than a decade. Overall: The Sox are underperforming where they should be if you look at run differential. I'd blame most of that on bullpen failures in close games. But the Sox also have studs like Jose Abreu and Yasmani Grandal underperforming, which will not continue. Mercedes will return to earth, but the Sox should have more than enough offensive improvement from other guys to compensate. Meanwhile, the starting pitching from the back end has been a revelation, with Carlos Rodon looking like an ACE, Michael Kopech looking even better in shorter stints, and Dylan Cease perhaps finally having the light go on. Once the bullpen comes around and the offense heats up, the Sox should be able to sustain some nice winning streaks.

There is no way I give Rodon a long term deal. Just too risky.

TLR does way more good things than Renteria did IMO. He also does about the same amount of stupid things Rickie did, which is a lot to take. The proof will be how they play down the stretch and in the playoffs it seems. Keeping a talented team relaxed will be his job.

Tony’s been slipping Leury PEDs. It’s the only explanation for everything

16 starts in 26 games, for a utility man, is really all you need to know. Lamb, I don’t mind as much, but removing Madrigal, who is hitting as well as anyone right now, to play Leury, is assanine.

It’s really the fault of Katz and Cairo, because they aren’t whispering loud enough to Tony (that tends to happen when you hit 76, can’t really blame TLR on that one)

TLR ain’t changing. These asinine decisions are him clutching to his “old winning ways” and he doesn’t give a shit what anybody including his FO think. This team will have to win in spite of him and that’s damn tragic. Who woulda thought the manager would be having a monster effect by simply handicapping his own team by playing shitty fuckin players consistently

If Robin Ventura or Ricky Reneria were making the same decisions Tony has made, no one would be defending them. Someone , maybe Hahn or KW or JR himself needs to tell Tony that especially from the left side Leury isn't a HOF baseball person brother. He isn't legit.

I'll just leave this here

Sure hope he doesn't take that too personally and resign. ?

So fired up - Fields has so much upside. I heard a former gm on radio today - said he was being asked by so many why fields was falling on boards (media perception). Said he talked to scouts for multiple teams - who apparently said whose boards - cause he was the clear #2 qb on their boards and they weren’t moving any of the other guys with helium up. I think Fields at 11 could be the steal of the draft in a few years and if it isn’t - oh well. Go big or go home at qb. Let’s go!

Long long way to go to get to that but if we are going there kind of hard not to include Rodon in the discussion.

Nice win, comrades!

The team is terribly run & they have to spend a ton of time in Cleveland. Can you blame them?

No rational person could actually believe this. Leury Garcia has a career 68 wRC+ against RHP while Nick Madrigal has a 124 wRC+. Nick has shown so far to be almost twice as effective against RHP as Leury. Garcia is not good from the left-side of the plate and there are 1,142 plate appearances to support that. I’m not joking when I say this, but Tony just not look at basic splits as insane as that sounds.

Leury Garcia has a career OPS vs righties of .626 in 1158 AB's, but yes... let's get the "lefty" out there.

He's good to give the starters breaks. TLR has seen how young players who have never played 162 before wear down at the end of the season. He is giving them breaks early so they will be fresh at the end of the season. This is the reason Mendick went down and Lamb and Garcia are with the team as I said earlier. Garcia can give Mandrigal, TA and Vaughn breaks. Lamb can give Vaughn, Moncada and Abreu breaks while also providing LH at bats.

I feel this haiku I wrote best describes the situation Hawk was vindicated La Russa is fucking trash Can the White Sox win?

If Hahn got rid of them and brought in new guys it would be the same shit unless they were rookies as well. I kind of understand Lamb hitting, he hasn't looked as bad as Leury but to continue to give Garcia starts especially over Nick is inexcusable. Nick is on the bench for the 2nd time in 4 games when he is probably our 3rd or 4th best hitter at the moment. It is mind boggling and I wish the press would push the questions on TLR more.

