It's a rare situation for players to be both bound enough to their current team to re-sign within the five-day exclusivity window while also being good enough for anyone to actually care what they do. Mostly we have teams cutting ties with undesirables at breakneck speed, and that's what we have here.
Read MoreWith the 2014 season behind us, I found it apt to take a look back at some of the more significant individual moments of the campaign, for better or worse.
Read MoreIn just under two months of play this season, the White Sox have already been forced to shuffle the roster quite a bit due to both injuries and poor performance. There have been 19 different pitchers and one position player that have pitched for the team. Waiver claim Moises Sierra has even made 11 starts in the outfield due to injury. There are a few guys that have been demoted due to performance who will still be with the team and they each have had a little time to show improvement or decline. Who is taking advantage of this time to get their season straightened out and who hasn't?
Read MoreThe White Sox have had 2-4 weeks already this season and I'll go out on a limb a predict they'll have another one--and not before long! But this somehow felt worse: the pitching was reliably bad, losing a series to Houston, while increasingly familiar, is also very bad, but it's more the hopelessness of the injury situation.
Read MoreThe White Sox went 4-3 this week. This is my first week in review, but I imagine each has had the Sox go 4-3, or 3-4, or 3-3, or maybe 2-4, but quickly followed by a 4-3. They haven't been more than a game over .500 since Tax Day. Their longest winning streak ended this week at four games. It immediately followed a four-game losing streak. If they weren't coming off a 63-99 season, they might be the most frustrating team in the world.
Read MoreFor a season that looked like it might see the Sox turn away from Rienzo as a starting option early on, it's now hard to see a scenario that doesn't ask for 20 more starts from him if he's ready and willing to provide it.
Every time I watch Rienzo, I'm struck by how much he looks like a reliever. Not in the way that Wade Davis looks like a reliever, in that he's awful and shouldn't be allowed to start anymore, but that he's effective in bursts. He takes damage as his command lapses and he starts playing too safe with a mix of 89-91 heat and mediocre sliders that don't really afford him the ability to be conservative, and he looks like a impact player when he's riding high on emotion, snapping 12-6 curveballs and smacking his mitt.
Read MoreTwo victories bookended the White Sox's first significant losing streak of the season in a week that further highlighted the team's pitching woes.
Read MoreFelipe Paulino's performance last night, on the heels of his previous two starts, would normally be enough to get him immediately yanked from the rotation. The problem is, there isn't really any obvious choice to replace him. Most of the starters in AAA Charlotte have gotten off to a slow start. Andre Rienzo has been giving up hits and walks without striking anyone out. Charlie Leesman has a shiny ERA in three starts - a product of his absurdly lucky 93% strand rate - and although his profile doesn't often generate good peripheral stats, he's still walking too many hitters to be viable beyond an emergency spot start. Eric Surkamp, brought in as insurance for just this sort of scenario, is getting absolutely annihilated by minor league hitters thus far. Dipping further down into AA, the options are either prospects whose development would be destroyed by calling them up - Chris Beck, Myles Jaye, and Scott Snodgress - or pitchers who simply cannot get major league hitters out.
Read MoreFelipe Paulino's first three starts were bad enough to put him on notice. His fourth will probably put him on notice that he works in the bullpen now. if he's lucky.
Paulino retired leadoff man Shin-Soo Choo to start the game...and that was about as long as he could keep the illusion of being a MLB starting pitcher going. Left in for as long as reasonably possible in what started to resemble an odd sort of punishment, Paulino was tagged by the Rangers for 10 runs on 13 hits in 3.2 innings, despite being recognizably dead in the early portions of the third.
Read MoreThe White Sox have scored 7 or more runs in 5 different games already this year. They only managed 7 runs total in a 3-game series with the Red Sox. Once clearly on top of the league for offensive production, a lesson in small sample size comes by way of 3 offensively inept games, pushing the Sox down to a second place tie in wRC+ with the Anaheim Angels. They’re going to need an offense today when Felipe Paulino takes the mound.
Read MoreAlexei Ramirez punctuated an up-and-down second week of the season for the White Sox with his two-run, walk-off home run on Sunday against the Cleveland Indians. The victory gave the White Sox a 4-3 record for the week and raised their record against the American League Central to 6-4 at this very early point in the season, and the 3-1 series win over the Indians helped them exorcise some of the demons that haunted them after going 2-17 against the Tribe a year ago.
Read MoreThe odds were against the White Sox from the start on this one. Justin Masterson, Cleveland’s ace, held the ball for the Indians while the Sox were represented by one Felipe Paulino. It seemed early that Paulino knew something that we didn’t, pitching to the score before there was a score. Both pitchers got hit around quite a bit, trading leads until both men had yielded enough runs for tickets to the shower, allowing the bullpens to decide this one on even ground. Spoiler alert: the White Sox bullpen failed, and the White Sox find themselves back at .500 by way of an 12-6 loss.
Read MoreIt's would not be farfetched to say the White Sox played an important role helping Cleveland clinch its first playoff berth since 2007 a year ago.
Read Morethe White Sox are going through one of those lean years in starting pitching. The type that comes after dealing away from the rotation--rightly--and showing a heavy dose of confidence in the organization's ability to convert unremarkable farm arms into mid-rotation starters. The Sox are exactly the type of team in exactly the type of situation that should suffer through a year of raw, undeveloped pitching.
Read MoreThe brightest spot in the White Sox's 3-3 start to the season was an offense that looked nothing like the massive black hole we saw in 2013.
Unfortunately for an already unimpressive Felipe Paulino, Monday's 8-1 loss to the Colorado Rockies showcased the fact that, no, the White Sox's offense isn't going to be able to keep them in every game.
Read MoreThe White Sox continue a six-game road trip with their first visit to a National League park on Monday as they begin a three-game series against the Colorado Rockies at Coors Field.
The White Sox are 6-3 all-time against the Rockies, including 5-1 at Coors Field. However, the teams haven't faced each other since 2011 when they won two of three, also on the road.
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 MoreThe White Sox walked off with a wild 7-6 come from behind victory over the Minnesota Twins in 11 innings, keeping pace for a 162-0 campaign. Samuel Deduno allowed Leury Garcia, who reached base on an 0-2 bunt single, to score on his second wild pitch of the inning.
Read MoreRobin Ventura has stated that it’s not a straight platoon in left field, but more a matter of who has the hot hand. This instantly makes me wonder what he plans to do when neither Alejandro De Aza or Dayan Viciedo are hot but at the moment that’s a moot point, seeing as how De Aza currently sits atop the league in homeruns. Adam Eaton and Jose Abreu collected a couple of hits each in their White Sox debuts, making their names known to the casual fan and with the power of the tiniest of sample sizes the White Sox head into game 2 feeling like things could be ok.
Read More"Everybody wants to ramp up to Opening Day, but the season is a long season, so you can't really look at it like that, unfortunately,"
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