It's always funny when someone who is typing in ALL CAPS accuses someone else of "ranting."

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Which players choked in particular?

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

bad teams win 5 of every 12. chokers win 2.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

Not Detroit?

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Are you interested in a reasonable and logical discussion?

If so, let's say the Sox had won enough to beat Detroit by a game and Detroit had done exactly what they did. Would that mean that Detroit had choked? Because I'm reasonably certain that if it had happened like that certain people would have suggested between "herps" and "derps" that the Sox weren't really too good but that Detroit had choked. Do you think that's a fair thing to say?

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

No. I would think people would agree that Detroit had under achieved and was probably the biggest disappointment in all of MLB except for the Marlins.

If Detroit had had a 3 or 4 game lead on September 18th and then lost the division by 2 or 3 games, that would be a choke in my book.

You're usually pretty on the money with the Sox, JOrr. I hate to admit it too, but going 2-10 near the finish line of a pennant race can really only be called choking.

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If Detroit had lost it's 3 game lead in the last week and a half, then yes.

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Detroit on paper going into the season should have won 10 more games. They underperformed expectations with the talent they have on the roster. They also dropped the ball at the trade deadline. The only thing they did this year to get the playoff spot was to beat the Sox head to head. It also took the Sox losing a lot of games at the end to get them in. The Sox played above expectations and the Tigers below. That is why I still say the Sox ran out of gas and some of the players came back down to earth.

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That's my purse! I don't know you!

I just don't think so, Frank. I figured there was a good chance it would go that way over a month ago. Of course, I hoped Sale would be strong all the way through, but there were plenty of reasons to believe he wouldn't. Still, he was okay, just not great. The pitching isn't what lost this thing. It was Pierzynski and Konerko more than anything. And I certainly don't believe either of those guys "choked". Call it what you want. They're going home and Detroit is going to New York. In the end it played out the way most people expected before the season began.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Did his team choke this season? A lot of people thought they would win their division.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

It was not just those 2 guys. Nobody, including those 2 guys, hit in KC. Nobody hit in Anaheim. The pitching staff walked 12 guys against the Indians when they could have stayed tied with Detroit. They gave up 10 runs to Tampa when they could have stayed within a game of Detroit. Thursday night bases loaded 0 outs, Viciedo gets HBP, after that nothing.

Aj, Dunn, and Paulie were not good at the plate down the stretch, but neither was anybody else. The entire team choked.

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JORR, you need to let this end dude.

AT BEST, you may achieve a pyrrhic victory.

You sound like Blago trying to convince people he wasn't auctioning off Obama's Senate seat.

Let it go already.

You do understand that suggesting an entire team of guys- including a few who have been "clutch" in big postseason games in the past- all succumbed to pressure at once does seem really ridiculous. And Konerko and Pierzynski were guys you counted on in the middle of the order. You weren't looking for Beckham or Dewayne Wise to carry the team.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

The White Sox were their mediocre selves. Konerko has been hurt most, if not all season. The Tigers were BRUTAL and let the White Sox hang around.
I look forward to the day when the Sox ditch station to station Home Run or Nothing baseball.

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There goes one over the fence..Tru Link Fence..Beauty, Privacy Security....Call Tru Link.
Murph's Union 76 Truck Stop....A great Thanksgiving Tradition!!!!

WOO LIFE!!!!

No thanks. We tried that already and got stuck with Rob Mackowiak in the outfield, and Mark Kotsay at DH.

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Doesn't seem ridiculous at all. A couple key guys start to fail, others feel the pressure and start pressing. Pretty soon, the whole team is trying to hit a 5-run homer with every pitch.

When that happens at the end of a game, season, etc., and the result is that a team performs well below the baseline they've set over a significant sample size of games resulting in the failure to maintain a lead of some kind, you've just defined a "choke".

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You know me like that.

BEARS

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This team did epically choke and for this reason attendance will be abysmal in 2013 as well. Being picked to win the division or picked to come in last has nothing to do with it. The Sox had total control of their own destiny for the majority of the season and when it came down to keep that 3 game lead they couldn't. They were playing shit-ass teams like KC, Cleveland and so on and couldn't pad their lead.