Hawk was right to kick him to the curb. The game has passed this drunk fuck by. JR sticking it to the fans after we sat through the rebuild.

So obviously we don’t know if those whispers are happening. So you can keep asking the question, but you know there is no way we find that out. What we do know is Tony LaRussa is the manager, and was paid quite a lot of money to do so. He was also selected over many other quality candidates, apparently because of his vast amount of experience. Yet here you are, asking about Ethan Katz and Miguel Cairo. As Hawk would say.....STRETCH!

Why didn't Miguel Cairo tell TLR not to play Lamb and Leury here?

Doesn’t the buck stop at the manager? It’s the reason he makes more than anyone else, right? If they Cairo and Katz DID offer input and were ignored, it’s an even bigger red flag for TLR. If they didn’t....why didn’t the HOF Baseball mind Tony La Russa know better than them? Isn’t that why he was brought in?

I feel like he’d be even worse as a first baseman.

The Yermin-Vaughn-Abreu-Garcia conundrum.

For all we know Katz or Cairo said something and TLR ignored it. That seems just as likely to me as no one saying anything at all. None of us really have any idea what communication did or didnt happen amongst the staff, but ultimately it is on the manager to make the call. The mounting evidence that Gio was running out of gas was pretty apparent to fans watching, so I don't know how it wasn't obvious to the staff in the dugout.

Dominkk I see you do this all the time, and I love your enjoyment of metrics, but this is just not how they were meant to be used. The projectability of 47 ab's (the total amount Vaughn has) using his current statistics has an R value still well south of .5 (sitting around .32-.42 depending on which stat you're looking at). That means even his entire sample still isn't yet a great indicator of what he's going to be as a hitter in his next AB or his next 100 AB's. By taking the sample down even smaller, to being L/R splits, you are dropping the R value down to .25-.32 depending on the metric you are looking at. The only thing that sees an R value near to past .5 over 50 AB's are K/BB metrics, and even then it just creeps over. It is typically the fastest to normalize. There is no need to take a small sample and make it smaller and start drawing conclusions on what Vaughn can and can't do. Is it possible he has been more comfortable vs lefties than righties this year? Sure. Is it predictable to the point of making a decision based on it? No.

Leury is a baseball person though

I saw that in the box score ( couldn’t watch today ) and immediately thought WTF.

I wouldn't let Eloy touch an outfield glove again.

Let's kick off the 2nd month of baseball with a win! If this team just keeps winning series they'll be fine. Lynn on the bump today for the good guys. First time since his injury, hopefully he continues his stellar outings. Mckenzie on for their guys. Let's light him up early.

As bad as Grandal has hit, his OPS is higher than McCann’s. McCann has always had a problem hitting righties. He was great with the Sox, but I don’t think he is a 125-135 game starting catcher. He wasn’t a good framer until last year, but then he had what many are criticizing Grandal about. A problem with catchers interference.

There are always folks lined up to share success. The line gets short when blame is getting passed out.

A week ago https://nypost.com/2021/04/20/james-mccann-a-big-factor-to-mets-rotations-early-success/?utm_source=url_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site buttons&utm_campaign=site buttons

Whatever it is, Mets fans hate him with a passion.

Vaughn has done most of his damage against LHP though, his line against RHP so far is 229/308/286, 75 ops+ and that is not a coincidence or small sample either as Vaughn has really gotten all his hits on the inner half of the plate, against righties who can locate a slider in the outer third of the zone he basically is an automatic out currently. https://www.fangraphs.com/players/andrew-vaughn/26197/heat-maps?position=OF&ss=&se=&hand=&count=&pitch=&season=&view=bat&data=&grid=&blur=&type=4 It is a good decision to not bat Vaughn against tough righties, the issue is that leury has been even worse. If you pinch hit for him it should be collins or even lamb against a tough righty and not leury.

