Black Sox Blog

This White Sox fan is glad that August is over and done with. Let’s put it in the books, close the book and then forget about it. The White Sox were 12-16 in the month, by far their worst this year. What’s odd is, their numbers before and after the All Star Break aren’t all that different. On the hitting side, they were .262/.324/.420 in the first half and so far this year, they’re .259/.313/.425 in the second half. On the pitching side, they had a 3.62 ERA and a 1.26 WHIP in the first half and a nearly identical 3.61 ERA and 1.27 WHIP in the second half.

Most of the reason is, they’re no longer getting into as many one and two run games, and when they are, this time they’re on the wrong side. I was hoping they would have made some kind of move prior to this last trading deadline, but it looks like we’re going into the playoffs with what we have right now.

On Monday, Mark Buehrle had a mediocre outing and the White Sox made four (yes, four) errors in the game. The new result of that was three unearned runs. Juan Uribe broke out of his season long slump and went three for four and Geoff Blum (more on him later) drove in two runs.

Yesterday was the doubleheader, which was a split. I don’t feel like talking about the loss, so let’s talk about the one shining moment in this series. Brandon McCarthy got his first major league start in almost two months and he looked like he did when he made his debut. He only struck out two batters, but he went 7 2/3 innings (117 pitches) and gave up only two hits and one walk. That one outing got his ERA down nearly two points.

This afternoon, the White Sox got shelled. They actually had a 2-1 lead through the top half of the sixth when Texas exploded for five runs. The Rangers added three more in the eighth just to run up the score. Orlando Hernandez gave up three homeruns in five innings of work as he took the loss.

The Indians are tied 2-2 with the Tigers. If the Tribe wins the game, we’ll only have a six game lead. We still have six games with Cleveland, so this is going to be a bit scary. While I’m all for a good playoff race, I really hope that final weekend series of the season means nothing.

The Tigers are on deck. We’ve owned them so far this year, so hopefully that continues. We need wins.