Posts tagged ‘Jermaine Dye’

The one thing you can count on in sports is just when you think you know you have no idea. As the White Sox head into the All Star break with a 1.5 game lead over the Twins, it is time to reflect on what we thought we knew as the season marched on. In March the problem was the pitching, many said a rotation relying on John Danks and Gavin Floyd to be major contributors was doomed to fail. Well 94 games later the Sox boast the second best ERA in all of baseball and the main reason for this has been the emergence of Floyd and Danks. Arguably they both should be pitching in New York tomorrow night as Gavin ends the first half with 10 wins, an ERA of 3.65 and has twice carried a no hitter deep into the 7th inning. Johnny Danks is fourth in the AL in ERA and with any sort of run support would be making a case not only to be in the All Star game, but to be on the mound in the first inning. Danks has decided recently to control his own fate by pitching into the 7th inning or later in three straight starts, which he was failing to do early in the season.

The sure thing headed into April was obviously Mark Buehrle, but after a rough April some fans were questioning the signing and wondering if Mark had lost it. On May 27th Mark’s ERA was 5.26, nine starts later it has dipped to 3.68. If there is one thing I have learned as a Sox fan the last person I am ever going to worry about is Mark Buehrle. The ace of the staff was supposedly Javy Vazquez and he played the part the first two months of the season, but after being outdueled by Scott Kazmir in Tampa in May, Javy has looked the Javy the Yankees wanted no more part of. Now there are Sox fans muttering it is the same old Javy that just doesn’t have the mental make up to be a front line starter. I am a sucker for pitchers with great stuff and without a doubt Javier has the best stuff on this staff. If he continues to slide into August, there may be something to worry about, but Ozzie is giving him plenty of rest over the break and that may just be exactly what he needs.

It was only about a month ago when Jim Thome was washed up and needed to be benched. He was hitting just over the Mendoza line, but Big Jim has been on fire in July, hitting .372, but more importantly putting up typical Thome slugging numbers. He can’t hit lefties? Well he is hitting 30 points higher versus lefties this season. Just another example of the more you know, the less you know.

What could be a deciding factor in the AL Central race is what the Sox get out of their Captain, Paul Konerko. Hands down he has been the biggest disappointment in the first half, but the “sit down Paulie talk for Brian Anderson and moving Swisher to first” nonsense needs to stop. The man has earned the benefit of the doubt and has shown in the past he can have a big second half. I don’t want to make excuses for Paul, but he did have a nagging hand injury and then the oblique strain. The man is just 32 years old, did he just all of a sudden lose his ability to hit? Somehow I doubt it, and I think we are in store for the Paulie of old coming up in August and September and hopefully October.

It is a looooonnnng season Sox fans - a team that wins 90 games is going to lose 72 games. It is important to keep that in mind and not get too high when it’s going good or to low when inevitable bad streak happens. Not many expected this team to be where they are in the standing at the All Star break and the division is ours for the taking.

Let’s all sit back and watch Quentin and Dye help secure home field advantage tomorrow night and get ready for what promises to be an exciting second half.

The best pitching staff in the American League figured to have at least one All-Star right? How about the best hitting catcher not named Joe Mauer? Or the guy with more home runs than Manny Ramirez, Vlad Guerrero, Magglio Ordonez, and JD Drew? Or the hot-shot rookie immigrant who’s hit .358 since June 1? Surely one of them merits consideration for the All-Star team, right?

Well, no. AJ Pierzynski, Alexei Ramirez, John Danks, Gavin Floyd, Matt Thornton, Bobby Jenks, and the rest of the White Sox all joined with the Final Vote runner-up Jermaine Dye in finalizing thier plans for a four-day vacation next week. Carlos Quention and Joe Crede will represent the Sox in the Farewell to Arms at Yankee Stadium.

