caulfield12

.367 for Rios. What Farmer said was that KW loved the aggressive and way the ball jumped off Viciedo's bat, but he's lost some of that aggressive because of 1) the steady diet of offspeed/breaking pitches and 2) the encouragement to be more patient and take more walks. So he's lost some of his initial aggressiveness you saw in 2010 with the Sox and become a bit more tentative instead of instinctual, which is causing him to be inbetween a lot (see Morel and Beckham) and seem like he has more of a slider-speed bat. Before, he always locked onto the fastball and was ready to swing whenever he came up to the plate. As Hawk's always saying, you have to have a plan up there...eliminate one of the pitcher's best pitches and make him beat you with his 2nd or 3rd pitch if he can do it, you tip your cap.

Nice looking lefty reliever....good stuff.

Fastball pitcher, meet Paul Konerko's bat.

QUOTE (greg775 @ Apr 23, 2012 -> 09:47 PM) Danny Manning was a 2-time all star in the NBA and was nothing to write home about. it happens. So was Bill Self in high school. How about the Royals actually win a game at home before a Lawrence reference, lol? Peavy now at 2.02 ERA for the season, 89 pitches. Jake will at least start the 8th, but a baserunner reaches and he's probably gone....although I'm sure Robin would love to get him a complete game shutout if possible.

"Too low, too low." Peavy got lucky that ball wasn't elevated.

He's been pitching well for them. Last time, I think he had a complete game shut-out or close to it. That ball DeAza just hit in about 90% of MLB stadiums (outside of Fenway) is another homer...but it's April, nightgame in Oakland. But IMPRESSIVE pop to the opposite field there.

Mitchell with another BB. Saladino 1 for 4 (single) but has 3 RBI's. Loman with a very good game.

QUOTE (OilCan @ Apr 23, 2012 -> 08:27 PM) Or that guy from Batman, you know, the back breaker. Ooops, thinking of Batman and wrote Spidey, lol. There's been so many posts in the Dark Knight Rises thread, it's probably the only movie-related thread I've never read much of there...

LOL at Alex Rios, now at .354 Viciedo jammed himself a bit there....that's been his tendency the first couple of weeks.

The Twins have a runner on 3rd with no outs last inning (Mauer up) and they somehow managed not to score, could have had the lead but now the Red Sox are gone ahead 6-5 in the top of the 9th. Still will be yet another test of the Red Sox bullpen. They brought in Bard to face Mauer, so clearly that experiment with him as a starter is already over.

QUOTE (flavum @ Apr 23, 2012 -> 05:48 PM) Next time I'll use a "Gee" in front of "wonder why", with an eyeroll emoticon. Sorry, wasn't even paying attention to who posted. 50% of the time, it's a real or honest question...you never know. Lincecum got a ROUGH win today, but he really was laboring with his control against the Mets. He had a ton of K's, but his pitch count got well over 100 in the fifth inning. It was to the point where Bochy was going to have to pull him out of a 6-1 lead (bases loaded though) and take away a win because of his control issues and the pitch count. Most of the game, his fastball was 90-91 but he was routinely in the 88-90 MPH range in the last couple of innings. He probably didn't quiet all the concerns and quiet whispers around baseball about his health....did seem to have his offspeed stuff working a B+ level at least.

But we have no other impact bats within sight in AA/AAA (please, don't mention McPherson, Dan Johnson or Conor Jackson)...so we go with Viciedo and see what he can do. We're certainly not going to trade him after ONE bad week. He was around .300 with 2 homers in the first ten games...well over a 30 homer pace for the entire season. Let's relax a little bit, we've always acknowledged the Cuban players starting off slowly, although the weather hasn't been exceptionally cool compared to years past.

Mitchell, 1 for 1 to start the game, still well over .300. 20 K's and 12 walks in 75 total plate appearances. Whenever I see Bayne's name here in the minors section, it reminds me of that guy who won the Daytona 500 (Trevor) or Spider-Man.

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Apr 23, 2012 -> 07:10 PM) He can receive credit and I give him credit. You really think you have me pegged, but you're really not close. The bottom line is there is some luck in a perfect game, bloop hits, swinging bunts, someone is going to hit the ball hard at some point,but the credit should go to Humber. There was hardly anything but strikeouts and routine plays Saturday. One ball I thought was hit harder than average was caught by Rios, and a foul ball was hit pretty well. Other than that, it was about as easy as it gets. Yeah, the Ackley ball to RCF. The batter that really had me nervous, though, was Saunders. After starting off 3-0, and Humber running out of gas a little bit, thought he was done for, in terms of the perfect game. Lillibridge had a "pretty good" catch in LF, but it wasn't highlight film material or anything like that. What would be even better would be having Don Cooper with his Brooklyn/NY accent...getting him some more pub. Maybe that would help us get even more free agent pitchers or reclamation projects in the future. There aren't very many many pitching or hitting coaches (at least outside of serious baseball fanatics). I mean, how many casual baseball fans would know that Mike Maddux is the pitching coach for the Rangers, for example?

