Here are some guys whose stocks is going up, plus some guys headed in the wrong direction.

Stock Up

Jacoby Ellsbury – OF – BOS

Over the past 15 days Jacoby is 20-46 (.435) with 4 home runs, 11 RBI’s, 10 runs scored, and 3 stolen bases.  If Jacoby stays healthy 20/50 is a very good possibility if not 20/60.  Life can’t get much better hitting for Jacoby hitting in front of the hot hitting Dustin Pedroia (currently on a 15-game hitting streak) and Adrian Gonzalez.

Wilson Ramos – C – WAS

Wilson batted .400 over the past 15 days (12-30) with 3 home runs, 11 RBI’s, 4 doubles.  He should continue to see a majority of the starts, but look for him to take an extra day off a week when Ivan Rodriguez returns by the end of the month.  Look for Ramos to continue to swing a hot bat while Pudge is out. He’s quietly raised his average up .256 on the year with 30 runs scored and 33 RBI’s.

Emilio Bonifacio - SS/3B/OF – FLA

Currently has a 16-game hitting streak while going 20-43 with 13 runs scored and 9 stolen bases.  His position flexibility offers a great variety as a bench player with speed.  Ride the hot streak while he’s leading off under interim manager Jack McKeon.  He doesn’t offer much in the form of power but is a must add for his speed.

Stock Down

Orlando Cabrera – SS/2B – CLE

The well-traveled veteran is struggling again.  Jason Kipnis has been hitting very well in Triple-A and looks to be ready for a call-up in the near future.  Orlando is 7-41 (.171), with one run scored, 3 RBI’s, and one stolen base over the past 15 days.  His days as a starter are numbered as the youth movement of the Indians is in full circle since Carlos Santana, Matt LaPorta, Lonnie Chisenhall, and soon to be Jason Kipnis are all young and playing well.

Austin Jackson – OF – DET

Hit 1-13 over the past 15 days with a wrist injury.  Austin hasn’t had a stolen base since the first of July but look for the Tigers to hold him out until he’s completely healthy.  Look for him to bounce back with some nice numbers by the end of the month while his owership bounces back from the 38% right now.

Maicer Izturis – 2B/3B/SS – LAA

Now 2 for his last 30 at-bats while his batting average has dipped down to .272.  Looks like Maicer has come back down to Earth.  If you need a second MI in deep leagues, feel free to hold onto him.  But in shallow leagues, there are numerous other options out there.

And after his two run shot to take the lead in the 7th, one could have doubtlessly heard the crowd’s eruption after Kirby Puckett’s Game 6 homerun.

And as Alexi Casilla came to the plate in the bottom of the 12th, the phantom of Gene Larkin revisited the hallowed ground, as the ball reached the outfield and the winning runner sunk into a sea of white pinstripes.

The ghosts of Metrodome past came out for one last night. One spectacular night. And strutted their stuff one final time.

The biggest night of baseball this year was a heavyweight fight. With critical moment after critical moment, match-point after match-point, and epic out after epic out; this game was everything everyone wanted out of a game 163. But where to begin? Simply a 20-year old rookie pitcher’s gutsy start, lasting well into the 6th inning, giving up a mere one ER, should suffice as a quality storyline. And if that’s not enough, maybe we can throw in a tiebreaking late inning homerun by a player acquired at the trade dealine, who simply wanted to get be a part of a winning team? And if that doesn’t quite do it, lets set a stage with runners on the corners, no outs, top of the ninth, and strike out a guy who K’s once every four games a second time in the evening – and then double up a guy who’s hit over .500 in his last 12 games on a line out.

And that’s the ballgame. Right? Is that not enough?

Is having a guy who has had 17 career hits and a lifetime .217 average step to the plate in extra innings and deliver a huge 10th inning hit for a team seeing their title hopes slip away believable? Is then following that up with having a guy, just as unlikely as the last, step up in the bottom of that same inning to send in the tying run on a single hit through a hole you couldn’t throw a ball through realistic?

