chitownsportsfan

What an absolutely awful play by Burdick. Plays a ball that might have been caught by a good defender into a triple and a line drive single drives him in. It was hit hard but you gotta at least hold him to a double.

Shuster is at 93 according to broadcast. He's dealing. Third K, of the looking variety, to start the inning. He seems like he's gonna be tough on LHB.

Burdick has gotten three good pitches to hit and done nothing with them. And that's what happens when you foul off meatballs at the MLB level. Aced at 97 on the outside corner for the K.

Writeup on him from a Braves site. Seems like he's gonna need to feature a good changeup. No velo reports so far but if he's just around 92-93 can see why he struggled last year. https://www.batterypower.com/2023/11/21/23969435/jared-shuster-2023-atlanta-braves-season-in-review

Wow, impressive half inning. He appears to have a smooth 3/4 delivery that hides the ball well.

I've watched 5 pitches from Schuster. He looks good. Pounding the edges of the zone. Nice crowd on hand on a beautiful day.

f***, it's 2024, put a hologram JR dunk tank on the concourse. For 5 bucks you get 5 throws to try and dunk the punk.

Now I'm hungry. I have a big greek church near my office. in the summer they do a "taste of greece" thing and for like $20 in tickets you can try a few things. I used most of my tickets on a lamb sandwich. the greeks know their lamb, that's for sure.

"We're celebrating ethnic yts day at the park, today is Dutch heritage night, free tulip with every ticket! Next week is Greek night featuring $5 Gyros!"

I'd make a reasoned guess that in aggregate it's easier to project than at the individual level. The Sox will probably have an above average defense, cool. But defense is downstream of pitching and our pitching is probably going to suck. Hard to make a lot of plays when the ball is rifling over your head out of the ballpark or rattling into the corner. It's ironic the Sox finally recognize defense now that the pitching and hitting are awful enough for it to make little difference.

Hear me out here, you know how nobody really uses physical media anymore? What if they had something like "CD and DVD demolition night"? Basically you'd encourage fans to bring in some old CDs and DVDs and then (this is where it gets good) blow them at some point during the game, maybe around the 7th inning or so after the fans have had a little time to get good and lathered up? You could have someone collect the things earlier and then blow them up on the field. It's bound to draw a good crowd.

You're missing the forest for the trees here: the point isn't that grifol is or isn't a good manager or even how he should talk about his players -- it's that not a SINGLE person has acknowledged to the fans that this is a reset year. If they have, they sure haven't done it very publicly.

Coach speak is fine but Grifol has talked like a clueless and out of touch moron pretty much since day 1 here.

We should have a new banner right?

If you were Shane Gillis level funny you could get away with this one. But you ain't, so imma boooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Trust me ur the zach lavine of this board we should have traded you last summer…

Stiff athlete, better suited to 3B — Keith Law

These aren't even deck chairs, these are like cocktail napkins we're rearranging. Maybe just doing the cubs a tiny favor in hopes of some reciprocity down the line.

This guy is gonna blow so much smoke up our asses this season it will turn our bowel movements mesquite flavored.

Man I have no idea who half these guys are. Why would I...

There's been a lot of great discussion on this trade and I can't add much more but this seems like a trade where the Sox "win" only if Fletcher produces like 3-4 solid seasons. Otherwise you just gave up a prospect for another fringe roster guy and why do we need a fringe roster guy in a rebuild? I dunno, maybe there's like a 1/5 chance chance this backfires horribly but that's still a 1/5 chance you should not take.

Yea just the guy he hired to run his minor leagues!

I feel bad I forgot about it! I'll blame the excitement around the Michigan natty that is still ongoing. I agree with your assessment. It was a trade that you sell to the fanbase as "adding an All-Star" when in reality you probably just traded for a guy on the downside of his career at the near peak of his value. The Mariners do some things well the Sox don't (their 40 man is usually pretty deep with guys that can step in and produce 1 WAR in a pinch for example) but they also do a lot of the same dumb s%*# like bringing in "stars" that they get at "50 cents on the dollar" or even pay full freight. You could write 5k words just on the Cano signing and subsequent salary dump for Kelenic, which led to both (probably) too much faith in Kelenic and then too little.

I touched on this on a rather comprehensive review of the Mariners' offseason and the parallels to the White Sox.