QUOTE (Dick Allen @ Apr 23, 2012 -> 06:57 PM) Cowley knows it was Ozzie. When Buehrle was on Letterman, he had Wise with him. I think it would be great if Humber had the Guillens. Umm....why would that be great? Now following you, here. Just for entertainment's sake? Because Ventura would be too boring? Because Ozzie might say something to get himself kicked out of baseball?

I'll stick take KC bbq over Memphis, but you'll get lots of arguments here I'm sure.

QUOTE (Jake @ Apr 23, 2012 -> 03:02 PM) Competing with Texas in Texas (holding their offense down fairly well), beating Detroit 2/3, THEN sweeping Seattle in Seattle along with good starts from Dunn, Rios, Peavy, AJ, Paulie are why analysts like us so far. The fans don't know s*** and that is literally the worst way to evaluate the team. That's asinine. I'm not going to pretend I evaluate every single team so I won't say definitively where we fall -- but 10 seems to be fair based on our performance so far. Well, most Sox fans are more educated than, say, Cubs' fans. Until the product out on the field proves itself, sustains that success for an extended period of time....driving the bandwagon effect, that's when Sox fans will start to come out. It's like those two Japanese dudes in MAJOR LEAGUE kept saying..."yeah, but they still suck" all the way through the season until they finally jumped on board at the end, too. Except the fans' acceptance or embrace of a winning team will trail their actual performance by about 4-6 weeks. It's only 7 games (four weeknight against an Orioles team nobody cares about or expects much from)...but we are 28th in the majors in attendance. That's not so easy to do. The Royals, without having won a single game at home and with a 3-12 record, are still outdrawing us at home. Those are facts we can't argue with, incontrovertible. We can explain them or excuse them or rationalize them away...but they still exist on paper or on computer monitors.

QUOTE (Quinarvy @ Apr 23, 2012 -> 03:12 PM) Caulfield finally outsmarted himself. LOL. Maybe from being a history minor and the fact that I've been to nearly every Civil War battlefield in the US, lol. Instead of going to Disneyland or SeaWorld, our family (because of my dad) took me all across the country to see those places....and actually, I have fonder memories of my childhood as a result, even though it was never my desire to become a "Civil War buff," as they're always made fun of on SNL, haha. One of my cousins, Gary Clifton Wisler, wrote tons and tons of books (mostly young adult fiction) about the Civil War, Texas, cowboys and Indians...so that was always a part of life growing up. Some of them can probably still be found at amazon or at your local library. He even beat a Louis La'mour book once for the Western Spur writing award, if I remember correctly. He actually had a heart attack when he was only 53, so I'm sure he would have been shocked to see what his Rangers have done the last two years, had he lived to see it. As far as comic books/marvey civil wars, never paid much attention like some at this site do, although I've seen almost all of the comics-inspired movies, even silly ones like THE PUNISHER or GHOST RIDER.

QUOTE (flavum @ Apr 23, 2012 -> 01:56 PM) Ivan Rodriguez had a press conference to announce his retirement, and he refused to take questions. Wonder why? Steroids/PED-related questions from the non-Rangers/beat writers who would stir up the past. He's probably more concerned that it will affect his HOF chances to have that dragged through the coals. In actuality, he's probably the strongest argument for including someone because of their defensive abilities (like a Bill Mazeroski at 2B) as a catcher...forget all the offensive numbers he posted.

If anything, the White Sox should be somewhere in the middle 10 teams, 14th-16th seems pretty fair. Beating Seattle or throwing a perfect game doesn't make your team jump 10+ spots magically in one day or weekend. That's a bit of an overreaction or overcorrection. Maybe a better indicator of belief is not the pundits/analysts but our attendance numbers. If they start to tick up from big walk-ups, that's always the best trailing indicator in terms of looking at how good the White Sox are actually going to be...if they can overcome the skepticism of their own fans and detractors.