That should do. Wait, it’s only 8:30 central time – we’re not ready to turn our television sets off yet.  Let’s keep this game going.

Lets have a relief pitcher who’s ERA approached 6.00…in the minor leagues…take the mound, with bases-loaded, full count, and strike out a guy who swung on a pitch that fell out of the zone. And then lets have an outfielder, exiled from his leadoff role and starting position at the same time last season, get on base with a leadoff single into left field. If that’s not enough, finally, we’ll close this game out with a promising guy who has had a terrible year by every barometer, who’s been destined to the bench indefinitely, who’s been up and down the farm system all year, come in and deliver a game winning single into right field, erupting a record crowd into euphoria.

That’s it.

You can shut your televisions off now. But I won’t blame you if you keep watching post-game in shock.

But it was much more than the game deciding plays. It was a storyline from the start. It was a patented ‘never-say-die” Twins team on a tear after losing their 2006 AL MVP, their starting third basemen, and their top pitcher during the season to injury: not to mention a complete collapse of their opening day starting rotation. It was a Tigers team, trying to rally a city attempting to recover from a collapse of their own, hoping desperately that they could avoid an epic fall from the top of the standings after holding onto it for the past five full months.

It was the small battles within the war that set the stage. It was Cuddyer’s triple that setup the bottom of the 10th due in great part to the failed effort of an outfielder trying to make a play on the ball. It was Nick Punto fouling off his 4th straight foul-ball en-route to a walk before Cabrera’s two run homerun. It Justin Morneau tirelessly cheering from the bench as he’s done all month and it was Orlando Cabrera showing us the reason he came to Minnesota was to win. It was Ron Gardenhire revealing his rare in-game emotion, it was Jesse Crain finding his stuff at the perfect time, and it was a record crowd erupting – refusing to let their temple of baseball go quietly into the night.

Many will say this was the best baseball game played this season, perhaps one of the best baseball games played ever. The test of time will tell as rarely do games even of this magnitude hold memory if a championship does not ensue, however, the comparisons are irrelevant. What the Twins and their fans did was something special, something that takes more than money, but character. Perhaps it will be a moment that may be forgotten in time by the public, but will be remembered in the hearts of the fans of Minnesota for ages. It was a great moment, a spectacular moment, and that as fans is all we can hope for.

A collection of thoughts about this trade. First, the excitement.

I like this kid Jeff Marquez, at least what can be gleaned from a quick five-minute Internet search. He was a first round draft choice in the 2004 draft and Baseball America recently rated him as the #7 prospect in the Yankees’ organization. Last year, he pitched for the first time in AAA, starting 14 games and pitching 80.2 innings while racking up a 6-7 record, a 4.69 ERA, a K/9 rate of 3.68, and a WHIP of 1.45. Those numbers don’t seem all that great, and they are not — actually, they look pretty similar to Javier Vazquez’s second half numbers from last year. However, for his minor league career, Jeff Marquez is 43-40 with an ERA of 3.60 in 560 innings, with a K/9 of 6.36 and BB/9 of 3.07. The best number though? How about a HR/9 rate of 0.55 (which was much higher during his brief stint in AAA, ballooning to 1.34). For a pitcher projected to start half his games in the U.S. Cellular Launching Pad, keeping the ball in the ballpark is key.

Earlier in his minor league career, Jeff Marquez was described this way on Scout.com:

The Yankees selected Jeff Marquez in the 1st round of the 2004 draft. Marquez has earned tremendous confidence from the organization with a mature approach along with a lethal combination of a sinker and an outstanding power changeup.

So, obviously we won’t know anything until we see this kid spend some more time at AAA and ultimately in the majors, but he appears to have a pretty high upside as he only recently turned 24.

