good morning and happy 2005 fantasy/baseball season to all y'all nonexistant readers in rockstar country. i had a big grandiose post about fantasy baseball 2005, but it got lost in the javascript somewhere so eff it.
yesterday, once i saw that the 30-40% chance of thunderstorms that was predicted ended up being a non-factor, i decided i needed to waddle out to comiscular park and see some quality early-dseason whitesox baseball i saw the whitesox vs the twins, radke vs orlando hernandez, on tuesdya april 19, 2005.
the game was essentially a microcosm of the early season success of the whitesox, aka, the team that i predicted would be THE story in chicago baseball by the time august or september rolls around.
what i saw in the whitesox' spring training stint was a general jubilation around the team. granted i got this off of watching htem on TV and reading beat reports, but it seemed liek the guys were having fu nout there, and when you combine that with kenny williamns auctioning off some .280/30/100 type bats for a leadoff hitter and a lat einning middle reliever, then letting magglio ordonez go and have shady injuries over @ detroit (the bionic mang was only 6 mil, so what does 76 make magglio, other than a liatr with a supposed hernia?)
the whitesox have a solid pitching staff. buehrle has taken a step or two forward and looks like a bonafide #1 ace right now, then the whitesox have two #3s in freddy garcia and orlando hernandez (im not a freddy fan, my apologies), and hten two #4s in contreras and garland. what's fortunate for them is that when he's on, and historically that's been i nthe clutch, hernandez can turn into a solid #2 or even a sometimes-#1, contreras has the stuff to be a solid 2 or 3 on pretty good rotations, but its all in his head (please check all cranberries' "zombie" references at the door), and garland at full realization of potential could be a #2-#3, i mean, as a #4 he's been a perennial 12 game winner with a mid to high 4.something ERA over the last 2-3 years, but you figure that sometime he'll get better.
that said, its better than having an abysmal ~5 win 5th rotation spot that basically goes like 5-25 all season long, and then after buehrle you've for 4 solid starters that can keep a scrappy offensive team in ballgames long enouhg to win a good % of them.
tonight's game featured a whole big heap of hits, in fact, i think there were around 25 hits between both teams combined. the amazing part is that runs dindt start scoring until about 20 of htose hits had came and went. hernandez got out of two bases loaded jams and either two or three 2 runners on jams, and radke had 2 runner jame pretty frequently as wlel, eventually buckling somewhat in the 6th, giving up a leadoff single, than a double, then a sac bunt and a sac fly. boom, you're up 2-0. vizcaino comes in and holds the twins down in the 7th, so you turn around and get HR #7 from paul konerko, an impressive ~400+ foot blast to dead-on-center-field. the sox would have had a chance to add on more if the umps hadn't blown a call on aaron rowand after timo perez singled on the first pitch after the HR. rowand slid headfirst into 2nd on a close play, and the tag was applied to his foot after his hand got on the bag, nevertheless he was called out. so instead of one out and runners on 2nd and third, it was two outs and a runner on third.
either way, those three runs held, despite anothe rshaky rendition of SHINGOTIME! he gave up a double then a single then got the quick hook for marte, who game in and got the save.
so call it smallball, call it smartball, call it ozzie ball, call it whatever you want. i call it baseball, and it was on display tonight in front of a crowd of 18.310 at comiscular park. i got in for $7 on a buy one get one free upper deck seats tuesday night promotion, so with my public trans figured in, the game itself cost me $11. not bad at all, eh?
the whitesox have a team with pretty capable SP (at least htey have upside. we probably haven't seen the best from garland in his career, contreras could be a beast if he figures it out, el duque is capable of being a 10-15 game winner if he;s somehow healthy all year), then you've got freddy who can pitch around ~3.5 ERA for steetches of time, and as iv'e said, buehrle seems to be locked in at a notch or two higher tha nhe was, which means a reruen to his sub-3.5 ERA glory days of 17+ wins, except with this team, he could win something once-thought-to-be-obscene like 22 games.
thus far, the carlos lee trade seems to be a success. scott podsednik isn't tearing the world apart, altho he's strained a groin already, and that notwithstanding, he's only hititng about .260something, but thats no big deal with now. second baseman tadahito iguchi came up with two solid knocks tonight, and whil eeverett was cold, konerko picked him up with a solo HR later. the sox' first two runs came courtesy of hte dynamic duo of pierzynski and crede, whose clutch double put the sox ahead 1-0 at the time. crede is an unknwon offensively still. while we know that he plays a very good, if not sporadically spectacular 3B, evidenced by a nice backhand stab long toss across the diamond play in the late innings tonight... but the big question with jos is what will you get at the dish?
he started off with high expectations because when he first came up, late 2002 i believe, he hit something like 10-15 HRs in a limited amount of at bats (200-300?) so it looked like crede could be a .270/30/80 guy bringing up visiions of a right handed robi nventura. alas, it wasn't meant to be in 03 or 04, as he'd start off the seasons terribly cold, be hitting .220-ish, the nstart getting that average up towards the larger side of 250, ending up with around 20 HR and 75 RBI. much like someone like derrek lee is prone for a big season sicne instead of being in a hole where he's .250/1/4 like he was aorund this time last year, he's instead at like .350/4/17, thus making fantasy owners of lee salivate over the potential for a career year.
