caulfield12

Looks like Stewart essentially has two sliders. 77-79 MPH version, and 85-86. The first one is more like a curveball in terms of velocity, but not as big a break obviously.

Hopefully he'll throw Gordon a change-up. He definitely can't hit a fastball this season. Another good defensive play by Beckham...at least there's that one good aspect of his game if nothing else.

Rios threatening to get back into the starting line-up again. 2 hits now. When's the last time Alex stole a base?

Konerko with "only" an 800 ops in July. That's his worst month of the season. Pretty amazing how consistent he's been all year long. Stewart working pretty quickly. Only 31 pitches coming into the Mauer at-bat. 3 scoreless innings, five pitches total. Couldn't ask for anything more out of him so far. Keep it up, longhair.

Not bad so far. Definitely no Jeff Marquez, at least. Looks like worst-case scenario he'll be a decent 5th starter under team control cheaply for 6 years. That's not a bad payoff for Edwin Jackson at all. Pierre and Gordon have almost the same exact OPS. I don't think that's a good thing. At least they're both way above Dunn, Morel and Rios. White Sox 0 for their last 12 with RISP. 1st and 2nd now, 2 ours. C'mon Konerko. 2 hits for Ramirez in his familiar two hole in the line-up. Make that 0 for 13 with RISP in this series so far.

Got a "slow" slider or slurve at 74 MPH there. Settling in at 92-93 MPH with the fastball.

140 K's now for Dunn. Still trailing our former #1 draft pick Mitchell in Winston-Salem. Detroit already jumping out to the quick lead with Verlander on the mound, up 2-0. Looks like we're going to have to win this game or be on the verge of elimination and 7 1/2 games back. Well, Rios got a hit against Pavano, something Quentin's never done before. Please Gordon, at some point this season, go on a tear before it's too late. We've been waiting since Opening Day. And waiting...

Got Kubel with a 95 mph fastball. Definitely can dial it up a notch when he needs it, sort of typical of a combo reliever/starter. It's obvious the main concern will be adding a workable changeup or curveball. Right now, he seems to be a classic sinker/slider type, and that (having two pitches as a starter without either being plus-plus) doesn't work unless you have pinpoint control.

88-91 MPH so far. 16 2/3, 26 hits....and his AAA start for us was similar, 10 hits in 6.3 Slider at 85. Fastest pitch so far 92. He really needs to come up with more of a variance in pitch speed. His stuff looks fairly identical to the "bad" Jake Peavy, actually.

Konerko tailor-made double play ball. He's been in a bit of a funk for awhile now. Let's see what Stewart's got. Span's finally back for the Twins. They've been hard hit by concussions the last two years. Can't remember the White Sox lost a player to the DL for that reason.

QUOTE (greg775 @ Aug 6, 2011 -> 04:11 PM) I bet he'd sign three years for 36 million right now. These guys risk career ending injuries every time they take the mound. I'm sure he doesn't need any more money. Just a personal/family decision. Wouldn't surprise me at all if he walked away. Or walked away for a year or two and then came back. Anything's possible.

They even tried to "hype" Marquez as being a future back of the rotation guy when he was acquired as the "centerpiece" of the Swisher deal. No way they're going to compare Stewart to, I don't know, Sean Tracey. Heck, I still remember KW "spinning" all the positives of Felix Diaz and Jon Adkins back in the day. This is no different.

QUOTE (greg775 @ Aug 6, 2011 -> 04:21 PM) It's easy to say you want a rebuild. Going through it will be agony. The Sox need to be Yankees light. Sign a batch of free agents and Latin/Janpanese players while trying to not have the worst minor league system in baseball. We need to keep this base of good pitchers and start "rebuilding' our lineup. First step is to somehow get somebody to take Rios and Dunn off our hands with us paying only half the salaries. What good is keeping Buehlre/Danks/Floyd if we're still millions of dollars away from a productive offense? We'd just have another season like 2011 in 2012...and be one year further away from being in contention as it would continue to get worse before things actually improved. For 2012, we have no leadoff hitter, arguably no LFer or CFer, a very questionable situation at 3B and Beckham. You can answer Viciedo is one answer, sure. But that still leaves a ton of holes and no money to fill any of them because of budget constraints.

Isn't that the same argument we've heard about Beckham for the last 2 years? PERHAPS there's something else going wrong with this organization, rather than just blaming every single player for their failures.

As Rongey keeps saying, Adam Dunn won't come out of his slump sitting on the bench. Mitchell...if he succeeds in the AFL again, might be exactly the impetus he needs. If he fails and is that psychologically fragile, maybe he wasn't the type of player they thought he was coming out of LSU. We'll see. It's the same argument with playing Brent Morel everyday in Chicago or AAA. At some point, they have to produce at the next level.

The Cardinals will have some money to play around with if Pujols doesn't resign. The problem with that is the reasons for Buerhle to be on the Cardinals WITHOUT Pujols dramatically decrease.

Why hate Rios, he has a 433 OPS on the road and he's replacing someone who actually hit two homers in one game last night. Rios hasn't hit 2 homers altogether in 2-3 months. Certainly not away from USCF.

