The White Sox beat the Blue Jays last night by a score of 10-1 (box). Comprehensive victory. Chris Sale won his fifth game, going a ho-hum 8 innings versus a lefty-destroying lineup in a hitter’s park. Southside hitters compiled 15 hits. They won on Monday in the first game of the series and five of the six games before that, too, and today they go for the sweep at the Rogers Centre — at which park the Blue Jays haven’t been swept since 2013. No one is saying that two games and the prospect of an early (and difficult) road sweep make a season, but the White Sox are one of two teams in baseball with 15 wins, and that merits some investigation. It would merit investigation no matter what team it was, but it especially merits investigation given where the White Sox were projected to finish this season.

At the beginning of the season, our projected American League Central standings looked like this:

There’s a lot of parity in the AL this season — not necessarily top-tier parity, but a solid, middle-of-the-road type where each of the division races could go down to the wire. The AL Central fits that mold, with the preseason projections telling us the Indians were clear favorites — though if the 2014-2015 Royals were any indication, we could expect the race to possibly be tighter. The Central was potentially seen as one of the more volatile divisions, with the possibility we could have a four-way race for the division. There was even the idea before the season started that even the Twins — with a little luck and a few breakouts — could be in the mix, but that seems less possible (to put it nicely) given their woeful start. Where do the playoff odds stack up for the Central now? Let’s take a look:

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Maybe it was the fact that she spent her formative years in Germany, while I spent most of mine in Jamaica and America’s South, but my mother and I have always disagreed about a fundamental thing when it comes to the weather. For her, she wants the sun. It doesn’t matter if it’s bitter cold and dry; if the sun’s out, she’s fine. I’d rather it was warm. Don’t care if there’s a drizzle or humidity or whatever.

It turns out, when we were disagreeing about these things, we were really talking about pitching. Mostly because life is pitching and pitching is life.

But also because the temperature, and the temperature alone, does not tell the story of pitching in the cold. It’ll make sense, just stick with it.

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On Sunday, with two outs in the bottom of the seventh, Boston reliever Noe Ramirez fielded a comebacker off the bat of Toronto center fielder Kevin Pillar. He flipped it to Hanley Ramirez for the putout. It wasn’t a particularly momentous occasion, but it got me thinking — was this the first ever Ramirez to Ramirez putout in major-league history? I probably would have let it go right there (I’m pretty lazy, after all) but Jim Reedy pointed out that there have only been 29 Ramirezes in major-league history, and that didn’t seem like to daunting of a number. So I dove in.

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It’s anecdotal of course, of little value maybe, but when you’re talking to Carlos Rodon these days, you get a different feeling than you might have last year. He’s more… comfortable. He’s not a rookie anymore. “Knowing you belong” is really important, as he put it to me.

But the reason he knows he belongs now is that he had a great second half last year. He agreed that went a long way to calming the nerves. But anyone can have a great half without a major adjustment, only to see things change once again at the whim of the baseball gods.

The good news is that Rodon made two huge adjustments last year that coincided with the start of his run. That suggests it wasn’t luck. That suggests that Rodon has found something that can help him walk fewer batters. And that’s about all that stands between Rodon and a breakout season.

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Ask a current major league batter about his two strike approach. Watch the words stop coming out of their mouth.

About twenty minutes into a long conversation with Josh Donaldson about his approach to swinging the bat, we got to what he can do to deal with the low and away pitch in counts where he has to protect. I didn’t realize it, but I’d asked for his two-strike approach. “I don’t really want to get too in depth into that,” he said, shutting off the inquiry.

Brandon Moss, the most loquacious of interviews, just laughed when I asked him about how his approach changed. Quickly, I learned not to talk about it.

But it was still out there. And when Paul Konerko told me (during another long conversation about hitting) that he felt like a strikeout was a weakness, my ears perked up. He’d tell me about his two-strike approach. He wasn’t in the league any more.

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Let’s start with the video. And then the words. Because you might not spot everything in the video the first time through. It sorta looks like an everyday foul ball, maybe with some sort of inside joke at the end. Trust me, though, this moment is fairly epic.

Paul Konerko‘s reaction provides our first clue that something was a bit different about this swing. He’s animated, talking to the third base coach about something. Zack Greinke’s doing a bit of stomping around after he watches it go.

“There are guys that take so quickly that it almost forces you to throw strikes,” Greinke told me at Spring Training earlier this month. “Paul Konerko, he would change his stances all the time, but there was this one time where he had this new stance where it looked like he wasn’t even getting ready and then all of a sudden you go and he’d swing.”

