Race To The Bottom: Diamondbacks Stand In The Way

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With the White Sox BASICALLY out of contention, every Monday and Thursday until the end of the regular season, we'll take a quick peek at where the White Sox stand in their 2016 MLB Draft position. The draft position is important for two reasons:

The first, very obvious reason is that the higher you pick, the better the talent pool you have to choose from. The second, slightly less obvious reason is that if the White Sox pick in the Top 10, they can sign free agents who are issued qualifying offers without forfeiting a first round draft pick.

We saw this work in the team's favor last season as they signed premium free agents Melky Cabrera and David Robertson and only had to sacrifice picks in the second and third rounds because their draft position was No. 8 overall.

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TCS Morning 10: Numb to the badness

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Shouts to Jeff Samardzija for lowering the expectations such that giving up two dingers and four runs to half of a real Cleveland Indians lineup over 6.2 innings doesn't even trigger a twinge of disappointment. Even this snapshot of recent performance--I'm assuming meant to be shocking to the less grizzled and beaten-down of us--just serves to remind: Oh yeah, Jeff Samardzija did win his last start, didn't he?!

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Race To The Bottom: Sweeping Away Top 10 Position

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With the White Sox BASICALLY out of contention, every Monday and Thursday until the end of the regular season, we'll take a quick peek at where the White Sox stand in their 2016 MLB Draft position.

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The AL Central and the MLB Draft: A recent history

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The success or failure of teams in the MLB Draft is difficult to determine. The main reason for this is because it takes so long for most draftees to reach the majors, and players shuffle from team to team so often (whether it's by trade or otherwise) that looking at a particular team's draft class for a particular year will often only yield one or two players who actually made an impact on that team's major league roster.

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Important stuff from a 5-2 loss to the Indians that at least wasn't a shutout

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Kudos to you if you walked out of work or school Thursday, let the wind hit your face and thought "It's be a while since John Danks got hammered in dispiriting fashion and took the Sox out of the game from the jump." You live a life chased by the constant shadow of doom, but damn if you're not perceptive. Danks got gobsmacked for back-to-back home runs from the normally tepid pair of Nick Swisher (homerless until tonight) and Mike Aviles, and the Sox were down 4-0 before they took an at-bat, which I suppose provided ample excuse to bypass taking any good ones all night.

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Important stuff from another run-starved 4-3 loss to the Indians

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Things are just a little too back to normal for the White Sox. They struggled to make contact against a marginal starter, they biffed away a lead with defensive miscues, they will not win the series for the first time out of the last five, and they're a losing ballclub again. It's familiar, in a way that the end of a sunny day reminds you that the electricity in your apartment is out.

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The White Sox can go back to being dependent on home runs anytime now

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This is the offense that baseball purist White Sox fans long craved for. They put a bat on a ball (sixth-lowest strikeout rate in the AL is a great leap forward for them, and it's combined with the fourth-lowest walk rate) and they don't swing for the fences hardly at all (AL-worst 23 home runs). In fact, with a .109 ISO (worst in baseball, despite half the league having to put pitchers in their lineup) they make a point of never getting close.

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Important stuff from a 6-0 celebration of life at the expense of the Indians

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Life is good! Life is just! The universe has rewarded us for our sufferiiiiiiiiiiiing! Which is, um, to say, that a powerful performance from the White Sox that affirmed their ability to hang with the elites of the AL Central was due. Overdue? No, it's April 22nd. Nothing is overdue. And we're stretching it to call the Indians AL Central elite since this was essentially a tiebreaker game to determine who has been the biggest early-season disappointment among AL Central contenders.

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This year, April results matter more than you might realize

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One of the most common refrains whenever we start to get worked up over something that happens this time of year is "it's only April."

While that, as well as everything you can say about the small sample size these results are a product of remain true, the wins and losses, as you very well know, count just as much as the wins and losses in August and September.

I bring this up because the White Sox are in the midst of a season-opening stretch that sees them play 25 of their first 28 games against AL Central opponents.

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And a Happy Chris Sale Day was had by all — Important stuff from a series win

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That's more like it.

A day after breaking their season opening four-game skid, the White Sox welcomed Chris Sale back with open arms and he pitched them to a 6-2 win over the Minnesota Twins, the Sox's second in a row against the presumptive AL Central bottom feeders.

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The Catbird Seat's 2015 MLB Season Predictions

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Sick of reading what other people think is going to happen this season?

Yes? Oh, well this is awkward...

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Every team in the AL sucks

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Heading into the 2015 regular season, it seems that most every American League team fancies themselves as a contender. As I’ve talked about earlier, this center-heavy distribution of talent should have interesting implications on the playoff race. This post is not about that. This post is me being a mean person who sees the flaws in everything. This post is about how every team in the American League will finish below .500, mathematical impossibilities be damned*.

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The Catbird Speaks: 2.9.15 - Just talking about baseball, really

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It's February: the most exciting and thrilling time of the baseball news cycle. Between Gordon Beckham return, Dayan Viciedo leaving, and Spring Training....coming eventually, there's so much White Sox news to t--ah screw it.

James Fegan (@JRFegan), Nick Schaefer (@Nick_TCS) and Ethan Spalding (@spaldingethan) gathered together to dish on Victor Martinez's knee injury, Tigers' depth problems, the Royals' stupid, cheap offseason, how the Indians could be scary, Mookie Betts being overrated, defensive metrics being dumb, and then, then it went off the rails.

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The post-Scherzer AL Central roundtable

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I always dreamed that a post like this would be written about Justin Verlander, after he had been sent off to slaughter a distant alien race on behalf of all humanity, but the wrath of God Detroit starting pitcher has left the division, and it’s that homer-prone fastball-slider guy with platoon issues from a few years back. Max Scherzer has signed with Washington for all the money in the world. Detroit still boasts David Price, Anibal Sanchez, and a possibly resilient Verlander, but have now lost two of their three-most productive arms from last season with Rick Porcello already off to Boston.

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The AL Central in 2015

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I 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.

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White Sox suffer through a Bauer outage, blow late lead

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As an internet baseball writer and computer owner, there's a certain pain in focusing on a lack of hustle as the difference in the result of an entire game. But such was the nature of the White Sox attack against Trevor Bauer, that Conor Gillaspie lazily jogging back to first base after a second inning flyout and getting doubled off could account for a 3-2 defeat in the first half finale in Cleveland.

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We Should See Some Runs - Lineups & Preview 7/12

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Scott Carroll and Zach McAllister enter today with a combined ERA of 10.41. Therefore, if my calculations are correct, this should be a day for offenses. At least given that the wheels fell off of Noesi fairly early last night, and that they didn't have to pitch the 9th, the better relievers such as they are had the night off last night. If Scott Carroll can survive Ventura can deploy Putnam and Petricka to try to preserve a lead should one exist. 

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Noesi takes the bullpen off the hook, blows lead by himself

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The secret worst thing about crummy pitchers isn't that they get lit up, it's that they get lit up and then leave work lying around for others. Allowing seven runs in two innings loses a single game, but it also leaves seven innings to pitch. Hector Noesi has been a statistically bad pitcher, but he's been a present one; sopping up goo-gobs of innings in mediocre fashion and saving a weary bullpen.

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