As far as the other guys go, Wilson Betemit was a former top-level prospect with the Atlanta Braves who has never seemed to live up to the early hype and promise. I remember fantasy gurus tugging on their little Salisbury about him when he first came up to the Majors. In six Major League season, Betemit has never topped 400 ABs once, and is a lifetime .260 hitter. He did hit 18 HRs in 2006, the season in which he had his most ABs of 373. He can, however, play both SS and 3B at a decent level and gives the White Sox flexibility to move Juan Uribe or Joe Crede with Alexei Ramirez expected to move to short, Orlando Cabrera to be jettisoned, and Josh Fields hoping to play somewhere.

With respect to Jhonny Nunez, I will withhold judgment until I see him play, but my first impression is not good. Why? Because he spells his name “Jhonny.” This reminds of Jhonny Peralta of the Cleveland Indians, and anything that reminds me of the Cleveland Indians is enough to make me want to wretch. It took me three years to fully embrace Jim Thome as a true member of the White Sox, and as the memory of his home run in the one-game playoff over Minnesota fades, even he still reminds me of the Indians. Anyway, back to serious baseball conversation, Nunez has only pitched 27 innings above A ball, and has already been in three organizations in three years. But he’s still young (22) and has shown a good K rate in his brief minor league career. Perhaps he can help shore up the bullpen at some point, but it does not appear that he will be on the South Side in the coming years.

Now back to Nick Swisher. I was ecstatic when the White Sox acquired Nick Swisher. He had always put up good numbers at U.S. Cellular Field and his defining characteristic was boundless energy that everyone thought would be a positive in a clubhouse that had gotten stale since winning the World Series in 2005. However, Swisher struggled mightily last season, and today’s article on the Sun-Times website explains that Swisher actually brought more negative energy to the clubhouse towards the end of the season as his playing time waned. He apparently was not receptive to coaching, and this did not help him break out of his season-long funk.

While the Swisher and Cabrera experiments in 2008 seem like failures, they were the primary additions (along with Super Alexei) to a team that reversed its awful performance from 2007 and ended up in the playoffs. It seems ironic that both Nick Swisher and Orlando Cabrera with leave Chicago embroiled in stories about how their final weeks and days in the White Sox clubhouse were defined more by pouting and being negative influences than the positive energy and excitement that they seemed to bring at the start of the year, and that everyone thought would be such a boon for the White Sox. I guess they were for awhile, but just could not find a comfortable groove with Ozzie Guillen and the rest of the South Siders.

Either way, I will say this: not every move that Ken Williams makes turns into gold, but he is not afraid to cut his losses and move on. Take a look at his moves before 2008. He struck gold with Carlos Quentin and Alexei Ramirez, and they are now two building blocks for the future of the White Sox. Nick Swisher and Orlando Cabrera didn’t work out, and they will be gone. A lot of General Managers are afraid to admit when they make mistakes, but not Ken Williams. He wants to win. And even though people will now question the wisdom of trading a pitcher with the potential of Gio Gonzalez for one year of Nick Swisher, Williams is not stubbornly holding onto Swisher in hopes it will work out. He has turned right back around and gotten three players in return, one of whom is a starting pitcher probably just one notch below Gonzalez. You have to take chances to win, as Ken Williams did in bringing in Carlos Quentin and Alexei Ramirez. Sometimes they work out, and sometimes they don’t. The good GMs double-down on the moves that work and quickly move past the ones that do not.

We will not be able to assess the true value of this trade for years to come, but I applaud the move despite how much I fell in love with Dirty 30 and his technicolor goatee at the start of the year. Ken Williams has earned my trust, and hopefully the trust of all White Sox fans. Now let’s hope that Jeff Marquez actually turns into the 3rd or 4th starter that he seems to have the potential to become.

[tags]chicago white sox, ken williams, nick swisher, mlb[/tags]

Juan Uribe and his regal goatee are the best thing that the Sox could have hoped for down the stretch. Starting the year, no Sox fan would have told you that the key moment would have happened at the end of July when we realized that “GoldenTee” was the man on the hot corner.

