At the time of the Peavy trade my mind wandered to John Lackey. I perceived Lackey to be a slightly less valuable/talented pitcher than Peavy and thought he would be a good test case of what it would cost to acquire a pitcher of similar value on the open market. Now that Lackey has signed for exactly what another potentially comparable player signed for last year a 3 way comparison should be insightful.

There are those out there who believe that Peavy's contract was an "ace" contract and yet he wasn't an ace. Of course at least one of those people believes that John Danks should be traded for Jose Lopez. A comparison of Peavy, Burnett and Lackey after the jump.

Continue reading this post »

Well probably not "the" unluckiest, but he does have the 3rd lowest BABIP in baseball (for players with >350 PA, data from fangraphs).  His BABIP is .226, just ahead of General Soreness and Jay Bruce.

Continue reading this post »

 , but I was motivated to try to start the discussion correctly after the last fanpost attempt at finding our left-handed power source for next year. I was also motivated by another horrific offensive "performance".

Continue reading this post »

AJ Pierzynski is having his best season since he's played for the White Sox and one of the best of his career. His wOBA and OPS are the best of his White Sox career. Much of this value is secondary to his (tied for) career high batting average. Why?

 Well yes part of it is luck. His BABIP is .321, his xBABIP is .306 using the THT xBABIP calculator and his career BABIP is .307. But the more interesting component of his season is that in addition to having a higher % of his batted balls fall for hits he is also putting a higher % of balls into play.

Continue reading this post »

Come on. We've got a southsider and White sox fan running for president. We've got to have an election day thread. I know we're apolitical here on SSS but this is a once in history event (southsider and White sox fan running for president). Even rarer than the cubs winning the world series!

I'll give my election day story. I early voted 10 days ago. Working until about 4 today. I've got my ticket to the Grant Park celebration, goin' with the wife and another couple. Probably hit a pre-grant park event first then grant park.

Yes We Can!

And WU I can't believe you're voting for a ticket with palin on it. McCain I can at least understand, but Palin??!!

[Note by The Cheat, 11/04/08 12:45 PM CST]: I was going to start one of these. We need an outlet for the inevitable political discussion that is bound to come up over the day-into-night-into-week. So consider this a suspension of the already broken soft rule about no politics. But let's keeep it to this thread, and leave it in this thread. Mkay thnx

We are a horrific 4 games under .500 against the other AL playoff contenders at a pathetic 17-21. If we make it to the playoffs, we will get eliminated in the first round. We should just pack it in. Maybe we can get a better draft pick.

We are getting crushed by a clearly better team. A juggernaut that will cruise through the playoffs and obviously is much better than us against contenders.

thought ballon: (hmm.... maybe I should check that out because somebody's gonna check that on a site devoted to thoughtful analysis).  

Red  Sox: 15-19 against AL contenders....................

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/standings/grid

http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/article/how_well_can_we_project_team_defense_and_other_uzr_data/

MGL's early UZR postings show Cabrera at the top of the heap. Also of note, Q isn't quite perfect (although small sample size of course and as I recall his UZR has been fine in the past). Juan was quite good at 2B (it would be interesting to see  Alexei's UZR). These are all per 150 games so Cabrera projects to +36, but of course is not likely to be that valuable defensively at the end of the year. And since defensive stats are best evaluated over a couple of years instead of a couple of months we must bear in mind these are very small sampke sizes.

The White Sox rank 4th in AL in defense according to UZR at +15. And that feels about right to me.

One of my recent favorite websites has become http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

It's byline is "electoral projections done right". Really great analysis and application of a regression model to polls. He developed a demographic regression model that actually predicted NC and IN dem primary better than the polls. I've been visiting the site daily for a couple of months now. The blogger was previously anonymous going under the name Poblano. Today he revealed himself as Nate Silver. Pretty interesting.  

I can't take credit for this one. This is one of of the very few times that I have actually Laughed out Loud online. And since there is at least one on base percentage/ batting average baseball line in here I figured I would share. I think you'll enjoy it.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/3/13/124649/291/112/475838

Some draft questions at BA.

It seems the top 8 right now are Alvarez, Matusz, Crow, Smoak, Melville, Beckham, Hosmer, Alonso. I'd be happy with any of those 8. Of course it's still early, and that will almost certainly change, but it seems like a relatively deep draft according to Callis. Only Alvarez and Hosmer are represented by Boras so far.

