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Home , Carson Kelly, Chicago White Sox, Clark (mascot), Harold Baines, Orel Hershiser, Rymer Liriano

WHITE SOX HEADLINES OF OCTOBER 31, 2016 “White Sox in AFL: Collins shores up defense” … Jim Callis, MLB.com “White Sox claim former top outfield prospect off waivers” … #WhiteSoxTalk, CSN “ isn’t banking on his Hall of Fame chances” … Graham Womack, “For White Sox fans, Cubs fever is something to endure” … Aamar Madhani, USA Today “What it’s like to be a White Sox fan when the Cubs are in the ” … Blake Schuster, “Why I sold the White Sox and bought the ” … Andrew Cave, Forbes

White Sox in AFL: Collins shores up defense MLB Pipleline checks in on Chicago’s prospects participating in the By Jim Callis / MLB.com | October 30th, 2016

The longest year of ' career has gotten longer. After leading the Miami Hurricanes to the College World Series during the spring, the made his pro debut in the White Sox system this summer and now is getting extra at-bats and instruction in the Arizona Fall League.

Collins isn't getting a lot of playing time with the Glendale Desert Dogs, because he's officially a taxi- squad player who's active twice a week while Carson Kelly (Cardinals) and Garrett Stubbs (Astros) handle the bulk of the catching duties. But he's still soaking up a lot of instruction while he tries to improve his catching skills.

Collins says he is looking forward to learning from Kelly, one of the best defensive in the Minors, and handling more advanced than he's accustomed to. While he's known for his offense, he takes pride in his defense and knows he has to work on it. Scouts grade his arm and receiving as fringy tools, and he gave up 18 steals (in 21 attempts) and five passed balls in 21 games behind the plate in his debut.

"Mostly over the last year or so, in my opinion, I've gotten a lot better behind the plate," Collins said. "I think a lot of teams can say I can stay behind there for the rest of my career, hopefully. I've been working on everything.

"I had a new catching come into Miami and he kind of changed everything I did and we just put in the time. Before the Draft year, I just knew that was my weakness and I had to learn how to catch if I wanted to get drafted high and have a chance to catch in the big leagues. That's pretty much what I spent most of my time on my junior year and I got a lot better. It's helped me out a lot."

Hitting comes more naturally to Collins, whose bat made him a star with the U.S. National 16-and-under team when he was a Florida high schooler. He could have been an early-round pick in the 2013 Draft had he been signable, and he spurned the Reds in the 27th round to attend Miami.

Collins powered the Hurricanes to CWS appearances in 2015 and 2016, winning the Award as college baseball's top catcher in the latter year. He batted .363/.544/.668 with 16 homers in 62 games this spring, leading NCAA Division I with 78 walks and finishing second in on-base percentage. His offensive upside prompted the White Sox to draft him 10th overall and sign him for $3,380,600.

One of the best all-around hitters available in the 2016 Draft, Collins generates plenty of power from the left side thanks to his bat speed, strength and the loft in his swing. He also employs a patient approach and controls the strike zone extremely well. The White Sox plan on expediting his bat to the big leagues and had him spend most of his pro debut in Advanced, where he .258/.418/.467 with six homers in 36 games.

He doesn't sell out for power, which Collins says always has come naturally to him.

"As a kid, I would always hit home runs," he said. "My dad always taught me how to hit home runs and our motto was always, 'Who gets paid the most? The guy who hits home runs.' Ever since I was a kid, that's what I tried to do and what I learned to do. Just get bigger and stronger and hit the ball out of the park.

"It's tough sometimes when guys are pitching around you... But it's tough to hit a home on good pitches or pitches out of the zone, so I try to simplify it and look for a pitch over the middle of the plate and put the barrel on it."

