The assumption when the fourth and fifth-place teams in the AL Central square off in the finale of a four-game set, and drag themselves, the paid attendants, the stadium staff and broadcast crews through a four-hour, 46-minute, 24-run war, that this is awful, low-quality baseball; a joyless slog. Let’s operate under a different assumption, that […]
Tag: Jose Abreu
Twins 8, White Sox 5: Let’s not even pretend to understand what happened
The Twins entered Thursday night’s contest twirling their way through a 13-game losing streak that will probably get frequently referred to when retracing how they lost 100 games in 2016. During said streak, the Twins had allowed 96 runs, or around 7.3 per game. If one wanted to gradually transition a major league team into […]
White Sox 9, Mariners 3: Four-homer night backs a typically brilliant Quintana
What will be more difficult? Explaining to future generations how impossibly nasty Chris Sale was in his heyday when decades of pitching development will make his pitch mix and delivery seem ordinary, or explaining the sublime nature of Jose Quintana‘s mastery over all that he can control. 1. A leadoff double from Leonys Martin put Quintana […]
Jose Abreu’s Hot Streak–Good News and Bad News
The offense has been terrible this season and it’s tiresome. It’s tiresome both because this is not a new experience, but also because it was completely foreseeable and preventable. Almost every hitter on this roster has delivered a season within the reasonable bands of expectation.* Until a month or ago, or so, the biggest exception was […]
White Sox 9, Phillies 1: Total dominance
The Phillies are not a good baseball team. They’re in the middle of a genuine rebuild, their hot start to the season was mostly helium, they have a moribund offense and no parts of their promising young pitching were on display Tuesday night with Jake Thompson on the hill. A Sox blowout shouldn’t have been […]
White Sox need to face facts about chronic offense shortcomings
I’m not sure what I expected. Kenny Williams speaking to assembled media on a golf course is not exactly the forum for a public bloodletting on the state and fate of the White Sox, or even the ideal place for an adjustment on their general policy to err on the side of opaqueness. But in […]
South Side Morning 5: The joy of Sale and Quintana
With the Sox season having gone from one of their best starts in memory to dead by July, and with nearly all of their rosterable rookies maimed beyond reason, the 2016 season has lost a lot of the traditional reasons to watch it. That Chris Sale and Jose Quintana are saddled with this group is […]
White Sox 4, Athletics 2: A rare, easy day for Quintana
Baseball often gets–Praised? Bemoaned? Slandered?–for its lack of predictability, but back-to-back games of Chris Sale and Jose Quintana facing fill-in rotation options for the A’s have gone about as predictably as could have been hoped. 1. Quintana himself was far from dominant, not that immolating his opponents is often his path to success. He needed […]
White Sox 6, Athletics 2: This was how things were supposed to be
Having the 53-70 A’s roll in town is, typically, a good way for everything for operate like it was always supposed. Time was, just a Chris Sale start was enough to make the Sox look like a killer outlet, but holding back his best stuff as he sticks to a conservation plan that begun running […]
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 […]