Important Stuff from the 4-3 loss to the Twins that happened during the HOF induction

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The White Sox took the lead while Frank Thomas was reciting his love poem to baseball, so they got the thematic punch down in an otherwise miserable day where they were again mystified by Yohan Pinto and left the tying run at third despite having three cracks to make contact compelling enough to bring Leury Garcia home in the ninth. An entire weekend without getting Twain'd is just too much to ask. This day gave us the Frank Thomas speech, already. Don't be selfish. They lost 4-3, in case you wondered.

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Important stuff from Chris Sale Day, a 7-0 victory over the Twins

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When the Twins announced they were giving left-hander Logan Darnell on Saturday against the White Sox's Chris Sale, one could reasonably assume they were essentially doing the real-life equivalent of pressing the "sim game" button on this one.

But the games are played for a reason, and Saturday night's showdown went, well, about as one would've expected as Sale and the Sox cruised to a 7-0 victory, their third straight in the Twin Cities.

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Important stuff from a fairly easy 9-5 victory in Twinland

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Poor Kevin Correia. He's carved out what's now a 12-year MLB career of soft-tossing, throwing strikes, being below-average but reliably present. And yet, whenever he's off his game, anyone watching wonders how he's still in the league. Correia and all observers knew he was up a creek when he hung a curve that Jose Abreu blasted to Duluth for three runs, and since that happened in the first inning, Correia spent his whole night making unsuccessful attempts at damage control, unaided by his defense. In Correia's defense, he only accounted for 10 of the Sox 17 hits on the night, two of their three home runs--and not the one to Tyler Flowers!--and if the bullpen had just shut out the Sox after his four innings, they would have needed to use Jake Petricka,

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Important stuff from Thursday's 5-2 win in Twinland

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What can I say about tonight's Hector Noesi start in Minnesota that's more telling than this: it prompted a discussion about Zach Stewart's near-perfect game against the Twins in 2011. Noesi retired the first 11 batters he faced, and took a one-hit shutout into the eighth. He did this mostly via flyouts. Long flyouts, medium-length flyouts, not so many short flyouts, and one swinging strikeout, which came against Danny Salazar, who later blasted an enormous two-run homer off Noesi in the eighth, his only runs allowed. You have to throw strikes to do this kind of work, and Noesi did that,  which beats the pants off the time he walked seven people in under five innings. 

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Important Stuff from Wednesday's 2-1 loss to the Royals

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It's always preferable for the white Sox to play well, and show progress from the important members of their franchise. But if they're not, if they're going have Jose Abreu and Adam Dunn combined for six strikeouts, while Tyler Flowers posts the only multi-hit game on the day, if they're going to spoil another Jose Quintana gem and get into a knowingly hopeless dry heave-athon with a bullpen infinitely more ability to carry on a dry heave-athon...well,then, fine. This is a fine result. Go right ahead and let Mike Moustakas knee a ball out of Tyler Flowers' glove fro the game-deciding run. See if I care.

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Important stuff from Tuesday's 7-1 drubbing at the hands of the Royals

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Five innings worth of a crisply pitched game is lot of innings. It's most of the game, even! It's certainly plenty to ask of Scott Carroll. But as Carroll snuck out of the fifth inning, throwing something that vaguely resembled a wipeout slider but obviously couldn't be, it was obvious that the Sox were not preparing the calvary to rescue Carroll at the first spot of trouble--as they have none--and instead hoping to stretch Carroll out for as long as he could go.

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Important stuff from Monday's 3-1 victory over the Royals

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That Chris Sale guy sure is good. A statistically dominant 8:1 K/BB outing over seven one-run innings that is instantly dismissed from any discussion of the best 20 starts of his still very brief career. Perhaps one of the tricks of managing Sale's workload is his resilience. He doesn't follow a linear path of decline over a start. He started leaving his changeup up in the fourth inning and got hammered for a bit and needed a relay line to save him from a crooked number inning, then corrected the problem and burned worms for the entire fifth. He had to reach back for extra life in his fastball to blow his way through a tight scoring situation and strike out the side in the sixth, then returned with nearly 100 pitches and cruised through a perfect seventh.

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Important stuff from Saturday's 4-3 win over the Astros

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Surely back-to-back nights of the bullpen clinging to one-run leads over multiple innings to prop up average or worse contributions from the offense will be prominently featured in the best-seller "How an Awful Bullpen Derailed the 2014 White Sox Juggernaut."

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White Sox suffer through a Bauer outage, blow late lead

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As an internet baseball writer and computer owner, there's a certain pain in focusing on a lack of hustle as the difference in the result of an entire game. But such was the nature of the White Sox attack against Trevor Bauer, that Conor Gillaspie lazily jogging back to first base after a second inning flyout and getting doubled off could account for a 3-2 defeat in the first half finale in Cleveland.