While it would’ve been a great source of pride to place two or three more deserving Sox players on what is (in theory) supposed to be a squad of 2008’s best players, it’s not the worst thing in the world to let a surprising team take four full days to rest and recharge before what is certain to be a bare-knuckle brawl in the AL Central during the second half. As play wrapped up after tonight’s 4-1 loss to Kansas City, (where the Sox continued to prove that down is up in 2008 - after consecutive stinkers from Jose “I’m Distracted by My Mancrush on Pablo Ozuna” Contreras and Javy “Did I Really Strike Out 10 Guys in My Last Start” Vazquez, two games the Sox managed to win via late-inning comeback, Mark Buerhle takes a shutout into the 8th inning and LOSES) the Sox are now 53-38, 2.5 up on Minnesota and 7 ahead of the Detroit Tigers with 71 games left to play. After a recent run which has featured up-and-down performances from the starters and a small but significant dip in the bullpen, let’s just get the Pale Hose through this last series in Arlington before a well-deserved break. They’ve already beaten down one set of expecations, now it’s time to rest up and get ready to take down another - the expectation that they can’t possibly keep this up through the end of the year.

Make Mr. Capone proud, Chicago. JD’s looking to make his third All-Star team and join Q and Crede at The Stadium.

The 2008 White Sox are turning into a team caught in a constant paradox. Some recent surges with the bat have propelled thier offensive numbers out of the depths, while outstanding pitching numbers have begun to level off. Both developments should not come as a huge shock considering how hitter-friendly the home ballpark is when summer time rolls around.

At 42-35 with a lead that’s been sliced down to a half-game by the blazin’-hot Minnesota Twins, the Sox have a lot to be proud of at this point while keeping in mind how much work still lies in front of them. On the plus side of the ledger:

This bullpen was supposed to be a disaster, and it isn’t. It was hard for opposing GMs to contain their laughter when they saw the high-dollar contracts awarded to Scott Linebrink and Octavio Dotel. While not perfect (and each with a pair of walk-off homers against them in the past three weeks) the two have combined to be a dramatic upgrade which has, alongside a revived Matt Thornton and an improving Nick Masset & Boone Logan, provided Bobby Jenks an actual supporting cast in the late innings. While losing 4 games via ninth-inning walk-off since May 30th isn’t exactly something to write home about, a dependable bullpen is the biggest reason the Sox haven’t faded into the pack of the AL Central.

John Danks and Gavin Floyd weren’t supposed to be ready. Danks was supposed to have already hit his ceiling, Floyd was a washed-up product of the hype machine who never got close. While still too early to start campaigning for Cy Young Awards, the alleged weaklings of the rotation have thrown some of the best starts all season for the Pale Hose. Danks in particular has been stellar in the wake of shoddy run support (2 runs or fewer scored on his behalf in 10 starts thru June 25th). The rotation was supposed to be unable to get off the ground after Mark Buehrle. Right now it leads the AL in quality starts.

Meanwhile, the elephant in the room…

The offense isn’t building any consistency…except perhaps to be consistent in their inconsistency. The same corps of hitters that raped and pillaged Kansas City and Minnesota to open June at home got muzzled by the Rockies in their home park and handcuffed by the Cubs on what was a very hitter-friendly weekend at a hitter-friendly field. They can light up a good Twins’ staff just as easily as a household name like Eric Stults can throw a complete game shutout at them.

Going into the season I was counting on three things - that the Sox would have a better offense, simply by virtue of believing the whole team can’t slump for 162 games twice - right? -, that the Sox should have a better bullpen based strictly on the numbers, and that the Sox could have a decent rotation if Danks and Floyd pitched above expectations. So far my expectations have been far surpassed on latter two. On the first, many of the exact same problems that torpedoed the team time after time in 2007 are still popping up, disguised by power-ball explosions that boost up the team offensive rankings - again, after the dismal performance of ‘07 anything looks great by comparison. But this remains a lineup filled with holes despite being third in the AL in runs scored.

Everything evens out over a long, grinding baseball season. You can’t expect dominant pitching every night, just like you shouldn’t expect having a dormant offense every night. But the great teams are the ones that strike the balance early and keep building on that through the season. Right now, even with their status as a pleasant surprise and an undeniably entertaining team to watch, the Sox continue fluxing back and forth between “good” and “mediocre” so much that it makes you very uneasy about the foundation on which they’re built.

Hey, everybody else is doing it! Want proof? Click here & here to get the expert analysis before moving on.