White Sox hitters in the Fall League Courtney Hawkins, OF Danny Hayes, 1B Trey Michalczewski, 3B/SS

The 13th overall pick in the 2012 Draft, Hawkins has big raw power but has yet to show that he can make enough consistent contact to do damage at the plate. The Texas high school product repeated -A in 2016, batting .203/.255/.349 with 12 homers and 137 in 106 games.

Hayes was off to the best start of his pro career, batting .250/.358/.489 with 10 homers in 55 Triple-A games, before a core-muscle injury ended his regular season in mid-June. The 13th-round pick in 2013 out of Oregon State has some of the best plate discipline among Chicago farmhands and is starting to show the power required of a .

The top infield prospect in the White Sox system, Michalczewski is a switch-hitter with power from both sides of the plate and the tools to play a solid third base. The 2013 seventh-rounder from an Oklahoma high school had a rough year in Double-A, hitting .226/.314/.363 with 11 homers and 153 strikeouts in 134 games.

White Sox pitchers in the Fall League Brian , LHP Louie Lechich, LHP Nolan Sanburn, RHP

A ninth-round pick from Kent State in 2014, Clark already has ridden his low-90s and solid to Triple-A. He had a 2.70 ERA and 48/12 K/BB ratio in 56 2/3 relief innings this year at the two highest levels in the Minors.

Chicago made Lechich a sixth-round senior sign out of San Diego as an in 2014, then converted him to a relief at midseason this year. His athleticism translated well to the mound, where he backs up a 90-93 mph with a promising . He didn't allow an earned run while fanning 16 in 15 innings between Rookie ball and Short-Season Class A.

The Athletics took Sanburn in the second round of the 2012 Draft out of Arkansas and traded him to the White Sox two years later for and cash. He has had intermittent shoulder issues as a pro, which has sapped of him some velocity, though he still works with a low-90s fastball and a decent slider. He had a 3.53 ERA and a 69/25 K/BB ratio in 81 2/3 innings this year, mostly in Double-A.

White Sox claim former top outfield prospect Rymer Liriano off waivers By #WhiteSoxTalk / CSN Chicago | October 28th, 2016

The White Sox announced on Friday they have claimed outfielder Rymer Liriano off waivers from the Brewers.

Liriano, a former Top 50 prospect by both and Baseball Prospectus, missed the entire 2016 season after suffering multiple facial fractures when he was hit in the face by a pitch during a spring a game on March 20.

The 25-year-old Liriano had a brief stint in the majors with the in 2014 in which he had a .220/.289/.266 slash line with one homer, six RBI and four stolen bases in 38 games.

Liriano has a career minor-league slash line of .277/.350/.435 with 68 home runs, 378 RBI and 190 stolen bases in seven seasons. Liriano was named the Most Valuable Player in 2011 and earned midseason All-Star honors in 2011, 2012 and 2014.

With the move, the White Sox 40-man roster now stands at 40.

Harold Baines isn’t banking on his Hall of Fame chances By Graham Womack / Sporting News | October 25th, 2016

Who he is: Harold Baines was surprised when a representative of the White Sox contacted him recently to tell him he’d made this year’s veterans' ballot for the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Before , Edgar Martinez or Frank Thomas came along, Baines might have been considered the best in baseball history, finishing with 2,866 hits and a .289 lifetime batting average. He was less impressive by sabermetrics, which might have doomed his Hall of Fame bid with the writers, who never gave him more than 6.1 percent of the vote in his five years on the ballot.

So he got a jolt recently with the news he’d made the ballot for the Today’s Game Committee, still known colloquially to many as the .

“I was shocked that I was on the ballot for the Veterans Committee, really,” Baines told Sporting News. “When you get less than 5 percent (from the writers), you figure your chance is over with.”

Baines is on an intriguing ballot that looks deepest for non-players. Honoring people who made their greatest contributions to between 1988 and 2001, the ballot features former All- Stars , , Orel Hershiser and Mark McGwire, as well as former commissioner , Braves president , late Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and former managers and .