 Q:  Steve from Chicago asks:
Hey Jim. There's great fear in Chicago that the White Sox will continue to not take the best available talent. Their 1st round picks in recent years seem to be conservative picks while passing on much higher ceiling players. Granted they've been picking lower in the draft, but what do you envision them doing with this year's 8th overall pick? Watching the Tigers snag elite talent (some of which the Sox passed on) while not being afraid to go over slot is not making Sox fans very happy about the Sox' recent draft philosophies.  

 A:  Jim Callis: I've heard that fear as well (I live on the North Side up here in Subzeroland). Last year, GM Kenny Williams reportedly mandated landing some multitooled athletes, but they loaded up on pitchers. I don't think you'll see Jerry Reinsdorf start playing the over-slot game, but I do think you'll see the White Sox take a quality player at No. 8. They might be in play for one of the first basemen, like South Carolina's Justin Smoak or Miami's Yonder Alonso, or someone like Skipworth. I'd be a little surprised if Chicago took another pitcher. The Sox system is really bereft of advanced hitters right now.

 Q:  Landy from Hinsdale asks:
White Sox fans believe Kenny Williams is enamored enough with Jordan Danks that there's contemplation about selection him 8th overall. Please reassure me that this won't happen. Please Jim. For the love of Shoeless Joe, say it ain't so...

 A:  Jim Callis: Oh boy. The White Sox did take a late-round flier out of high school and did deal for his brother. And if they wanted Danks, they might have to take him at No. 8 because they won't pick again until No. 84. But I can't see them popping Danks there at all, and he could be available at No. 84. He looks great, but his bat isn't what scouts thought it would be at this point. So, it ain't so . . .

http://www.baseballamerica.com/chat/chat.php?id=2008021101&rnd=12

Der Komminsk Star over at BTF found some davenport translations for Alexei Ramirez. Pretty optimistic and yet potentially realistic given that Davenport has cuban league at A level. Last three translated OPS .750, .850, .765. Heck even a .700 OPS is better than JO. Jerry Owens has a .639 career OPS. I'd rather the kid get a 1/2 season of AAA under his belt first, but if he dominates in ST (unlikely given his recent lack of ABs) put him in there.

http://baseballprospectus.com/news/images/wbc.CUB.hit

Interesting discussion of Gio vs. DLS over at Sickels site. It's not his opinions but part of the community projection they're doing over there. They ranked DLS the #34 prospect in baseball. Gio hasn't been ranked yet, but will probably wind up top 40 or so. Interestingly the AL Central is noticeably weak with only guys that played very little (Porcello and Moustakas) ahead of DLS.

http://www.minorleagueball.com/story/2007/12/18/222422/57

I think the oft repeated mantra that we are competing against teams with loaded farm systems no longer applies. Now if we switch that mantra to teams with young talent (esp. Cleveland) it may be accurate. One intersting development is that MCab hasn't been signed long term and I haven't even heard talk of negotiations.  

Last year our LFers hit .256/.332/.399/.731. Of course once Mack was traded it was sig. worse than that. So .249/.342/.428/.770 would be a very nice upgrade. The AL average for LF is .275 .335 .426.

Amazingly our CFers posted an incredibly putrid .247/.308/.320/.628 line. Average for CF is .272 .340 .414 .754. An average everyday CF would probably be a 5 win upgrade (Mike Cameron are you out there?)!

3B? .221/.275/.367/.642 (remember Crede sucked before going under the knife and when Fields went to LF gonzalez and Cintron replaced him). Still, that is amazingly bad. Average is .266 .334 .427 .761 (of course that includes A-rod).

SS: .232 .279 .380 .659

Summing up
SS: .659
3b: .642
CF: .628
LF: .731

That is frankly stunningly bad. If Fields, Quentin and Cabrera meet their projections we're about 10 wins better.

I've noticed a number of posters seem to be assuming that since Joe Torre replaced Damon with Cabrera as CF that Damon is done as a CF. Is this true? Well at this point in the offseason there are essentially 2.5 available good defensive ratings.

