Pierzynski will turn 40 just before New Year’s Eve, and has been exiled to Atlanta these last two seasons, so a quiet exit was always likely, though very ill-fitting for the loudest, most rambunctious member of the 2005 World Series team. How can he leave the game without inflaming the hatred of the league once more, telling one last umpire “you’re f****** brutal,” before stepping on Casey Blake’s chest, swigging a rally beer and exiting the field?

At the risk of being extremely naive in my dismissal of the threat of Pierzynski of being made into another inexperienced player-turned manager for the Sox, the Sox fan adulation of him is fine, and overemphasized as evidence of their base and meatball core. The point of World Series, and pursuing them at full-bore is that they can be cherished forever, and everything we have learned about catching in the decade-plus since suggests it’s hard to overrate Pierzynski’s role on a team powered by dominant pitching.

2. Chris Sale threw three more innings than Justin Verlander on Sunday, pushing him ahead for the American League lead for innings pitched, despite making two fewer starts than Verlander and David Price. This was supposed to be an element of his Cy Young case that he ceded with his five-game suspension, but in throwing 7.2 innings per start in 10 outs since the All-Star break, he’s managed to not only overtake the entire field, but do so fairly quickly.

Sale started the eighth Sunday having already thrown 104 pitches, clipped 120 twice last month, and has now thrown 110 or more in his last seven times out, so it’s a fair speculation that no one else is being used this aggressively. Sale, at least publicly, refuses to give a hoot about the awards race, and even gave an all-time sad quote in response to being informed of making it to his fourth-straight season with 200 strikeouts.

Chris Sale on 4 years of 200+ K’s: “There’s not a single part of me that wouldn’t give all that to be in the playoffs four years in a row.”

— Paul Roumeliotis (@PaulRoumel) September 11, 2016

But while this usage is likely reckless and serves no purpose other to pad his resume, after sitting through endless blind speculation that his weird delivery doomed him to an inevitable elbow blowout, seeing him take the mantle of the ultimate workhorse is amusing, to say the least.

3. Brett Lawrie last appeared in a game for the Birmingham Barons on Aug. 20, the minor league season and any opportunity to play rehab games within it is over, and the Sox themselves have only 20 games left, so it was pretty easy to determine that Lawrie was likely done for the year before Robin Ventura acknowledged it over the weekend. If he’s done, 2016 will be his second-lowest total for games played since he was first called up mid-season in 2011, which is pretty notable given how injury-marred his career has already been.

In the meantime, Tyler Saladino has hit .296/.321/.421 in 40 games since Lawrie went down, with just an 18 percent strikeout rate, which has served to quell a little bit of concern about how full-time play would suit the utility man. Saladino hasn’t seemed quite as comfortable at second as all of the other infield positions he’s been trusted with, but there’s no doubt that he has the physical tools for the position.

The White Sox are so starved for some sort of depth to deal from that any hint of two competent players at one position conjures up speculation of a trade, but between Lawrie’s questionable prospects for staying healthy, and Saladino’s questionable prospects for producing at a starter level in a full-time role, maybe just having…infield depth…for once…would be worth trying.

4. The White Sox released groundball specialist Ryan Webb this week, ending injury-marred efforts to revive his career in park where groundball specialists have a lot of value. Looking at the list of minor league transactions revealed that Terry Doyle–a few months shy of 31 and four years removed from asking to be released from the Sox to go to Japan, as it became clear the finesse righty was not in their major league plans–is still kicking around and back in affiliated ball. He’s with the Diamondbacks too, so a major league appearance might still be possible.

5. It’s a little hard to comprehend still that Carlos Rodon threw a 93 mph wipeout slider to strike out Paulo Orlando on his 116th pitch of the night on Friday. It’s not really a point that needs to be made right now while Rodon is still just 23, and is in the middle of a second half where he’s recorded a 2.52 ERA over eight starts and posted a nearly four-to-one strikeout to walk ratio, but these are the sort of elite tools that force teams to give a pitcher as many chances as he needs to develop into a starter. It’s also the sort of overwhelming ability that made it hard for Rodon to grow in the minors and forced him to grow up in the majors, but that could be working out just fine.

Lead Image Credit: David Banks // USA Today Sports Images

When Tyler Flowers was acquired from the Braves for Javier Vazquez in December of 2008, it was immediately assumed he was the heir apparent to A.J. Pierzynski. Flowers was ranked as the 72nd best prospect in baseball before 2010 by Kevin Goldstein, who said at the time “Flowers has the kind of offensive skills rarely found in a catcher, with plus power and an excellent approach at the plate.”

Despite the glowing praise, that offensive upside never materialized for Flowers in Chicago.  In 431 games over parts of seven seasons (the last three of which saw Flowers in a starting role), Flowers put up a .223/.289/.376 slash line, good for a well-below average .237 TAv. Even in a league where good offensive catchers are scarce, Flowers’ production with the bat simply wasn’t enough, and the White Sox declined to tender him a contract and instead signed a likely platoon of Dioner Navarro and Alex Avila to one-year deals for a total of  $6.5 million.

This move undoubtedly was done with plans to improve the team’s offense. While Navarro and Avila are unlikely to hit like they did at their peaks (each have posted a season of at least .300 TAv, though Navarro only did so in part time duty with the Cubs in 2010), platooning them should provide an offensive boost. Indeed, PECOTA projects a .259 and .256 TAv for Avila and Navarro, respectively, versus a projected .242 TAv for Flowers with the Braves.

While these moves make sense from an offensive standpoint, both new White Sox catchers represent quite a massive downgrade from Flowers in the receiving department. While none of the three are good blockers (and Flowers was actually the worst pitch blocker in baseball in 2015), Flowers has made a name for himself over the last couple years as one of the better pitch framers in baseball, culminating in a 2015 season where he was the third-most valuable pitch framer in baseball. Avila and Navarro, on the other hand, both were negative framers, with Avila posting the second-worst CSAA in baseball among catchers who received at least 1,000 pitches.

Is sacrificing framing value to this degree worth the offensive upgrade? According to PECOTA, it is not. Flowers is projected to post a higher WARP than either Navarro or Avila in 2016. So did the White Sox actually get worse with these moves?

Maybe. If we can assume that framing is a relatively static skill and can be mostly predicted by past performance, they certainly did. Navarro and Avila should be serviceable as an offensive platoon, but Flowers was just too good behind the plate to let go like this. But what if it’s not a static skill? In the last two seasons, year-to-year correlation of individual framing performance has absolutely deteriorated. Catchers are not as good a bet to maintain their framing advantage (or disadvantage) from the previous season. This could be for a number of reasons, many of which could be connected to the growing awareness of the value of framing. If teams recently found out how valuable framing is, it would stand to reason they would encourage their catchers to work on the framing, which could very possibly lead to leaderboards looking very different year-to-year.

It’s quite interesting to note here that Flowers himself talked up how much he worked on his framing and subsequently shot up the league leaderboards. This was very unlikely something that he did without involvement by the White Sox, suggesting they weren’t simply unaware of the difference between his framing ability and that of his replacements. So maybe — and this is certainly a very big maybe — the White Sox are confident in their ability to teach and improve their catchers’ framing abilities? If this were the case, it would certainly make the move to Avila and Navarro much more palatable. Flowers’ bat was poor enough that it really hurt the White Sox to have him in the lineup every day, and if the gap in his framing value to his replacements could be trimmed down even a bit, replacing him would be an upgrade.

Or, maybe, the White Sox do not see the same value in framing and simply wanted a somewhat cheap offensive upgrade. In this case, the negative effect on White Sox pitchers may end up costing them dearly.