QUOTE (Reddy @ Apr 23, 2012 -> 11:04 AM) how f***ing funny is it that everyone's clamoring to be the first to say "oh, no the sox are good, we knew that all along!" just so that at the end of the year people don't think they were all idiots. We were sort of in a similar position at mid 2009. We'd actually gotten to the playoffs the previous year, but you had Buehrle's no-hitter just like Humber's this weekend, all the Peavy talk, acquiring Alex Rios....but it all kind of fell apart. Of course, the buzz this season isn't nearly what it was back then, but it's largely because everyone was so disheartened by last season...maybe we're all hoping against hope that things can be turned around in a single year and we can catch lightning in a bottle like 2000, 2005, 2008 or even mid-season of 2010. It's not exactly unprecedented for the White Sox to surprise people when nobody's predicting success, or the opposite, to crash when they're the popular pick.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 23, 2012 -> 02:18 PM) I'd have to go with 1. Contreras 2. Floyd 3. Thornton 4. Jenks 5. Humber 6. Loiaza Loaiza could have been at the top, but he didn't sustain it past one year. Contreras was a long time contributor, and was a trainwreck before he got here. Same with Floyd. Really hard to do, when it comes down to it. I would argue the opposite, we took Esteban off the scrap heap, out of nowhere. I think he was a non-roster invite that year, along with Gil Heredia...not only does he look like the best pitcher in the American League for most of the 2003 season, you end up the next year turning him around for the one pitcher who puts you over the top to win the World Series in Contreras. So the reverberating echo of that one 2003 season singlehandedly launched us into the Garcia/Contreras acquisitions and a title. And then you have to look at the amount of time that Esteban spent here...compared to some of those other guys. And Jenks, another guy off waivers who was having loads of personal problems but always had the arm/talent/stuff...so hard to put these guys in any kind of order. One of the only and major criticisms of Cooper has been his ability to work with Hudson a couple of years ago...even then, you can understand a pitching coach in a "win now" mode again falling in love with Edwin Jackson's arm and saying he can work with that. And Jackson was nearly great for us for most of 2010, too. But he's no miracle worker...he can't turn a Chris Marquez or Van Benschoten or Kip Wells or Mitch Mustain into Cy Young. You have to have the stuff, the talent and ability. Same thing with Aardsma, Sisco, Masset, MacDougal, etc.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 23, 2012 -> 01:58 PM) I am going to stay out on my limb and say I do not see us in that position. It has been a nice couple of weeks, but I'm still not convinced we will sustain this for 162 games. I think we are going to be a middle of the pack-ish team. You're absolutely right about this. I said it before the roadtrip, too. With the size of those stadiums, the colder April air...we're likely to have success and probably look better than we really are in the process. So here we are. When you came into the SEA series having won at around an 80-85% clip against them 2/3 or a sweep wasn't hard to predict. And Oakland has a pretty weak offensive line-up too, outside of Cespedes in the middle when you pitch to him. Then it all comes down to how we play in the AL Central. We have the advantage of being weighted towards all these match-ups with the Twins, Indians and Royals. Can we beat THOSE teams, and at a .600 clip? Then it's doable, because you'd have to think that the Rangers/Angels will beat up on Oakland/Seattle and that with the quality and depth of the AL East, those teams beating each other up night after night after night, there's the possiblity afforded to sneak into the 2nd wildcard because of the lack of quality in our divsion vis a via the AL East. I mean...you have what was the best team in baseball for 4 1/2 months last season possibly being the worst team in that division...probably the Red Sox will catch the Orioles and the Blue Jays, but you just never know what will happen with the Valentine situation. That team might completely implode...or they'll go on an amazing tear at some point and quiet the doubters.

You probably have to give a little credit to Cooper with Danks too, at least the breakout season in 2008. We're not there in the clubhouse or on the field with them and in ST, so it's hard to ascertain, other than the bits and pieces we hear in the press or in interviews. For example, we know Mark Buehrle also had a pronounced effect on some of our starters, getting them to work more quickly or helping them with some of their secondary pitches, etc. Providing insight about how to pitch to certain batters, things like that. Unfortunately, pitching advice seems to payoff with more immediate dividends than Gordon Beckham spending so much time around Paul Konerko picking his brain about hitting.

As soon as we're free of Rios/Dunn, we're going out and committing huge dollars again to David Wright and throwing all the "develop for the future" talk into rubbish bin? I thought the idea of rebuilding was to time the acquisition of an impact bat from outside the organization (like a Wright) with the arrival of a group of players cresting from the minors at about the same time? Who is that group? Viciedo, Morel, Beckham, Flowers/Phegley and DeAza (well, he's 28 already)? Now the success of the pitching staff is causing this ugly situation to rear itself again...where we are desperate to add one or two more pieces to the everyday line-up to compete now, but we clearly don't have those pieces in our own minor league system. Just not seeing any possibility with the attendance being what it is so far (yes, I know....attendance is now only 20-25-30% of revenues generated on a per season basis for most MLB teams and is lessening and lessening in importance compared to other revenue drivers) that JR and the Board will forget all the mistakes of the last 3-4 years and go out and make another one. Isn't the whole point to go forward in a different way, instead of going with the Mississippi Riverboat Gambler approach to assembling competitive clubs? Build with young starting pitching...build SOMEWHERE. We have to have a focus and direction and strategy with where we're going...at least we should.