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Roster Moves, Injuries, and Abreu - Saturday Recap & Sunday Preview

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Jose Abreu hit his 29th home run on Saturday, a 2-run shot that would give the White Sox a lead they would not surrender on their way to victory. Abreu's blast was a laser to opposite field in the fourth inning off a Zach McAllister who had yet to give up a hit to that point. Despite a stint on the 15-day DL with an ankle injury, despite being a rookie, and despite playing through ankle injury for a while before succumbing the DL, Jose Abreu leads the majors in home runs coming into today.

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Noesi takes the bullpen off the hook, blows lead by himself

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The secret worst thing about crummy pitchers isn't that they get lit up, it's that they get lit up and then leave work lying around for others. Allowing seven runs in two innings loses a single game, but it also leaves seven innings to pitch. Hector Noesi has been a statistically bad pitcher, but he's been a present one; sopping up goo-gobs of innings in mediocre fashion and saving a weary bullpen.

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Strong Quintana start spoiled, comeback spoiled, afternoon spoiled

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Perfect baseball moments seem to make a point of creeping in out of nowhere, to the point where perfect setups should be looked at suspiciously. 

Jose Quintana cruising with a perfect game through five innings against a sleepy Boston offense, in the afternoon hour so that the baseball world could gaze upon him and wonder how he missed All-Star attention? Too perfect.

Conor Gillaspie pinch-hitting hopelessly in the ninth inning against Koji Uehara with a runner on and down two in the ninth? Just random enough.

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Bullpen blows four-run eighth inning lead in loss to Red Sox

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Well, many White Sox fans would probably describe the end of Wednesday night's game as "upsetting."

The White Sox were again betrayed by their bullpen, which when asked to get four outs with a 4-0 lead delivered by Chris Sale, delivered a 5-4 walk-off loss in Boston after getting just two. Worse yet, the heartbreak came at the hands of two relievers Robin Ventura was hoping he could start to trust.

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Danks carried to victory in Boston behind waves of offense

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John Danks could get used to this.

A classic tough-luck loser in his prime, the Danks we know now--who has to scrap his way through every night--has now tied his highest win total (8) since 2010 after the Sox rallied on Brandon Workman and the Red Sox for a 8-3 victory, their third-straight.

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Defending World Series champs helpless against Scott Carroll

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If we take the last two weeks of play as representative, the White Sox rotation is absolutely aces, and Dayan Viciedo is a power-slugging monster. But I'm still not sure if that provides solace to the Red Sox, who were non-existent in an easy-breezy 4-0 romp in Fenway Park.

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A pitcher's duel? A pitcher's duel! White Sox win a pitcher's duel

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Well look at that, after waiting until the last game in June to record their first shutout, the White Sox pitching staff has another in a week, taking the rubber match from the Seattle Mariners in a 1-0 surprise gift from Hector Noesi and the deservedly maligned bullpen.

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The Mariners might actually be happy to see Hector Noesi - Lineups & Preview 7/6

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While he has charmed many on the South Side for his surprisingly consistent mediocrity, for being a below-average consumer of innings on a pitching staff that was a phone call away from more Dylan Axelrod or Undead Tommy Hanson, Hector Noesi is relic of darker times in recent Mariners history. He was a hurricane of suck (6.31 ERA in 135 innings in Seattle) in the 2012 starting rotation, and an equally disastrous reminder of the Pineda-Montero trade in brief appearances in 2013 and 2014.

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Sox bullpen spoils brilliant Quintana outing, then takes really long time to finally lose

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For four innings, the White Sox wandered around not knowing they were dead. They trudged into the 14th inning despite the disastrous waste of Jose Quintana's 7.2 shutout innings and the grand fortune of a two-run outburst in the eighth inning against the best starter in the league, and that they were being blatantly outplayed and outhit nearly three-to-one by the Mariners.

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Fireworks for Sale on Fourth of July

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When Lloyd McClendon's lineup for Friday night's tilt between the White Sox and Mariners was posted about four hours before first pitch, one had to assume it would be a rough night for Seattle's offense.

Sending out six left-handed hitters against Chris Sale — who has been borderline untouchable against lefties this season — didn't seem the wisest strategy.

What one couldn't assume is how the White Sox's offense would fare against Seattle starter Roenis Elias.

Well, Sale was as dominant as expected and Jose Abreu & Co. provided the Fourth of July Fireworks show as the White Sox cruised to a 7-1 victory in the first of three games at U.S. Cellular Field.

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Too wet to sweep, Sox salvage one against Angels

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Despite it being contained in a single day, and having been preceded by a three-game win streak on the road against a first-place team, and the July 2 signings reminding that more 2014 losses just mean more bonus pool money, Tuesday's doubleheader contained so much misery and butt-kicking at the hands of the Angels that the Sox just needed the feel of a win again. And that need went beyond questions of how that win came about, if the right players showed progress, and why the hell is Leury Garcia being used as a pinch-hitter?

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