I cannot imagine what possible inspiration there would be to discuss anything besides the excellent, excellent MLB postseason to date, and since I cannot imagine it, it's a major hindrance to writing about it. The AL Central results in the playoffs so far have been rather extreme, and discussing the fallout can only be fun.
Read MoreTuesday night’s game was objectively amazing. The Royals were such an unrelenting, unkillable beast, there was no semblance of my weeks--nay, months--spent resenting their stumble into media darling status, I simply could not do anything but admire the complete triumph of their approach.
Read MoreMost of the gang got together--James Fegan (@JRFegan), Nick Schaefer (@Nick_TCS) and Matt Adams (@2015WhiteSox)--to wrap up the last threads of the 2014 White Sox season, talk about Paul Konerko's goodbye, other weird stories about the Sox roster usage, mourn the bullpen, pine for Melky Cabrera in free agency and...
Read MoreMuch of the discussion lately among the long-running email thread between The Catbird Seat writers has more or less centered around the AL Central race between the Tigers, Royals and (to a lesser extent) Indians.
With apologies to Detroit and Cleveland, the heart of the discussion has been about the Kansas City Royals and the fact that they appear set to break a 29-year postseason drought with either a Wild Card berth or a Central Division title.
Read MoreAnxiety sets in at different times for everyone, but I started to realize the 2012 White Sox might be screwed on the night of Thursday, Sept. 20, a night much like Monday night. The Sox spent the evening blowing an early 3-0 lead in slow-motion. They at least looked like they could escape a tense ninth inning when Matt Thornton came on with two out to face Eric Hosmer, who would finish the season with a .591 OPS against left-handed pitching.
Read MoreIt's always preferable for the white Sox to play well, and show progress from the important members of their franchise. But if they're not, if they're going have Jose Abreu and Adam Dunn combined for six strikeouts, while Tyler Flowers posts the only multi-hit game on the day, if they're going to spoil another Jose Quintana gem and get into a knowingly hopeless dry heave-athon with a bullpen infinitely more ability to carry on a dry heave-athon...well,then, fine. This is a fine result. Go right ahead and let Mike Moustakas knee a ball out of Tyler Flowers' glove fro the game-deciding run. See if I care.
Read MoreFive innings worth of a crisply pitched game is lot of innings. It's most of the game, even! It's certainly plenty to ask of Scott Carroll. But as Carroll snuck out of the fifth inning, throwing something that vaguely resembled a wipeout slider but obviously couldn't be, it was obvious that the Sox were not preparing the calvary to rescue Carroll at the first spot of trouble--as they have none--and instead hoping to stretch Carroll out for as long as he could go.
Read MoreI am achieving a level of true baseball impartiality: I loathe all teams and the absurd notions of uniqueness that float around each one.
Read MoreThat Chris Sale guy sure is good. A statistically dominant 8:1 K/BB outing over seven one-run innings that is instantly dismissed from any discussion of the best 20 starts of his still very brief career. Perhaps one of the tricks of managing Sale's workload is his resilience. He doesn't follow a linear path of decline over a start. He started leaving his changeup up in the fourth inning and got hammered for a bit and needed a relay line to save him from a crooked number inning, then corrected the problem and burned worms for the entire fifth. He had to reach back for extra life in his fastball to blow his way through a tight scoring situation and strike out the side in the sixth, then returned with nearly 100 pitches and cruised through a perfect seventh.
Read MoreI will almost certainly write several more articles on this topic before next season starts. But, with the All Star Game come and gone, the Amateur Draft Deadline in our rearview mirror, and teams having played between 95-100 games this season, it seems as good a time as any to take stock of the White Sox' competition for the near future.
Read MoreHector Noesi actually looked pretty good to start the game on Saturday. He had a very clear plan the first time through the lineup, getting ahead of hitters on strike one, sitting about 92, and then attacking very aggressively once getting to two strikes, dialing it up to 94-95, going up and in on righties, and sweeping his breaking stuff everywhere. At first he only allowed a few unlucky hits on weak contact that went for no damage. Then the fourth inning was a combination of poor control by Noesi, atrocious defense (a Leury Garcia error and a Dayan Viciedo-it-wasn't-called-an-official-error-but-he-messed-up) meant the Royals would put up a 5-spot. Danny Duffy was on his game and that was far more than he would need.
