Sox Machine: Chicago White Sox blog

Godot doesn't show; Fukudome signs with Cubs (updated)

Last month, I was a Nielsen family.  The logs I filled out mainly consisted of college football, a couple episodes of Jeopardy! and syndicated shows I didn't catch the first time around, like The Office or Scrubs.  Suffice it to say, I don't watch much TV, mainly because I watch it too much during baseball season.

However, if I did have appointment television, I imagine the writer's strike would hit me like Kosuke Fukudome's decision to sign with the Cubs did tonight.  Unless Kenny Williams: Ninja GM returns with a vengeance, we're relegated to reruns for the indefinite future.

We've already seen the top remaining center fielders left in the free agent market, and they're probably not going to be as good the second time around.

1. Aaron Rowand (seen it).

Unless Rowand decides to kiss some more unprotected fencing or another dirt bike track, he still has a lot of good baseball left in him.  He provides Gold Glove-level defense up the middle and has shown the capability to fill the Triple Crown categories.

On the other hand, he’s also shown the propensity to be below average at the plate just as often, and while maybe he was trying to compliment a friend, I’m a little frightened by how much he preferred Greg Walker’s methodology even though it didn’t produce results in 2005.

I like him better than Torii Hunter, but five years is still a scary proposition.  I suppose it’d be interesting to see how fans respond to Rowand if he’s making four times the money he did the last time around, and the Sox are topping out at 78 wins.

2. Mike Cameron (seen it).

He’s a low average hitter who strikes out a ton, which means he would fit in pretty well.  It also means he wouldn’t be that much fun to watch, although he’d probably get decent results.

I suppose two years would be OK, I guess.

(On a tangent, whenever I think of Cameron is a Sox uniform, my first memory is his role in the White Sox charities commercial during the mid-90s.  He stood in the middle of a group of kids, and the commercial ended with a close-up of Cameron pleading in a severely doleful voice, “Won’t you pleeeeeeeeeeease help?”  To this date, I don’t know if I can think of a sadder-sounding guy.

So what I’m saying is that if Cameron comes back, I want those commercials back, too.)

3. Kenny Lofton (seen it).

Yeeeeeeeeep.  It’d be too kind to call Jerry Owens a poor man’s Kenny Lofton at this stage.  More accurately, he’s probably a poor man’s 41-year-old Kenny Lofton.  But Lofton isn’t the guy to put his team over the top, so there’s no reason to spend the money on him.

The only guy who’s happy about this development is the guy who owns Owens’ Baseball-Reference.com page, but it’s hard to find a more attractive alternative.  There’s always the outside chance that Williams ropes in an Alex Rios or somebody else out of thin air, but that’s rooting against a trend that’s a solid 1 ½ years in the making. 

I have to say, it’s just a little discouraging that all signs point to watching the same program we watched three months, three years or last century, while flipping to Cubs games to see if we were right to covet Fukudome. 

At this point, maybe we should root for the Sox to shave a couple dollars off the ticket prices or parking.  Or at least have parking lot attendants who don’t think they’re doing you a favor by letting you park on gravel.  We'd be seeing something new that way.