Greg Hibbard

I was watching Ken Harrelson drool all over Kansas City the other night, as he is wont to do, and like stopped clocks that are always right twice a day, he actually stumbled upon an excellent point. He said that at some point the KC "grinderball" Royals had won because they had designed their team for their ballpark (just like the 2000-2005 Minnesota "grinderball" Twins that got a bunch of skinny, fast dudes that Harrelson ALSO LOVED to beat the ball into that astroturf as hard as possible to fly down the first base line in hopes of singles, had the staff turn on the AC in the ninth, and hope the lead held). That ballpark in Kansas City is NOT a park where you can hit home runs, which is why the stadium has been a House of Horrors for the Sox over the years. But this got me to thinking - the Sox don't actually hit homers. And then, it got me to more thinking. It has been beaten into our skulls over the past umpteen years that US Cellular is a home run hitter's wet dream of a ballpark. And Guaranteed-to-Not-Call-It-Guaranteed-Rate Field in 2017 is still gonna be....you guessed it....a home run hitters ballpark. It used to be that we made sure we got a few dudes who could hit these things. Used to be. These days? No. So my question is....when the hell did this team lose this mantra? And why did we stop doing this? Because whenever the White Sox HAVE succeeded, it is because their lineup HIT HOME RUNS. A LOT OF HOME RUNS. I think there is this pervasive myth that the successful teams from the last 15 years were built on pitching and a good mix of power, speed and bench. I would say that it's much more simple than that. It's about home runs. The 2008 Blackout Sox won their division largely because they led MLB in home runs in a home run hitting ballpark. That lineup hit 235 of them. If you divide 235 by 9, that's as if every single of the 9 regular slots of that lineup was responsible for 26 home runs. Every single slot hit a home run every six games. Can you imagine that with this team? I sure can't. Yes, it was nice to win that blackout game with some pitching. But we got there because men hit balls out of the park with runners on base with one swing. The home run. The 2005 World Series winners with 5th in homers in MLB. Yes, they had great pitching, and yes, they had the emergence of a genuine flash-in-the-pan phenom closer. But that lineup still hit 200 home runs. Again, this is as if every single slot was responsible for 22+ home runs. Oh and by the way, the best white sox hitter of all time, Frank Edward Thomas, was severly limited in the number of games he played due to injury. Remember that 2000 team that won the division? There's a reason why Cal Eldred looked like a world beater until June and James Baldwin started 7-0 and it had NOTHING to do with their pitching skills. It had to do with the lineup hitting the cover off of the ball. Future $100,000,000 man Carlos Lee hit SEVENTH in that lineup. 216 home runs for that team. This current team? Does not hit home runs. They are 23rd in homers. If pace holds, they will hit approximately 165 of them total. That's atrocious considering our stadium, considering the number of homers our opponents hit against us, and considering the history of this team. Does it get better next year? Not if we sport this lineup again. Because: 1) Tim Anderson, at first glance, seems like a great little player. A little-known rookie with no expectations hitting .279 with a bit a pop and some wheels, the future seems bright. However, like many, many other players in this lineup - the looks are deceiving. Because: a) He has a .279 average and a .300 OBP. This is a worse OBP than Todd Frazier, who hits roughly 60 points worse than Anderson. b) He has a 10 to 1 strikeout to walk ratio. That's an absurdly bad statistic. c) He has a .702 OPS. d) He does not hit home runs. e) He does not hit home runs. f) HE DOES NOT HIT HOME RUNS. 2) Melky Cabrera and Adam Eaton are good players - who do not hit nearly enough home runs. Can this team acquire an outfielder who can have an OPS north of .800? Apparently not! Note: I am not complaining about these players. However, they are symptomatic of the White Sox building a team that has great stats for the ballpark they do not play in - and many of the wrong strengths for the ballpark that they do. It is wonderful that Eaton has ostensibly transformed into a gold glove defender. It is commendable that he gets on base at a nice little clip. However, The third best home run hitter on this team CANNOT have less than 15 home runs for a season, so if these guys are NOT going to hit home runs, we need another Beefcake slugger to pick up the slack. Normally, this would be a designated hitter, but the White Sox have also decided to have a year long joke with the fans that they now play in the National League and their Designated Hitter should actually hit like a pitcher, which is why Avisail Garcia cannot maintain an OPS north of SEVEN HUNDRED and you get people like JB Shuck and Jerry Sands laughing all the way to the occasional start. I don't even know that those guys should be called AAAA players. 3) Brett Lawrie and Tyler Saladino are nice little players - who do not hit enough home runs. Again, if your outfield cannot hit homers, the rest of our infield besides Abreu and Frazier better. Abreu and Frazier only come up so many times in a game, and without power protection why wouldn't teams just pitch around them? 4) Our catchers cannot do apparently anything at a major league level, and I don't know that there's a remedy for this. Our best offensive player, Jose Abreu, is ranked 43rd in MLB in OPS. The next best offensive player, Adam Eaton, is like 86th. Yeah, 86 for 86 this offense, I guess. There's a reason why James "Big Game" Shields has NINE QUALITY STARTS as a member of the White Sox and is only 3-3 in those 9 games. There's a reason why the bullpen comes up so many times in the 6th, 7th, 8th inning protecting small leads that we have no hope of retaking if we lose them (and we do with the likes of Cat Albers holding so many games in his fat little hands) There's a reason why mediocre starters have no chance to recover if they get touched for say 4 runs in 6 innings. There's a reason why Jose Quintana has "bad luck" and can't win games. WE CANNOT HIT HOME RUNS. Fix the home runs, fix the OPS. We need to remedy this, stat. How the hell has this organization lost this simple fact?

