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AL Wildcard Game: Rays vs A's


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1 hour ago, maxjusttyped said:

Does anyone think the Sox could have helped Semien develop into a 7.5 WAR player?

Good question. They had him long enough to make him a better fielder yet it took individual attention from Ron Washington to get there. You can never say how much coaching helps along with maturity/desire . After all it took him until he was 29 to get that kind of WAR in one season.

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44 minutes ago, CaliSoxFanViaSWside said:

Good question. They had him long enough to make him a better fielder yet it took individual attention from Ron Washington to get there. You can never say how much coaching helps along with maturity/desire . After all it took him until he was 29 to get that kind of WAR in one season.

I listened to an interview with Susan Slusser (A's beat writer) and she talked about the A's building Semien's defensive skills from the bottom up. They retaught him how to play the position. It was a pretty brutal indictment of the Sox player development staff.

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10 hours ago, maxjusttyped said:

I know he isn't everyone's cup of tea, but Benetti is crushing it on the statcast broadcast. I feel very lucky to have him broadcasting Sox games & hopefully he doesn't get scooed up by ESPN or TBS as their full-time national guy.

I think Benetti has great potential and has come a long way already. He just grates on me with the cute stuff sometimes. The "one question" needs to go. But he does come across as likable and is a good descriptive announcer.

As far as the Rays fan bases goes: It may shock some people but not everybody loves baseball. And that stadium doesn't even look like a baseball stadium.

I saw one funny thing when I went a Sox playoff game in Tampa in '08. In between innings, they had a comedian doing a little bit on the jumbotron. He said he had been a Rays fan for a long time. Since June in fact. No, he then said, since July.

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12 hours ago, maxjusttyped said:

I listened to an interview with Susan Slusser (A's beat writer) and she talked about the A's building Semien's defensive skills from the bottom up. They retaught him how to play the position. It was a pretty brutal indictment of the Sox player development staff.

One of the things about the Semien trade is that the quotes by the A's people have always been shots at the White Sox's development staff that are not meant to be shots at them - just matter of fact statements supporting their player. In 2015, Washington had a quote somewhere saying that Semien had promise but he'd never done basic fielding drills at shortstop so he had to start from scratch. He said that not to take shots at the White Sox, but to support his guy when he was having a huge problem with making errors. But, that was describing a guy who came up through each level at our system and, although the org pigeonholed him as a utility player, he played SS more than any other position. How on Earth does a guy come up through a team's entire system, playing 100+ games as a starting shortstop, without doing basic fielding drills as a shortstop?

I'm not sure how it works with the guys today, that could easily have been part of the Ventura "take it easy don't work to hard don't practice it'll be fine" mentality and it may have somewhat gone away today. At least I hope so. 

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