Steve Stone commented after one of Vaughn's strike-outs in that game that he was a young hitter was being "taken advantage of" by a veteran pitcher. In short, he was dominated. LaRussa didn't want that to happen again with the game on the line against Cleveland's Closer. As CaliSoxfan said yesterday, LaRussa is also trying to put Vaughn in situations where he is more likely to succeed. That wasn't one of them. Give me a break. That game was lost by Keuchel's walk-a-thon, not by LaRussa. The last 3 relievers that the Sox faced haven't given up any earned runs to us in a while. The Indians have a strong back end of either bullpen. If you trail after 6 innings, you are probably going to lose.

Vaughn had a far greater chance of hitting into a double play than Leury. Vaughn is by far the slowest player on the team. That was a consideration.as were Vaughn's prior at-bats in that game where he looked entirely over-matched. He put swings on balls that he missed by a foot. Leury had at least been making contact and had several RBIs in the games against Detroit. The LaRussa critic derangement syndrome continues. Proceed.

Hahahaha he really thinks Leury was the best shot in that spot. Holy Shit the delusion...

You need depth. It will be a miracle if all five guys stay healthy and effective all year -- it just doesn't ever happen in today's game. It's more likely that two or three will go down than none -- and right now you're looking at Reynaldo and Stiever as the next men up. Realistically it's probably Kopech for a couple weeks the first time it happens, but he's gonna run into an innings limit and disappear a la Strasburg if he has to cover for more than one guy. Good teams (Dodgers, Rays) have figured out how to juggle it, whether it's alternating spot starts for veterans at the back end or younger guys sitting in AAA until the call comes. If you're trading prospects with real value, I guess the ideal target is an MLB-ready but not polished guy in the mold of, say, Luis Patino or Brusdar Graterol, who has the stuff to be a late inning reliever if that's what is needed, but you want to develop as a starter long-term. Basically, a couple more Garrett Crochets. Also Rodon and Lynn are FAs at the end of the year, and it's still Lopez/Stiever up to replace them.

yeah but Keuchel makes top dollar and frankly you should win the pitchers duel at home. If you concede games with Dallas pitching, why pick him up in the first place?

Add Tatis Jr to that lineup and it is eerily similar to one of your wet dreams

This is amazing. Larussa mismanages the guy, doesn't give him consistent Ab's, plays nick Williams over him and despite that some people want to give him credit for Vaughns success and not the fact that Vaughn has hit and would hit if he was just given a chance too. This place is too damn funny sometimes. Imaging giving a young player with a polished bat who was born in rake towns success to a geezer who refused to play him over a guy who isn't even on the team anymore.

Not to the Sox . Having too many good players means they can trade one for cheap young starting pitching. Rodon, no idea how long this version of him lasts but probably gone next year. Keuchel not getting younger, Lynn gone after this year most likely. Cease has to prove he can be consistently good. Kopech coming but not there. Crochet a long way from being a starting pitcher so doesn't even make sense to look ahead with him. Stay healthy and we'll see. Giolito's the rock but starting to show a few cracks but he'll be fine. Sox can't keep on expecting the minors to fill pitching holes. No Wheeler , no Gallen , no Burnes, no Woodruff, no Darvish , no Snell.

And many have agreed for months.

i'm just still pissed we had to go in this direction with this effing guy. this should be a great time to be a sox fan. most compelling team we've had in quite some time. young talent all over the place. instead, they had to introduce this variable to ruin it. it's cast a pall over everything and just didn't have to be the case. ffs.

Bottom line is most White Sox fans who are old enough to have lived through Tony's first stint with the White Sox , are far more surprised he has this reputation of making teams better. None of mismanagement is a surprise. This was a guy who Tom Paciorek, the mild mannered Wimpy, once said couldn't manage a lemonade stand. He's clearly slowed down. You can tell that in his speech. Call it ageism or whatever, but he shouldn't have been hired, his drinking and driving gave them an out, they didn't take it, and at the end of the year, I can almost guarantee he will call it a day.