Baines isn’t sure what to make of his chances when the committee meets in December.

"Hall of Fame is tricky 'cause you don't know what really makes you a Hall of Famer,” he said. “Is it you've got to play on winning teams? You've got to be a full-time player? You can't be a DH? I really don't know what the writers are thinking or even if my numbers are good enough."

Are they?

Cooperstown chances: 25 percent

Why: The first overall pick for the White Sox in the 1977 draft, Baines spent the first several years of his career as an outfielder before knee injuries forced him into full-time DH duties. Because of the timing of his career, he was arguably the best DH in baseball history through the mid-1990s.

Even today, because of the low number of players who’ve been long-term designated hitters since the position was created in 1973, Baines still rates as one of the best. Here are the top OPS+ rankings for players with at least 5,000 plate appearances and at least 50 percent of their career games at DH, according to the Baseball-Reference.com Play Index tool:

Frank Thomas, 156 OPS+ Edgar Martinez, 147 OPS+ David Ortiz, 141 OPS+ Hal McRae, 125 OPS+ Baines, 121 OPS+ , 118 OPS+ , 116 OPS+

Thomas, Martinez and Ortiz have long since overtaken Baines in the DH rankings. McRae arguably ranks in front and regardless might be one of the more underrated players in baseball history. He, Baylor and Butler don’t have much chance at Cooperstown.

Ortiz just wrapped up one of the best final seasons in baseball history, offering a .315/.401/.620 slash line and maybe figuring into consideration for the Most Valuable Player award. Asked whether he thought of Ortiz as a future Hall of Famer, Baines said, “I would think Edgar would hopefully get in before [Ortiz] does. Edgar’s had strong numbers. Not to take anything away from David, he has this great career. He’s played on a lot of world championships, his numbers speak for themselves. So he’s definitely a Hall of Famer in my book.”

Baines seems to be more bullish on Martinez’s Hall of Fame chances than his own.

“I never won a batting title or anything like that,” Baines said. “He’s won batting titles. That might be a plus. And he kind of broke all of my DH records, and then Big Papi broke all of his records.”

Baines rated Martinez as one of the best hitters he saw.

“He was just a smart hitter,” Baines said. “He used the whole field. Actually, he wasn’t a bad third baseman, either.”

“When you can’t do something, you move on to something else,” he said. “The only way I could keep a job and help my team [was to] be prepared on the offensive side.”

Like , Baines enjoyed superb longevity, posting a 106 OPS+ past his 40th birthday and wrapping up his career as a pinch hitter for the White Sox at age 42 in 2001. Asked whether he was hoping late in his career to get to 3,000 hits, Baines said, “That wasn’t my goal to get to 3,000 hits. My goal was just to win World Series rings.”

Baines’ strongest Hall of Fame case comes through traditional stats, his role in helping popularize the DH position, and his clubhouse presence. He’s less of a sure thing by sabermetrics, with just 1.6 Wins Above Average and 38.5 WAR for his career. The only reason those stats might not sink him in this go-round is that Hall of Fame committees are typically composed of older writers and baseball lifers who have little use for those metrics.

It’s uncertain, though, whether the committee will make allowances for Baines’ long tenure as a DH. “I have numbers just as good as people in the Hall of Fame, but they always go to the DH part of it,” he said.

Regardless of his Hall chances, Baines looks back fondly on his career.

“It was a very special part of my life,” he said. “Made a lot of friends. Seen a lot of different states I wouldn’t have been able to visit if I wasn’t a baseball player. All these stadiums that I went to, I wouldn’t have went to if I wasn’t a baseball player. I have nothing but great, fond memories of baseball.”

Two candidates Baines thinks are shoo-ins on this ballot, by the way? Selig and Schuerholz.

For White Sox fans, Cubs fever is something to endure By Aamer Madhani / USA Today | October 29th, 2016

CHICAGO — In the Second City, White Sox fans long ago became accustomed to their team playing second fiddle.

