Baseball

Series Preview – Sox At Mariners: Sailing The Seas Of Cheese

By Andy Jonathan 1254 0

VS sea captain

 

Records: Sox 64-82  Mariners: 60-86

Game Times: Fri 9:10/Sat 8:10/Sun 3:10

TV: Fri/Sun WGN  Saturday NBCSN

Tis No Man, Tis A Remorseless Eating Machine: Lookout Landing

It’s always fun at the end of a season to have two rebuilding teams throwing whatever they can at each other. This matchup between the Sox and the Mariners promises to be no different, as they’re both basically in the same spot as each other in their rebuild. The both made big splashy moves in their off-seasons for the past few years, and now they’re both just sitting in front of the stove, waiting for the water to boil.

While the White Sox water may be bubbling more than the Mariners right now, it’s not by much. The M’s have a pretty interesting group of position players ready to take the next step in their major league careers, mixed in with some aging veterans who have been providing decent pop for the team. The Mariners as a whole are a better hitting team than the White Sox so far in the season, with their big bats being lead by Kyle “Not Cory” Seager and Dan “West Coast Palka” Vogelbach.

Seager missed the first 3 months of the season with a pretty nasty ligament tear in his hand. Before that he scuffled through the 2018 season, enduring his worst stretch of his career that saw him slash .221/.273/.400 and post an 83 WRC+, down almost 50 points from 2016-2017 seasons. He’s back at it this year however, as he has a .248/.331/.503 line thus far in 90 games, with 22 home runs. He’s been on a tear since the all star break, having hit 14 of those 22 home runs in the months of August and September. His .256 BABIP suggests that it’s pretty real, and actually he’s getting some bad batted ball luck in there as well.

The issue for the Mariners is not on the offensive side, as it’s their pitching that has let them down thus far in the season. They’re second worst in the AL, and third from the bottom of the league behind the BP machines that are the Marlins and the Orioles. Japanese import Yusei Kikuchi has not had the effect the Mariners were hoping for, as he’s gotten routinely shelled with a 5.24 ERA and 1.48 WHIP so far on the season.

Softball pitcher Mike Leake is gone, as he got shipped to ‘Zona at the deadline. The ghost of King Felix is here, who just returned from his 33rd trip to the IL since 2017 related to his shoulder which is “fine” and “structurally sound” and not at all “made from paper mache and balsa wood.” I joke here, but I actually love King Felix and were he on any other team than the Mariners would’ve had a pretty decent shot at being a Hall of Fame pitcher. Sam had a pretty great take a few weeks ago when they played the Cubs, check it out here. He’s also responsible for one of my favorite GIFs of all time, which is from last season when he struck out Adrian Beltre (who is also a national treasure) with a nasty change that resulted in a hideous swing, which Felix saw and prompted this reaction:

The only highlight for the M’s pitching staff is ace Marco Gonzalez, who came over from the Cardinals and almost immediately became the pitcher St. Louis had drafted him to be. Thankfully the Sox will miss him this time through the rotation. They will see Justus Sheffield (son of Gary) on Sunday, the prized rookie that came over from the Yankees in the Edwin Encarnacion trade. Sheffield was up earlier in the year and got knocked around pretty good. He got called back up a few weeks ago and has fared a bit better since then but still has a 4.43 ERA.

For the Pale Hose, the story remains the same. The Bullpen needs to be ready tonight, as they trot Dylan Covey out again to get decimated. Perhaps this time he makes it out of the 3rd inning, but I’m not going to hold my breath. Dylan Cease gets a chance to work on his fastball location again, and perhaps keep the walks down under 3. Nova goes again on Sunday. If the Sox pitching can keep the M’s off the board, the bats should have a good chance at feasting on sub-par Mariner’s pitching.

Let’s Go Sox

Baseball

Mariners Spotlight: My Two Dans

By Andy Jonathan 1251 0

Some players are born to just do one thing. It’s like they’re cut directly out of the molds that used to make the little plastic army men some of us played with as kids. Daniel Palka and Dan Vogelbach are two guys who look like they were made from the EXACT same mold. Literally. Like they had the same form and everything, then at the last second they put a different head on Palka just to make sure people could tell the difference.

