Chicago White Sox ace Mark Buehrle is, along with Jose Reyes and David Ortiz, one of three baseball players whom we can appreciate not merely as great and admirable athletes, but as defenders of civilization itself. This may seem a wild claim, but civilization is premised on two things: The cultivation of beauty, and consonance between word and deed. Like Reyes and Ortiz, Buehrle plays a beautiful, vibrant style of baseball, and like them he does so simply by doing what baseball players are, to hear them tell it, supposed to do. For Reyes, that means calculated recklessness and aggression in baserunning and bat placement; for Ortiz, that means mastery of self under pressure; for Buehrle, it means simply throwing the ball over the plate and letting the hitters do their damndest with it.

Sometimes that’s nothing at all, as in April, when Buerhle tossed a no-hitter against the Rangers. Even when he’s losing, though, the man can pitch a marvelous game. Last Thursday, for instance, Buehrle threw a game that should be taught in colleges. Facing Toronto ace Roy Halladay, Buehrle took a 2–0 complete game loss and did it in style. He allowed only two baserunners, took only 91 pitches to finish the game, which lasted a tidy one hour and fifty minutes. As it turned out, his two baserunners both hit home runs, and with Halladay at the top of his game it wasn’t enough for the win, but even that speaks well of Buehrle. The only hits were home runs because he throws his fairly unimpressive fastballs and changeups in the far half of the strike zone as quickly as possible, daring hitters to do something with them. They’ll thump the odd extra-base hit because he keeps the ball over the plate, but their runs only come when they earn them. Buehrle does the enemy no favors.

This leads to wonderful things. Buehrle’s games, when he is going well, routinely last just two hours. This is the natural length of a baseball game, and after sitting through a few of this length it can be excruciating to watch a typical, flaccid three hour game, complete with batters wandering all over the field and pitchers shaking off every other sign from the catcher.

Even better, while conjuring up glorious memories of properly paced baseball games, Buehrle is incredibly effective. His career 3.82 ERA is as good, when adjusted for park and league effects, as Tom Glavine’s 3.46 career mark. He’s also ridiculously durable, because he’s ridiculously efficient. From 2001 to 2005, he never pitched fewer than 220 innings in a year, and in three of those years he pitched at least 235 innings. At one point, he pitched at least six innings in 49 straight games. Even his struggles reflect well on him: After pitching 236.7 innings in the regular season in 2005, he pitched another 23.3 while leading the Sox to a world championship. Probably for this reason, he had a tired arm last year, and thus had the first off year of his career — in which his ERA was a hair worse than average while pitching 204 innings.

Have all those innings had any ill effect on his arm? Almost certainly not, which I don’t just say because he enters tonight’s game against the Yankees with a vintage-Buehrle 3.66 ERA. I also say it because he doesn’t throw many pitches. This year, he’s thrown 114 pitches twice and never more; last year, he threw 113 or more pitches just four times, and never more than 118; the year before, he threw between 110 and 120 pitches 10 times, but never broke 120. He’s not an iron man; he’s just smart.

Pitchers, coaches, and managers preach endlessly about the benefits of working quickly and throwing strikes, but Buehrle, like Tom Glavine, actually reaps those benefits, because he practices what is preached. He can pitch a lot by the standards of the day without stressing his arm at all, because he doesn’t waste pitches or overthrow the ball. An easy motion, a good sense of when to throw a slow one and when to throw a hard one, and a confidence that allows you to shamelessly toss beach balls at the plate will do any pitcher all the good in the world. Credit Buehrle for having the brains to be aware of this.

There’s one outstanding question around the 28-year-old Buerhle, though: How much is this guy worth? Barry Zito isn’t more durable or more effective, has lesser stuff, and a far worse sense of how to use it than Buerhle, and is a far worse risk going forward, as he relies on a curveball rather than a changeup and is thus more susceptible to the ravages of age — and he signed a $126 million contract last winter. All the attention has been paid to Buerhle’s North Side counterpart, Carlos Zambrano, last seen mugging his catcher and allowing more than five runs a game, but the shrewd executive — and both Brian Cashman and Omar Minaya are nothing if not shrewd — will have his eye on Buehrle this winter. On the merits, $126 million ought to be the opening bid, and that’s without a bonus for civilization defense.

tmarchman@nysun.com