Jake

Portis had a crazy high usage rate, have to wonder how well he'll adjust to being more of a role player or facilitator at times

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Jun 26, 2016 -> 07:13 PM) Joe Crede and Mark Buehrle were farm boys, as well. So was Jim Thome. Don't think that's the common thread, unless we want to start arguing Mike Trout came from a farm, too. I prefer wild-caught Trout QUOTE (ptatc @ Jun 26, 2016 -> 07:31 PM) Someone posted an article in another thread showing that he has changed his swing. He now swings with more of an upper cut. This would cause the increased pop up rate and decreased line drives. I still think there is something about Comiskey that gets these guys to try to lift everything for a HR and really messes with them. Yeah there have been times where it almost seemed as if his mind is telling him when he should swing and what he can hit, but his mind assumes he has the swing he used to.

The main things I've been looking for: 1. Will he play so badly that it could permanently hurt his development? So far, that doesn't appear to be the case. 2. Will he be at least in the ballpark of the play we'd expect to have gotten from Rollins/Saladino? So far, we almost certainly haven't downgraded in that position unless you're a major Saladino nuthugger. Strikeouts are high and he hasn't drawn a walk yet, but that wasn't entirely unexpected. He has a lot of at bats where he looks like he has no chance, but he exudes talent and you can see it at the plate. Can't say if he's a defensive star just yet, but he's far from the guy that many scouts were matter-of-factly claiming could never play SS/the infield. He looks MLB-quality there, at the least.

There's definitely enough stuff going on with his batted ball trends to say it is not merely luck going on. Maybe he's been more unlucky than lucky, but he's hitting a lot of pop-ups, not many line drives, and is pulling everything on the ground. These are all differences from career norms. His defense has also not been fabulous, per some metrics and my eyeballs over the past 3-4 weeks.

QUOTE (fathom @ Jun 24, 2016 -> 10:02 PM) Futuresox has some great tweets tonight about Adams and Burdi. Burdi throwing gas, but a little concerned at Adams throwing at 90-92. I had the impression that Adams has been throwing in that range basically since he became a pro.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Jun 24, 2016 -> 11:41 PM) Why do the old people need to give money to the young people in all of these scenarios? If the old people started out broke and worked their way up to making more money, why can't young people do the same? More importantly, Social Security is not the problem with the budget and the benefits are so meager that there's simply no cutting them back without making many beneficiaries destitute and hurting the economy in the process. If you want to stimulate the economy, spend more on SS; people who have little money and not many years to live tend to put their money right back into the economy. And let's not forget that one of the most oft-repeated campaign promises of the Brexit side was that leaving would somehow open up more money to spend on their national healthcare system. This was a lie, of course, but it shows you the average person voting Leave wants these government benefits to stay.

If there's one guy who could sit on his ass for months, throw 83mph, and get guys out from the bullpen, it's Mark Buehrle

QUOTE (shipps @ Jun 24, 2016 -> 05:01 PM) Jake, where are you pitching now? No place! I tore my labrum during my senior year of HS (didn't know it then), went to a small academic focused college and pitched for a year before the labrum tear made me too useless to get by on cunning and guile anymore. Despite Anthony Romeo's best efforts, I wasn't quite right after surgery and the time off got me interested in other pursuits. It may be 5 years since I threw a baseball at this point.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Jun 24, 2016 -> 01:28 PM) Look...I'm sorry if people weren't okay with getting Boozer and being that close to a trip to the NBA finals (losing to the Heat in the conference finals while Rose had a bum ankle) and than of course missing out the following year when Rose tore his ACL in the playoffs, but you know what, I was okay with it. f***...some of you all want to be miserable forever and just watch lots of losing basketball. Sure, they could have landed better guys or Rose couldn't have gotten hurt, but the reality is that impacts things. This team had quite a few chances. Just a year ago, we were the right call from probably beating Cleveland and presumably going to the finals (to get crushed by Golden State). I.e., Blatt getting T'd up. Now what happened since than was awful, i.e., dumping Thibs was a disaster move, but lets not act like the Bulls were some horrific franchise who had no shot. Than again, I'm sure a lot of people here would have traded Klay for Love and well, Golden State would never have won 1 title and they certainly wouldn't have the best regular season record in NBA history. Honestly, I don't see how dumping Thibs wasn't the right move. The team was just not up to snuff in the playoffs. Maybe if Rose never got hurt it wouldn't have mattered and you would have stuck with Thibs, but it was becoming abundantly clear that his teams would never put the ball in the basket, especially at crunch time. I think he's a really great coach, but after some amount of time you have to look and ask yourself if this coach is going to get this franchise where it needed to go...and it sure didn't look like it as we lost to Cleveland his last year. It looked like a team that should have won, or should at least have played far better, but didn't. Was Hoiberg the right replacement? Well, last year's output isn't an encouraging sign. Would a better relationship between GarPax and Thibs have made the on-court product better in the last year or two of Thibs? I have no idea. I also have no idea whether, perhaps, Thibs was the asshole in that dynamic. And of course like you say, we had some great teams in the past ~5-6 years. Rose got hurt, skipped a season, got hurt again, and then wasn't good anymore. It was truly awful luck and it made it impossible to know what the right moves would be to make the team most competitive. It's the biggest bright spot of getting rid of Derrick because you don't have to wonder or pretend there's an unseen MVP hanging around that just might show up at any moment. You can build your team based on known quantities.