Positionally they’re almost identical as well, as they are both generously listed as first basemen/outfielders but are both horrible in the field and better suited to being designated hitters. They’re both pretty identical there as well, being that they’re both plus-sized left handed uppercut swingers. Both guys are the prototypical “Three True Outcomes” hitters in this launch angle era of baseball that they both hit in.

They were both considered career AAA hitters as well, until last season when Palka had a fairly decent run at the big league level with the White Sox. He turned in a .240/.294/.778 slash line in 417 at bats. He also socked 27 dingers and added 67 RBI to the equation.  Vogelbach meanwhile had a brutal run at the major league level last season with the Mariners. He was called up twice and played in a total of 37 games with just under 90 at bats. In that time he slashed a miserable .207/.324/.691 with 4 home runs and 13 RBI. Vogelbach’s splits were exactly what you would expect from a left handed power hitter, having a .050 average and one extra base hit against same handed pitching in 2018, while he hit .250 against right handers and hit all of his home runs.

Flip to this year, and the two have practically swapped spots. Palka had a brutal start to the season, hitting .059 in 50+ at bats, with no extra base hits and an almost 50% strikeout rate. He was sent down to Charlotte in May. Vogelbach won the 1B/DH job out of spring training and came out of the gate smoking hot, hitting 8 home runs and ringing in 14 RBIs in the month of April. His job security increased even more at the beginning of June when the Mariners sent Edwin Encarnacion to the Yankees in the trade that netted them pitching prospect Juan Then. Vogelbach currently has a .212/.344/.800 line with 24 home runs. Palka was called back up this month as part of the September roster expansion and picked right back up where he left off, with a .135/.141/.176 line. Yeah, you read that right. Daniel Palka is currently slugging at a .035 clip in the 2019 season.

So what’s the difference? What changed? Why has Palka gone from a 0.7 WAR player to a -1.5 one in a single offseason? For once, there isn’t much in the advanced stats that can give us a clue as to why Palka’s swing has fallen off a cliff. Last season his BABIP was a little high (.308) but certainly not a number that screamed drastic regression. His 38% K rate is way above the league average, but that doesn’t speak much to his lack of hits. His hard hit rate is the only number that’s followed his performance off the cliff, going from 36.4% last year to 8.8% this season, but Palka himself admits he hasn’t really tinkered with his swing at all.

What is the cause of the turnaround in Vogelbach’s game that has him now a valuable major league contributor (granted for a rebuilding team) instead of a career AAAA player? This is pretty much the guy the Cubs envisioned when they took him in the 2nd round of the 2011 draft. Kind of  like a pre-Schwarber Schwarber. A look at Vogelbach’s advanced stats show that most of them are pretty much in line with what he’s produced his entire career. His hard hit rate is 52.5%, up 4.8% from the previous year, which is what you’d expect with an uptick in power. His BABIP this season is at .230, which is actually lower than what he produced last season and indicates he’s not getting very good batted ball luck. His wOBA is only .010 higher than last season. What gives?

Ultimately we come to the point in baseball where there are some things that just can’t be explained away by advanced stats. Sometimes good (or bad) luck just takes over and produces career best and worst years. For the Mariners, they’re currently reaping those rewards being produced by the good stuff coming off Vogelbach’s bat. For the Sox, what was shiny last year has been polished right into a turd. Palka should be given the rest of the month to try and hit his way out of this epic slump that he’s in the middle of. The Sox should know if what he did last year was a mirage, or if this season is just some ungodly bad luck vortex that Palka is swirling amidst. Both guys have value to their teams, but only if the cards are cut juuuuuust right.

 

Baseball

Series Preview – Pirates vs. Cubs: One Should Die At Home

By Sam Fels 1536 0

vs.

RECORDS: Pirates 65-82   Cubs 78-68

GAMETIMES: Friday 3:05, Saturday/Sunday 1:20

TV: Friday/Saturday NBCSN, WGN Sunday

MOURNING THE DEAD: Bucs Dugout

SERIES PREVIEW POSTS

Depth Charts & Pitching Staffs

Pirates Spotlight: Bryan Reynolds

The optimistic out there, and let’s face it, they still make up a large portion of Cubdom because they had to for so long, will tell you that returning home for 10 games is where the Cubs finally charge. They’ve been great at home all season, they’re playing two doormats before welcoming The Red Menace for a true NL Central Main Event, and if it’s ever going to turn around, it’s now.

