False Alarm

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ May 18, 2009 -> 05:16 PM) He's a big McCarthy fan, and PK Dick's writing reminds me a bit of McCarthy. That was why I thought it was a good connection. i can see that. kinda a workmanlike, pulp version of mccarthy's writing but similar rhythms and sensations in places. might work for dylan then.

QUOTE (BobDylan @ May 18, 2009 -> 04:07 AM) Do you read SciFi? I need some book recommendations. I was at the book store the other day looking to pick one up, but I had very little idea what was good (outside of what I've already read) and most of the covers look too queer to be good literature. dunno what you've read but knowing that your background's probably in lit fic i'd recommend writers who are at least servicable stylists. i don't recommend ender's game. the book's decent, if a little overrated, but the prose is fairly juvenile and i think that'd turn you off if you've read mostly lit fic and are a newcomer to SF. i'd also be hesitant to recommend dick for the same reason, though his ideas tend to be so strong and cool that any deficiencies in his prose are easy to ignore. he's definitely required reading for peeps interested in SF, but maybe someone you should save for later, when you're more used to SF. some writers i think might work for you: neal stephenson, gene wolfe (who is a complete badass), ursula le guin, william gibson (though he's gotten away from SF as he aged), vernor vinge (who's very good but maybe more in the dick category cuz his writing ain't always the prettiest). right now i'm reading kim stanley robinson for the first time and it's too early for me to rec him, but it's looking real promising and his prose is heads and shoulders above that of most hard SF writers i've read, so you might wanna take a look at him. david mitchell (in cloud atlas, anyway) and jonathan lethem are two more contemporary writers i consider mainstream rather than SF, but their writing's much more polished than most SF writers and they've both done work in the SF field. finally, covers: you've pretty much gotta ignore them when you get into genre fiction. it's just a sad fact that SF and fantasy publishers pander in their cover art.

excellent.

QUOTE (maggsmaggs @ May 1, 2009 -> 01:52 AM) I'd be curious about his stuff. Undrafted Free Agent. Ehren Wasserman also dominated in the lower levels, so did an Aaron Kirkland years back. But he is intriguing, especially being 6-5, 255. he's a soft-tosser. from SSS: http://www.southsidesox.com/2009/4/25/8519...white-sox-minor

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=8804 i don't think their statistical profile is very similar, and i don't remember sweeney having a longish swing, and i had the impression that danks is a much more natural CF than sweeney with quite a bit better speed. thought it was interesting info anyway.

QUOTE (DABearSoX @ Apr 28, 2009 -> 10:21 PM) Church lot... QUOTE (SnB @ Apr 29, 2009 -> 03:32 PM) ^ if you need to drive (like many of us in the south suburbs do) that's the only way to go. sorry if this is a dumb question, but can someone elaborate on this? or maybe PM me if it's a big secret or something?

didn't see this anywhere and this seems like as good a thread as any to put this in. BA named gregory infante their "helium watch" player in last week's prospect hot sheet. it's for players whose prospect status is on the rise. some slight description of his arsenal, which i hadn't heard anything about, in the blurb: http://www.baseballamerica.com/today/prosp...009/267976.html

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Apr 21, 2009 -> 01:14 AM) When is the last time that assists from the outfield measured anything, usually, but the worst outfield arms or defenders that were constantly challenged by opposing 3B coaches like Carlos Lee or Alphonso Soriano? C'mon. I realize Rowand and Anderson are like Immortals to some here, but this is getting ridiculous...above-average arm strength has magically morphed into something more than it is. Brian Anderson has all of 4 outfield assists in 244 games played in his career. Lance Johnson had 11 assists in 1991 and 1992. One Dog had one of the worst arms in the history of the game...rivaling Juan Pierre, Jerry Owens, Scott Podsednik and Johnny Damon. To have a "plus" arm on the traditional scouting scale, you'd have to be at 60+. There is no way that Brian Anderson has a plus arm...maybe 50 or 55, but not a 60 or above for his position. 50 would be by definition an average arm. i ain't read no pro scouting reports on anderson but i'm pretty confident no one's rating him a 50. 55 is unlikely too.

