Greg Hibbard

Many are obviously disappointed with the results of this season thus far, and I want to be clear about something: I am amongst those who are disappointed. I consider this season (thus far) to be the third most disappointing season in the past 10 ('03 and '01 are worse). I had high hopes for a 90-100 game winner, a relatively easy AL Central crown, and a second World Series shot for some of my favorite players. Obviously, many of those hopes are on the ropes. However, consider this: Wouldn't have been just easier for this team to fold up and quit after its horrible 33 game start? Wouldn't it have been totally justified for Ozzie, Kenny or anyone else to throw Pierre, Dunn and Rios under the bus and start pointing fingers? Wouldn't it have been easy for us to dump everyone possible on July 31st, and blame the fans for not coming out and supporting the team? This isn't what happened. The team stood pat, kept things in the clubhouse professional with respect to Dunn and Rios' struggles, and battled back for the past 87 games. Now, they are at .500, 4 games back, and poised to at least give us a finish worth talking about. It might not be ideal, but they didn't quit. I look across town and see Carlos Zambrano turning another forgettable Cubs campaign into another laughable sideshow circus, and I think "thank god we have players they keep it between the lines and comport themselves professionally in our clubhouse". I think "thank god we have baseball people in front office positions". I don't like our manager all of the time, but I do think he is at least a mixed bag that has some good (if not intangible) qualities, and I believe he acts professionally on the field. If we didn't have a strong organization, I think we would have easily succumbed to a freefall. We wouldn't even be close to 4 games back right now, and we would be set up to struggle through an Indians type overhaul/rebuild with bad choices. I know many people on this board don't think that's a bad thing, but I do. I think this team can and will compete next season, and I think we are set to make a run here. I also think that given the kind of contracts we are stuck with, we'd better damn compete. If we can just get over this last hump, get over .500, and get it within three games, this season might actually turn a late corner. However, regardless of what happens, I'm happy a root for a team that battles back despite the setbacks it has had, even if this season comes up far short of expectations. Silver lining, I suppose.

yet another must-win.

QUOTE (Iwritecode @ Aug 11, 2011 -> 03:02 PM) Since 1996 the ALC division winners have averaged 92 wins. The ALC division winner has never had less than 86 wins. I would be willing to bet the ALC winner will not have 86 or more wins this season. Also, the AL aggregate records of the past ten years are somewhat informed by AL dominance in interleague play. The AL-NL record this season was 131-121, which is far more even than it has been in previous seasons.

Let's talk about how much "over .500" would have meant to the 1994 american league western division champion if the strike had not happened. 1st place was 52-62 on August 11th. Twice in the past ten years one of the NL divisions has had a barely over .500 team win a division. In the NFL, the NFC West from last season comes to mind as well.

QUOTE (flavum @ Aug 11, 2011 -> 01:14 PM) Yeah, the games back column says one thing, but I don't think you're in it unless you're over .500. Until they get there, it really means nothing. The Sox will finish this season over .500; I don't really understand why people don't believe this. Yes, they have seemingly stumbled recently. They were over .500 for the month of May, over .500 for the month of June, at exactly .500 for the month of July, and are at exactly .500 in the month of August. They are over .500 in the second half, even with a 6 game home losing streak. They will be over .500 by the end of August. That will take care of itself. GB is everything. Sorry to disagree with you.

QUOTE (flavum @ Aug 11, 2011 -> 08:33 AM) The Sox have to go 8-2 the next ten. Win tonight, and come home and go 7-2 like a championship team does at home. If the Sox do that, then they've earned their way back into the race. They are currently in the race. 4 games is nothing. If they go 6-4 and Cleveland and Detroit both go 5-5 in their next ten, the Sox are still in the race and only three games out, and it's a totally believable result given the track record of all three teams. Cleveland and Detroit split their 4 games, Sox win 2/3 against Cle, Cle wins 2/3 against Min. Det splits the Min and @Bal series 3-3. Sox win today, win 2/3 vs KC and lose 2/3 vs. Tex. 6-4 for the Sox, 5-5 for Det and Cle. Sox still in the race.

A win tonight and I really think we'll have something on our hands here.

One thing that is very encouraging is Detroit's run differential. If we believe Pythagorean W/L has any value, then the Sox and Det are just about dead even.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Aug 9, 2011 -> 10:45 AM) It's better than not winning the division and him only throwing 220 innings. See Milwaukee in 2008. Not if your pitcher has dead arm the next season I don't care how superhuman Verlander seems, the aggregate innings are going to have an adverse effect on him eventually.

what's the point of winning a division if the only starting pitcher you have worth a damn in the postseason has 250+ innings under his belt by October 1st

Bear in mind that technically speaking, Cleveland controls its own destiny to a far greater extent than the Sox, so Det will have to pick its poison.

The hottest I could see the Sox getting is winning 29 of their last 48. That would put them at 85-77.