But for some fans of the South Side team, the October-long party for the Cubs is getting a little bit nauseating.

Most die-hard White Sox fans don’t begrudge serious Cubs devotees their moment in the sun. The hoopla over the Cubs' young core of talent and the excitement over the historic nature of the Cubs' chase for their first World Series title in 108 years is understandable.

But White Sox fans can’t help to roll their eyes at the current Cubs fervor in this city — which at times has been treating this World Series like a once in a lifetime event even though the South Side team won a World Series 11 years ago.

“For most of us, we’re used to being second fiddle,” said David Hinz, a White Sox fan from Spring Grove, Ill., as the Cubs prepared to play their first home World Series game in 71 years. “Everyone remembers the Red Sox streak without winning a World Series even though it was shorter than the White Sox streak (of 88 years). There isn’t any of this marketing ‘We’re the Loveable Losers.’ They’ve marketed 108 years of losing into something that is admirable.”

For White Sox fans, the traditions of singing “Go Cubs Go” and flying W flags after wins is like nails on a chalkboard. The only thing worse are celebrities like John Cusack, and Jim Belushi who seem to find their way into prized seats for playoff games.

The annoyance of Sox fans has been piqued by major media outlets seeming to forget about the White Sox' 2005 title run in their coverage of the Cubs-Indians series.

Fans point to ESPN airing a graphic earlier this week that listed titles won by professional sports teams in Cleveland and Chicago that omitted the White Sox’s 2005 title. CBS This Morning also posted incorrectly on its account Monday that “Wrigley Field is prepping this morning for an event Chicago hasn't seen in 71 years: the World Series.”

After the ESPN and CBS gaffes, Daniel Kay Hertz, a North Side native who sympathizes with South Siders angst, launched a tumblr called The South Side Exists.

The site pokes at the tendency of local and national media to ignore that there’s more to the other side of Chicago than murder — some of the city’s most violence-plagued neighborhoods are on the city’s South Side — and the University of Chicago.

Roscoe Nicholson, a White Sox devotee who adopted the team when he moved to the city’s South Side from North Carolina more than 12 years ago, said the disproportionate attention given to the Cubs World Series compared to what the White Sox saw in 2005 is reflective of the chasm between the city’s North and South Sides.

The Cubs play in Wrigleyville, a subsection of Lakeview, a dense, well-to-do Chicago neighborhood. The White Sox’s U.S. Cellular Field (soon to be renamed Field) is located in the Armour Square neighborhood, a diverse pocket of the city abutting predominantly black, white, Latino and Asian neighborhoods.

“It’s another example of how this is a very divided city,” Nicholson said of the current Cubs fervor. “The South Side is continually overlooked, continually unexplored, and that gets under your skin.”

Jim Dudlicek, who grew up in south suburban Oak Lawn when it was sacrosanct to be a White Sox fan if you lived in that part of Chicagoland, said it’s been difficult to escape the non-stop Cubs gushing. But even more grating, Dudlicek said, is the bandwagon fans that flock to the Cubs.

“My thought is if you live in Chicago, you eat your pizza in squares, you don’t put ketchup on your hot dogs, and you pick your baseball team and stick to it,” said Dudlicek, who has been avoiding local television newscasts to avoid the non-stop coverage.

Dudlicek, who now lives in the northwest suburb of Hoffman Estates where Cubs fans outnumber White Sox backers, said he’s managed to raise his 12-year-old daughter Mia as a White Sox despite her surroundings.

Mia, he said, did him proud when her school encouraged students to dress in their favorite Cubs gear to celebrate the playoff run.

She wore a White Sox shirt.

What it’s like to be a White Sox fan when the Cubs are in the World Series By Blake Schuster / Yahoo Sports | October 28th, 2005

An hour after the Cubs clinched the pennant, I got a text from one of the only other White Sox fans I knew growing up on the North Shore.

