In Wednesday’s game against the Royals, Robin Ventura continued to fill out his dismal managerial resume with a number of questionable (read: bad) moves including but not limited to: intentionally walking Alcides Escobar, owner of a .587 OPS and .228(!) TAV, with two outs, intentionally walking Escobar again later in the game also with two […]
Tag: Chicago White Sox
White Sox takeaways from Saberseminar
The 2016 iteration of Saberseminar, a conference devoted to baseball scouting, statistics, and sports science, took place in Boston this past weekend. In roughly 12 hours of baseball presentations across two days, it was inevitable that topics relevant to every team would pop up; here are the portions of my notebook that pertain to the White Sox. In […]
Marlins 5, White Sox 4: Sale underwhelms as Sox comeback comes inches short
Death, taxes, government subsidies for sports stadiums, and the White Sox losing reviews on the plate-blocking rule. 1. Pinch-runner Carlos Sanchez was beaten by a strong throw home from left fielder Christian Yelich, as he tried to score the tying run in the top of the ninth after Tyler Saladino singled with two outs. The […]
White Sox 4, Marlins 2: Jose Abreu’s son probably thinks the Sox are great
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 […]
Robin Ventura and the Danger of Treating Symptoms
Do you know what the most common disease is in American household dogs and cats? It’s periodontal disease. House pets, in general, have bad oral hygiene and fairly gross teeth and gums. When left unchecked and untreated this can result in bleeding gums, cracked teeth, and systemic illness. The cure for this is obvious: clean […]
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 […]