Jake

I just can't believe anyone thought it was a good idea to have Covey start this game

Love this game from Carson, he's even pitching over a decent amount of missed calls in KC's favor at this point. You can see some of that "bulldog" stuff was more than cheap talk.

Fascinating to see Carson almost completely abandon his curveball. I'm not sure if this is a White Sox thing or what, but it seems extremely common for us to have guys whose best offspeed pitch in the lower levels/college was a curveball and by the time they get to MLB it's either ditched entirely, converted to a slider, or demoted to 3rd or 4th status.

To me the fact that Fulmer has been serviceable in the majors thus far is shaping up to be a real impressive achievement on the part of the MLB staff. Guys who struggle that badly in AAA aren't supposed to come up and survive. Of course, maybe he won't survive — it's not exactly a done deal yet.

A good way to think about it is there are quite a few good left-handed hitters who struggle to maintain a .600 OPS against lefties. He doesn't have to be the same guy on both sides of the plate and you have to recognize there's risk that he could be worse as a lefty against lefties.

For the time being, there's no reason to move him off SS unless you're absolutely convinced he is incapable of being adequate there. As far as I'm concerned, it's very clear that he has the athletic tools to be really good there. He has great arm talent and can cover a lot of ground. While I'd say his hands are below average, by far his biggest impediments are his footwork and decisionmaking (which are related, I think). I would like to call up whoever was coaching him in the minors because these just weren't issues when he first came up — his footwork wasn't polished, but he was trying to do the right things. Now he too often makes errors because he isn't trying or isn't aware of how he should set himself up for a play. We don't have a SS pushing him for time right now and there's no 3B that might push us to move guys around to accommodate someone there either.

Seems like Collins is starting to settle in.

Anderson needlessly made that play difficult by looking at the runner on 3B and throwing off balance, but Abreu should have caught the ball. On his end it was shades of his pre-2017 self.

At 91.9mph, yesterday's game was Giolito's best average fastball velocity so far this year (was 91.2 in the opening weekend start, his best up to yesterday). That being said, it would have been tied for his slowest velo start among his 2016 and 2017 appearances.

These same stats have pretty consistently ranked Semien below average and worse throughout his career at SS, so I would treat what he has so far this season as a blip in the same way that bad hitters occasionally have good hitting statistics for a while.

Welp, looks like Collins is good again Since this thread was created, he is 4 for 8 with 2 2B, 1 HR, 2 BB, 0 K

This isn't quite that, but here's Jeff Sullivan on Giolito in the spring: https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/lets-watch-lucas-giolito-look-very-good/

I never saw much substantiation to the allegation that Giolito had better velocity in the spring. I think he *felt* good and perhaps hit 94-95 sometimes and the "Giolito has his fastball back" story spun out of control from there.

I wonder if the time-sharing situation with Zavala has gotten into his head at all. He did have to manage it last year for a while, but this year moreso than last they are something close to equals in terms of priority for getting reps at C.

The velocity drop has been part of a multi-year pattern which is what makes it most concerning. In Spring Training this year, Lucas was saying that last year part of his problem was trying to throw as hard as he could to regain lost velocity. At some point we might want to ask where it went.

Gotta love this start for Carson. If you check the box score it won't jump out at you but he really didn't have any issue with his command all night. He needs to work on his offspeed mix but this was a big step forward.

Have to be pretty close to that magic date for Kopech. Kris Bryant was called up on April 17 to get the extra year of control in his debut season.

Man I read that as Covey and I was just thinking that this had to be some kind of joke. Makes much more sense now.

I wonder how long we have Zavala tear it up in Birmingham before we push him to AAA.

What's being expressed with the chart is that the typical strike zone (as it is called by the umpires) for left-handed batters does not typically include that pitch.

Pitch locations from Moncada's AB. Pretty well-pitched.

Lopez has been fortunate to pitch around as many walks as he has, but as of today he's clearly our best major league starter. He's going to take some lumps soon if he doesn't stop the walks, but I really like the kid.

I'll also add that since Cooper took over the Sox had the 3rd best combined pitching WAR and 6th best RA9-WAR over that span of time.

Sox pitching staff MLB rank by WAR and RA9-WAR: 2002: 16 / 15 2003: 5 / 5 2004: 18 / 15 2005: 1 / 1 2006: 4 / 8 2007: 9 / 18 2008: 1 / 6 2009: 4 / 7 2010: 1 / 10 2011: 2 / 8 2012: 12 / 6 2013: 16 / 18 2014: 25 / 25 2015: 9 / 16 2016: 13 / 11 2017: 29 / 23 Had to take the time to call out this lunacy that Don Cooper has never presided over a top staff and this is without addressing the questionable assertion that he's been constantly handed some amazingly talented crew to work with.

Listen, the bar here is not very high at this point and quite a few people in the industry thought it was questionable — if not for the service time issue — that we didn't have him up here to start the year. Unlike Giolito, we'll know that Kopech has stuff that can play.