“The world is ending,” he wrote. “This is one of the worst days of my life.”

It was the first time I’d heard from him in at least two years, but empathy was vital here and who else could understand these complex emotions?

There are two schools of thought Sox fans like me are dealing with as the Cubs play in their first World Series since the Truman administration. The first: This month has been unbelievably awesome. There may be no sports fan, certainly no baseball fan, who hasn’t imagined what this moment would look and feel like. It is truly amazing to have this happen while I’m alive. I wish I could be back home to see it in person.

The second: Everything is awful. May the Cubs crash and burn.

That’s not because I hate the franchise. I don’t. Once, as a kid, I tried being a Cubs fan. This was mostly for my dad, who grew up in Rogers Park, only a few miles from Wrigley Field. He was always kind with the TV and let me flip to the Sox game if they were playing at the same time. But I knew he wanted to watch the Cubs. So when I was in middle school I started one summer off by following the North Siders instead of the Sox. I hated myself. It felt dirty. It wasn’t my team. I flipped back to the Sox after four weeks and tried to erase that month from my memory. This wasn’t my dad’s fault. My uncle was a White Sox diehard. He couldn’t raise me himself but he was damn sure I’d know who to root for. My father had no chance.

I don’t want the Cubs to lose because of some silly rivalry with the White Sox. As far as I’m concerned the Cubs are just another team. They could be in any other city but happen to share one with my favorite team. This has nothing to do with where they play, either. Wrigley is my favorite ballpark. Its aesthetics remain undefeated.

And how could I hate this specific team? It may be the most exciting group of ballplayers I’ve followed in my lifetime.

No, I want the Cubs to lose — be it six games, seven games, doesn’t matter — for the same reason so many want them to win: the kid in me craves it.

It was torturous growing up a White Sox fan in Cubs country. You get other-ized. You get bullied for your allegiance. You are an afterthought. This whole week I won’t be able to stop reliving childhood arguments with kids at school who laughed at me for being a Sox fan.

Which is really why my friend texted me. All those faces kept flashing up in his memory, too. And as cool as it is watching all of this unfold, neither of us wants those kids to get their rings.

I don’t hate all Cubs fans. That’s important to note. A diehard North Sider is marrying my sister in a few months and he couldn’t be a better guy. I have family and friends who live and breathe for the Cubs and I wish them nothing but joy this October. This has to do with something deeper.

When it comes to sports, the feelings fans develop as kids never fade. Just ask anyone over the age of 40 who’s wearing a or . Whereas some shed tears over loved ones who went their whole lives without seeing the Cubs make it to this stage, I clenched a fist in anger thinking of all the snot-faced punks from grade school who talked about how their wait would be more worth it than anyone else’s.

“No one can talk about losing because no one loses like the Cubs,” they’d argue. “No one can talk about how good winning feels because Cubs wins are so rare.”

Why I sold the White Sox and bought the Chicago Cubs By Andrew Cave / Forbes | October 30th, 2016

Since buying Alco Packaging with his father in 1988 at the age of 27 and re-titling it under the family , Andrew Berlin has grown the firm’s sales from $69 million to $1 billion.

More recently, the Chicago businessman sold his shares in the city’s White Sox baseball team, and in February 2015 he became a minority investor alongside majority owners the Ricketts family in the Chicago Cubs, which this year reached the World Series for the first time since 1945

Are the upward trends at the two organizations connected? Berlin, who also owns the baseball team, certainly believes so.

I recently conducted an interview with him in which he was adamant that the development of his family company and the recent success of the Cubs are based on the ethos of building profits by putting people first.

Berlin is chairman and chief executive of Berlin Packaging, which supplies plastic, glass and metal containers and closures and is majority-owned by private equity firm Oak Hill Capital Partners.

Principles “The principles that we use in business and in sports are very much the same,” he says. “I was 27 when we led the leveraged buyout. It was a troubled company at the time and it was a rocky start, given that I did not have a lot of experience in business. My father had a steel business but neither of us knew much about packaging.

