Tweet, Tweet

Clare told me yesterday that the White Sox tweet out minor-league updates during Sox games.  The message, again, is: Forget this year.  It’s the future that counts.  Didn’t anybody tell the front office what happens when you play with fire?

You tweet that Joe Hardy is having a great year, and fans will start to think he’s the real deal.  I speak from experience, minus the tweets.  Me, I never would’ve traded quality pitching in its prime, definitely not Chris Sale and probably not Jose Quintana.  I would’ve held on to those two and traded just about everyone else, Adam Eaton and Jose Abreu included.  That, and I would’ve started treating the draft as though it counted, which is supposedly what the Sox did starting in 2016.  Let’s see.

Outfielders Alex Call and Jameson Fisher sure looked to be on the fast track to the majors.  After being drafted in June, Call hit his way out of rookie ball to low-A Kannapolis, where he hit .308 in just under 200 at-bats.  This year, he started slow—.244—at high-A Winston-Salem before suffering a muscle injury that sidelined him for close to two months.  Then Call went on the rehab assignment from hell, going 3 for 51 in Arizona before being reassigned to Kannapolis.  Call is hitting .152 his second time around in A ball.

Fisher did even better than Call in rookie ball, hitting an impressive .342.  He started the season at Kannapolis, where he hit a respectable though not great .269 before getting called up to Winston-Salem.  Let’s just say a .214 batting average won’t get you to Double-A Birmingham, let alone 35^th and Shields.

Like Call and Fisher, catcher Zack Collins was a highly-touted ’16 draft pick.  The Sox thought so much of Collins they sent him to Winston-Salem after just three games of rookie ball, and Collins responded by hitting .258 with six homeruns and 18 RBIs in 120 at-bats.  Carlton who?   Or so Sox fans might’ve dreamed.  Then came a second season of high-A for Collins.  The 15 homers are encouraging but not the .211 batting average or 107 strikeouts in 299 at-bats.

Long story short—be careful what you tweet.  Like they say, what goes around comes around.