QUOTE (scenario @ Apr 8, 2009 -> 05:47 AM) The WhiteSox put him on the Reserve List. I'm guessing he has visa issues and will get sent to Kanny or Winston-Salem when those get cleared up. oh good i hope so. was worried it was related to his injury.

i'm troubled by jose martinez's absence from all these rosters...

performed well according to this FWIW: http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2009/4/4/...-base-prospects

QUOTE (The Beast @ Mar 11, 2009 -> 03:49 AM) you may be right about being an English major; however, I just am not seeing the connection between me hating reading and talking courses that are based around reading.... I have always been intrigued by the prospect of being...an editor. you'd probably hate your job.

dude looks like a fraud anyway: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/sports/b...&ref=sports

QUOTE (Kenny Hates Prospects @ Feb 17, 2009 -> 05:23 PM) It seems that Borass' only good deals lately have been with his no-brainer candidates like A-Rod and Teixera. He ...almost f***ed Pedro Alvarez out of playing in 2009 among other things. he made alvarez millions of extra dollars with no penalty whatsoever (alvarez wasn't gonna play in '08 anyway). tough to see how that was anything but a good deal for his client. if anything, the strategy almost f***ed over a different client of his--hosmer, not alvarez--but even there i'm guessing he talked it over with hosmer first and that the week or two of playing time hosmer lost won't affect his development at all.

QUOTE (The Critic @ Feb 12, 2009 -> 07:53 PM) I'm currently reading Bret Hart's autobio, Hitman. I would NEVER have guessed that Hart had any sort of sense of humor at all, but the book is a really great read. Often very funny, other times self-depricating, and some thoughtful stuff in there as well. This is not the side of himself that Hart let the public see, and that's too bad. i went to the hart book signing when he was in schaumburg. was pretty cool. (i do wish they'd played his music when he walked in.) i'm reading the book only in bits and pieces between other books but i agree with you about it. good stuff. other than that i just finished a pretty good fantasy novel called acacia by david anthony durham, and i'm starting ken kalfus's second story collection, pu-239 and other russian fantasies.

honestly, i feel like KW (despite what he says) is thinking of this as a bit of a rebuilding year. i think we'll be reasonably competitive--.500 or so--but our lineup is still pretty one dimensional, most of our sluggers are aging, and our rotation is cause for concern. despite the fact that three extra home games gave us extra revenue last season and the sox raised ticket prices for 2009, he did little to address those issues, instead slashing payroll and acquiring good young talent that's probably not ready just yet. looking at these moves, in our situation, and looking at the money coming off the books over the next year or two, i can conclude only that he's repositioning us to be truly competitive again in 2010 and beyond. i do feel better about the 2009 team than i did about the 2007 team at this time that year, but i remember thinking than there were just too many question marks to comfortably predict success for the sox. i feel somewhat similar now. (no, i didn't feel that way last year. i was a big believer in danks and thought contreras would bounce back.) the difference is that now those questions involve a lot more young guys with potentially bright futures than the guys in 2007, and our minor-league system is improved to boot. so yeah, i think there's a chance everything goes right and we compete for the division--maybe colon'll stay healthy, danks won't suffer the frequent slump or injury for a young pitcher who sees that big a jump in IP, broadway/marquez/poreda/egbert/whoever'll turn in an adequate performance from the #5 spot, jerry owens'll manage a .350 OBP/brian anderson'll break out and establish himself, dye and thome'll maintain their production despite their advanced age, konerko'll bounce back despite a steady decline the past couple of years, and fields/betemit/viciedo and getz'll establish themselves as solid regulars. it's not a great chance, but it's a chance. but even if we don't see most of those things happen and it becomes a bit of a lost year, i think enough youth and talent have been injected into the org that it'll be a fun team to watch, and i think we'll be in real good position to field a contender beyond 2010.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Feb 2, 2009 -> 09:27 PM) In that case, if we're still focusing on Silverio...the question for any particular person doing rankings is going to be...what does he judge that player's age to actually be and how is he weighting that? Pablo Ozuna wound up #8 on BA's lists a few years back because everyone thought he was 2-3 years younger than he actually was. If he's actually seen the kid and thinks he projects highly, then that's one thing. If he's projecting from what he knows and taking the age at face value, that's another. i'm guessing he's considering him to be 17--still silverio's officially listed age--until proven otherwise. i can't see a 21-year-old hitting .220 in low rookie ball getting any mention, no matter how good the tools.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Feb 2, 2009 -> 10:00 PM) I'll bet that they used defensive metrics in that evaluation, i.e. can he stay at catcher, and that probably dragged him down a lot. But, if it's true that last year was his first year behind the plate, there's another reason why the metrics might miss a useful factor...that he hadn't done it before. goldstein is not a numbers guy. yes, he works for BP, but if you read his stuff and his chats, he pays little attention to BP's advanced metrics. these rankings are his, and he weighs scouting reports, discussions with scouts, and his own observations quite a bit more heavily than statistics. he was recruited to BP from BA and is kinda the anti-BP in some ways. i guarantee you he's not running any complex formulas or algorithms or anything like that. incidentally, nate silver has done a PECOTA-based projection of prospects for BP the last few years that might be more along the lines of what you're thinking balta. was always kinda interesting to compare em with goldstein's more scouting-based lists. doubt silver'll write those articles this year, though, since he's pretty much abandoned writing about baseball. as for viciedo, it's reasonable to rank him. college draftees who haven't played an inning of pro ball (eg, pedro alvarez) get ranked all the time on these types of lists. i don't really see how viciedo's case is so different. however, i can understand how people'd have doubts about him too. i consider him our #2 prospect, but cuban prospects've been so tough to evaluate over the years that i can't blame someone for putting allen ahead of him.