Those of you like me can’t help but feel the winds of 2004. The Cubs returned home for four with the lowly Reds, still the wild card in their grip even after the disaster at Shea. They promptly lost three of four in the most pathetic way possible, and the season was over and basically the whole thing was broken for two more years. You feel a similar pivot point here, where if the Cubs don’t use these 10 games to springboard into at least a stranglehold on the wildcard spot, and really launching themselves up to and past the Cardinals, the effects could be felt for years.

So it starts with a team already frayed and dead, the Pittsburgh Pirates. They’re fighting with each other, they’re fighting with their coaches, they hate everything, they throw at people, but mostly they just want to go home. This season has been utterly miserable for them since like May 1st, the organization seems directionless, and any hope for the future is curbed by the knowledge that Bob Nutting won’t let that future happen.

Somehow, the Bucs have managed a 6-5 record in September, though it’s buffeted by getting four games with the similarly dead Giants. They lost two of three to the Cardinals last weekend, and that’s the absolute minimum requirement here. They’ll start with Steven Brault, who handcuffed the Cubs a couple weeks ago for seven innings, so get your bomb shelters ready for the hot takes that will be spilling should he do it again. James Marvel will only be making his second career start, and we saw how well that went with Bolanos in San Diego earlier this week. The Cubs have cuffed around Trevor Williams a couple times this year, so there’s your hope.

But mostly what the Cubs have to watch out for is their rotation disintegrating beneath Yu Darvish and Kyle Hendricks. Jose Quintana fell apart when Ben Zobrist couldn’t locate Nico Hoerner for the second straight night. Jon Lester has been more bad than good for months now and melted down against the Brewers on Sunday. The Cubs just can’t have any of that this weekend. They’ll have to duck around Adam Frazier and Kevin Newman, who are the hottest Pirates at the moment. Josh Bell clearly just wants the season to end, as he’s been average for a while now. But you don’t have to go far to picture him with a big homer somewhere over these three days.

The Cubs need their starters because we’ve seen the pen is still a mess without Craig Kimbrel, and it wasn’t all that orderly when he was around anyway. Once again, Steve Cishek has been turned into paste, and Wick has been adventure-prone of late (and is probably down for today after yesterday’s theatrics). Get runs off this team that doesn’t want to be there, and only ask your pen for six-to-eight outs or something. It’s not hard, but the Cubs have made it look exceedingly so for four months now.

These 10 games are about way more than the 10 games. The entire direction of the organization is in the balance. Maybe the Cubs will finally play like it, or we’ll know something has been truly rotten in Denmark for a while.

Baseball

Pirates Spotlight: The Lone Bright Spot?

By Sam Fels 1324 0

Comparing hellish years for the Pirates is probably folly. Is this worse than winning 98 games and getting half of a playoff game? Or every season that’s come after it? Still, this one has particular sting, because not only have the Pirates been bad–last place in the division–but they’ve been startlingly unpleasant. Constant fights with other teams and themselves, capping off with leading, raging prick Kyle Crick (we’re a poet and don’t even know it) sending himself to the IL for the rest of the season in a fight with closer Felipe Vasquez. It’s one thing to be bad, it’s one thing to be no fun, but it’s another to be the former while trying to shard to be the latter. Penguins training camp can’t come soon enough.

Amongst the flood of horseshit baseball and horeshit people and horseshit tactics, there has been something of a bright spot. Bryan Reynolds led the NL in batting average for a long stretch, and has put up a pretty impressive season in left for his rookie campaign in The Confluence. He’s fallen off Anthony Rendon’s pace a bit, but has still managed a .326 average and a 137 wRC+ for a 3.2-WAR season so far. That’s something, right? It might ever so slightly soften the blow that he and the human thumbtack in the skin Crick were the return for team hero Andrew McCutcheon, no? Well, maybe not.

Reynolds has been good, but he’s probably been lucky too, and what that will translate to in the future is a hard guess. Reynolds has benefitted from a .404 BABIP on the season, which is absurd. It’s the highest mark of any qualified hitter in the majors, besting out Tim Anderson by nine points. And Reynolds doesn’t come with high-end speed that leads to beating out a lot of grounders that boosts a BABIP.