Now, I will fully cop before things even start to being biased. The one thing I stipulate is that I tried to gauge all performances and pick the team in what I call an “immediate context” - as in, if MLB declared that Chicago had to pick one baseball team to play a game tomorrow, a game Chicago had to win in order to continue its existence as a city, who would I want on it? As such, current (like, say, the last two weeks) performances trumped fond memories of Opening Day. So, without further ado, the humble picks of Soxcast for who mans each position on a Chicago Dream Team…

Catcher: AJ Pierzynski, White Sox. Probably the overall toughest call; Geovany Soto is in the middle of a fine campaign and so is the Polish Wonder. How then to break the tie? If we need just one guy to throw out a runner late, we’d probably be making a defensive switch for Soto. But as it is, AJ’s left-handed swing has produced a .308 average and .442 slugging percentage along with the veteran savvy needed to handle a pitching staff everybody had written off before the season started. Soto may very well be on his way to fame as the next great power-hitting catcher, but for this exact moment our vote is with AJ.

First Base: Derrek Lee, Cubs. He kind of wins by default now, doesn’t he? Even if Paul Konerko hadn’t been on the DL, it wasn’t much of a contest. Neither player got off to the start they desired, but Lee has rallied himself while Paulie has battled injury and hard luck throughout the year. Here’s hoping PK gets it back on track after he returns.

Second Base: Alexei Ramirez, White Sox. So many candidates - Ramirez, Juan Uribe, Ronny Cedeno, Mark Fontenot, Mark DeRosa, Pablo Ozuna…wait, not Pablo. But remember, we’re picking the Dream Team that would go out and represent Chicago tomorrow, and we’d be foolish not to pick a guy who’s batting .390 in the month of June to go with some fine (though still rough) glove work. DeRosa’s our first man off the bench if needed.

Shortstop: Ryan Theriot, Cubs. Theriot has the bat, Orlando Cabrera the glove. And yet, there can only be one. Tie goes to the younger in this instance, but given another two weeks Cabrera would probably unseat the Cajun; OC’s average has risen every month, rising from .216 (April) to .265 (May) to .370 so far in June, why’ll Theriot has slipped a little each week from his .340 hot streak in the first month.

Third Base: Joe Crede, White Sox. I take it back. This was the toughest call. Ramirez has a better average, Crede better power stats, and they both have a sub-.950 fielding percentage (Crede the more egregious violater right now with 13 errors.) This is one position where I think my Sox bias is fully coloring my choice, but remember I’m picking the team as if it was one that I were betting the farm on to win a game tomorrow - and if you watched the 2005 playoffs you know how clutch with the bat and the glove Crede can be when it’s all on the line.

Outfield: LF - Carlos Quentin, Sox; CF - Reed Johnson, Cubs, RF - Jermaine Dye, Sox. Quentin wins in left by default with Soriano on the DL, otherwise he’d have been the fourth man. Nick Swisher’s got all his “gamer” bravado and Brian Anderson finally stopped pouting and started playing, but Johnson has them both solidly beat straight up. And in right, it was again the most recent performance that tipped the scales - JD is hitting .292 with 5 HR in June, while the big import prize Kosuke Fukudome has struggled with a .241 clip and is now fluxing thru the Cubs’ lineup.

Starting Pitcher: Many solid candidates, but there can only be one. Remember, I want this guy ready with his ‘A’ game for tomorrow. It probably would’ve been Zambrano, but that MRI throws a wrench into it. Vazquez has concerned me in his more recent starts, and the youngsters Gallagher, Floyd, and Danks have exceeded expectations in their respective roles. Buehrle has been stellar in 6 of his last 8 outings, but he will always be prone to a big inning. So, the pick is…wait for it…Ryan Dempster. I’m shocked too. But Dempster’s been as solid as anybody in the NL and doing it while often waiting for runs to come in behind him. In an emergency stand-by role I’d have (in order) Buehrle, Jose Contreras, & Zambrano pending the test results.

Closer: Bobby Jenks, White Sox. Yeah, I know, we’re all supposed to give Kerry Wood extra credit for doing something nobody counted on him to do - make it two whole days without a freak gasoline fighting injury (Zoolander reference, for those who don’t follow). But Jenks’ has been every bit as dependable in closing 16 of 19 opportunities alongside a 1.91 ERA. If we’re putting together a whole bullpen, I definitely want them both (save for strikeouts, the numbers are almost identical for each man) but my own biased fan opinion tells me to put the ball in Bobby’s hand needing three outs for a championship - because he’s been there before.