White Sox | The Baseball Zealot

Ozzie’s caught tweeting in the dugout

White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen is in doghouse again though I’m not sure for the right reasons. He’s been suspended for two games following his altercation with umpire Todd Tichenor at Yankee Stadium Wednesday night. MLB states that Guillen is in violation of its “social media policy and other regulations regarding the use of electronic equipment during the course of a game.”

Indeed, after arguing balls and strikes with Tichenor, Guillen went back to the dugout and showed him up the best way he knew how. By using Twitter. Kicking dust at the ump is so old school.

Two tweets came through Guillen’s account… the first simply said, “This one going to cost me a lot money this is patetic” The next a little more to the point, said, “Today a tough guy show up a yankee stadium”.

As of now, his twitter account has been silent since then.

I’m usually pretty tolerant of Guillen’s antics. He makes the game more colorful and gives the organization a respectable amount of uncomfortableness that I like. But MLB has it right. Guillen has a job to do in the dugout and it’s not to be using his smartphone to twitter about the game whether to badmouth the umps or whatever.

By the way, Cubs manager Mike Quade has made it clear that HE won’t be caught using Twitter mostly because he can’t pronounce it:

“I will never get in trouble tweeting, twittering, tweetering — I can’t even say it — because I will never do it. I don’t have the time, energy or know-how, and I’m real happy about that.”

Give him time, he might come around.

And Ozzie, arguing balls and strikes, really??

Obama, typical Sox fan, talks about HIS team in congratulatory call

Listen and watch as President Obama follows protocol and calls the San Francisco Giants (is it Bochy he’s talking to?) to congratulate them for winning the 2010 World Series.

Within 10 seconds, Obama doesn’t hesitate to invoke the Chicago White Sox, who “broke a much longer dry spell” in his conversation. Let it go, Barack… we’re ALL happy the SOX won what, five years ago??

Nevertheless, a fine call despite the fact it was probably scripted on both ends.

Weekend roundup

-There is some baseball happening in the south that doesn’t involve the Rangers. The Arizona Fall League season has started.

-Speaking of the Rangers, there’s no doubt they got the most bang for their buck in 2010.

-I guess we aren’t ready to forget the Cubs’ collapse in the 2003 postseason… but our remembrance might be delayed. Steve Bartman: Catching Hell, the documentary on the unfortunate affair, will be postponed till next year. Could they possibly wait till after the Cubs win a World Series (that way, we might not see it)?

-No surprise here: The columnists at the Sun-Times and Tribune respectively have differing opinions on Mike Quade’s hiring. Post-Trib (owned by ST) column headline: “Sandberg got Sandbagged”. The Trib column claims that Quade is a “good fit”.

Old habits die hard.

-Finally, some Chicago tattoo artists apparently aren’t Sox fans.

Skip the first inning, Randy Wells

Can we just have a “reverse reliever” in those games that Cubs’ starter Randy Wells pitches? A pitcher to start the game and get through that first inning? Seems that Wells is having trouble with that recently. Today, he got rocked for five runs by the Chicago White Sox with two of them coming in the first frame.

For the season, Wells has a 10.64 ERA in he first inning. After the third inning, it dips below 4.50.

Split	G	IP	ERA
1st inning	12	11.0	10.64
Innings 1-3	12	32.0	5.34
Innings 4-6	10	28.1	4.45
Innings 7-9	6	6.1	4.26

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 6/11/2010.

Soriano did get his tenth homer of the year and his 300th of his career. He passes Tim Salmon on the all-time list and joins Chuck Klein and teammate Derrek Lee (who hit his 300th on Wednesday) for #125 on the list.

The Sox won 10-5.

Illini alums who done good

Last Saturday, I had the privilege of meeting former MLB players, Donn Pall (left) and Darrin Fletcher. They’re both University of Illinois alums and they showed up for Alumni Weekend at Illinois Field.

They got a good show. Illinois starter Kevin Johnson shut out Purdue and Illinois won 7-0. See the full report at the Illinois Baseball Report.

Beginner’s Guide to Following Chicago Baseball on Twitter

If you use Twitter, I assume you are on for on two reasons. To glean information and perhaps to give your own analysis/info on what you know.

If you are a Chicago Cubs or Chicago White Sox fan and on you are Twitter, there are some must-follow feeds to get the most out of the social networking tool. This is a general guide that will help you get started.

Let’s start with the basics.

The Teams

Here are the official twitter accounts for the two major league teams. Follow these if you want the latest news from the Cubs and Sox. Keep in mind that anything from here will most likely be links you will see on mlb.com or press releases. Certainly nothing too juicy.

Chicago Cubs @cubs

White Sox @whitesox

Search Hashtags

Since you all can can read the articles on mlb.com on your own, perhaps of more interest to Chicago baseball fans is search hashtags. This will allow you to follow all tweets from baseball fans having to do with say, the Cubs. Without going into a whole tutorial on Twitter (you can find a good one on hashtags here), suffice to say that any tweet with the “#” sign before the search term before it will be included in the search query and folks will see it when they follow that query.

So the ones that we’re interested in are:

Chicago Cubs #cubs

Chicago White Sox #whitesox

Keep in mind that Twitter programs (like Tweetdeck, Tweetie or Twitterific) take advantage of hashtags much better than the web version of Twitter.

MLB on Twitter

Let me throw out the general Major League Baseball Twitter links out there while I’m on the topic.

MLB on Twitter @mlb.