LOL. I don't even care about points being addressed or not. However, unlike last year's 26-5 stretch, there has been ZERO reason to believe in this team. We can never, ever put together a 7-8-9 winning streak with our current offense unless our pitchers (two of who are under duress every start in Peavy and Humber) throw shutouts every single game. They "eye test" of watching enough games should tell any informed baseball fan that. Sure, you could go to fangraphs and they'd say there was a 10-15% chance of the White Sox making the playoffs...but those same computers haven't watched the White Sox either this season. The Tigers have a better offense, arguably a rotation that's at least equal to ours and their bullpen is much improved with Pauley and some their injured guys like Albuquerque returning to form. I could add that Valverde hasn't blown a save all season...but that's just as good a reason to argue he can't possibly keep that up and the White Sox have hope. But when that hope is based on other teams failing around you, then too many things have to go right. It's like the 10th or 11th seed winning the Big 10 tournament. There are too many obstacles in the way now.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Aug 6, 2011 -> 02:51 PM) Bah, if the 3 games that we needed to have the starter pulled in the 5th/6th where Ozzie didn't pull him...had instead had Bruney coming in, we'd have probably won 2 of them. If you inserted Frasor's name for Bruney, then yes, there would be clear agreement on that one.

QUOTE (MAX @ Aug 6, 2011 -> 02:42 PM) I know. I just told you -it was the wrong move then. You don't seem to understand that. There were no overwhelming reasons to assume we couldn't win the division. For every argument that we could not, there was one showing that we could. I have over 2,000 posts? 1) Detroit has beaten us head-to-head pretty consistently the last 2 seasons. 2) Dunn/Rios/Beckham have shown no signs of being All-Star caliber players 3) Humber/Peavy wearing down and struggling in middle innings 4) Acquisitions by the Indians (Jimenez/Fukudome) and Tigers (Fister/Pauley/Betemit) made winning the division all that much more difficult 5) Health concerns about Viciedo getting back to form 6) Verlander wins nearly every game out, we don't have a true ace 7) Porcello and Scherzer have pitched very well since Knapp was fired 8) Detroit got healthy Carlos Guillen and Austin Jackson back...even Ordonez has been hitting better 9) Spectre of facing the Yankees and then the Twins/Orioles on the road

QUOTE (Jordan4life @ Aug 6, 2011 -> 02:38 PM) You are not going to fix this mess KW has gotten us in overnight. I was not trying to imply that. What irks me is that because the division is so bad and that we still 'technically' had a good chance of getting back in it blinded some and, more importantly KW, into thinking this team had a shot. I love baseball. One of the main reasons is because baseball 9 times out of 10 tells you the truth. If you're at or below .500 100+ games into the season, chances are you're not very good. They should've gone full-blown sell mode. I didn't need to see the massacre that was Boston/NY to know this team is not good. I already knew that. Now our top trade chips are either a year away from FA or overpaid. Unless you trade Alexei Ramirez, that's the only card you have left to play. But doing that almost certainly means you have to go full rebuild again because trading Ramirez forces another Beckham position change (unless you get a SS back in return) and then you're dealing with Morel and Lillbridge/Kuhn at 2B (once again, unless you get another IF back). So trading Ramirez doesn't give much salary relief at all for 2012 but cripples the infield. Other than that, who could you possibly trade with value? You're left with only Santos, Sale and Viciedo. But it will be interesting to see if Crain, Frasor, Ohman, Konerko, Thornton, Buehrle, Floyd, AJ and Pierre all survive the waiver wire process and are still here at the end of August.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Aug 6, 2011 -> 02:30 PM) You've got to look at the bigger picture a bit more. Tell me how you're going to rebuild RIGHT NOW with the salaries we're committed to over the next 2-3 years. We'd still be on the hook for $80 million in salary for about 6-7 players. To me, it makes more sense to keep around guys like Thornton and hope our players actually perform next year than to shave $5-6 million and still have a swollen payroll. There's no way you can afford to have a bullpen of Thornton, Crain, Frasor AND Ohman. The numbers aren't going to add up revenue-wise. They SEEM to be once again stuck in a position where they have to keep trying to compete, but holding on to Danks and resigning Buehrle...all these things are impossible to do simultaneously. We want to keep Quentin, but then AJ's salary is rising by $4 million. Trading Teahen helped A BIT, but not enough to override the massive tide turning against the Sox payroll situation unless they do something very radical. They just can't keep Floyd, Danks and Buehrle together for one more year unless JR authorizes it. It all depends on Buehrle. He's the only player (along with Konerko) that JR would seemingly have an issue with losing from the active roster.

Except for the part where Rios is hitting 5th and not 7th-9th, yeah, it makes some sense. And at least Ozzie wasn't tempted enough to play Omar and hit him 2nd. There's that.

We only need to beat the Twins 21 times in a row to even up our record with them since May 2009. Let's go boys! Keep it going.

Still, I'm sure the return we got from Jackson ends up a lot better now than had we held on to him until the end of the season and watched him go FA. There's at least a 33% chance Stewart makes it as a starter...definitely he fits into the pen. We pay Frasor $3.75 million for next year or get the same draft pick we would have had from Jackson. So the real question is whether Stewart (long-term) is worth the loss of Jackson for the final two months. With our offense, you'd have to side with KW on the overall cost/benefit side of riding it out until the end of the season with Edwin. We'll see how the Cardinals feel at the end of September if they finish 2nd to the Brewers. We had two teams in front of us and the Twins not so far behind when that calculated trade was made.