People act like the Cubs have the patent on losing, and painful losing in particular. But it’s not true. The city of Chicago might, and if you haven’t noticed (and judging by the attendance and TV ratings–you haven’t), one of the proud franchises is in the midst of an unbelievable collapse.
While the Cubs had the good sense to crush our hopes early this year, the other team in town spent the first half of the season playing so far over their heads that after a while people just expected them to win. We all know, from years and years of practice that unless you have Michael Jordan or Tyrone Keys on your team, no amount of expectations are too much to bury yourselves under.
It is still almost beyond belief that the Sox could blow a lead that at one point was 15 games. Nobody does that. Not even the 1964 Phillies or 1969 Cubs could pull that off.
What they are doing, is something that every Chicago sports fans knows too well. They’re getting you ready to be disappointed.
You don’t need a baseball PhD to know why the Sox got off to such a good start. They had great starting pitching, their bullpen did the job and their defense, while not exactly great, was much improved over the past couple of seasons. They won a lot of close games and they seemed to have the Royals on the schedule every other day.
At one point the teams with the best records in baseball were the Sox and the Washington Nationals, and people who won’t go to see “The 40-year Old Virgin” at the movies because, to them it’s not a comedy, it’s real life, crunched the numbers and said it couldn’t last for either team.
The Sox had a better chance than the Nats did because while they weren’t scoring a tremendous amount of runs, they were at least scoring more than they were giving up. But these “men” waved their slide rulers around and predicted doom and gloom for both teams.
But the Sox kept winning. Sportswriters, being the dumb people they are, were slow to catch on, and when they did, they gave credit to the wrong things.
They looked at Scott Podsednik leading the majors in stolen bases and decided he was the reason the Sox were winning. They overlooked the fact that for most of the first half he had more stolen bases than runs scored, and in fact, at the time he went on the DL, three members of the Cubs had scored more runs than he had (E-ramis, Derrek Lee and Jeromy Burnitz), and the Cubs weren’t exactly an offensive juggernaut. Stealing bases is fung, as the Sox manager will tell you, but the object of the game is to score. If you steal second and third and wait by the third base bag at the end of the inning for someone to get your glove and your hat for you, that’s not so fung.
That’s not to blame it on Podsednik, but it points out what the real problem with the Sox has been. Their offense sucks.
In the offseason their general manager set out to change their offense. He was tired of watching them hit three-run homers and win 90 games and watch the playoffs on TV. It was a good idea. The way he set out to accomplish it was typical of him, though. It was wrong.
He traded Carlos Lee to the Brewers for Podsednik and his worst relief pitcher, Luis Vizcaino. The idea was that with a real leadoff man the Sox would be able to score more runs. At the time the trade looked disastrous, given that Podsednik spent eight years in the minors, so he was old, and had followed up his “rookie” year with a horrible season in Milwaukee where he fell so out of favor with Ned Yost for stealing bases on his own (actually he got thrown out most of the time) that the Brewers didn’t want him back.
Williams replaced Magglio Ordonez, who took his weird knee injury and bolted for big cash in Detroit, with Jermaine Dye, who wasn’t going to make anybody forget Magglio. And that was the extent of the offensive overhaul, until he signed Todd Iguchi to play second base as kind of an afterthought. It turned out to be his best move, since Iguchi is the Sox best player.
The offensive “overhaul” has resulted in the Sox scoring fewer runs than they did at this time last year, by a large margin. In fact, their record has almost nothing to do with their offense.
It has to do with the great start Jon Garland got off to and the fact that Mark Buehrle is really good. The defense is better, largely because Aaron Rowand is playing center field every day, Jose Valentin is gone and the fill-ins for Magglio Ordonez last year (Timo Perez, Carl Everett, Ross Gload, etc.) were brutal in right, so Dye has been a major upgrade there.
But the Sox are not a particularly good defensive team, either. Juan Uribe has even less range than Valentin did at shortstop, though to his credit he doesn’t throw the ball in the stands as often as Jose. Podsednik is not a particularly good outfielder, though playing him left mitigates that to an extent. AJ Pierzynski is not a good defensive catcher, and doesn’t hit well enough to make up for it (.264 with a Corey Patterson like .318 on base average and 47 RBI). Paul Konerko’s first base play is…well, he’s a righthanded Sean Casey.
So you get through all of this, and you have to wonder, “Hey, moran, if they stink this bad how did they get to 35 games over .500?”
That’s what we all wondered at the time. If you use the Saber geeks favorite stat in regards to wins and losses, which projects, based on runs scored and runs allowed what a team’s “expected record” should be, the Sox “should” be 70-52 instead of 75-47. Not much of a difference, huh? Not now. 10 days ago when the Sox were 73-39 it was a little more out of whack.
The interesting thing is that if you believe in “expected record” (and you have to give these geeks credit, most teams finish within 1-3 wins of their expected record every year) Cleveland stands to benefit the most. The Tribe is 70-56, but their expected record is 72-54, which would put them two games ahead of the Sox expected record.
Can the Indians catch the White Sox? They have six more head to head matchups, including the last three games of the season, and the Indians have seven more games with the Royals. Working against them is six more with the Twins and three with Oakland.
The Sox have six more with KC (how is that possible?) and four with reeling Texas. But in addition to the six left with the Tribe, they have nine more games with the Twins. So it’s going to be interesting. It’s hard to believe any team could gag away a 15 game second-half lead, but if anybody’s going to do it, a team from Chicago is probably up to the challenge.
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Jerome Williams pitched a very good game with his dad in attendance, and Jeromy Burnitz had a chance to one of two very unusual things. When Burnitz batted with the bases loaded in the eighth it was the third time he’d hit with the bases loaded in the game. He had already hit a grand slam and walked in a run. It made me wonder what was less likely, hitting two grand slams in one game, or walking twice with the bases loaded in one game? Burnitz worked it to 3-0 but struck out, so we’ll never know. Well, we could know, but we won’t.
