Jake

I have a suspicion Robert never said anything

Some teams, including Sox teams of the past, discourage or prohibit use of outside labs/coaches/etc. At minimum I'd say it's a good thing if the Sox current leadership lets guys go get external help when they want it. Even better if it works when it happens.

If they can get Lenyn a therapeutic use exemption for Adderall he'll be an All-Star

I have no regrets on trading Crochet. Only had two seasons before free agency, limited track record of success, and significant injury history. I wish him the best but it made no sense for the Sox to hang onto him given how soon he hits free agency and how little sense it would make for the Sox to give him a long-term, high-dollar extension like the Red Sox chose to. Whether these particular players pan out, I don't know. That's the occupational hazard. But trading him was the right decision and the perceived value of the players the Sox received exceeded my expectations.

Just hire Rojas as a roving instructor and get it over with

Sox making the Guardians pay for an error again

I suppose this has already been discussed, but does anyone know why we are playing this Will Robertson kid? Are we just required to plug in a player with platoon advantage at every position even if he sucks? I guess the playing time given to Rojas suggests the answer is "yes."

Schultz's first two hits were softies, but the third sure wasn't. I wonder if he will even stick around on the top 100 lists

Regarding Vargas, Statcast would indicate he's been getting some horrific batted ball luck during the recent tough stretch. Not that Statcast says he deserves to be running a 1.000 OPS, but quality of contact would make you think you'd hardly call it a slump at all. I still like his swing decisions so I'm not super worried about him yet. Shane was having a lot of good luck in the early going, but to me the biggest thing that has changed is he's not getting much use out of his changeup. The results are worse than before and he's throwing it a lot less. The rest of his arsenal is generally unremarkable so he really needs that pitch. I don't know if the issue is that he's lost the feel for it or he's just foolishly giving up on it for some reason or another.

Sign him up, I need someone to root for in Charlotte

Burke is the least fun pitcher to watch since Luis Vizcaino

Not much track record of success. I assume this is just for organizational depth.

Sounds like increasingly many signs pointing towards it being a more garden variety inappropriate comment (that, to be clear, I don't remotely endorse) moreso than something that would ordinarily turn into a national news story. Also seems like the perpetrator may be a completely unrepentant asshole which won't help his case. But he may not be clever enough to have actually come up with something on the level of e.g. what was said to Jarren Duran earlier this season. FWIW, I thought it was telling that when Lovullo said he agreed with banning the fan, a big part of his stated reasoning was that the fan seemed arrogant when confronted. There are some things you can say where the harshest punishment would be justified solely by what you said. At any rate, anyone who has lost someone so close knows that sometimes it just hits you hard. A human moment for Ketel and I think it's been nice to see that it has mostly not devolved into "no crying in baseball" discourse.

Lenyn is just a solid big leaguer. Sox fans are too used to everybody being horrible so they have a hard time seeing a player with flaws without assuming that he's 100% flaws.

Let the guy be an honorary first base coach and then we'll let a pair of formerly disgraced fans redeem themselves the only way they know how

Hard to get fired up over the possibility of a trade as it seems very unlikely that Sox receive anything noteworthy in return and I have the bold opinion that it likely makes the Sox even harder to watch for the near term.

The way to think about his trip to AZ is this: it returned him to his 2024 level. Unfortunately, that level wasn't good enough.

Are we blaming Tony La Russa for Pedro Grifol's poor management again?

I wonder whether he's getting back onto the radar at all with his torpedo-fueled 138 wRC+ in the month of June and 118 wRC+ season. On a related note, although Nick Madrigal kept a good bit of prospect hype through his promotion to MLB, I always found it strange that: 1. He was announced as a shortstop by the Sox on draft day 2. He made his professional debut as a shortstop 3. He never made another professional appearance at shortstop after that one minor league game I don't think he was very likely to be even an above-average defensive MLB SS, but that's usually an "innocent until proven guilty" thing when a middle infielder moves through the minors.

I feel fairly confident that although a team can certainly mishandle their pitchers, by far the most important factor is the player himself. I don't mean this to victim-blame (my small-time baseball career was cut short by a bad shoulder), but just to say that the players brings important things to the table that are very important for his likelihood of injury: genetic/innate susceptibility (to oversimplify: how weak are the ligaments, cartilage, and so on), his throwing motion, his personal habits, etc. It's very difficult to change an advanced player's throwing motion so I tend to treat that as mostly set in stone; range of motion, the player's build and proportions, and deeply set muscle memory make big mechanical changes probably not worth pursuing by professional teams. So I tend to think the likely reason that the Sox kept their pitchers healthy better than basically everyone else for many years was that they were scouting/acquiring healthy pitchers. It's nice that they didn't screw it up and props to those who managed to not screw it up...but at the same time if you have the wrong guys on the staff I deeply believe there's not much you can do to avoid injuries entirely for a certain, large subset of players. As for the role of pitcher effort and overall stress on the arm from velocity, the evidence definitely seems to support caution around guys who throw with high velocity and those who throw with high effort. Unfortunately, it feels like the incentives aren't well-aligned on either side to deal with it. The vast majority of MLB pitchers are on very thin ice. They cannot let themselves get 5-10% worse and keep their jobs, let alone maintain hope for a significant payday in arbitration or free agency. So they go all out to try to keep their heads above water. Meanwhile, teams aren't very committed to many of these guys either and seem to see it as a better tradeoff to just burn through guys rather than baby a bunch of players who 1. may break down anyway and 2. may be too ineffective if they pitch in a lower-risk way. FWIW, the favorite "Coop will fix 'em" guys seemed to be the select few who had enough raw stuff that they could be successful if they backed off their effort just a little bit if it unlocked more command. I know Twins pitcher Brock Stewart from my playing days. He straight up says that to resurrect his career, he had to make changes to his training and approach that greatly increased the risk of serious injury. But for him, if he didn't do those things he'd be selling insurance by now. Since he saved his pro career by adding several ticks of velo, he hasn't reached 30 innings in a season. On the other hand, the innings he's managed to give were pretty effective. I think the Twins are accepting of the tradeoff and I'm sure the guy who takes his spot on the roster when Brock is hurt is rolling the dice in a similar way. For now, I think this is the cutting edge in MLB: look no further than the LA Dodgers who have 7 starting pitchers on the IL with arm injuries and another 4 relievers on the IL with arm injuries at the moment. Widespread practice seems to be maximizing effectiveness today because tomorrow's injuries are too hard to predict in comparison to today's wins and losses.

Wonder if her strategy is to score a (perhaps small) settlement from a White Sox organization that may "know" they are in the right but are worried about what topics may come up in the depositions.

Korey Lee hit a home run with an exit velo of 88.5mph today. Lee just surpassed Julks on the most extreme AAA batted ball luck leaderboard. Of course, #1 in all of the minor leagues for batted ball luck is Brooks Baldwin (at least, as defined by wOBA - xwOBA)

Have we gotten confirmation that Tauchman got hurt on that play? Any chance he got benched for making a bad baserunning decision?

FWIW, I think Schultz looked better than the box score will look. I didn't expect him to run a nearly 40% whiff rate across his arsenal, especially the sinker. Didn't get hit hard very often, homer was a cheapie, threw strikes. He got a couple big whiffs with his four seamer towards the end of his outing so I hope he can find a way to keep using that pitch effectively. He didn't get much out of his changeup but he really could have benefited from another pitch whether it was the changeup, a cutter, or something else.

That ump was clueless