“Right from the start, we focused a great deal on recruiting leaders and people who would make a difference.

“We became expert recruiters and focused a lot on human resources recruiting, training, skills development and the retention of the stars in our company.

“We laid very specific plans in those areas and the company started to build. We’re now looking at our 29th record year of sales and earnings and the company has a value of more than $2 billion.

“We’re in an industry that grows about 2% a year a year at best and we’ve outpaced that. We have a compound average revenue growth rate of 26% over the last ten years so we’re building something that’s very sustainable and powerful.”

Investing In Baseball Berlin believes the Cubs are doing something similar. He’s been involved in major league baseball since 2007 when he invested in the .

Seven years later in 2014 he left the White Sox and in February 2015 he rolled all his investment there into the Chicago Cubs.

On the club’s board of advisers in addition to being a large minority investor, he says he has noticed similarities to the way it and his packaging business are run.

‘Right from the start, we focused a great deal on recruiting leaders and people who would make a difference.

‘We became expert recruiters and focused a lot on human resources recruiting, training, skills development and the retention of the stars in our company.

‘We laid very specific plans in those areas and the company started to build. We’re now looking at our 29th record year of sales and earnings and the company has a value of more than $2BN.

‘We’re in an industry that grows about 2% a year a year at best and we’ve outpaced that. We have a compound average revenue growth rate of 26% over the last ten years so we’re building something that’s very sustainable and powerful.’

Investing in baseball Berlin believes the Cubs are doing something similar. He’s been involved in major league baseball since 2007 when he invested in the Chicago White Sox.

Seven years later in 2014 he left the White Sox and in February 2015 he rolled all his investment there into the Chicago Cubs.

On the club’s board of advisers in addition to being a large minority investor, he says he has noticed similarities to the way it and his packaging business are run.

‘The Cubs put a tremendous amount into recruitment, not just of players but also of the executives that run the business,’ he says. ‘They’re very, very good at strategic planning, which is something that Berlin Packaging is also very good at.’

What about his own recruitment as a partner and investor by the Cubs? Didn’t his switch from the White Sox to its domestic rival cause waves in the city? ‘Not really,’ Berlin replies. ‘In baseball, moving from team to team is part of the culture of the business. Your players do it all the time.

‘It’s rarer that owners move but in my case I saw an opportunity with the Cubs to be with a company that was willing to give me a position on the board of advisers and also to enjoy a team that was really building from the inside out.

‘It was an exciting opportunity for me and it worked out for all parties. There’s a great rivalry between the teams.

‘I’ve been a Cubs fan since I was a little boy but I would never have invested such a significant amount of money in it just for vanity.

‘This was not a vanity investment. It’s a financial investment with a club that’s very profitable and very smart about how it operates.’

Berlin feels that management and leadership played a significant part in the Cubs’ most successful season for 71 years.

Moneyball ‘The Cubs have taken things way beyond the metrics,” he says. “The Cubs are very data- driven and have a great deal of metrics around performance and analysing the past to try to understand the future.

‘I would say that in the use of data and analytics, the Cubs are probably among the best in the business. We’ve had more success with it than most.

‘The leadership of the Cubs and my leadership of Berlin Packaging are also very similar in the sense that we’re very communicative with the employees of the organisation.

‘We’re very clear about our vision for the business and the layers of that vision, whether that’s the noble cause of being a good community partner or bringing the World Series to a city that’s starving for something to be proud of.

‘Vision, recruiting, planning and execution with talented people are the keys to building a great business. Making a commitment to get very, very good at those human resources strategies is something that very few businesses focus on.

‘They focus on innovation, on machines, buildings and brands but they don’t necessarily focus as well on human resource building and on management and retention. I think that’s the big difference and that’s what the Cubs and Berlin Packaging share.’