UZR (which IMHO is the best, but is proprietary) data for the first half of the season indicates that Damon was exactly average in CF, but it was a small sample size. UZR had Damon at +15 runs above average in 2006. MGL hasn't released his complete 2007 numbers. Here is the data for the first half of the year and 2003-2006:

http://www.tangotiger.net/mgl/

Chone Smith has combined ratings from THT fielding data (RZR) and also ZR adjusted by Chris Dial's method. He has shown that combining these 2 sources correlates best with UZR. He has Damon at +2 (THT data has +5 and ZR adjusted data 0). And these are totals not rates, so with more playing time his totals would go up significantly. His projection for Damon in CF next year is +3.

http://lanaheimangelfan.blogspot.com/2007/10/defensive-projections.html#links

So summarizing: Damon was very good in 2006 (as an example Beltran was +16 in '06, Sizemore +21). He was average to above average in '07. His SB stats would indicate that he still has at least above average speed.

There doesn't appear to be any real evidence that Damon would be a below average CF next year. Worst case would appear to be that barring injury he's an average CF. ZIPS projects .279 .348 .408 Average CF's that can post an OBP heavy .750-.800 OPS are valuable.

I'd take him for Crede if the yanks threw in 3 mill a year, put him in CF and at leadoff. He instantly becomes the Sox best leadoff man in quite some time. Put Fields at 3B. Sign Geoff Jenkins (who is actually a really good LF) to a 1 yr. plus option contract.
 

Larry made a comment in a recent thread that he didn't think schedule strength was that big of a deal and that we don't play any better against bad teams anyway. So I decided to do a comparison of our schedule and Detroit's.

CWS:     18 (11-7) games against teams below .500
Detroit: 29 (20-9) games against teams below .500
CWS:     21 (9-12) games against teams above .500
Detroit: 13 (6-7)  games against teams below .500

The tigers have played an amazing 29 of their 42 games against below .500 teams.

If you assume that we maintain our present winning% against good and bad teams and give us Detroit's schedule we would go 24-18. Detroit is presently 26-16. So I'd say that about 1/2 of our 4.5 game deficit is because of schedule and half is because the Tigers have played better. We're like Detroit and most other teams: If we play a lot of bad teams and fewer good teams we'll win more games than if the schedule was the opposite.

The best part about this is that starting may 25th we go on an incredible string of playing 44 consecutive games against teams .500 or below leading into the All-Star break. Now some of them are probably better than their records (Yankees, Cubs) and will probably be above .500 by the time we play them, but still 44 straight!

The Tigers? Over that same span they play 22 times against teams above .500. If we can hold on through the A's series, continue to normalize our hitting and keep Thome healthy, we'll be right there at the All-Star break.

Note that I'm not arguing that we've played better than the Tigers, just that some of our deficit can definitely be attributed to SOS and that will all even out very soon.

on one page. BB-ref now has a listing of every player in the organization and his stats on one page! They are grouped by position. So you can see every catcher in the whole system and his stats. No more looking up every team or searching for a player. It's gonna be a daily stop for me.
Here's the link for batting. From there you can switch over to pitching.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/CHW/2007_orgbat.shtml  

CC Sabathia was hit by a line drive in his pitching wrist and came out after the first batter.

Sabathia tried to shield himself from the ball with his throwing hand and his glove. It appeared to strike him in the left wrist. A frustrated Sabathia came out of the game immediately. He was replaced by Tom Mastny.

http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20070328&content_id=1863204&vkey=spt2007news&fex t=.jsp

Although we all liked the Toby Hall signing I for one didn't realize how much we needed it. The thing that stands out is we were DEAD LAST in MLB in Catcher's OPS against LHP.

Bottom Five Team Catchers vs. LHP

Team OPS

26. Nationals .674  
    
27. Red Sox .669  
    
28. Angels .665  
    
29. Mariners .599  
    
30. White Sox .587  

Since our home season is over we can examine our attendance predictions. Here was the original diary with our attendance predictions

http://southsidesox.com/story/2005/11/19/161418/94

Details of our attendance this year:

With 2,957,414 fans attending games at U.S. Cellular Field in 2006, the Chicago White Sox today set a new franchise attendance mark, breaking the previous record of 2.93 million set in 1991.  

The White Sox averaged 36,511 fans this season, fourth-best in the American League and ninth best in baseball.  The franchise-record 52 sellouts shattered the old mark of 18 set in 2005. This season is the eighth time in franchise history that the team has topped 2 million in attendance.

So without further ado, the winner of the Guess the Attendance Contest was ..... WestSideSoxFan with 2,934,155. He was off by only 23,000 fans. For your amazing feat you receive..... our undying admiration.

Who was the farthest off? Zokmaad at 2,623,754.

