caulfield12

2-0 Tigers over the Rangers already. To go from 2 1/2 GB (Saturday afternoon) to 6 1/2 GB in just five days would be cruel coming one week too late.

Well...at any rate, I meant/mean high in the line-up. 2nd. TYPO. Must have been thinking about the fact that Konerko WASN'T there at the same time I was typing...

There's a possibility they can still move Thornton this year. How many teams would claim someone owed that kind of money as a set-up guy, and at his age? I think not very many. You could argue more strongly that it might end up being the best time to have maximized Danks' value, based on his June/July numbers. And Quentin. Trade Santos? He's one of the biggest bargains on the team. We still don't even know for sure that Sale can make the transition to starting...to act like he has the value of Randy Johnson instead of Aaron Poreda/Royce Ring isn't accurate either. Does he have great stuff and multiple pitches? Yes. Does he have a very slight frame and/or mechanics that might not hold up? Possibly. Of course, the same concerns existed about Gio when he was drafted and he's turned out pretty good as a starter.

Fister making his debut for the Tigers tonight.

QUOTE (Reddy @ Aug 3, 2011 -> 05:26 PM) who even cares anymore? 21,661 in attendance last night says "not so many"

Except there's no way to foresee Carlos Quentin doing that to himself. Had Quentin gone into that offseason healthy, I still think there's at least a 35-45% chance we could have taken out the Rays. But because we were missing Crede (Uribe was filling in more than adequately), Contreras was a non-factor, CQ, and then the scrambled rotation because of the 4 man and having to win on turf as the Rays had the home field...it's not like we were completely blown out. We had leads in both of those first two games. It's not like we were the Cubs or (typical) Twins that post-season.

Ozzie....really??? Vizquel over Beckham, and hitting 3rd, when Gordon's actually been collecting a few hits? And I'm not even so sure that Omar gives a defensive advantage even over Beckham...and hitting 2nd? Sigh. This offense is so screwed without Konerko, and then there's Viciedo, who we could actually have used (yet again) but who is of course now having problems hitting for the first time all season while recovering from injury.

QUOTE (kitekrazy @ Aug 3, 2011 -> 03:39 PM) No they wouldn't. No one will ever hit .160 on the Yankees. There's 1000s of reasons for that. One is they are surrounded by talent that will make them perform better. They are just as patient as any other organization when it comes to coaches. Their fan base surely thought that with Torre and now Girardi. Failure has a different meanig in New York. They have a great cash flow so a bad contract doesn't hurt them. It's rare for them to have a bad one. Players come to the Sox to have career setbacks. Comparing anything the Yankees would do vs. the Sox organization is really an apple and oranges comparison. One sucks the other doesn't. Posada was pretty close to being in that exact same position (as Dunn) and he recovered quite nicely. But some of their big-contract pitchers like Irabu (very sad about his suicide), Contreras, Igawa, Pavano, etc., tanked almost as badly as pitchers as Dunn has offensively...more or less the equivalent. Or Lackey and Dice-K with the Red Sox.

I won't root against them making the playoffs for one simple reason, we were in similar looking circumstances in 2007 and turned things around in one offseason enough to win 89 games the next season. Of course, we didn't have the burdens of the Peavy/Dunn/Rios deals weighing down future payrolls at that time. We still had something of a carryover effect from the 2005 World Series where fan "goodwill" was much higher than it is now. But we could have easily let Buehrle and Dye go that at time and started rebuilding. There were the rookie seasons of Fields/Owens/Wasserman that were fun to follow and gave hope for the future. Would we have been better off totally deconcstructing the team back then? I don't think so, although you could argue all the moves (Quentin/Floyd/Danks/Ramirez) that made us a playoff team in 2008 should have been put in place for a rebuilding effort just as relevantly as a "reload." Just the final week of 2008 and Game 163 (finally taking down the Twins) was worth it from my perspective. Looking back, if we had parted ways with Mark Buehrle at that point (in 2007), can we automatically assume we would be better off right now? I doubt it.

It's almost more amusing to think how much outrage there would be against Oney had Mrs. Teahen been as Oney described here. We've talked so much of hyperbole here this summer, and his description was just a "cheap shot" hyperbolic/exaggerated description of her. The reality is in that clubhouse, the woman who's the "7-8.5" on a 10 scale isn't good enough because the way MOST NFL, NBA and MLB players judge women is almost completely superficial. Oney was raised and still seems to be caught up in that "machisimo-driven" Latin American culture, which teaches the men that "men prefer girls who are beautiful (modelos) but brutas (dumb)" and Oney would be challenged by any relationship with a woman who's educated, confident, strong, athletic and well-rounded. That's the kind of woman that's harder for someone like him to dominate and control. What would be even more interesting would be to see how Oney reacted to criticism of his "groupies" or girlfriend/s. And the way Oney thinks, unfortunately, is pretty common. It's just rare to see it articulated. Just watch all the groupies and "trophy wives" in the players' boxes and you'll notice that quite a few of them are out of the same cookie-cutter mold.