Reynolds carried a higher-than-average BABIP in the minors, so having a high number can be expected. In fact, he never had one below .376. Still, .404 is basically rude. Reynolds gets there by hitting the ball hard, but he doesn’t hit it as hard as most of the dominant hitters in the league. His 44.4% hard-contact rate is not even in the top-30 in baseball. His 23.8% line-drive rate is 29th. That’s good, but hardly dominant.

As you might expect, Reynolds can crush a fastball, which is how kids usually come up through the minors and arrive. He’s hitting .421 on them with a .726 slugging. Which makes you wonder why anyone’s throwing him fastballs at all at the moment, as he doesn’t have a .300 average on any other pitch and has been utterly helpless against sliders and change-ups, whiffing on over 40% of his swings against them. They’ll get there soon enough, y’think.

Going forward, Reynolds will probably have to add power to his game or the Pirates will have to find it in rarer spots. A left-fielder who only hits line drives puts a team behind the eight-ball a bit. He hasn’t been particularly good in left field either, and the Bucs might want to consider flipping him to right, which in PNC is the easier field to play. Would the Pirates ever swap their corner outfielders based on home or road? It’s the kind of outside-the-box thinking they used to specialize in, and then watched the rest of baseball catch them and pass them by.

This is what Pirates fans have to hang on to, which lets you know just about how bleak it’s been.

Eloy 2
Baseball

Series Recap – Sox Lose 2 of 3 To Royals: Rearview Mirror

By Andy Jonathan 1200 0

BOX SCORES

Game 1: Royals 3 – Sox 7

Game 2: Royals 8 – Sox 6

Game 3: Royals 6 – Sox 3

 

Man, the Sox sure are going to make it tough on me to keep up my sunny outlook on the rest of the season. After starting this series out on such a positive note, the Sox forgot the one axiom every team should have when playing the 2019 Kansas City Royals: Don’t Leave Shit Over The Plate For Soler To Nuke Into Orbit. You’d think by now most teams would’ve figured it out, but as Soler creeps ever closer to 50 dongs on the season I guess everybody is just gonna keep pressing their luck. Good lord when he connects with the ball it goes a long way.

It was actually pretty fun  watching Eloy and Soler go back and forth this series. Between the two of them, they accounted for 14 of the 23 runs knocked in this series. 60% of the runs! That’s pretty nuts. For the foreseeable future, that’s pretty much how the Royals are going to need to win games, and it worked out swimmingly for them this series. All told, the White Sox winning one was enough to wrap up the season series in their favor, but not nearly as satisfying an ending as I was hoping for.

To The Bullets

 

THE POWER OF POSITIVITY

-As mentioned above, Eloy had himself a series. His first career grand slam on Tuesday night, a 3 run shot on Wednesday night and another few RBIs thrown in for good measure. That brings him up to 26 on the season, with 68 RBI to go along with it. For comparison, Yoan Moncada at this point last season had 17 HR and 56 RBI. Right now he’s slashing .299/.357.508 with 23 HR and 69 RBI (NICE). Do I think Eloy will have the same progression as Yoan? Probably not, but it’s not out of the question. If he happens along the same climb statistically speaking the middle of the Sox order is gonna be something to behold.

-Lucas Giolito struck out 8 Royals in a row today, setting a new record for White Sox pitching on his way to 12 total Ks today. He made some mistakes as well, and this was one of those days where mistakes got pummeled, but overall it’s just a blip on his radar.

-Tim Anderson didn’t have a great series, but he managed 2 hits and kept his lead atop the AL batting list, thanks to DJ Lemahieu going 0 for 6 today. It’s gonna be a race to the finish, and hopefully Timmy can keep focused on opposing pitching and not get distracted.

-The Sox bullpen fared pretty well against KC this week, only giving up 2 earned runs (both charged to Carson Fulmer) in 9.2 innings pitched. This is a nice turnaround from last week where the Angels feasted on them. More please.

-Ivan Nova started out pretty shakily but settled down and came 1 out away from another quality start. Much like the other two starters in this series, the Royals were able to knock dingers off him, but they were of the solo variety so no real harm done.

-Next up is a trip to the Pacific Northwest for a battle with another team in the middle of a rebuild. It will be interesting to see who the Sox throw out there as a 5th starter. Fingers crossed it’s not Covey…I’m trying to stay positive.