It's really about those six head-to-head games. Both teams have pretty easy schedules. Anything less than 4-2 and it's over. 4-2, 5-1, or 6-0 and we have a really good chance of being close.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Aug 9, 2011 -> 08:03 AM) 5 GB now. Sox go 2-1, DET goes 1-2, that would only cut it to 4 I suppose even my optimism isn't enough to make the mathematically impossible possible

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Aug 9, 2011 -> 07:49 AM) Fister vs. Masterson AT CLE Porcello vs. Jimenez Verlander vs. Carmona. Indians will take 2/3. We have to take 3/4 from the Orioles. That puts us at 4 GB heading into the weekend. Wouldn't we be 3 GB in that scenario?

QUOTE (greg775 @ Aug 8, 2011 -> 02:55 PM) I don't get your post. They are 4-5 games within what many expected? The team is under .500 and all-in. It has been totally a piss poor season IMO. The team has played so bad at home there have been as many boos as cheers. The team has a season-high win streak of four games. The offense has been disgracefully bad, so bad at knocking in runners that the games are almost impossible to watch in their entireity. The team has sucked overall. Now if suddenly the team plays as it did in Minnesota the rest of the way, great. But that is not going to suddenly happen IMO. Flash back to May 6th. The team is 11-22. fill in the blank with what your thought would have been that day: "I think ______ would be an acceptable winning percentage over the next 80 games" 44-36 feels acceptable to me. Did you expect 50-30? 60-20? I did not feel as though this team was a 100-120 game winner at any point. I felt as though they were a low to mid 90s winner. Which means that 8 over .500 for 80 games is about where they should have been.

Yeah, I'm really sick of evaluating every single aspect of a baseball player based on OPS.

QUOTE (Jordan4life @ Aug 8, 2011 -> 02:32 PM) Fact of the matter is that we have 6 (yes, 6!) of the worst players in baseball at their respective positions getting significant playing time. I can't think of off the top of my head a team being so prohibitively handicapped by that many guys ever winning a division title. Save the sample size. Baseball tells you the truth 9.5 times out of 10. Are we evaluating everyone solely on OPS?

QUOTE (maggsmaggs @ Aug 8, 2011 -> 01:00 PM) The Sox have the fifth highest payroll in Major League Baseball, and as of today, they are three games under .500. I don't know how this has been anything but a piss-poor year. Their record simply hasn't piss-poor for most of the season. I don't know how to qualify it further. It's remarkable that so many baseball fans will scream SAMPLE SIZE!!!! and TREND!!!! when it's convenient to their argument, but then ignore their importance when it comes to something they disagree with. Looking at their aggregate record and evaluating it against their payroll feels myopic to me. For almost 3/4 of this season, they have been winning at a rate within 4-5 games of what many people expected them to win at (I feel as though most people expected a win rate of 93-94 games). A .550 winning percentage for half a season's worth of games. Disappointing? I guess maybe slightly. I never expected them to win at some superhuman rate, like they put up during interleague last year. I did expect them to bounce back from a horrid april and compete, and they have done so. 8 over for the last 80 feels about right to me and certainly doesn't fit "piss-poor".

can we please stop talking about this guy

It really hasn't been a piss-poor year, though. It was a piss-poor 22 game stretch, and then a slightly-better-than-mediocre 3+ months after that (89 win pace over the last 80 games).

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Aug 7, 2011 -> 08:10 PM) No, Greg, don't go to the dark side, too. I'm going to take the optimistic route and say they have a pretty good chance to make it...but they have to make up some ground next week. Who are DET and CLE playing against? If Humber can come back around (50/50, right?) with the six-man rotation giving him more recovery time, and Rios and Lillibridge play like they have the last two games, they could actually do it. You have to like what you saw out of Carlos Quentin too, 2 opposite field doubles. Harrelson's right, he does that consistently and he's a .285-.305 hitter and close to MVP level again. He's just so naturally strong, he doesn't need to pull everything to collect homers all over the diamond. My pessimism has more to do with Detroit's recent surge than not believing in the Sox. I believed the Sox would win games against the Twins this season, and even after the 11-22 start I felt they'd win at least 80 games. After 11-22, winning the division was always gonna be about how well everyone else played more than how well the sox played.

I can totally understand not really following the team if they are on their way to a 67-95 season. Not really following the team when they are 55-58 and 6.5 out with 6 weeks left to play in a bad division is sort of insane. It's unlikely the Sox will win it, but they still have a chance. You can't say that about more than half the teams in the majors.

This team went 32-21 despite Alex Rios, Adam Dunn, Ozzie Guillen, Ken Williams and everyone else anyone would care to blame for most of this season. The team didnt play spectacularly well during that stretch. If they win that same percentage of remaining games, they will finish the season with 84 wins. Its not asking this team to do what they have not already done before this season, with the same problems that are apparently with them for the duration. Unfortunately, a lot of it is simply out of their hands now. This team is probably not capable of winning many more than 84-86 games, and the tigers would need to play several games under .500 to give us a chance.

I don't go to Sox games because ticket prices have just gotten astronomically high. As a 37 year old fan who has been attending games since the early 80s, I've happily bought tickets to go see far worse than this because it was still a good, entertaining product for the price. Paul Konerko, Mark Buehrle, AJ Pierzynski, some of the bullpen - that's worth paying $20 to see. It's not worth paying $100 to see.