That might be it. When the reporters start asking AJ, Konerko and Buehrle for their reactions about the possibility of being involved in a waiver transaction in the next month...we'll see how forthcoming they are about the "state of the franchise" and their future/s with the club (Buehrle in particular).

Andre Dawson offering to play for a blank contract comes to mind. Or Gil Meche offering to retire a year early (instead of a prolonged DL stint) and saving the Royals something like $11 million. Last I checked, we didn't retroactively pay Alexei Ramirez the multi-millions he was worth the first 3 years of his contract or Chris Sale/Phil Humber/Sergio Santos this year. Does anyone think Konerko would have given back any of the salary from the times when he's struggled the last decade? Buehrle? C'mon. Although Mark was willing to give at least $1 million of his salary back to keep Juan Uribe. Does that count? Or deferring money so other players can be brought in...

Pants "Oliver Stone" Rowland. Really? A pre-emptive tweet can set off a concussive domino effect that can lead to Ozzie getting fired? Sounds like a tangential plotline from Inception that was thrown out. I've heard of the butterfly effect, but ... now it seems we're all reading way too much into this.

ESPY after the ESPN awards show or Cecil ESPY former major leaguer, lol?

http://sports.yahoo.com/video/player/news/...nDepth/26116801 Ozzie is IN, maybe OUT? This is the headline MLB video/story about Guillen right now at yahoosports, at least the baseball page.

How to turn Edwin Jackson into Cris Carpenter.... 1. Make Edwin Jackson a little worse. Carpenter and Jackson each begin their Cardinals story at 27, but Jackson, who's been around since he outdueled Randy Johnson as a teenager, has managed to fit more disappointment and success into those early years. Jackson's put together one-and-a-half bad seasons and three-and-a-half solid ones, and more importantly for our perception of him at 27 he's put them together in the right order--after a few years as an ex-prospect in the post-Unit wilderness he turned into a reliably average type in a hurry. Carpenter the Blue Jay never looked right twice in a row after emerging as a solid starter in his first two full seasons. after 320 above-average innings in 1998 and 1999 Carpenter led the league in earned runs in 2000, recovered in 2001, and then faltered again in 2002, never quite escaping the impression he was striking out fewer it looked like he should. If 27-year-old starters can still be talked about in the language of prospects, that Chris Carpenter was a year or two behind Jackson on the developmental curve, and didn't have a no-hitter or any ESPN hype to show for it. 3. Now, tear up his arm. Jackson, despite throwing nearly four million pitches in a single no-hitter, has passed through the Pitcher Injury Nightmare Zone without requiring major surgery. Not so for Carpenter, who made 30 starts once in four tries with the Blue Jays and left Toronto with considerably less labrum than he'd brought through immigration. By 2002 Carpenter's shoulder had finally had enough, and despite the Cardnials' vague intimations about his pitching in 2003 he was a lost cause by midseason. So--having made Edwin Jackson worse and given him a career-ending injury, we've successfully turned him into Chris Carpenter the Blue Jay. Now we just need to make it so he wins the Cy Young Award sometime in the next two years! 4. Make him live up to his strikeout potential. Carpenter is a big guy who throws hard and has an I'm-a-big-guy-who-throws-hard curveball, but his numbers as a Blue Jay look a little like what you might see from a successful junkballer. As a Cardinal he added a full strikeout per nine innings to his previous career high. So that's the first thing we need from Jackson. 5. Make him into one of the league's best control pitchers. Oh, yeah--this is the other thing! After you make Jackson into the firebreathing strikeout king he resembles, you'll want to change him into a different pitcher entirely. Carpenter walked 3.4 batters per nine innings in Toronto, and 4.3 in the minors. With the Cardinals, between 2004 and 2006: 1.9. You're following, right? Write this next one down-- 6. Tear up his arm again. More shoulder problems! And some elbow problems, just while you're digging around in there. Toss in two false-start comebacks, and then, when people are writing "If we get anything out of Edwin Jackson you'd have to consider it a bonus, at this point" articles from the "blog entry about Mark Mulder" template in iWork, 7. Repeat the whole thing. Carpenter's start Monday was a to-scale reproduction of his 2011 to date; he looked like Chris Carpenter the entire time but drowned, eventually, in bloop singles. I'd be worried about it, except--he's Chris Carpenter. Who expected one strikeout, or 50 strikeouts, or 500 or 1000? Who expects 200 more?

