ashbury

I was willing to ride it out a while and see what it was that the FO apparently saw, but enuf's enuf. If he's wearing the Sombrero today, challenging and losing on that first strikeout looking should elevate it to a Platinum Sombrero. Or maybe a Lead Sombrero, and make him really wear it until the next game - which one hopes at this point is in St Paul.

I was writing in response to someone railing against home runs and extolling table setters - "All this emphasis on hitting home runs is ridiculous." Doesn't anyone here like Runs Scored? Because when you look at the guys who score 100 in a season, you don't find many table setters in the list. You find guys with home runs. I listed some guys at the very tip top in scoring runs, because they happen to also hit a gob of homers. Or, maybe they don't just "happen" to. If people here took a little more time to try to digest and understand what someone else took the time to write, instead of quickly dashing off something snarky about a power hitter stuck on bad teams never winning a pennant, the conversations here might be more productive.

Man. If I had a nickel for every time I gave up on Brad Rudis. But his BABIP is .412 right now, if I computed it correctly, so better days may be ahead!

No. Now, let's see what the video has to say, BRB .... Okay. Still, no. With a BABIP of .188 while on the Twins, a return to his career norms can be expected.

Detroit is underperforming expectations, the Nationals lead the majors in run scoring (albeit in surrendering runs too). The Red Sox are underperforming expectations, the White Sox are overachieving. Twins' performance against them respectively seems basically congruent to me.

My daughter and her family are in Chicago right now! But are they going to attend the Twins game? No!!!! Mediocre fans that they are, they will stay another hour or two at O'Hare airport and then board their connecting flight to come see Mrs Ash and me.

It's not the same thing at all, but this reminds me of something all-time flake Rey Quiñones was reported to have told his manager.

He hasn't exactly laid an egg while DH'ing these past few games. 18 PA of which 16 were AB (a walk and HBP account for the other two PA), and he has 5 hits to show for it including three doubles and one HR. A .312 batting average with power speaks for itself, given that small sample size is all we're going to have to go on. I too bear the scars of watching a diminished Buxton try to tough it out in '23. My gut would tell me to IL him until he's ready for full-time CF duty. But each injury is different, and it's his hip this time instead of his knee, I believe, so if that has a different impact on fielding versus hitting I will defer to the on-field decision makers for something like this. Him being by far the best hitter on the team this season (easier to say with Jeffers sidelined) adds to incentive to take him at his word if he says he can play even one side of the game.

Very salient point! b-r.com shows service time (years.days) for Jax as 4.091 and Bradley as 2.097. I can't remember if these values are updated every day or if they reflect the status during the off-season, but since both have been on their respective rosters all year it doesn't matter. Jax can be a free agent after 2027, Bradley after 2029. Two years of extra control is huge, if comparing two valuable major league talents.

I'm trying to wrap up my contributions in this thread, and I agree with most of your reply, but I want to explore this thought a little further. As a refresher for others who may be reading, there's BA, there's OBP, and there's SLG - they are intertwined. A good portion of SLG comes from BA, so to "isolate" the extra-base power component somebody once cooked up ISO, which is SLG-BA. ISO for a guy like Judge can be above .300, while for guys like Luis Arraez it can be under .100. Right now Keaschall's career ISO is .108 I took a look at all the guys in 2025 who had an ISO .108 or below, and found that Nico Hoerner scored 89 runs, Xavier Edwards scored 75, and nobody else (not even Arraez as I occasionally mention) scored as many as 70. Meanwhile thirty-two other guys scored more runs than Hoerner - Ohtani and Judge scored 146 and 137 - but they and the other thirty all had ISO above .108 Turning to 2024, it was Hoerner again at the top with 86, and four other guys with at least 70. Thirty guys scored more runs than Hoerner that year but, again, they displayed extra-base power. There is this narrative that there are table-setters, and then the guys who drive them in. The irony is that when looking for high run-scoring results, it's not the table-setters who show up in the rankings. Are all the RBI guys across the majors failing to do their job in driving in their table-setters? Or is the narrative itself in need of revision? So back to your comment. A lot of guys have nice OBP. So it comes down to what you mean by "support." If the player's goal is to be "just a guy" in the majors, it happens all the time, and OBP can support that. But without the power component that ISO measures, their run-scoring potential is severely limited - if you are aiming for players who can be difference makers, I mean. Someone dismissed another post of mine by asserting that I was trying to equate Luke with Shohei and Aaron, and that's not the case - we're so used to pedestrian performance on our team that it's good remind ourselves what the high-end really is like. But my interest in Keaschall is whether he can do something more that makes him better than "just a guy." Otherwise the incentive to invest much more in his development diminishes. He's trending at present toward Trevor Larnach territory, with uninspiring defense and a batting resume that doesn't elevate him, and at a certain point in a player's career we tire of him and clamor for something better. I'd like to see Luke get off that trend if he can. Finally, in the bigger picture, I'm concerned that where it comes to drafting and developing, our few success stories are in the tier of Larnach and Keaschall.