I laughed out loud. He was quick-pitching you! “Yeah,” Greinke agreed. “Before release, I think, oh, he’s taking, and you’d get overconfident. He only did that for a month or so.”

Go back and look at the video. It’s not quite a bat on the shoulder, but there is something about Konerko’s setup that seems lackadaisical. Given the 1-0 count, it looks like he’s waiting for Greinke to get himself in a deeper hole. “A guy like that, you think most pitchers would be coming with the fastball, but he’s liable to give you another slider out of the zone,” agreed Konerko when contacted by phone about the at-bat. “And then sometimes, he’d even take something off when he was supposed to come at you.”

So maybe Konerko was just taking, and that’s why it took him so long to get ready? Not quite. It did take him a long time to get ready back then. On purpose. “I used to be too tense too early before the pitch came,” Konerko remembered, “so sometimes I would wait to see how long I could wait. I was so ready to hit that it didn’t help me.” So, in the footage here, Konerko actually is attempting to chill out as long as possible, but not so much to mislead Greinke as to prepare himself optimally.

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Adam LaRoche’s unexpected retirement announcement on Tuesday – along with the many twists and turns that followed – dominated the baseball headlines last week. To recap, on Wednesday we learned that rather than walking away from the game voluntarily due to a perceived diminution in talent or lack of desire, LaRoche instead elected to retire after being informed by Chicago White Sox Vice President Ken Williams that LaRoche’s son Drake was no longer welcome in the team’s clubhouse (or, at least, was not welcome to accompany LaRoche quite as frequently as he had in 2015). Then on Thursday, reports emerged that the Major League Baseball Players Association was considering whether to file a grievance against the White Sox on LaRoche’s behalf.

It’s currently difficult to determine exactly how strong a legal case LaRoche might have against the White Sox because there is still a lot we don’t know about what agreement, if any, LaRoche reached with Chicago regarding the extent to which his son could accompany him to games. For instance, on Friday, White Sox union representative Adam Eaton told the media that LaRoche’s contract with the team did in fact include a provision regarding his son’s access to the clubhouse. Meanwhile, other reports have suggested that any agreement between LaRoche and the team regarding his son was limited to a verbal understanding, and was not embodied in his written contract.

Ultimately, this distinction between a written and verbal agreement is likely to determine whether LaRoche has any real hope of prevailing in a grievance against the White Sox, should he choose to pursue one.

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Adam LaRoche may or may not be retiring. It certainly seems as though he is, and it seems as though his decision was made abruptly. While that may not be 100 percent certain, now seems like a good time to look back on his career. On one hand, LaRoche was sort of a letdown, in that he never really took off the way it seemed like he might. On the other hand, LaRoche was a huge success, and should be celebrated as such.
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Don’t lose sight of the fact that the biggest story in baseball right now could have been the smallest. Adam LaRoche up and retired because the White Sox wanted to cut down on his son’s presence around the clubhouse. I’m sure you’ve already read all about this, but Drake LaRoche has a history of being around all the time, going back to when Adam was with the Nationals. The White Sox requested that Drake not be around so much, and they probably didn’t anticipate that LaRoche would walk away from thirteen million dollars. This could’ve all stayed behind closed doors, and we never would’ve known, but it’s a story because it’s been blown up to the greatest possible magnitude. The regular season is right around the corner, but this is what matters today.

The story presents with two sides, so it’s only natural to want to pick a favorite one. It’s no different from when people want to figure out the winner of any trade. On one side, there’s the organization, that says it wants to do what it can to keep the team focused and disciplined. On the other side, there’s LaRoche, who obviously cares enough about this to willingly forfeit an absurd amount of money, not to mention the rest of his career. Ultimately, this is a clubhouse matter, and barely public, so we’ll never be sufficiently informed. Yet based on what’s knowable, it’s challenging to arrive at any conclusion other than “well I’ll be damned.”

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It’s Bold Prediction season over on the fantasy side, and since it’s in the water, it’s starting to spread. And though this bold prediction will be a silly enterprise, it’s not an insane one. It’s a prediction like any other, a dart thrown at a board with some intention and thought behind it.

The projections on our site that say that the Chicago White Sox are a .500 team poised to finish tied for second, five or six games back of the Indians in the American League central? Those represent the meat of possible outcomes, the median result of throwing thousands of player projections into a battle with each other.

But the error inherent in projecting one player adds up with each additional player added, and the error bars on those projections are relatively large. One standard deviation is around five wins, meaning that a result that is ten wins above or below the projection is not out of the norm.

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