I remember sitting at game against Cleveland in June, up around section 526 thinking, “Man, Crede is in a contract year. How much is it gonna’ cost to lock that down?” He was hot, a third baseman that made White Sox fans love everything happening on the left side of the field in combination with Carlos Quentin being the most underrated thing in baseball coming out of Arizona. The glove of Joe Crede was like a wall and our ground ball pitchers, like Marky Mark Buehrle, loved that security. Buehrle loved it so much he won every game he started in June and had an ERA of 1.60. John Danks floated down to 2.10 that same month. It seemed like, with that defense, all we had to do was hit a few homers, coming from anywhere in the lineup, and we could win big games. We did, too, sweeping both the Cubs and Twins.

Then comes July, things start slowing down and sure enough Crede gets sent to the sixty day DL on the 25^th. Who waltzes in but the Golden Boy himself. We were skeptical: the bat, the feet, the beard. Plus, who could replace Joe Crede down the stretch?

The reporters were merciless on manager Ozzie Guillen, not giving Uribe any staying power: “What’s the word on Crede?” “When do you expect Joe to return?”,”Any injury updates? Joe Crede?”, “Can you call Joe Crede at his home and ask him if he thinks he can play soon?” Until he officially said on September 5th, “I have to be honest with you because I’m tired of people asking me the same question about Joe. Joe is not going to be with us and I don’t expect him to be back [this] season. I don’t know if it’s going to be true or not. That’s my plan.”

Finally, fans and media stopped and realized…Wait a second, the Wizard of Oz is right again. Juan Uribe has stepped up. Take your time in Charlotte, Joe, and get that back healthy, bud.

Juan Uribe did step up, by the numbers and otherwise – Crede batting .248 on the year and Uribe at .255 were even. Crede tossed up 17 homers to Juan’s 7, but Juan was almost perfect in the field, He only had 8 errors in 98 games, to Crede’s 20 errors in 97. He more than stepped up; he overshadowed Joe Crede. That may have been because of his bulky frame and huge rear but nonetheless, who needs Smokin’ Joe, when you got Fumando Juando?

What isn’t seen on paper or in the interviews are the intangibles. He’s known as a vet, a team guy and someone that brings that energy back to the sometimes childish locker room. What more can you ask for when a huge injury scares everyone heading into crunch time, and you are trying to fend off a Minnesota Twins team always within striking distance?

By September even Ozzie was scared, “I know it’s been the hardest season because for the first time since I’ve been here, we weren’t expected to win.” He followed that with “If we don’t win this thing, it’s almost like I wasted my time, I wasted my players’ time, their effort.”

But the gang held on. Players stepped up.  Then it looked like Crede was back and Ozzie pulled Orlando Cabrera, and dropped Uribe at short. Orlando Cabrerra got a late scare and a wakeup call in Baltimore with Uribe filling in at shortstop for a few appearances. OC probably wondered if his job was safe, with Uribe so solid and while Crede looked like he might get the corner back. Orlando Cabrera realized he needed to start picking up his game and that he wasn’t getting paid $10 million for laying down on the job. Cruise control was getting him nowhere in July but when he felt a little fire under him in August, he popped up batting .292 at the end of August. When Crede landed back on the DL, it put Uribe back at third. Then, OC held on, getting real serious about his job and is batting .365 here in September.

When then Sox needed Juan Uribe, he kept them up. He stepped up huge when an All-Star fell to injury. Then he played so well, Crede didn’t need to come back and OC needed to step up. Juan Uribe kept the Sox moving, and lifted the play of his team through the second half of the season, doing his job on and off the field. People saw the team sliding at any moment. We slipped a little here and there but managed to stay alive and a half a step ahead of the Twins till this point. This team has proved their toughness with the help of the Sox “Golden Boy” this year. All you gotta’ wonder is will this carry them into the postseason and how far can we go when we get there?