.500 club

The White Sox have won six in a row and 11 of 13, and are now back at .500--34-34. That was unthinkable just a couple of weeks ago, when it looked like A.J. Pierzynski, Jake Peavy and others could be headed out the door at any moment.

This weekend, they swept the Washington Nationals. They survived an outing against phenom Stephen Strasburg and came away with a win, finally got the kind of effort they had been expecting from Peavy, who threw a complete game victory, and today brought out the bats for unlikely staff ace Freddy Garcia, scoring six runs on 15 hits in a 6-3 win.

The winning streak hasn't come against the best of teams--crappy interleague foes like the Cubs, Pirates and Nationals, and this week, the Sox will face a real test at home in an interleague match-up the Atlanta Braves, a bonafide first place team. Are the Sox for real? Are they putting it all together the way we expected when we saw the group of players that assembled for spring training?

The next three games, before another weekend dance with the cupcake North Siders, should tell us how much work there is left to do.