QUOTE (ChiSoxFanMike @ Sep 16, 2016 -> 12:07 PM) You sound angry. You're not wrong. The man is having an absolutely torrid second half, and deserves unqualified praise for it.

My lord, you f***ing people. Do you seriously strangle splits for "when it mattered" with other players in other eras? With other players on other teams? Math nerds, please do me a favor and tell me how many more wins Jose Abreu would have netted us if his second half was his first half. Add that total to the Sox's win total and tell me if we're in contention yet because Jose Abreu hit "when it mattered" By the way - newsflash - if it turns out that Jose Abreu wouldn't have made a difference by himself "when it mattered" then guess what IT DIDN'T MATTER. JFC. A lot of you are looking WAY TOO HARD to find ways in which Jose Abreu had a bad season. I'm sorry, but Jose Abreu did not have a bad season. His season will end up being very, very similar to last season. Last season was a good season. Not spectacular, but good. If Jose Abreu had the 4 more home runs in the first half to make his numbers "acceptable", and if every one of those home runs turned a loss into a win, the Sox would still be out of contention.

QUOTE (ron883 @ Sep 7, 2016 -> 09:50 PM) Jose starts finally producing when it doesn't matter and people keep calling me out? Too bad he couldn't do it back when it mattered. I'll reiterate what I've previously said. Jose isn't what we thought he was. The league adjusted to him after his rookie year. He is a mid-tier first baseman. Ron obviously thought that Jose Abreu would automatically sustain a .964 OPS after a single season, which would make him....one of the top 20 baseball hitters of all time. My lord, man. It must royally suck to have to root so hard against one of your own players every night.... and to have be proven wrong literally every single day since August 1st. Please. Give up the ghost. There isn't a better offensive player in MLB since August 1st than Jose Abreu. IN ALL OF BASEBALL. AT THE MAJOR LEAGUE LEVEL. Oh and Frank Thomas also produced a lot when it didn't matter....I wonder if you qualify his career numbers in the same way.

If they're gonna buy, they need to bring in a good DH and a couple of other bigger supplemental offensive pieces. 23rd in team home runs 23rd in runs scored 23rd in OPS ....in a hitter's park It's killing us

QUOTE (harkness @ Sep 4, 2016 -> 06:17 PM) The guy is on a crazy hot streak no doubt... I hope next year he doesn't take 4 months to get it going. I maintain that he was only really cold in April and May. He had a homer drought in July but still hit a lot of doubles and had a good BA and he had a pretty good June all around

Abreu now at .814. He's so hot he might finish with a better OPS than last year, who knows?

QUOTE (ron883 @ Sep 1, 2016 -> 11:41 AM) Our first baseman finally pushes his OPS above .800 and people want me to apologize for saying he was figured out. News flash, .805 ops and 19 homers isn't all that great for a below average fielding 1B. Jose just isn't what we thought was. Yes, I want you to apologize for saying he was figured out by MLB pitching, which has nothing to do with his fielding. Stick to YOUR point. He had a 1.062 OPS in August. Just admit you were dead f***ing wrong.

Jose Abreu's final August 2016 numbers: .362/.414/.648/1.062 8 homers, 6 doubles. second best OPS month ever and best since mid 2014. Yep, MLB pitching has sure figured him out. Can anyone claim he's even having a bad year overall at this point, despite his first half numbers? If he stays hot, he might actually approach his 2015 totals.

