Last night's game was really, really ugly until the bottom of the 9th. But the fact that the Indians couldn't come out in victory formation and kneel out the clock is one of the many reasons why baseball is the best.
Read MoreThat's more like it.
A day after breaking their season opening four-game skid, the White Sox welcomed Chris Sale back with open arms and he pitched them to a 6-2 win over the Minnesota Twins, the Sox's second in a row against the presumptive AL Central bottom feeders.
Read MoreThe White Sox have won a game!
A 5-4 victory that frequently looked like it might send the White Sox into a Worst Season Ever 0-5 certainly puts things in perspective. At the beginning of the day, Chicago was a Brewers win and a loss away from being the only 0-5 team in the majors. Instead, they sit at 1-4 alongside several other teams, many of which fancy themselves contenders. Right now the Braves and Phillies are a combined 8-2 while the Nationals, Marlins, and Pirates are all 1-4 alongside the White Sox. We heard repeatedly that anything can happen over the course of a few games, but seriously: anything can happen over the course of a few games.
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Short of injuries, this has been about as frustrating a start to the season as you can get. Losing to the Royals brings its own frustration, but coming off the World Series appearance you can at least understand how they beat you. The Twins were coming off of a humiliating opening set against Detroit wherein they didn't score a run until late in the third game. Tommy Milone was on the mound, and the Royals' terrifying bullpen wasn't lying in wait. And the White Sox got shut out anyway.
Read MoreOne of the small comforts of the Royals goofy little run to within one base of a World Series Championship, is that their success without the presumed basic tenants of franchise success--elite starting pitching, above-average hitters--was widely and visibly applied against the league at large. Sustaining themselves solely by eliminating every margin for error from their opponent, turning every small mishap into a major crisis, was not just a statement on the White Sox lack of precision, but an effective MO against every other flawed competitor they churned through.
Read MoreThe Royals are a pain in the White Sox's ass. If it weren't official before, I'm making it official after Wednesday's 7-5 defeat that saw beanballs, gopherballs, and a myriad of other weird stuff.
Read MoreThe White Sox had a requisite number of clunkers in their supply for this year, so kudos to them for finding a foreign lawn to go drop this on. Very little went right! Until further notice, you have six innings to jump the Royals' starter in an alley, pick them up by the legs and shake all the runs out of their pockets, or you're screwed. Instead, Yordano Ventura kept the ball down, the Royals defense didn't spare any borderline basehits, and a shaky, slider-less Jeff Samardzija couldn't pitch over the Royals typical array of soft singles and Mike Moustakas' inevitable ascent to the MVP award. That the defense imploded and Kyle Drabek was awful was the icing on a cake that was already full of ricin.
Read MoreThere's an identity that we want to understand the 2014 White Sox under, in which Sunday's 7-5 triumph in the rubber match against a desperate and hungry Blue Jays team fits perfectly. The White Sox flashed dizzying, game-changing offensive potential, had their lack of pitching depth exposed by both starter and reliever performance, and did just enough to keep the watching fun and not sort of tragic. Six games under .500, obviously the prototypical 2014 White Sox game would seem to be a loss, and their offense's season performance does not live up to the ideals their juggernaut April inspired, but the Sox have had less than 10 games where their young offensive core of Adam Eaton, Jose Abreu, Avisail Garcia, and yeah, Conor Gillaspie have been operating at once. They didn't build on that total Sunday, but a seven-run outburst stoked its legend all the same.
Read MoreThis is one of those games that a rebuilding team can manage to enjoy even though the result was a loss. By far the most important thing is that Avisail Garcia returned from the DL, and in fact went 2/4 on the night. Far less important is the return of Matt Lindstrom's return from the DL. Unfortunately, he was knocked around - but there's a silver lining here as well.
Read MoreThe night of Avisail Eve--where Robin Ventura has said before the game that Garcia would possibly re-join the team this weekend and Garcia didn't play in Charlotte--brought wonder and mystery to every outfield substitution. Why did Moises Sierra replace Dayan Viciedo in right field the fifth? Wait, why did Leury Garcia replace Sierra in right field in the ninth? Wait, are either of these substitutions significant? They're not getting traded! Also they're both hurt, Viciedo in particular was supposedly dizzy, probably from being made to score from first base on a Conor Gillaspie double in the first inning.