goldstein's heavy on tools and silverio has them. that's gonna be more important to him than performance in rookie ball. he even says in the intro that after our top 5 there's a huge dropoff and everyone's almost interchangeable. people are freaking out over the placement of grade-C prospects.

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=8459

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jan 22, 2009 -> 04:52 PM) That would actually be a really interesting study. Take a few given years, and look at where the Top 100 prospects ended up, versus all the rest. See which ones succeeded, by some basic measures (games played, years in majors, basic offensive/defensive/pitching stats). I'd bet that if you look at which players, for example, managed to play full time in the majors for at least a few years, that you'd have just as many outside the top 100 as inside of it. But I do not have this data, so its just a guess. Also, I am certainly not saying that the CHANCES of any given player in the top 100 are less or the same as those below. The chances are higher. But its not some on-and-off thing, is what I am trying to say. Player A who is #50 on that list in a given year may have a 70% chance, and some player that would be around #150 may have a 30% chance. And since there are so many players outside the top 100, versus in it, if you add up the partials, the total for the below group might be higher. yeah part of it would have to be defining what constituted star-caliber performance in MLB too. i do agree that most "regular" players'd come from outside the top 100.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jan 22, 2009 -> 03:46 PM) I also think these rankings sometimes focus too much on the top 5 or 10 players. History shows that many of even those players will fail to live up to expecations, and further, that many star players are found below that level. That #11 through #50 group of players might be a bigger difference maker in providing young talent than the top 10, and yet we (and they) know a lot less about them. Take the SS position in our system for example. Beckham, rightfully, gets a ton of attention. But I think to get an idea of systemic depth at SS, you also need to get an idea of the potential of guys like Kuhn, Miranda, Escobar, etc. i'm not sure history bears out what you're saying here. i'm too lazy to research it, but i'm guessing if you take the annual MiLB top 100 prospect lists and compare them with the thousands of players who missed the lists each year, the majority--and probably the vast majority--of eventual major-league stars will have placed on top 100 lists at some point in their MiLB careers. and of course top 100 lists are, broadly speaking, composed of the top few players from each system. now obviously depth matters, and every team needs to develop chris getzes (solid contributors with limited ceilings). but those guys are by definition more common; most teams have some. so i think star potential with a pretty high floor, a rarer commodity, should weigh heavily into system rankings (inasmuch as system rankings matter at all). and sure, occasionally a getz- or miranda-type prospect might unexpectedly bloom into a star, but that happens so rarely and unpredictably that i'm not sure how you'd incorporate it as a factor into ranking systems.

i'm pretty sure callis is real high on viciedo. notice how in his revised sox top 10 he had viciedo above poreda. compare that with, say, sickels, who gave poreda a B+ and viciedo a B- (a big difference in his rating system). wouldn't surprise me if that accounts for most of the difference in callis's and law's rankings--a lotta pundits are skeptical of viciedo. but since callis is a viciedo believer and puts a premium on impact talent (as opposed to prospecters who value depth in a system), he ranks us more favorably.

i'm much more bullish on viciedo and i think brandon allen deserves a b-, but otherwise i don't have any real complaints with it.

QUOTE (scenario @ Dec 21, 2008 -> 04:30 AM) Really... What scouting reports have you read? sorry, i thought it was understood i was saying that no publicly available scouting reports suggest his stuff is improving. if you can direct me to something that suggests otherwise, i'd be excited to check it out. failing that, we have obsolete reports saying he has #2 upside. sorry if those don't get me worked up. stop it. neither of us is naive enough to put any stock in anything KW says. i think marquez has a chance to be a poor man's garland eventually. i didn't say he's completely hopeless. it's just silly to expect much of anything from him this year.