To follow the Major League Baseball hashtag, it’s #mlb

Other Chicago Baseball people to follow

Cubs fans will want to follow MLB Cubs beat writer Carrie Muskat (@carriemuskat). Similarly, Scott Merkin (@scottmerkin) who covers the Sox for mlb.com is must for White Sox fans.

For the Cubs fans, here a few more.

Iowa Cubs @Iowa Cubs

Official Cubs Vine Line @vinelinetwitter (not too active yet)

Len Kasper and Bob Brenly’s Official Twitter @lenandbob

For the White Sox:

Charlotte Knights @KnightsBaseball

Sun Times Sox blog @CST_sox

I was thinking of throwing up some baseball blog twitter links for both teams but so there are so many I wouldn’t be doing justice to some good ones out there. Just know that most all of them out there have a twitter presence and it’s easy to follow them. Not only is it an easy way to get notified when they update their website but more importantly, you get some good insights from the bloggers in 140 characters or less.

Also, there aren’t too many active Chicago players on Twitter right now (no, the Carlos Zambrano you see is a fake). Former White Sox OF/1B Nick Swisher (@NickSwisher) has an account is quite active (and interesting). Fantasy Baseball Dugout blog has a list of current MLB players on Twitter. Keep in mind not all players with accounts are active or even post themselves.

I’ll throw one more in here for kicks just because it’s been in the news lately. Ozzie Guillen is on the Twitter thing now. And so far, he been having fun with it. So has the Twitter community because his Tweets have been quite nonsensical at times. I’ve said it before… I’m not a Sox fan but I kind of like Ozzie Guillen because I think he makes MLB a little uncomfortable. This Twitter venture on his part is just one more example. You can find Ozzie on Twitter @ozzieguillen.

I hope this help those of you baseball fans who are just starting to use Twitter. If you have other relevant Chicago baseball people to follow on Twitter, please let me know.

Ozzie Guillen gone all Tweetin’ on us

Ozzie Guillen is tweeting.

At least that’s the rumor. You never know with celeb-types if these things are real but it’s been picked up by the mainstream media so it HAS to be legit, RIGHT? <—— <sarcasm>

But seriously, this one appears to be the real thing. As to the content of Guillen’s tweets, nothing too majorly earth-shattering. Things like:

Yessss nice day let’s go to work

and

I feel nice and relax today I don’t know why yeeessssssss carlos quentin and rios in camp b ready people

Guillen on twitter is appropriately, all the buzz on twitter right now. If you think of it, Twitter is just the thing for the outspoken Guillen. How MLB will moderate him will be the big internal issue, I’m sure.

Apparently, Kenny Williams is already unhappy with Guillen’s idea of tweetin’.

If you twitter, you can find Guillen tweeting @ozzieguillen.

Wildcat Lacrosse team edges ‘05 White Sox for “Team of the Decade” in online poll

Some things are apparently more important than baseball. Like college lacrosse.

In a “Team of the Decade” online poll hosted by the Chicago Tribune, the Northwestern women’s lacrosse team soundly defeated the 2005 World Series winner Chicago White Sox.

For those who don’t follow the sport (no, I don’t either), the Wildcat lacrosse team has won five of the last national Division I titles. I guess they are that good.

They won with 57 percent of the vote in the poll compared to the White Sox’ 36 percent. Rumor has it there was a little “ballot-stuffing” by fans of the lacrosse team.

"Our fans wanted it bad, I guess," (lacrosse Coach) Amonte Hiller said with a laugh.

It’s tempting to take a jab at the Sox for losing out to a bunch of girls but a) those “girls” worked hard and really deserved it b) the 2003 Cubs barely got 1% in the poll and most importantly, c) it just a stupid poll.

2009 MiLBY awards announced

Roll out the red carpet. It’s time for the 2009 MiLBY Awards which awarded to the best performances in the minor leagues this year.

You can find the complete coverage of the MiLBYs on mlb.com

A couple awards of note:

Dan Hudson who pitched for the White Sox organization (and actually made it to the bigs for a quick cup of coffee late in the year) won the award for best overall pitcher. He did so thanks to a 2.32 ERA and a 14-5. Want a more impressive stat? He struck out 166 and walked only 34 for a 4.88 K/BB ratio.

David Cales is someone who I’m looking forward to seeing in a Cub uniform. For Single-A Daytona, he had a 0.78 ERA in 37 games which got him the Best Reliever in Class A Advanced. It may not be too long before we see him… he’s already made it to AA Tennessee.

Speaking of Daytona, Catcher Robinson Chirinos who also plays for them, won the MiLBY award for Best Single Game Performance at the Class A Advanced level. On May 31, the Venezuelan native hit two grand slams to help the Daytona Cubs to a 11-3 victory over Sarasota. That’s the second time that’s happened in the Florida State League history.

The Best Team award went to Padre Class A affiliate Fort Wayne Tin Caps. They won over 100 games (a 101-48 record to be precise) which in the minors, is pretty dang rare. By the way, their manager? Former Cubs speedster Doug Dascenzo.

The Best Hitter award will be announced sometime today.

Linebrink in BG’s Big Picture Gallery

Chicago White Sox reliever Scott Linebrink was a subject of a photo in the Boston Globe’s annual gallery of The Big Picture photos. If you have seen any of the Boston Globe’s galleries in past years, you know that these photographs are the year’s best of the best in news, science and society. I really encourage everyone to take a look at them. You won’t regret it.

Here is the direct link to the photo with Linebrink. As was the photographer’s intent, Linebrink himself is a bit fuzzy (a bit like his performance with the Sox this year) in the background but the ball which seems to be hurling towards the camera is crystal clear.

Nicely done by AP photographer Issac Brekken.