Jake

I don't think Engel should make the team out of spring training unless the team's talent evaluators know that his bat has improved greatly in the offseason. His ability to catch the ball, per the best metrics we have available, suggest he is at Buxton's level. The eye test will tell you that too. But his bat is so bad and so very far from being good enough that you need him to hit the ball consistently for a while before you have him play in the majors again. Leury is not the defender, but is very fast — his very small sample of Statcast data on speed does not contradict what has long been reported by scouts about his speed — and showed last year that he can actually hit and defend well enough in CF. It's Leury's spot to lose in my opinion, but for some reason it seems to me that the Sox are not as high on him for some reason.

If I were trying to start a Cubs network, my first goal would be to get as much *exclusive* Bears content as possible. Sign a deal with the Bears that forces CSN/NBCSN to do that embarrassing stuff where they can't show any video of the games, only photos. Don't have Bears staff and representatives come on NBCSN shows. Then you'd have to go to the Cubs channel to get the good Bears content, where they'll have surely poached the best Bears people from Comcast due to the cancellation of some of the Bears programming.

As far as slick-fielding SS, we also acquired Yeyson Yrizarri.

I'm not too worked up about this, the reason you wouldn't include the end of the Sox's drought is that our fans didn't make up a supernatural explanation for our lack of WS wins and never embraced the "lovable losers" BS....so most people wouldn't have realized how long our drought was.

Pitching is really bad, though it got a little bit better with today's trade. But we still got a lot out of Quintana, Kahnle, Robertson, Swarzak, and Frazier before they were traded so I wouldn't want to bet on a better record this year.

I don't get the pessimism with Soria. He's had one bad year ever and that year was hardly a total s***show by White Sox standards. We're going to get something much nicer than Jake Peter in return for him at the deadline.

The problem with evaluating a single team's draft picks in the NBA is that a huge proportion of all the players drafted in the first round are just totally s***ty and never contribute

The Sox did well on their players because they were signed to cheap contracts. You can't get top talent in exchange for a $300M player on a $300M contract.

It's really something to hear a pro sports commissioner get really fired up like that.

Unless the Sox are very confident among their pro scouts that Avi's 2017 was a fluke, it makes little sense to trade him now

QUOTE (flavum @ Dec 14, 2017 -> 09:46 PM) Anyone else hate the nickname Gio for Giolito? I can’t be the only one. I had to click the tweet to even get it to register that that is who it was referring to.

Here's a question. Are these two ideas compatible? 1. Police officers can be afforded some leeway, in the words of several posters here, given that use of deadly force is very possibly warranted in their day-to-day work and would be warranted much more frequently than the justifiable uses of force are for typical civilians. 2. Police officers, as an important part of the criminal justice system, should be expected to give the benefit of the doubt to the people they confront even if it entails risk of bodily harm to the officer. This is because the least desirable outcome of an encounter between a citizen and police is a death, regardless of how innocent or guilty the citizen is because that cannot be known definitively until the other arms of the justice system have decided. This is also not to suggest that cops shouldn't defend themselves, sometimes with deadly force, when there is no margin for a benefit of the doubt.

I'm fond of the term "1st basement." Makes me think of end-of-career Paul Konerko.

I would hate running a minor league franchise where good players are always taken away without my having any say in it. It's like how do you convince anyone that the winning and losing matters?

This idea is no different than the rule allowing a runner to run through 1st base, which was not always the rule. And it requires judgment in the same way—does the runner intentionally leave the base or not? The reason you would want to alter the rules to let the runner sprint past 1st is because the game is way better that way. So the question I ask is whether it's consistent with the spirit of the game to change the rules in this way? My first instinct is yes, it is totally consistent with the design of the game. It's all about getting to the base before the tag without (when it's not 1st base) running so hard that you go past the base.

Crazy. I had just been talking to a friend about how I'd like the Sox to give him another shot—he had a ton of talent and seemed to have struggled a bit after his mother's death before the eventual elbow issue.

Ventura's first season was a bit of a curse. That team wasn't that good, but the fact it almost made the playoffs kept the franchise half-assing an attempt at competing for years after despite never having a team that had much of a chance to make the playoffs without a lot of luck. Give him better talent or lower expectations and he can be an adequate manager. Mets probably would like a calming influence.

Avi clearly has a ton of power. You can measure that, you know, and he hits the ball as hard as anyone on this team. Whether he will hit a bunch of home runs is another question.

QUOTE (Sox-35th @ Sep 24, 2017 -> 10:23 AM) Stolen bases are overrated as a stat. They're nice, but an out is a lot of risk. Sure, but the difference between 5-10 stolen base player and 40-50 stolen base player is a lot of value. And coming from a power hitter who takes a lot of walks may affect the way pitchers try to pitch to him

Interesting thing with Lopez is he's been without his best offspeed (breaking ball) the whole time he's been up. I'm looking forward to seeing him work through the lumps like so many young starters have to do. The raw talent is great and it looks like he's got a good head on his shoulders.

I noticed a strange gait as he trotted around the bases either tonight or last night. I thought he had to be hurt.

Moncada just oozes competence and confidence at the plate. He doesn't always get the result, but between his demeanor and his physical tools it's hard not to be optimistic.

I think main thing with Fulmer is getting to spend a month with Coop

Am I crazy or does Zack Collins get a ton of days off?

Kind of odd how bad it got. Went from "lost my edge without it and felt dreadful" to "I gotta go to rehab" really quick. I've taken prescription amphetamines since I was in my early 20s and it would suck to get used to not using them again and would probably affect my ability to keep my job. But I don't know what I'd get out of rehab because I'd either have the stuff or I wouldn't. But, of course, I'm not addicted—the drugs are treating an illness, of course I should feel badly without them even after the withdrawal fades. With that said, good for him to deal with whatever happened and get back to baseball. I always wondered what caused him to leave the Brewers like that.