caulfield12

Predictable. Two batters too late.

Walden survived, K by Kipnis after LaPorta DP ball.

DP ball in CLE. 2nd/3rd, 2 outs. Kipnis with a chance for two walk offs in a row.

Looks like the Indians are going to do it AGAIN. Bases loaded, no outs....in the bottom of the 9th, down by 1.

Rios and Teahen both approaching the dish with a .207 average and sub 600 OPS. How are we even in this division race? Pitching, pitching and pitching.

Who do you go with in the 6th? Too early for Crain. Humber? Sale? Thornton? This is where we could use that other RHR. Bruney? In what is arguably the biggest game of the season to this point? Ozzie will be tempted to leave Jake in because the 5th went by uneventfully.

The old at 'em ball...Peavy is skating along on a 2 mm thin glacier in the middle of a global warming trend here.

Unless Peavy is still feeling some pain when he throws it and not fully snapping it off...but then he wouldn't be using it nearly as much as he does, would he? You have to hope that if his full velocity and arm strength comes back, some of the crispness on the slider will accompany it. When his fastball is short by 2-3 MPH, it's got to detract from his offspeed stuff. There's a big difference when you can throw the slider at 86 off the 94-95 MPH heat rather than the 88-91 MPH version we've seen pretty consistently since that relief appearance.

Wind held up the balls by Martinez and Konerko... Dodging too many bullets here. Need to get Humber up. You know Ozzie will trot Jake out there again in the 5th to try to get a win, but he simply has to be on a very very thin rope. 69 pitches by Jake. Danger territory. The one encouraging sign is he was at least back at 93-94 occasionally instead of everything at 86-92. Indians will try to walk off the Angels again, 2-1 Angels in top of the the 9th, same scenario as last night.

Here we go. Uh-oh. Thornton's not exactly a huge bargain contract at his age and getting paid like a psuedo-closer. It's a fair deal, but he shouldn't be the most coveted LHR unless you're a team with a top 5-7 payroll.

Teahen did everything right he possibly could on that play, Jackson just BARELY beat it out. Huge inning for Peavy here to get through still scoreless for the Tiggers.

The Indians sure have been pesky at home this year. I think they have something like 10 or 11 walkoff victories alone at Jacobs/Progressive. And yet they can't beat the White Sox to save their lives. Around 50 pitches for Verlander through 3. Pretty normal pattern for him.

What is all this talk about DeAza? Benching Rios? Who would be gone, Lilly or Vizquel?

Why I'm not swimming in Bali in hopes that Jake Peavy's throwing 93-94-95 instead of 88-92, I'm not sure. We've seen too many games start out with a 2 or 3 run lead, with zero added on later while the other team slowly pecked away...especially at Jake in innings 4-6. Crosses fingers.

The Astros are asking for multiple impact players in any deal involving Hunter Pence, according to Jon Heyman, Jayson Stark and Buster Olney. Pence earns $6.9MM this year and is due for a raise this offseason, when he could see his salary jump to the $10MM range. He'll earn another raise for the 2013 campaign before hitting free agency that offseason. Here's the latest on Pence, who is one of few impact hitters available: The Phillies are targeting Pence, but the price for him is rather high, writes CSNPhilly.com's Jim Salisbury. Houston would probably want a package that begins with Domonic Brown. The Phillies might also have to include another top talent along with him. If Pence is making $2 million more than CQ this year and will make at least $1.5-2 million more than Quentin in 2012, why shouldn't the White Sox be getting a very good prospect back for him? Maybe not #1-30 or so, but there's absolutely no reason we shouldn't get a consensus Top 30-80 guy or a COUPLE of Top 6-10 prospects from an organization with a lot of minor league depth. Besides Beltran, who's out there? And Beltran's going to cost 2.5X as much in terms of additional payroll added on...

Obligatory...I should be enjoying the beauty of Bali, Indonesia (OR spending quality time with family...reading every classic novel ever written...learning how to do latch-hook), anything besides suffering with a foundering White Sox team for 6 months and hundreds if not thousands of hours per year. We can't even get 1-5/0-6 or 5-1/6-0. We're permanently stuck in purgatory or an abyss...or maybe it's the river Styx and the Grim Reaper is ferrying us across but we're neither dead nor alive and never being allowed to reach our final destination.

They don't have .300 hitters stacked up in their line-up. They do have the best hitter in baseball, Cabrera, and V-Mart (whose power is down but so was Juan Gonzalez in that park). The All-Star catcher in Avila hitting 8th, Boesch and then Peralta and we know how good Carlos Guillen can be against us when he's actually healthy. That leaves 3B (which they're in the process of addressing), Magglio Ordonez and Austin Jackson as the 3 "weak" points.

Well, you're certainly going to see MORE fingers pointed at KW over Dunn/Rios than Ozzie, there's very little debate over that. Looking back over this season, the point that might be most rued is not bringing up Viciedo 2-3 weeks ago when he was white-hot at Charlotte. That's the the point in time when Villain #1 was officially transferring from Juan Pierre and the possibility Dunn would never turn this season around was dawning on most fans and certainly the front office. As always, we have the pitching to make a run at the big teams like Yankees/Red Sox in the playoffs, but that's a little bit more questionable now with Peavy struggling so much with his stuff and Humber falling back to earth a little. If the playoffs were to start today, I'm not even sure who I would go with as my Top 3 besides 1) Buehrle and 2) definitely not Peavy. Probably Danks and Jackson. Although it's really impossible to imagine skipping over Humber based on a couple of average starts and going with Edwin just because he "seems" hot again. And benching Rios and Dunn still leaves another huge issue, 3B. Every time you fix a gaping hole in the dike, another one or two pops up in our line-up. For most of the season, we've been getting nothing from 4-5 slots (minimum) on a consistent basis. The best thing to do is find a veteran 3B who won't cost them Viciedo but will give them more offensively than Teahen/Vizquel and NOT kill them defensively. And that's not going to be easy to do, obviously. And I agree about Dayan and DeAza...although at this point, I can't imagine them doing it. The time to make the changes would have been over the All-Star break, and that's the time when SUPPOSEDLY Rios and Dunn were going to lead us in the 2nd half. It seems Ozzie and KW were determined to give them more time to fight through this, right or wrong. And there is precedence for this. We benched Swisher for DeWayne Wise in the heat of a pennant race, although he wasn't a well-like "White Sox veteran" like Dunn, Pierre or even Rios (don't really know if he's well-liked, but I don't think he's hated either because his teammates would have completely turned on him with how he's played so poorly for 7-8/10 months out of his Sox career).

Moustakas now 0 for 19 on the season against the Sox. 5 K's. Really should have pinch-hit there, but they're so sensitive about his confidence these days.

By my count, that's the fourth extra inning game out of 8 total.

This won't end well. 3-5 against the Royals? Really? What more evidence do they need that something...ANYTHING...needs to be changed.

Except the Indians lost and the Tigers are losing again. Minnesota might be only 1/2 game back. Quite the turnaround from the 8th inning in Minnesota last night.

But you also have to adjust for those pitching ratings being, from first glance. pedestrian. Same thing with the hitting...playing half the games at USCF. If you do the park-adjusted ratings (baseball-reference), you'll come up with a much different set of comparisons.

And Rios stupefied everyone by collecting 2 hits in one game even.

Twins bail out the White Sox and possibly save their season by walking off Chris Perez. 2-1 Twins. Bases loaded two-run single by Danny Valencia after Mauer walk, Cuddyer double and Thome was intentionally walked.