Read MoreFriday the 13th is supposed to be unlucky. Jeremy Guthrie destroys the White Sox. One had hoped that these two things together would cancel each other out and Chicago would once again pull to .500. Those hopes were immediately dashed as Quintana started the game by allowing five straight hits, and the game was instantly out of reach. Jeremy Guthrie, who has been coasting with a K-rate below 5 for years now, struck out 9 batters and easily protected the lead he was staked.
Read MoreBetween the prominent presence of Royals fans in the Internet baseball writing landscape - Joe Posnanski, Rany Jazayerli, Jeff Passan, and Rob Neyer to name a few - the Royals' recent trolling of the White Sox, and my petty schadenfreude when they fail, I have paid a lot of attention to the Royals in the past few years. Dayton Moore has also just been interesting in his own right, making grand proclamations only to backpedal from them as his promises of a winning team in 5-years was then revised to 6, 7, 8 and then 10 years as the Royals kept losing. Moore has his strengths as a GM. He added a lot of talent to the Royals' minor league system* and got a very good return on Zack Greinke from the Brewers. Salvador Perez looks like a nice find, and he's squeezed more value out of Jeremy Guthrie and Bruce Chen than one might anticipate. At the same time, since his hiring in June of 2008, the only hitters on the major league roster who look like they can hack it are (1) Eric Hosmer, a #3 overall draft pick who plays first base and is currently slugging .391; (2) Lorenzo Cain, a player I like a lot, who was part of that Greinke trade I was praising earlier; and (3) Salvador Perez, not necessarily because I think he's a very good hitter, but rather that I think he's a good enough hitter for a good fielding catcher. Otherwise, the offense still largely depends on Alex Gordon and Billy Butler, two guys acquired by Allard Baird before Moore arrived.
Read MoreQuintana had simply glorious command. Back when there wasn't much to his game, he always had a knack for putting his pitches where they wouldn't be crushed. Now that it's mixed with 90-93 mph velocity, an 87 mph cutter and the newer feature of a slider that looks more like a wipeout offering than a show-me pitch, it seems like he should never fail. He's too precise.
His defeat Wednesday night was thus an appropriately infuriating collection of unlucky tappers and terrible timing.
Read MoreNotorious White Sox nemesis Jeremy Guthrie is the last hurdle between the White Sox and A) a sweep of the Royals, and B) getting back to .500 after sitting between one and three games below during each of the last 11 days when the two teams meet in Wednesday's series finale at Kaufmann Stadium at 7:05 p.m.
Read MoreLast night was a rare occurrence. The starter gave up 6 runs in just 4 innings of work and somehow the team emerged victorious. Help from the opposing pitcher is necessary for this of course. Tonight that help is unlikely to come. Royals fans have come to look forward to Yordano Ventura outings much the same as White Sox fans do with Chris Sale. They don’t win every time he steps out but there’s always strikeouts. Lots of strikeouts.
Read MoreThe White Sox starting pitching situation is rough. Monday night, they sent out 29-year-old rookie Scott Carroll to get mollywhopped for the third time in a row, and after a defensive breakdown opened up the floodgates for a five-run first, they counted themselves lucky when he got through three more innings with only one more run. It was an improvement over John Danks' outing on Sunday, after all.
Read MoreImagine a world in which the White Sox did not win the Jose Abreu sweepstakes. A 2014 that never included the exciting young slugger. This is a world in which we instead sit and watch games out of pure routine, wondering when a losing streak long enough to doom the team to another 99 loss season will happen along. We may have just watched Jose Abreu, young Astros slugger manhandle our beloved Pale Hose, making this trip to Kansas City a relief. Respite from watching the opportunity missed make our lives miserable, allowing us to highlight a young pitcher’s (hopefully) triumphant return to his hometown instead of lamenting an offensively questionable immediate future.
Read MoreAfter a week of games one thing is certain — there are still 156 games to play.
Yes, it's a long season. But let's take a look at some of the more noteworthy bits and pieces we saw after six games of White Sox baseball.
Read MoreNow it’s a matter of not getting swept. But Chris Sale to the rescue! There’s the hope that this isn’t a microcosm of the season. Rattle off a couple of losses and then rely on Chris Sale to bring it back home and stop a negative streak. The series finale has arrived and regardless of the score, the outcome is a trip to the Rocky Mountains.
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