He left after 28 pitches. We're not dead yet. A win today and a minnesota loss and we're only 1.5 back.

Suddenly that end of the year series doesn't seem quite so ominous. If we're one out going into that at least we'll still have a chance. Hate to rejoice about an injury, but this could be just the break we need.

against us on Tuesday. According to BA:

It appears that the Devil Rays' Delmon Young is finally going to get his wish. With Jonny Gomes poised to be placed on the disabled list and Ty Wigginton headed to Triple-A Durham for a rehab assignment, Tampa Bay appears set to call up Young and put him in the starting lineup on Tuesday night in Chicago. Young is hitting .316/.341/.474 in 342 at-bats for Durham with eight home runs and a 65-15 strikeout-walk ratio.

We'll use June 11th as the cutoff day.

4/01-6/11-
AB Hits 2B  HR RBI BB  K  BA  OBA  Slug% OPS      
125 19   2  4  12  16 42 .152 .250 .264  .514

6/11-8/15  
AB Hits 2B  HR RBI BB  K   BA  OBA  Slug% OPS
140 41  15  3  19  11  26 .293 .351 .464  .815

So BA has actually been good for longer than he was bad now. That is an amazing transformation!Thank god KW had the foresight to stick with him.

BP has him at -11 BRAA (batting runs above average) and 14 FRAA (fielding runs above average). So he is actually more valuable (per inning) than most MLB players. His WARP1 (wins above replacement player) for the year is 2.5. Aaron Rowand's is 1.8 despite more playing time for Aaron.  

As I've read a number of posters that have essentially given up on the season even though we are 1/2 game out of playoffs caused a sense of Dega Vu. I remember similar thoughts last year down the stretch so i thought I'd look up the worst stretches from last year.

Now: 3-12 our last 15 games

Last Year:
8/8-8/23: 3-9
9/8-9/22: 4-10

So this slump is worse than either of the slumps we had last year, but not by much. Hopefully, they'll only be one big slump this year.

It's baseball. Good teams have slumps. We're still right in the middle of a pennant race. We'll turn it around.

There are now 2 websites where you can get minor league splits. One of them even has ground ball fly ball data. The other one also has "daily organizational reports" where you can get all of the white sox minor league boxscores on one page.

You can get all kind of great info here such as Ryan Sweeney has improved every month this year batting .322 with an .825 OPS in June with 3 of his 5 HR. And he doesn't have a platoon split.

Jerry Owens has also improved in June, although less impressively, hitting .279 with a .703 OPS. Which of course still is not good, but better than the .230 he hit in May. And he has a huge platoon split. First Inning doesn't always have the most up to date stats (it seems to depend on the player).

And oh yeah, i haven't given up on Pedro Lopez yet. For some reason the Sox have consistently put him in levels above where he should have been. He's still young at 22 and is finally in an age appropriate environment. He's been on fire since getting to B-ham with a +.900 OPS. Now obviously he won't keep that up but if he can post around an .800 OPS at AA at 22 as an excellent fielding SS then I think he reclaims prospect status.

http://firstinning.com/daily/chw/
http://www.brewcrewball.com/special/milb+splits

Jeff Nelson picked up his first win last night pitching for Charlotte.

2IP 1H 1BB 2K.

Believe it or not Josh Fields is currently 3rd in the International League in OPS with a line of .321/.402/.566  .968 OPS. Ranking way ahead of uber prospects such BJ Upton, Delmon Young (pre bat throw), Lasting Milledge and Andy Marte.

He's playing in a homer friendly park and his rather short minor league history says he can't keep this up, but man would it be nice if he did!

I was reading that ozzie liked what Jerry Owens is doing in the venezuelan winter league. So I thought I'd look him up. He's tearing it up. Hitting .377/.481/.452 in 162 AB.

On the heels of his Southern league batting title in a pitcher's park is he ready to take the starting CF job from Anderson?

The use of the word contest is probably a little misleading, becasue the only thing you will win is the admiration of your peers. I think Marvel comics used to call this a no-prize?!

Cheat and I have been discussing how much we think the WS win will affect attendance.

Baseline data: 2005 attendance was 2,342,834 with a per game average of 28,923. That was 17th in baseball and 7th out of 14 AL teams.

My guess will be 2,800,000 for next year. That's about 34,500 per game average. That would put us about 10th in MLB in attendance.

I won't do a poll beacase I want everybody to post their projection and then we can compare at the end of the year.