I wouldn't say the blame lies with Robin, but he's clearly been a non-factor in making a positive difference in any season. If we had been able to somehow sustain the hot early start, he could have proven himself. Instead, he's been a bystander. The record against the division....I dunno. Something is just WRONG there. Also, every press conference I've seen after a loss seems to be him shrugging his shoulders "what CAN you do" and saying things like "we NEED to be better". Great, and THEN what?

How many managers have lasted 5 full seasons with a winning percentage as bad as Robin's in the last 30 years?

QUOTE (shysocks @ Aug 30, 2016 -> 02:41 PM) I don't know, but it's the defining characteristic of the Robin Ventura Era, fair or not. Yep. For sure. 2016 Sox vs. Central (gotta include twins) - 20-30 2016 Sox vs. everyone else - 43-37 2015 Sox vs. Central - 32-44 2015 Sox vs. everyone else - 44-42 2014 Sox vs. Central - 33-43 2014 Sox vs. everyone else - 40-46 2013 Sox vs. Central - 26-50 (holy s***!) 2013 Sox vs. everyone else - 37-49 2012 Sox vs. Central - 37-35 2012 Sox vs. everyone else - 48-42 Robin Ventura vs. Central - 148-202 Robin Ventura vs. everyone else - 212-216

I'm asking because I honestly don't know. We are 52-40 against everyone else, and 11-27 against the Tigs, Royals and Indians. What is it, exactly? How do we handle good teams like Toronto, Texas and Boston just fine, but scuffle so much against our own division? The disparity doesn't seem to really make any sense, whatsoever.

Alright, let me start over. No, I do not believe the front office based their construction of this team around the assumption that they could plug in .317/40 for Jose Abreu each and every season. Nor do I believe that Jose Abreu was the only player they were building around. Obviously Sale and Q (and others) were relied upon. I do think they assumed Jose would be "very. very good". I think his 2015 and 2016 numbers were actually reasonable to expect, and obviously, expectations have been, for the most part, met. I suppose my main point is that Jose Abreu is pretty far from the problem this season, and that as usual, the White Sox constructed a team of "we hope the rest of the guys are good enough!" They weren't. I think 5 times in the last thirty years they've caught lightning in a bottle from dudes like Herbert Perry, and the whole organizational philosophy seems to assume that they were somehow geniuses for cracking the code and the next scrap heap undervalued diamond in the rough is just around the corner at bargain prices. It's f***ing nauseating.

QUOTE (lasttriptotulsa @ Aug 24, 2016 -> 02:21 PM) This is one of the more ridiculous posts in awhile. Yes it was just Abreu that they centered their rebuild around. It had nothing to do with Eaton, Sale, Quintana or Rodon. Does the front office know anything about baseball? That is such a clown question. Reinsdorf has owned the team and been involved in the day to day for 25 years. Williams played professionally for 10 years and has been a GM or higher for 16 years. Hahn has been with the team 12 years as an Assistant GM/GM. Not to mention the rest of the scouts, coaches, assistants and advisers who have been around the game their entire life. But yes, some schmuck on a message board knows more than they do about the game of baseball. You based this entire post on assuming I was asserting what I posed as a question about someone else's ridiculous line of reasoning.

I don't think he sucked at all during his sophomore campaign, but the notion that people would just expect his rookie numbers to extrapolate out over his career seems silly to me. He seems to be settling in to a .290-.300/25-30 guy with an .850ish OPS. Which is great, IMO.

Yeah, that's really nice that our front office just automatically inserted elite numbers for presumed elite players and ostensibly filled up the rest of the lineup with hot replacement level garbage, in a hope that the dumpster would catch fire seems philosophically sound to me

QUOTE (Jenksy Cat @ Aug 24, 2016 -> 11:53 AM) I wouldn't say "finished" but this team was based around him being an "elite" bat, not just a pretty good/solid bat. I still don't think we'll see him get back to the level he was at as a rookie. Who knows? He's maybe having his best month ever....right now. But to your point....what's exactly the line of thinking, here? That we built this entire team around the expectation that Jose Abreu would be able to automatically duplicate one rookie season's worth of elite numbers? That Jose Abreu would absolutely clobber everything at that same .317/40 homer clip, and that he's somehow a "disappointment" for not doing so? That he f***ed the Sox because the front office built the whole team around that ridiculous expectation? Did this fanbase and front office learn absolutely nothing from Gordon Beckham and his rookie year/subsequent years? Or any other player with standard dropoff type things? I mean...does this front office know anything about the game of baseball, in general?