back to crede though, if he can start hitting like he did at the end of 2002, the the whitesox are that much better. at first, much like the cubs, it seemed like losing magglio and carlos, both perennial .280-.300/30/100 type players (altho maggs had an injury riddled 2004 that left him at like .280/9/30) would be a big blow to the sox. i mean, you didnt outright replace those power #s.... and the cubs got rid of sosa and alou, you hear of 70+ HRs and nearly 200 RBIs... and you wonder, wow, without those nearly 150-200 RBIs on both sides of town, how can they be better than last year with similar pitching staffs?
the cubs and whitesox both proved that you can hit 235 and 242 homeruns respectively and still finish third in your division, or i think maybe 2nd in the whitesox' case. anyways, if you have people who can get on base, then mosey over to scoring position, all you need is a single or a double, not necessarily a HR. most teams that can hit a lot of home runs tend to live and die by the home run, which more often than not leads to death by homeruns. so with a more balanced offensive attack, you can turn it over to pitching and defense, which seems to be genuinely improved over last year. this is how you start off 9-4 and own every series you've played against myriad AL central foes thus far.
the crowd was pretty good tonight, lots of baseball fans there (a stark contrast to early beautiful 2:20 friday games at wrigley, where drunken fratboys clamour for girls to flash their boobs, even though they get kicked out of the park for doing that) and as always with comiscular park, i always meet good people there and around there. i met a family on teh train who worked with me to use the pepsi 2 for 1 discount so i could get in for $7 instead of $14. happy birthday jessica's uncle, whatever your name was (i dont think he remembers at this point by now. they were sauced when we arrived right around 6:30, so figure at 3:30, he's passe dout somewhere)
so tonight's game had it all, lots of impotent offense (think of the term "shooting blanks") as we had ~20 hits between the teasm by the start of hte 6th inning and a 0-0 score, then it had solid pitching, close calls, emotion, and another rough outing by zero-san, shingo takatsu.
it seems that shingo is quite vulnerable to the beatdown after teams get enough looks at him. thus far, his implosions and beatdowns have come at the hands of AL cental opponents, who have seen him the most.
but kenny williams has hermanson, then marte and maybe even vizcaino ready for ozzie to use as potential closer material. so he's got depth in an area where he could use it. just imagine the collective "oh shit" if latroy hawkins went down on the other aide of town, although, the way things go with him, if they give someone like michael wuertz a shot at closer, he could take it and run with it for all we know. remember that joe borowski came out of nowhere to become a closer, so why not another guy we've never heard of prior to his stint in cubdom like wuertz?
regardless, it was a beautiful summer-like night for baseball (clear skies, light breezy winds, and about 70-75 degrees at gametime)... there was wiggle room around the stadim (sure, while it's kind of cool to be at a stadium that's jam packed and rocking, you can get accustomed to the plentitude of space available at ballparks that have teams that aren't the hottest trendy ticket in town for non-baseball-fan-bandwagoners. i've grown to love the amebience of a sub.500 team's 1/3 filled ballpark, as those games between 4th and 5th place teams ten dto bring out ACTUAL HONEST TO GOD BASEBALL FANS. which means that when i wear an expos cap, as i alwasy do, i hear "HEY EXPOS!" once or twice, as opposed to a good 25-50 times at your typical wrigley game.
i tend to meet nice people at both ballparks, but thus far, comiskey wins hands down. my introduction to cool whtiesox fans came at age 20, when a friend and i moved down from the upper deck to the lower deck club box seats, and the approaching-elderly couple in front of us turned around, shook our hands, welcomed us to the "real seats" and said thta if we need beer and cant get it on our own, just let htem know and they'll ordeer up for us.
good people like that. and the people who got me in 1/2 price today. and on top of it all, most importantly, a good solid baseball game.
i went to the whitesox game tonight looking for a good quality baseball game played by two pretty good teams that have a solid rivalry going, and that exactly what i got (evidenced by the still-ringing choruses of boos for torii hunter. viva jamey burke, eh? hge's no chris widger tho)
either way, this whitesox team seems to be enjoying coming out to the ballpark and playing a game everyday, ozzie seems to be getting better as a tactical manager, and the whitesox thus far haven't flat out dominated teams, but htey've scrapped together wins that show that they might have the magical baseball "it" aka the undiscernable x-factor that gets teams over the hump and gets them in a good position to make things happen at crucial junctures in the mid-late innings of the game.
and therein lies one of the big mysteries of baseball: is there truly an undiscernable and undefineable "it" factor, or is that merely hte product of a team doing a whole lot of little things right on such a consistent basis, and htat we're so used to slugging HRs to win games 7-4 then turning around and losing 6-2 in another games, that we just feel its magical when you see a team wit ha different philosophy come out and do all kinds of little/fundamental things right and end up winning ballgames.
the cubs are another post, but i dont have a complete mini-analysis of the myet. but they can entertain no doubt. prior looks good, and when nomar decides to wake up, he's got a solid a-ram in there and d-lee rolling while c-patterosn starts to get hot. that offense combined with zambrano, a resurgent-looking-prior, god-knows-what-you're-gonna-get-from-wood, a suddenly resurgent ryan dempster (back to back solid starts, adn 19k in 15.2 IP even when he did get rocked)
yep, this 2005 season could be the best overall year of chicago baseball that i've seen in my now-fifth-year of keeping a keen eye on the game of baseball. both teams have the capacity to entertain, both have some lights out pitchers, and some offenses not anchored by big traditional feast-or-famine sluggers... and solid bullpens too? wow. this could be the best year in quite some time, and hopefully its not hte best FOR quite some time.
more later sometime. like y'all believe me on that :-D
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