Baseball Everything Else

Series Recap: NEW KID ON THE CUBS HAD A BUNCH OF HITS

By Forklift 1775 0

Game 1 Box Score: Cubs 10 Dads 2

Game 2 Box Score: Dads 9 Cubs 8 (10 innings)

Game 3 Box Score: Dads 4 Cubs 0

Game 4 Box Score: Cubs 4 Dads 1

Not the hero we need, the hero we deserve.

Not the hero we need, the hero we deserve.

 

For guys of a certain age (old), the thought of the Cubs going to San Diego in a must-win situation can still conjure up visions of 1984, with Steve Garvey walking the Cubs off in a game that looked as good as won, Jim Frey leaving Rick Sutcliffe in during Game 5 while he had Steve Trout rested and ready to go, then the ball getting past Leon Durham/s Gatorade-soaked mitt. So, good times.

Let’s…

Baseball

Series Preview – Royals At White Sox: Twirling Towards Freedom

By Andy Jonathan 1902 0

  VS 

 

RECORDS: Royals 53-91  White Sox 63-80

GAMETIMES: Tues/Wed 7:10, Thursday 1:10

TV: Tues/Wed NBCSN, Thursday WGN

Are You Missouri Or Are You Kansas: Royals Review

SERIES PREVIEW POSTS

Depth Charts & Pitching Staffs

Royals Spotlight: David Glass

Talk about your must see TV. A mid September battle between two of the AL’s worst should pull in the viewers, right? Coming into this series, the Royals are on somewhat of a roll, having won their last 3 series in a row. Granted those 3 series were against the Orioles, Tigers, and Marlins, so it’s not like they’ve exactly been slaying the dragons. The Sox actually present their stiffest challenge since losing 3 of 4 to the A’s at the end of last month. One of those losses to Oakland involved the Royals giving up 19 runs, which leads into their biggest issue right now, which is run prevention.

The Royals have languished at the bottom third of the league in pitching since the All-Star break giving up an average of 5.2 runs per game. In comparison, the Sox have rocketed to the top third on the wings of Lucas Giolito and a revitalized Reynaldo Lopez, averaging 4.8 runs a game. The only decent starters in the back half of the season for the Royals have been Jake Junis and Brad Keller, each worth 1 WAR a piece. Unfortunately for Royals fans, the team has shut Keller down as he’s reached his career high in innings pitched with 165, which is 20 innings more than he pitched in 2018. The Sox will see Junis, Jorge Lopez, and moon-faced yahoo Glenn Sparkman, who as you’ll recall plunked Tim Anderson in the dome last time the two teams met and was summarily ejected.

Offensively the Royals are 25th in the league in hitting, a whopping 1 position higher than the White Sox. Jorge Soler quite possibly may have finally reached the potential he always flashed in his time with the Cubs. He’s sitting on 41 home runs thus far, with 102 RBIs which is extra impressive considering he’s only had Hunter Dozier and Whit Merrifield to knock in, as everyone else is lost in the dugout tunnel. Merrifield in particular is having another standard year for himself, getting on base at his usual prodigious clip (.364). Hunter Dozier is also having a breakout year, worth 3.4 WAR so far.

For the White Sox, they’ll send out the best of their starters with Nova, Lopez and Giolito scheduled to take the bump. Hopefully all three will get the offensive support that the Sox flashed in their weekend series against the Angels. Tim Anderson continues his quest for the AL batting title, and this is the perfect pitching staff for him to do that with. Ricky Renteria has talked about putting Moncada back in the leadoff spot, which, whatever. He can definitely get on base, but I’d rather have someone else there as Yoan is more valuable knocking in the runs. I’m curious as to which Eloy Jimenez we’ll get this season, as the one that showed against the Angels was not optimal, but the one against the Indians was cash money.

This is the final meeting of the season between these two teams, and with the Sox holding a 2 game edge all they have to do is win one for the season series. While winning the bare minimum has been the Sox modus operandi thus far I say fuck that, take all 3 and drive home the point that having fun in baseball is not a bad thing and Tim Anderson has more personality then your whole fucking city. Except for maybe Patrick Mahomes.  He’s cool.