There was also a late-August baseball game going on. There were tons of singles. More from the White Sox, though.
Team Record: 58-63
Next game is Saturday at 6:10pm CT on CSN vs. Toronto.
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That was something. And then it wasn't! And then it was something else entirely, and it became that new thing with an intensity entirely ill-fitting of a Wednesday afternoon game. After around 10 minutes of review of a new rule that no one has a clue how to interpret, Jose Quintana went from one out away from seven shutout frames in San Francisco--kinda as impressive as kicking over an empty trash can, but still an important task--to watching Ronald Belisario lay waste to rational disorder. Again.
Read MoreBoy, this is getting fun, isn't it?
Friday's 13-3 loss at the hands of the Seattle Mariners was yet another showing — the third in recent memory — in which the White Sox's pitching woes somehow managed to overshadow the offensive dry spell that is getting more and more pathetic by day.
Read MoreAs far as fatal flaws ago, at least Chris Sale being unable to retire Adam Rosales, or the White Sox as a franchise's inability to retire Adam Rosales, at least it's full of fun and whimsy. Rosales pulled into the MLB lead for most career home runs off Sale with three after bombing an opposite-field two-run shot to right in the second, and gave himself five home runs off the Sox total for his career with a seventh inning solo shot off Daniel Webb.
Read MoreThis one's not going up on the Danks' family mantle, not with the room that needs to be cleared for Jordan Danks' Charlotte Knights All-Time Hits Leader plaque. Danks had held off a night of nonexistent command, wayward 89 mph fastballs and hanging changeups for a longer stretch than we thought him capable of in this post-surgery life, but ohhhhhhh did he pay the piper Tuesday night. He might have paid ahead for the next couple weeks if we're lucky.
Read MoreApparently quieting compiling monster stats on an unworldly hot streak wasn't enough for Flowers to fully launch the narrative of switching to glasses--FROM CONTACTS HE ALREADY WORE--unlocking some offensive monster, he had to go and beat the Texas Rangers all by himself. The Rangers are a pretty sad major league product these days, but still, one man. Flowers got a two-run third inning started with a one-out triple that bounced on the edge of the right field wall, slammed out a game-tying home run to lead off the fifth, threw out Jim Adduci trying to steal second to end the sixth, and poked the go-ahead two-run single in the bottom half of the inning, saving a scoring opportunity the Sox looked primed to blow after Gordon Beckham and Alejandro struck out.
Read MoreWhat was important about Sunday's game? Probably extremely little, since 15 of the astounding 16 runs the Sox allowed were coughed up by a bullpen filled with guys who don't figure to play a major role, if any role at all, next season. Hell, after walking three batters and allowing three runs in a single inning of work, Taylor Thompson didn't even make it through the day.
Read MoreThat was a fun game. Full of offense, multiple comebacks, offensive virtuosity, doinked singles and odd hijinks looming large, a decent and loud crowd, and Moises Sierra. The combination of a Chris Sale off-night, the Sox bad bullpen and Twins pitching made for the kind of fun-bad scoring fest that the April of this season promised for the Sox. No one even noticed that Gordon Beckham and Dayan Viciedo are still around.
Read MoreClassic Noesi! He completely demolished any notion of a competitive game after seven batters, then wind up sopping up six innings and still earning plaudits for perseverance in the end. It was his Sox career in a nutshell. He was bad and didn't give the team a good chance to win, but saved them stress they couldn't afford by not forcing them to find a replacement. When the opposition scores six runs in the first seven batters, you start telling the utility infielders to get their arms warm, but it didn't happen! It didn't happen. We're so blessed.
Read MoreWell, that was a fun seventh inning. The best part might have been when Rajai Davis and the Tigers defense botched their way into a big inning, or when Jose Abreu and Adam Dunn went back-to-back, or when Jose Quintana just got pulled afterward before he could find his way to turn it into a no-decision. Another frustrating game in Detroit became one of the most fun nights of the season in an awful hurry as the Sox sent Anibal Sanchez poorly and greeted newly-acquired Joakim Soria with extreme malice in an 11-4 romp.
Read MoreThe Catbird Seat is a White Sox blog by White Sox fans that focuses on intelligent and humorous baseball commentary. Brought to you by ESPN's SweetSpot Network.
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