When it came down to the most crucial time in the season to retain their lead over Detroit they just plain choked. Pitchers didn't pitch and as usual the hitters couldn't hit, which has been a consistent theme for the last 4-5 years. There were no significant injuries that hampered the majority of the team besides the Dunn's oblique muscles and the Konerko's wrist, but they had all the important players for the majority of the season. Floyd's time on the DL did nothing to this team because he is a piece of shit pitcher as well as the highly "meh" John Danks.

This ultimately falls on the shoulders of Kenny Williams and the new Manager Robin Ventura. Kenny's ego keeps him wanting to win at all costs because his inflated ego would never let him deal with a true rebuilding process. He keeps stalking the aging veterans who have little left in the tank and ultimately peter out on him (Peavy, Youk, Dunn, etc.). Robin's giving away of outs and his game 7 management of the pitching staff was awful, but hopefully he will learn from this.

The irrelevancy of this team is growing by the season and they have no one to blame but themselves.

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RFDC thinks I'm retarded.

Of course it's ridiculous. You're suggesting that every guy in a lineup responds to pressure the same way.

Let's not act as if this was a team that played .600 baseball all season. It was a team that struggled to play around .500 for quite awhile and then went on a little run and got 10-12 games above and then stayed around there and went on winning streaks and losing streaks. They had trouble with Kansas City all season and happened to have a bunch of games against them at the end.

What happened was obvious. Two old guys who were keys to the offense got banged up and wore down and a bunch of young pitchers wore out just enough that they couldn't overcome that lack of offense the way they might have earlier in the season.

The Cubs have been in first place in June many times with many horrible teams. Do you think they all choked? Or that they just couldn't maintain such a pace over the full schedule?

Come on. Do you really find it shocking that this was an 85 or 86 win team?

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Again, I've made it clear I don't believe they "choked", but I do agree with the second part. Not making the playoffs is likely a disaster for this team going forward. They're probably going to have the same lineup but without Youkilis and Pierzynski. They're losing a bunch of salary. I doubt they spend that money. Even if they wanted to, the free agents don't look great.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

As Jimmy Piersall would say:

"Thank you for your call".

It's a team that played about .550 all year and then played .167 in the two weeks when the pressure was the highest.

So, yes, I am mildly shocked that a team that had 81 wins at the 147-game mark, might end up with 84 wins. That's generally what happens when a team chokes.

But, I suppose it's more likely that everybody got tired at the exact same moment and couldn't win another game.

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You know me like that.

More likely than a bunch of guys, several of whom had been World Series heroes, all "choking" at once. What do you think happened inside the brains of Youkilis, Konerko, and Pierzynski that they suddenly couldn't handle the pressure? That wasn't the first bad stretch they had. Did they choke when they lost 11 of 14 back in April and May? How about when they lost 8 of 10 in the middle of July? Were those "chokes" or "pre-chokes" or maybe just bad baseball?

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

You were looking for a definition of a choke. I provided one in an effort to kill this thread.

What are you looking for, JORR? If you want everyone to agree that they just played bad baseball, then I'll agree. You can call it that.

The rest of the world calls bad baseball down the stretch of a pennant race that results in a 6-game swing in less than 2 weeks a choke. That's just life.

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You know me like that.

The timing of the losing would define choke, much like the timing of the winning would define clutch.

A player/team who has success at the end of game/season when pressure is highest is determined to be clutch. Therefore the converse must also be true.

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The real question here is whether or not MLB is more popular than the NFL

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I think I've said it more than once in this thread, anyone can call it what they like. But I think I've made a pretty fair and logical argument why I wouldn't call this a "choke" and why I don't believe teams can "choke" in general. If we agree that choking means losing one's composure and playing below one's ability due to said loss of composure, I'd simply ask if anyone saw any evidence of anyone in a Sox uniform losing his composure this season.

They weren't even really dreadful as they struggled at the end. They lost by a run or two and left a lot of men on base. They just weren't very good. And they had other twelve or fourteen game stretches during this season where they looked exactly the same. It just so happens that Detroit suddenly found a way to win 7 of 8 or whatever it was at the same time, something I don't think they did all season.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

But I think that the concept of "clutch" has pretty much been proven to be perception rather than reality. Who are the "clutch" players and why do you believe them to be "clutch"?

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don