For the first time in his young life, Dariel Abreu got to see his father play major league baseball in person, taking in the game from some nice seats behind home plate. The adorable little five-year-old Abreu has his father’s same high forehead, his same gummy smile, and showed a precocious ability to blend into […]
Author: James Fegan
Why Jose Quintana is good
It certainly was before the point I became a believer in Jose Quintana‘s ability to thrive in the long-term, but one of the first times I really noticed what he was doing, was on June 12, 2012. Single games can take on greater thematic weight in retrospect, when years of work reveal it to the […]
Royals 2, White Sox 1: Rookies perform well after Gonzalez injury, but still no offense
Conceding that the Sox cannot hit, they lost again, Danny Duffy owns them (and the rest of the league too, now), Miguel Gonzalez got hurt, and most of the results for the rest of the season are meaningless: hey hey, some good things happened Friday night! 1. Gonzalez looked really crisp for that inning he […]
Royals 3, White Sox 2 – Finally enough blown leads and offensive ineptitude to lose
It turns out there are limits to things. Limits to how long a team can stay in a game when failing to produce against 12 innings of fluff pitching (the game was 14 innings long but some of these pitchers were actually good), limits to how many one-run leads they can cough up, and limits […]
South Side Morning 5: Sale forced into a change
1. As nice as it was to see Chris Sale stabilize himself by leaning a bit more on his mid-80s changeup in the later innings, it was more of a forced adjustment than an intentional shift in approach. His slider was hanging and getting appropriately hammered early, and the approach he used last week in Detroit […]
White Sox 7, Royals 5: Frazier’s blast, two-out rally carry Sox in extras
White Sox games against Kansas City, and certainly in Kansas City, feel like a nightmare. A specific nightmare, where the impossibly slow villain that you can easily outrun is chasing you, but you keep falling down, repeatedly, and then inexplicably, and then it becomes the rule, and by the time you realize the game is […]
South Side Mid-day 5: Please be alive, Jose Abreu
1. By the end of the year, the only thing that will stand out as garishly wrong with Jose Abreu‘s raw seasonal totals is home runs. His strikeouts are down, his doubles total will be fine (though it will obviously be leaching from the home runs), even his walk rate will look fairly normal because […]
Orioles 10, White Sox 2: White Sox lose game immediately
I went to the game Sunday with my sister, with tickets I bought her for her birthday. Despite getting inside the park 10 minutes before first pitch–would have been sooner if the pounding sunshine agreed better with the digital ticket scanners that had to read confirmation codes off phone screens–we made the critical mistake of […]
Investigation into Padres could shed new light on Shields trade
Last week, the Marlins made an uninspiring trade with the Padres to add struggling starters Andrew Cashner and Colin Rea to their rotation, and wound up getting even less than they bargained for. Less than four innings into his first start in Miami, Rea left the game with elbow discomfort, and is now ticketed for […]
Orioles 7, White Sox 5: Offense saves best moments for garbage time
Somewhere on their way to a run of the mill loss to the AL East-leading Orioles centered on blowing opportunities to capitalize on three Baltimore errors in the first three innings, the Sox staged a dramatic near-comeback, allowing them to blow later, far more high-leverage opportunities. 1. Carlos Sanchez was already having a bad game, […]