.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.

The Sox are back (?)

The White Sox have won seven of nine games behind improved pitching and some lively hitting from Carlos Quentin and others. Good signs of things to come? Maybe...

The Sox pitching staff was impressive against the Cubs over the weekend, but the Cubs have been pretty woeful of late. This week, they beat up Pittsburgh, but everybody does that (well, except for the Cubs).

More promising is that CQ has been pounding the ball recently, and while Gordon Beckham continues to disappoint and Mark Teahen is injured, it's Quentin's role in the line-up that is most significant for the Sox in taking more advantage of stellar seasons thus far from Alex Rios and Paul Konerko. If the meat of the line-up is getting on base and driving in runs, that should be enough for Sox pitchers like Mark Buehrle and Gavin Floyd, each of whom looked good in their last outing. And, amazingly, Freddy Garcia is still vexing everyone.

Unfortunately, Jake Peavy continues to be a source of stress, annoyance and disappointment. The dreaded "shoulder problems" issue has come up, for now only pushing back a start, but we'll see. Peavy actually has tried hard through a tough season to contribute to team unity and motivation, but the Sox need his arm, not his coaching abilities.

Meanwhile, a winning streak and some good vibes could go a long way toward mitigating the supposed tension between GM Kenny Williams and manager Ozzie Guillen. There have been almost daily reports about how the two don't need to get along to win, or that they actually do get along--whatever... Just win, baby.

Weekend update

After their first weekend of play for the 2010 season, both are teams are 2-4, with line-ups on both sides of town still struggling mightily. The White Sox actually did manage five runs Sunday, the most either team has managed since the Cubs scored five in a hopeless effort back on Opening Day.

The Sox got a nice surprise from Andruw Jones Sunday in the form of an eighth inning game-winning hit that kept them from losing their fifth in a row and getting swept by the Piranhas. Paul Konerko had a two-run homer to continue his tear, and the Sox got solo shots from Mark Kotsay (finally make Ozzie look good for sticking with him) and Gordon Beckham, but Jones' pinch-hit single may have been the brightest moment for this team since Game 1.

Mark Buehrle also was good enough in holding the Twins to four runs over eight innings, keeping a somewhat taxed bullpen off the field.

The win came after a frustrating 2-1 Saturday loss in which a gutsy performance by Freddy Garcia's was wasted. The Sox had a number of scoring chances, but couldn't manage timely hits, and all the recent talk of aggressive base-running backfired at one point when Alex Rios, after his lead-off double, was doubled off of second on a fly ball out.

The Sox head north for a series in Toronto early this week, and it seems unlikely they will find their hitting touch in a dome (damn domes...), but at least they won't have to face Roy Halladay anymore.

The Cubs really should have won all three games in Cincinnati, yet they leave losing two out of three, and when they don't get sabotaged by their own bullpen, they can always count on Alfonso Soriano's clumsy fielding to do the job. On Sunday, Soriano's fumbling of a catchable fly ball in the seventh inning--while not extending the inning, since it would only have been the second out--changed the karma of a game in which Tom Gorzelanny had pitched very well.

After Soriano's error, and with the bases now loaded, Lou Piniella decided to take his anger out on Gorzelanny, removing the lefty for... another lefty, Sean Marshall. Still, Marshall has been dominant this past week, and we've been hoping he'd get the call more often, so the change wasn't a complete surprise. In any case, the karma had changed for the Cubs, and what we got next was a pure bad luck play in which a possible double-play grounder deflected off Marshall's glove and brought in the tying run.

The Reds scored two runs an inning later, and three runs is just too much for this Cubs team. The Cubs didn't do much hitting against rookie starter Mike Leake, with Kosuke Fukudome collecting three of the Cubs' five hits, but they didn't need to, as Leake awarded them seven walks. Still, except for an RBI single by Derrek Lee, the Cubs did nothing with the free runners. The worst was a waste of a bases-loaded, no-outs situation in the first inning. So maybe a little of the bad karma was there from the beginning.

Saturday featured the Cubs' second win of the season and a nicely modulated performance by Carlos Zambrano, who fell behind early 3-0, but didn't implode, and kept the Cubs in the game until homers by Soriano, Fukudome and Jeff Baker brought them a 4-3 lead. Carlos Marmol was at his unhittable best un the ninth for the save, but Zambrano was most impressive. With the obvious exception of his no-hitter in 2008, I've rarely seen get tougher to hit and more calm as a game has gone on. It was an especially nice recovery after his Opening Day horror show.

Home opener for the Cubs tomorrow against the Brew Crew.

Quick with the pen

So, the hated Piranhas now know what it's like to win Game 163. When the Twins beat the Tigers 6-5 in extras last night--a game that I have to admit was more epic than last year's Game 163 Blackout win by the Sox--it proved what we Sox fans had been saying all season: Detroit just isn't that good, and the division can be won by another team. But, we also assumed that other team would be the Sox, and watching the Twins prove our claim to be true provides no satisfaction at all. If anything, it makes the season seem like even more of a disaster.


While the Piranhas moved on, the White Sox were busy with the pen--both the ink pen and the bullpen. Yesterday, they signed on to 2010 options for possible closer Matt Thornton and aging starter Freddy Garcia. I actually doubt that Thornton will be the closer, though I'm also waffling about current closer Bobby Jenks being with the Sox at all next year.


Meanwhile, Garcia wins the right to come to Arizona next spring and compete with Daniel Hudson and Carlos Torres and maybe some new arrivals for the No. 5 starter job. Contrary to how the year ended, I don't think Garcia has that spot locked up at all. In fact, I sort of wonder how long it will be before he is hampered by an injury and gets criticized for a lack of intensity (the latter being an old complaint that dogged Garcia after he allegedly tested positive for pot in 2006).

I still wonder if the Sox will throw another proven arm into the starter mix, or come up with other ideas at closer. Perhaps Tony Pena should have been the closer mix toward the end--he really under-performed for the Sox, but was considered a closer candidate the last couple years when he played for Arizona.