 

 

Baseball

Royals Spotlight: They Call Him Mr. Glass

By Andy Jonathan 1498 0

Word broke a few weeks ago that longtime Royals owner David Glass would be selling the team to an ownership group lead by Kansas City businessman (and Cleveland Indians vice chairman) John Sherman. What was particularly staggering about this news was the fact that Glass would be selling the team for a tidy $900 million dollar profit. Glass originally bought the team just before the start of the 2000 season for $96 million dollars. The sale (if finalized and approved by MLB ownership) would be for over a billion dollars. That number in and of itself is pretty ginormous, but when you factor in how the Royals consistently pleaded poor during most off-season free agent periods it becomes even more obnoxious. A brief glance at where the Royals fall in reference to the rest of the league in payroll since Glass took over the team in 2000 shows that in those 20 years the team has averaged 21.5th in the league in payroll. They’ve never been higher than 15th in the league, and in the bottom 1/3rd 15 out of the 20 years. Yet in that time, the biggest contract they’ve handed out was to Alex Gordon this year, a whopping 20 million dollars. In comparison, the Red Sox are paying one of the Royals former players (David Price) 31 million. The now suddenly financially conscious New York Yankees still have 4 players on their team making more than Gordon, and the usually spendthrift Cardinals have two (and Dexter Fowler making 17 million).

All of this adds up to yet another MLB owner who has purchased a team not because he loves the game of baseball, but because it’s a profitable investment for him. Glass has made plenty of money in his career as a CEO of Walmart way before he bought the Royals for a song. Now he’s flipping the team like a shitty house in Skokie because he’s made 10X the profit on a less than $100 million dollar investment. You don’t have to look very far to see how actual Royals fans (and there are only about 34 of them left) feel about the deal. BeyondTheBoxScore did a pretty in-depth review of what Glass actually provided the team in his almost 20 years of ownership. Other than a one time luck out of a World Series win, it’s not a whole lot. In fact, Glass’ ownership of the team (other than the WS win) is a pretty impressive display of how an owner can come in and treat an MLB team like an asset, then flip it like Two Face’s coin in Batman and sell it to someone that gives a shit about the sport.

Patrick Brennan said it best as a guest writer for Beyond The Box Score in the article about the sale of the team:

“As a Royals fan, I took this news as nothing short of fantastic. I can’t sit here and tell you all the things I know about John Sherman, because I know very little. If he ends up buying the Royals, I don’t know how much he’ll spend, I don’t know what changes he’ll make, and I don’t know how he’ll run the organization. But he’s succeeding an owner that a) was very scarcely involved with the Royals and Kansas City, b) slashed payroll constantly, c) spent very little, even though he’s likely to turn a $96 million investment into over a billion dollars, and d) ran a terrible organization for 95 percent of his tenure.”

Here’s where it becomes more important to Sox fans. Does that sound like anyone you know? Does that blueprint seem pretty familiar to you? Granted, I’d never trade 2005 for any pile of magic beans, but it’s a pretty common refrain throughout the league. You have your top 10 teams who spend the money that’s required to make you team competitive, then you have the bottom 2/3 of the league that is more concerned about wringing as much value out of underpaid young talent as you possibly can before you let them hit the bricks in free agency.

Basically the entire AL Central falls into this category. When was the last time you saw any of the 5 teams in this division spend big money on a free agent? The Tigers and Miguel Cabrera are the only ones that come to mind. Even the Sox with Jose Abreu didn’t break the bank, as they spent 68 million on the man as the most highly paid player in team history. Other than Cabrera and maybe Alex Gordon the AL Central isn’t exactly breaking the bank. Yet we are expected to sit here and listen to the owners cry poor after getting loads of money off the newest TV deal. Combine that with the 900X investment David Glass made off his purchase of the Royals and I start rooting more and more for the inevitable lockout 18 months from now. Do I think this is important? Absolutely, as the White Sox enter the most critical phase of their rebuild after shitting the bed on potential game changing free agents like Bryce Harper and Manny Machado. Now the rumor mill churns about JD Martinez opting out of the deal he has in Boston. As much as I’d like to see the Sox sign him to a deal and piss off both the Boston AND Detroit fanbases (The legendary Double Play), I find it super hard to believe that Sox ownership cares about anything more about the bottom line of the organization’s value on the open market.

 

But hey, at least the Rick Hahn brought up Dylan Covey to entertain us for the rest of the season…

 

ITS SUCH GOOD SHIT.