The White Sox came home to die last week. No one was prepared to admit it when they opened their last home stand against the Detroit Tigers, but everyone felt it, from the upper deck down to the dugout. The Sox were businesslike but somber during batting practice, especially compared to the younger, playful, Central Division-leading Tigers. And as the Sox dropped two of three to the Tigers and then lost 9-0 and 11-6 to the Seattle Mariners to open the final home series of the season, their fate never seemed tragic, the mood in the park never despondent. For the most part, Sox fans passed from denial to acceptance, skipping anger. Even when starter Mark Buehrle was removed from the first game with the Tigers having surrendered four runs and ten hits in six-plus innings, he received polite applause.
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The same was true last Saturday, when Buehrle pitched much worse, getting scored on in the first inning for his seventh straight start and going on to give up seven runs to Seattle in five innings. The Sox were down 7-2 by then, and when they went tamely in the bottom of the inning to make the game official only moments before an extended rain delay, it seemed a bookend with the rain-soaked season opener in April that began the year with such optimism–a 10-4 win over the Cleveland Indians. In between, the Sox underachieved. When statistics crunchers like Baseball Prospectus execute their “Pythagorean theorems” on this year’s Sox, they’ll no doubt determine that the team should have won more games given the runs it scored and runs it allowed.
Pitching was the Sox’ weak point this season: they allowed almost a run more a game than they had last year. Manager Ozzie Guillen again managed by gut and intuition in a way that earned comparisons with old-school types like Casey Stengel, but it should be pointed out that Stengel’s intuition extended to his pitching staff and year after year he cobbled together rotations around stars like Whitey Ford. Guillen stuck with his rotation through thick and thin, and the 90 or so games the Sox will wind up winning this year won’t be quite enough to put them in the playoffs. The Sox have a number of lean, promising minor leaguers like Ryan Sweeney and Josh Fields coming up, and Guillen and general manager Kenny Williams need to make decisions about who deserves a job; but what Guillen needs to do more is put some hunger into the pitching staff by being as ruthless with personnel moves there as he is with his lineup. A wide-open spring-training competition among this year’s starting five and Brandon McCarthy and even knuckleballer Charlie Haeger might extend “Ozzie ball” to the entire team.
