per Peter Gammons on twitter...

Ozzie says Thornton has first dibs on closer role
about 14 hours ago via Twitter for BlackBerry®

Do you lot think this is a good thing for the White Sox? Obviously Thornton has got the far superior pedigree to Chris Sale, but ideally I wanted to see Sale take the job so that way Matt Thornton could be, to use a B&B term, Ozzie's "blankie" throughout the season-- putting out fires in innings 6-9 as needed.

This begs the question, do you think having a lockdown fuck-you closer in the 9th is better than having a dominant setup guy whose non-closer status allows more flexibility in their usage?

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An argument can be made either way as to which is more important. I guess it comes to you having a good setup man/great closer or great setup man/good closer. If one of those is below average, you're fucked...

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This is my signature...

Bobby Jenks was generally pretty good with the Sox. He had a great 2007, but the team overall sucked. When Jenks has been "good", for lack of a better term, the Sox have had behind him: Politte, Cotts (were both great in 2005), Thornton, and Linebrink (who was great as a setup guy in 2008).

Ivan is right. Either you need to have dominant 7th and 8th inning guys-- which Sale looks to be and Santos could be-- or you need to have an absolute lights out closer.

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Don't forget having Jesse Crain around as a setup guy now.

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I'd prefer they use a "committee" approach, but I have no problem with Guillen expressing a vote of confidence in Thornton. The RH portion of the pen, namely Crain and Santos, has more questions than the LH. We don't really know if Sale can be trusted to get RH batters out as well as LH at this point.

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This really isn't a surprise. They paid him to be the closer and I think they made a great choice. I believe the Sox will really surprise a lot of baseball "experts" this year by how good they will be. I'm out of the WS predicting business before the start of a season (Mark Prior) but I really like this team.

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Last season right handed batters hit .120 against Sale. With his slider of death I think he can be trusted to get righties out.

Aside from fantasy baseball proclivities (my autopick drafts netted me 0-2 closers across each of my 5 public leagues) I really wanted Sale to end up the closer.

I will confess that this is the opposite of my Marmol take in 2009, cuz I knew Marmol was the man when he was first interviewed on Boers and Bernstein and asked "what's going through your head when you pitch?" and he's like "For real? (("Yeah")) You have no chance!! HAHAHHAHAHA!!!" and having seen his stuff I was like, OK, lock this kid into a 9th inning "fuck you" closer role and stop dangling him around. He's obviously your closer of the future so let's stop messing around with his role and give him one. Plus it didn't hurt that Kevin Gregg was/is hot garbage as a closer.

As it stood, the Cubs went with Gregg until he pitched himself out of the closer role and the up-n-down Marmol took over the duties, and has basically been the best strikeout reliever in baseball since then.

This time around, as it's been said in the thread, Sale has the kind of stuff that screams out "closer of the future", if not a Neftali Feliz type situation should he master a third or even fourth pitch. I was hoping that Ozzie would be proactive and want to use Thornton as a veritable fireman from innings 6-9, making sure that any tight situation leading up to the 9th would be handled by someone he knows and trusts... but with the "All In" mantra, evidently he's going for having a known entity in the 9th as opposed to using his best reliver earlier in the game. Also, maybe this is a means to give Sale more experience in situations with less pressure in earlier innings to build him up to the eventual closer role. Barring either a promotion to the rotation or some sort of mental/physical breakdown, Sale will be closing within a year or two tops.

I really just wanted it to be this year, especially given my fantasy baseball proclivities! =/

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He had ungodly numbers, but the kid has 23.1 innings in the Show. Let's give him a couple spins through the league before anointing him the next Randy Johnson.

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Too late. I already annointed him that on draft night.

Per Barry Rozner, "Right now as of 2:27pm, the plan is to have Chris Sale close and have Matt Thornton set-up"

This would make sense, seeing as if Ozzie wanted to up and name Thornton the closer he's had ample time/reason to do so and he hasn't done that to this point. Rozner intimates that if Sale keeps struggling in spring training, or if he starts off the year closing and provides a boatload of suck, it'd be really easy to insert Thornton into the role.

Stay tuned, true believers!

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Rozner with bogus info again. Ozzie names Thornton closer to start the season.

http://sports.espn.go.com/chicago/mlb/news/story?id=6237785&campaign=rss&source=MLBHeadlines

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Maybe Rozner was right and they changed their minds?

Not even Lois Lane could get the scoop

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