Most of Wednesday felt like the Sox deal for Lawrie had fallen through. After being reported to be on the doorstep of confirming the trade with Oakland as reporters were heading to bed Tuesday night, nearly all of Wednesday went by with no report of progress, some word of squabbling about the prospects going in return, and buzzing about the Sox now shifting their focus to Todd Frazier.
Read MoreDioner Navarro's official terms have been announced.
Read MoreThat new catcher replacing Tyler Flowers is Dioner Navarro.
Read MoreTyler Flowers was non-tendered. The staff at TCS saw him as, "Not ideal, but nowhere close to the biggest problem with the roster." But Hahn has hinted that a new catcher is on the way? What?
Read MoreMidnight ET Thursday morning is the deadline for decision on whether to tender a contract to arbitration eligible players. For the most part, it should be full of easy decisions for the White Sox, but they have already surprised us with the "Punt a reliable shortstop to the moon" decision. Who knows what's up their sleeve?
Read MoreJust to add to the sense that the White Sox could struggle to rope high-level candidates into this bench coach gig, Doug Padilla confirmed that Sandy Alomar Jr. did not even agree to interview for the position. This was kind of the indication already, since it would have been poor form to speak publicly about misgivings about the opening after interviewing for it.
Read MoreI'm wondering how much time I should give to this 14-inning marathon when interest seems like it's...waning.
Read MoreAs someone who once knocked the sunglasses off the face of their junior high crush with a football by airmailing my best friend (the tallest kid in the eighth grade) by nearly 20 yards, I cannot in good conscious impugn anyone for a misfired throw in even the lowest-intensity situations. However, if the Sox want to snap out of their open to the season that's seen them cough up 16 runs and four homers to the no-hit, small ball Royals in their no-hit, small ball ballpark, they might want to stop hanging meat over the heart of the plate.
Read MoreThe Royals are a pain in the White Sox's ass. If it weren't official before, I'm making it official after Wednesday's 7-5 defeat that saw beanballs, gopherballs, and a myriad of other weird stuff.
Read MoreBaseball season is finally here.
After months of speculating, the White Sox's 25-man roster is set and the starting nine will take the field this afternoon against the defending American League champion Kansas City Royals.
Now that all the roster-building questions have been answered, what can we expect out of these guys?
Let's take our best guess.
Read MoreAs you probably know, you can gamble on just about everything under the sun nowadays. Who will be the President in 2016? Which movie will win Best Picture at the Academy Awards? How many home runs will Jose Abreu hit?
You probably have an opinion on that last one (maybe the other two, we don't know). Either way, the staff at The Catbird Seat decided to make some over/under predictions for the 2015 White Sox.
We came up with a starting point, compiled by Collin Whitchurch through a combination of looking at last year's numbers, this year's projections, and some just plain out of thin air, and each staff member predicted whether the final 2015 tally would be over or under that number. Some are fun. Some are sad. Some are ridiculous.
Enjoy, and let us know your predictions in the comments section.
Read MoreSpring Training is finally here. What this means is we can all get excited about the sight of actual major league baseball players on an actual baseball field, and then cry over the realization that we're still six weeks away from meaningful games being played.
Still, the season of optimism is upon us, so let's take a look at some of the important things to monitor during the White Sox's time in Arizona.
Read MoreA week after the Padres lured Derek Norris' revered bat out of Oakland, this isn't the best time to feel rosy about the White Sox seasonal arrangement of below-average and whiff-prone catchers, but they are here. There are many of them, which is the best feature of this group.
Read MorePaul Konerko has only officially been the team captain since 2006, but has been dominating the locker room in non-dominant fashion for at least a year longer. His demure and honest post-game interviews, ceaseless personal accountability, slavish devotion to routine and labor, and perhaps most memorably, public self-flagellation have been such steady elements of White Sox culture, that part of processing his retirement has been imagining a non-Konerko leadership. Compared to the Konerkocracy, every clubhouse seems like Brohio. Should we go to Brohio? It's the question of a generation.
Read MoreLast off-season, the White Sox made a pretty good bet that I had no interest in them seeing through. They bet Flowers probably couldn't do worst than 59 wRC+ (That's 40% below league average) while allowing more passed balls than half the AL despite only playing 84 games.
Read MoreThe end of the Gordon Beckham era brought with it a little bit of nostalgia around these parts. After all, Beckham was supposed to be The Next Big Thing.
Read MoreIf I can even try to care about something related to baseball after the day's events, it's the measure of sympathy I feel for the MLB umpires in San Francisco on Wednesday afternoon, waiting for Robin Ventura to stop kicking dirt on the plate, or realizing it's the only respite from bouts of screaming and spitting at them and wishing he'd kick for longer, or thinking about which one of his veins they'd focus on to keep from bursting out laughing.
Read MoreThat was something. And then it wasn't! And then it was something else entirely, and it became that new thing with an intensity entirely ill-fitting of a Wednesday afternoon game. After around 10 minutes of review of a new rule that no one has a clue how to interpret, Jose Quintana went from one out away from seven shutout frames in San Francisco--kinda as impressive as kicking over an empty trash can, but still an important task--to watching Ronald Belisario lay waste to rational disorder. Again.
Read MoreWhile I was spying on his Twitter account a while back, Jon Bernhardt, formerly of the sadly gutted Sports on Earth masthead, pontificated that the problem of homerism was not explicitly because fans are intrinsically poor analysts, but because they watch their favorite team too much.
Not only does this give them a lack of perspective of how players on the team they watch compare to the rest of the league, but they simply have too many details. We become so well-versed in such a wide breadth of details that it's hard to see the forest for the trees. We could provide a detailed account of Alejandro De Aza's miserable start and mid-season recovery at the plate, his plus-speed but inability to use it properly to man center field or steal bases, his suicide slides, his vulnerability for breaking balls at his feet and love for yanking his hands in to rip singles through 3-4 hole, when others would leave the summary of him at "left-handed fourth outfielder" and move on. Would they be better or worse off?
Read MoreApparently quieting compiling monster stats on an unworldly hot streak wasn't enough for Flowers to fully launch the narrative of switching to glasses--FROM CONTACTS HE ALREADY WORE--unlocking some offensive monster, he had to go and beat the Texas Rangers all by himself. The Rangers are a pretty sad major league product these days, but still, one man. Flowers got a two-run third inning started with a one-out triple that bounced on the edge of the right field wall, slammed out a game-tying home run to lead off the fifth, threw out Jim Adduci trying to steal second to end the sixth, and poked the go-ahead two-run single in the bottom half of the inning, saving a scoring opportunity the Sox looked primed to blow after Gordon Beckham and Alejandro struck out.
Read MoreThe Catbird Seat is a White Sox blog by White Sox fans that focuses on intelligent and humorous baseball commentary. Brought to you by ESPN's SweetSpot Network.
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