You know what would be pretty cool at this point? If everyone who said Abreu was "finished" and that MLB pitching had "figured him out" owned up and said they were wrong not that it will happen that way

He has a 7.62 ERA with the White Sox. That's a f***ing AVERAGE. I suppose that means if James Shields goes out on the mound, if we don't score EIGHT RUNS, on average, we lose. Is this the worst acquisition in the history of major league baseball?

QUOTE (bmags @ Aug 9, 2016 -> 01:06 PM) My position is that Jose Abreu has declined. While I would certainly take an .850 OPS from him, it's not exactly the .960 6 WAR player we imagined at the end of 2014 when we accelerated our rebuild into oblivion. I'm open to the idea that him being distanced from his family has caused this steady decline, because being separated from your family in a completely new city with the pressures of a baseball player could feasibly cause this. But, I don't know how you could be both incredulous that baseball players personal issues could affect their play meaningfully and decide that Jose Abreu has not declined because of fun with sample sizes. Abreu may be fine next year, but this is 3rd straight year of meaningful decline. A .780 OPS first baseman who can't play first base is not a part ofa core. I'm hopeful this is just because of personal reasons, because if not, then it's going to be all the more sad when we sign Jason Castro and trade for a pitcher and say we are going for it in 2017. Ok, so after one rookie season, you expected Jose Abreu to be able to be a .960 OPS player and a steady 6 WAR? That would have made him one of the top 15-20 sluggers in baseball history. I'm not sure a single rookie season ought to earn that kind of expectation. Jose Abreu could be in decline, sure. However, all of us who follow the game have seen, hundreds of times, that there are rookies who come out and put up great numbers, and once the league adjusts to them, they experience some decline. One needs look no farther than Gordon Beckham to find an example of this. I'm inclined to believe the 2015 version of Jose Abreu is much, much closer to the "true" version, and that his rookie year was simply off the charts because the league hadn't made those adjustments they would make in the following year. Every rookie has holes in his game that haven't been exposed yet. Jose's holes are that he doesn't have great patience with pitches outside of the zone, and can be fooled on breaking balls badly. This has been exposed this year, particularly. I won't argue that defensively, he's been a liability. I have no problem shifting him to DH eventually, as we currently don't really have one. Still, an .850-.860 OPS player is nothing to sneeze at. I'd take numbers resembling Bernie Williams, Wade Boggs, George Brett any day of the week. And yes, Adam Dunn fits into that .850ish career range too, but Adam Dunn was a great run producer for a long time before we got a hold of him and he went south. And again, I'm not trying to offer any explanation as to why he had an off April and May, and didn't hit a homer in July. However, I think it's very, very wrong for several posters to enter this thread and be sanctimonious about how hard it is to be away from your kid when there is absolutely zero evidence that this is the reason why he's "in decline." I also would reiterate that it's ludicrous for us to try to find reasons to explain these things away, other than s*** happens and in baseball there are streaks. That's all we can really know. I do think it's much more likely that the 6 months of 2015 and past 2.5 months of 2016 paint a very consistent career picture for Jose Abreu, one that is a happy medium between his white-hot 2014 rookie year and his 2016 spring slump. I could be wrong, as well.

QUOTE (Hatchetman @ Aug 9, 2016 -> 12:43 PM) We have no idea if he is in decline or not. Let's hope not, but the stats are what they are. In 2016 he's been below league average 1B. http://www.espn.com/mlb/stats/batting/_/po.../true/minpa/275 He's really not that far off, and given his recent track record and historical numbers I guess I'm willing to give Jose Abreu the benefit of the doubt. I think that he's certainly capable of moving his WAR up from 1.2 to 1.4 and his OPS up from .770 to .785 in the next 7 weeks, which I suppose would be about league average 1B. I think he'll finish with 22 HR, .283ish BA, .790-.800 OPS. A down year, but if that's the worst we get from Jose he's far from the problem here.

QUOTE (shipps @ Aug 9, 2016 -> 12:38 PM) Dammit bmags, what is your position!? Apparently, it is that Jose Abreu's .932 OPS in April 2015 was indicative of a slow start.

QUOTE (bmags @ Aug 9, 2016 -> 11:56 AM) He had a slow start in 2015 too, should I remove that to show how much better his june-end of season was? Um, He hit .293 in April 2015 with a .932 OPS.

QUOTE (bmags @ Aug 9, 2016 -> 11:56 AM) He had a slow start in 2015 too, should I remove that to show how much better his june-end of season was? Is your position that Jose Abreu is in some sort of permanent decline, yes or no?