That'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 MoreIs there any hope for John Danks at this point? I’ve written about why I'm skeptical that Danks can even be usable on a team that has playoff aspirations. And while we only have one start in 2015 - and I think it's fair to say pitchers aren't always fully up to speed on their first outing of the year - we have about 340 innings and 2.5 years between now and the shoulder injury that changed his trajectory from solid #2-3 starter to liability.
Read MoreA question was posed. A brief discussion followed.
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 MoreAs someone who once knocked the sunglasses off the face of their junior high crush with a football by airmailing my best friend (the tallest kid in the eighth grade) by nearly 20 yards, I cannot in good conscious impugn anyone for a misfired throw in even the lowest-intensity situations. However, if the Sox want to snap out of their open to the season that's seen them cough up 16 runs and four homers to the no-hit, small ball Royals in their no-hit, small ball ballpark, they might want to stop hanging meat over the heart of the plate.
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 MoreThis is an assumption, but an assumption I'm pretty confident in making after Monday's less-than-inspiring 10-1 loss in the season opener.
Read MoreIt was bad enough that the Braves just automatically dumped Carlos Quentin like he was empty contract, like he was friggin' Theo Ratliff, but they announced dumping him as the third entry in a roster move tweet that talks about Josh Outman and Brandon Cunniff?! Why don't they just dump his corpse into pauper's grave while they're at it?
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 MoreBaseball season is finally here.
After months of speculating, the White Sox's 25-man roster is set and the starting nine will take the field this afternoon against the defending American League champion Kansas City Royals.
Now that all the roster-building questions have been answered, what can we expect out of these guys?
Let's take our best guess.
Read MoreIt's Opening Day. Today is Opening Day. The White Sox will play their Opening Day game today.
In that vein, Matt Adams, Collin Whitchurch and James Fegan got together to exercise their existential dread, cast aspersions on the Royals, discuss the final bits of roster housekeeping, and deride the many mistakes of the Atlanta Braves.
Read MoreSick of reading what other people think is going to happen this season?
Yes? Oh, well this is awkward...
Read MoreThat escalated quickly. Per Doug Padilla, a little over a week after claiming him off waivers from Toronto, the White Sox have made Kyle Drabek the 7th man in the bullpen. Since we haven't had much time to get familiar, what do we know about Mr. Drabek?
Read MoreAs you probably know, you can gamble on just about everything under the sun nowadays. Who will be the President in 2016? Which movie will win Best Picture at the Academy Awards? How many home runs will Jose Abreu hit?
You probably have an opinion on that last one (maybe the other two, we don't know). Either way, the staff at The Catbird Seat decided to make some over/under predictions for the 2015 White Sox.
We came up with a starting point, compiled by Collin Whitchurch through a combination of looking at last year's numbers, this year's projections, and some just plain out of thin air, and each staff member predicted whether the final 2015 tally would be over or under that number. Some are fun. Some are sad. Some are ridiculous.
Enjoy, and let us know your predictions in the comments section.
Read MoreThe new-look White Sox will be without ace Chris Sale for the first week, so they'll need new arms Jeff Samardzija and David Robertson to come out with sharp command after getting bombed all Spring (28 IP, 26 ER, 11 HR combined)
Read MoreAs a message and principle, peaceful resolution and avoiding hostilities is a fine message. As the conclusion to weeks of battle in a presumed winner-takes-all duel, it is terrible. Terrible.
Carlos Sanchez vs. Micah Johnson wasn't just a battle between similar prospects (relatively) for supremacy, but had remarkable stakes: a starting job on a possible contender, or back to the minors and blocked from promotion. For Sanchez, it could even mean getting DFA'd. It almost certainly wouldn't, but it technically could!
Read MoreOne of the most exciting things about the buildup to a season is anticipating the debut of your favorite team's new acquisitions. This year, White Sox fans can look forward to seeing Jeff Samardzija and Melky Cabrera, among others, in a White Sox uniform for the first time (well, at least in meaningful games).
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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