QUOTE (JenksIsMyHero @ Jun 24, 2016 -> 04:47 PM) ha, f*** you buddy: K.C. Johnson ‏@KCJHoop 26m26 minutes ago Rose said he may change his approach to free-agent recruiting. Was tepid participant in Bulls' pitch to Melo in 2014. Would have helped when, you know, the Bulls needed it. At this point nobody gives a f*** what Rose says because they only want to be recruited by the good players on the team

QUOTE (ptatc @ Jun 24, 2016 -> 09:49 AM) what is it with the sox and drafting pitchers with really odd mechanics. This guy starts with both feet on the rubber and his a$$ facing the hitter. Also another guy with no follow through and a low arm slot. Not a big fan of that. What's funny is I know he and I saw some of the same pitching instructors in the Chicago area and sometimes they will have you throw some pitches from a similar stance for drillwork. As I had to do it, you'd position your left leg over your right just as you would if you were going to isolate the right leg to touch your toes and stretch that hamstring. That would be the set position out of the stretch. The idea was to give you more of that sensation of being closed and leading with the hip. I suspect Burdi may have done something just like it and felt like it made his mechanics better than what he could do from a conventional set position.

Bulls are going to have an interesting team to watch. Will be interesting to see what Valentine can do. There's some real upside, but some serious downside.

Listen, we hit pretty well today and got burned by Matt Purke and some other losers. I think it's going to be okay.

Shields looked much more competent today. Not like he's "fixed," but like he's "going to make it past 2 innings in his next start"

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Jun 23, 2016 -> 06:13 PM) Beck didn't have much command with his fastball. He threw it 94-96, but it was his slider that saved him today. And Webb wasn't counted on by anyone to be a part of the bullpen. He was just AAA depth. I'm forgiving Beck for some command issues in the second MLB appearance of his career. He wasn't walking anybody as a reliever in AAA. Webb was depth, but the whole point here is depth. Webb was the first guy to get the call from AAA but now we're into the Purkes, Kahnles, Becks, etc. of the world. It would be nice to bump off the next weakest link and have Webb.

QUOTE (SoxPride18 @ Jun 23, 2016 -> 06:09 PM) Yes, they didn't do well in the clutch situations, but when you score 7 runs in a game, you should win that game. These are the same assholes that made two errors in the field that led to runs, too

I actually thought Beck looked decent. We really need to get rid of Purke though, but I don't have an obvious answer for a replacement. Losing Putnam, Petricka, and Webb really strains things.

Bullpen wasn't great but our offense is still the overarching problem. Too many guys who can't handle the bat well enough to execute when situations call for a specific type of at bat. I like Anderson at the top of the order but he's the guy the opponents are dying to see in a situation when you need a strikeout.

I wouldn't have traded him, but meh

QUOTE (oldsox @ Jun 21, 2016 -> 10:20 PM) Robin actually looked like a Manager when he went out to mound after Robertson walked Ortiz. Looked like a leader. ha, I was joking that he went out there to remind everyone that he was the one managing the winning team tonight

QUOTE (soxforlife05 @ Jun 21, 2016 -> 01:51 AM) It didn't look like they wanted it in the 9th. Luckily for them the Red Sox choked. No. One pitcher not throwing strikes does not mean the team gave up.

This was a really well-played game. You can't accuse this team of not wanting it.

I'm very pleased with him. He's a reliable mid-rotation starter with zero minor league seasoning 35 starts into his MLB career. Considering his stuff, he absolutely has the profile of the kind of guy who suddenly finds himself in All-Star/Cy Young discussions a year or so from now. And it will take people by surprise because he'll have been around for a while, but the truth is that he's getting his seasoning in the majors whereas most players do that in the minors.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 19, 2016 -> 04:18 PM) Without doing a lot of research, it strikes me that the top of the last list is extremely small in population and diversity. There also seems to be some level of correlation to physical size of the country. Tiny and wealthy definitely wins the day, but as you start going down the list you see populous and relatively diverse countries: Canada, New Zealand, Singapore (very diverse, not so large), Australia, Belgium, the UK, and Spain would meet those criteria to me. You could make some of those arguments about some others, depending on what diversity and largeness means. Of course, Hong Kong is very diverse itself but also really tiny (and not exactly a sovereign state).

We have a couple of topical threads around, one (well, several) about firing the manager and another about the team playing better when the players meet expectations. I would like to counter both of those explanations for the team playing badly with another one: the team doesn't have enough talent. The Sox have enough talent to get lucky and win; in April we saw how the right bounces of ball and guys getting hot at the same time can produce a hell of a run. But if the guys on this team are on average just meeting expectations (for every guy who exceeds them another guy doesn't meet them) then there isn't enough talent. The fallacy that is easy to fall into is looking at the struggling players and saying if they played well, the team would be however much better. But this ignores the guys who are playing over their heads. You could have looked at Abreu a few weeks ago and sounded the alarm, claiming everything will be good if he starts hitting. He started hitting, but a guy like Lawrie regressing over the same time span completely cancels out the boost we got from Abreu starting to hit as expected. The thing about that, though, is we should have expected Lawrie to regress. There are obviously many other examples. So that's the issue. As for the manager, the amount of talent on this team doesn't necessarily say anything about whether he should be kept. If your argument is that he has ruined an obvious playoff team, then you are wrong. But you could argue that a good manager should lift a team with middling talent into playoff contention and on those grounds you could say the manager should be replaced as we seek someone to get this team to play above its talent level. You might also say simply that after a certain amount of time, if things don't happen—like a playoff appearance—then the manager should be fired. That's reasonable. You might also say that it's wrong to fire a manager who has never had playoff-level talent to manage on the grounds that his teams only play to their talent level. All acceptable arguments. But it's doubtless that the main problem is the talent. That is unless you subscribe to the idea that numerous guys on the team's true talent expectations for this season are beyond anything they have ever shown with their track record (might call this the "Tyler Saladino fallacy").