QUOTE (witesoxfan @ Aug 3, 2011 -> 05:15 AM) I imagine the White Sox have lost far too much money and have seen far too disastrous of a season to commit anywhere near that amount to the payroll for next year. It'll be closer to $90-95 mill, and they'll still be losing money. If that really is the case, the cost-benefit analysis of possibly winning the division VERSUS white-flagging it to get the best possible return for Danks/Floyd/Quentin/Buehrle/Thornton/Pierre/AJ/Ohman/Frasor/Crain/Konerko should have been decided by Reinsdorf. Probably it was. Because if winning the division was the only possible way to maintain even a $105-115 million dollar payroll, statistical probability should have told them to start the savings process ASAP (and they've cut about $10 million with Jackson and Teahen).... If it was KW arguing for his job, then maybe it is best that we bring in someone else to do whatever they can to fix it in the offseason. There's at least 10 players on that list that could be on the way out, and possibly Alexei Ramirez or Beckham as well (change of scenery move, although it would be insane to sell so low without at least trying to pair him with a new manager and hitting coach). And if Buehrle or Konerko is claimed and traded, probably they both should go and deal with all the pain in one fell swoop. It wouldn't be fair to either one to keep them around for mass rebuild at this point in their careers. The only untouchables (or untradeables, is more like it) right now: Ramirez ??? Santos Sale Beckham ??? Dunn Rios Peavy Humber Viciedo Zach Stewart Addison Reed Trading Humber now, it's too late....we have to hold onto him and hope he can at least be a productive back-end starter and eat innings. And possibly shut him down...if it becomes necessary with his "hitting a wall" issue in the 5th-6th-7th innings. Morel should be given one more shot to win/keep the position over the rest of the season and early 2012. If we're really going to be down at that $90-95 million mark, then the math beyond Peavy/Dunn/Rios simply won't add up. It will be very interesting. The next 8 months will decide the next 5 years of White Sox baseball. Manager, GM, hitting coach, everything is up for grabs.

What's next this week, after Rios and then this? KW coming here to apologize for Daniel Hudson, Adam Dunn and Nick Swisher? I don't think he possesses the humility. It's gotten to the point where White Sox baseball is much less interesting and entertaining than an internet message board about White Sox baseball. Bizarre. I guess it's appropriate, since the Soup Nazi from Seinfield threw out the first pitch last night. Feels like more of a sitcom than the actual show they did last year based on the Sox.

Agreed. Get what you can for everyone in the pen not named Sale/Santos. To imagine anyone would claim Peavy/Rios/Dunn...no way. In fact, I'd say at this point we're better with Peavy for 2012 if we have any possibility of competing, because there's a 75% chance he can finally rebound and give us one very good complete season (and questions are starting to multiple about Humber's viability going forward). It all rests with Buehrle. If there's no way to bring him back, you almost have to start saying goodbye to AJ, Danks, Quentin and really restocking the entire organization If Buehrle wants to come back, then you have to scramble to keep Danks/Quentin for 2012....and cut salary to $110-115. Not easy at all. At this point, unless there's a clear managerial change, you'd have to imagine Buehrle would want to part ways with the Sox.

Me thinks you doth protesteth too much. SoxTalk hasn't been this unified or united since 2008, 2005-2006 and 9/11, lol. Or being against the Edwin Jackson deal, I suppose.

Ozzie and Danks haven't quite given up just yet. Even though they sound borderline delusional. http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/baseb...,0,472799.story

Still a bit upset about the 1993 playoffs though...

G/f in the Philippines. "Mistress" in Bandung, Indonesia, lol. Joking. Well...Americans are more popular in Taiwan, Thailand and the Phillipines, but I do alright Greg, thanks for asking. Just got divorced finally this year after being separated for 6 years. So finally can breathe again and enjoy being single and unattached. The girl I really want to marry lives in Nanjing, China.

NVM. Don't think about it too much. I'm already joking around too much with you today. That's probably enough.

Yeah, I know SINCE, lol. 3 month long vacations will do that to a person. Six weeks, fine. But this is too long. That's why I went to the library and checked out about 30 books today...can't wait for my teaching job to start at the end of the month (in Shanghai) and to forget about this year's White Sox until the offseason at least.