Good, 'cause nobody was saying otherwise. But, you do realize, a 162 game season is really long, so those 162 game extrapolations mean there is no room for even a backup player in whichever batting slot the player resides. If you had 9 players with 75-run extrapolations, playing them would give you a season total of 675 runs, which would be, um, not actually good. (League average last year was 720.) 75 runs is good in a normal context, because the normal season for a player is below 162 games, but that's not what the 162-game extrapolation found on b-r.com is telling you. A full team performing at a level Keaschall has shown so far would be challenged to get out of last place in their division. There's hope, especially given his youth, that he shows more than so far. Thus the article, which you and I are both responding to.

Tough call (😀, for the humor impaired ) but I'll take Carew over Wallner. And if you mean Gallo, I was never a fan, though I'm not sure what the slur after his name is meant to inspire. I didn't bring up any of these players and I'm not responding to further strawman arguments. This article is about Keaschall and why adding some power could benefit him and thus the team. If he turns out no better than 66-run Arraez, I guess he still has a place on the team, but he'll always be looking over his shoulder.

Gallo hit 200+ homers and the $38M that b-r.com says he earned in his career went for hardly anything other than those homers, so I'd say he's a pretty good example of the aphorism (granting that in the modern game even a player earning the minimum can afford a Cadillac if he wants one, so Kiner himself would have phrased it differently today). Wallner, at this point, reflects what happens to a failed power hitter whose other skills to fall back on are pretty limited, though it's still possible he turns it back around. Let me put it another way. Are you of the opinion that runs win games and that scoring those runs is more important to a ballplayer than sabrmetrics or other attempts at advanced analytics? Do you agree that scoring or driving in 100 runs in a season is an important benchmark for the really good players in the game? Because guess what, it's not just the RBI guys who hit a lot of homers, it's also the 100-run scorers too. No one in 2025 scored 100 runs while hitting homers at the pace Keaschall did last year. Of the 12 players who scored 100, only two had fewer than 30 home runs, and those were De La Cruz (22) and Tatis (25). Keaschall last year was on a pace to hit about 12. One of the very best ways to score a run is to drive yourself in, and 100-run scorers like Ohtani and Judge and Soto do exactly that dozens of times each season. There certainly is room in the game for players who will never score 100 in a season. They're not likely to wind up being the best paid though. Renowned singles-hitter Luis Arraez, who scored 66 runs last season despite leading his league in base hits, is earning $12M from the Giants this season on merely a one-year deal. The market has spoken, and continues to speak. Who can blame them if ballplayers by and large choose to listen?

I'm just following on Gameday and I saw there was a mound visit. What did the pitching coach tell him? "Nobody's coming back out to get you. In case you were wondering." 😀

The Red Sox played in green and yellow this past weekend. Simply nothing is sacred anymore.

Baseball's a game of inches and of bad coaching decisions. 😀

Zebby with 6 full innings and 3 runs against. That's a Quality Start, folks! Would not have bet on that, earlier in the game.

Same number of hits and walks as the Sox today so far. Only difference being an extra fly ball going to a lucky fan.

In that order, perhaps. 😀

I know. Managing a ballclub isn't color-by-numbers. And different kinds of injuries affect different players in different facets of the game. Still, any time he goes 0-4 as DH, I feel vindicated, while if he gets a hit or two, then, well, that's baseball. 😀 Like I said, 2023 scarred me.

It's rare that I would criticize making the third out on a play at the plate. However, this was on a single by the 9-hole hitter, meaning that Buxton's on deck. The ball wasn't hit very deep, so this was a "make them make the play" kind of situation, and it didn't work out too well with the runner being out by a mile. Giving Buck a shot with men on base sounds better to me.

"White Sox announcer! Give me your tears! If you will not give them to me, I will take them from you!"

2023 left me with the conviction that if Buxton isn't healthy enough to roam CF, he isn't 100% at the plate either. Hope he proves me wrong today, because I'm inferring it's difficult to get him to accept an IL stint.