White Sox Are Victims of League Imbalance
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Life’s just not fair for the Chicago White Sox.
The big story of this year has probably been the shocking disparity in quality between the American and National Leagues, and the plight of the defending world champions illustrates the point perfectly. Heading into last night’s contest against the Yankees, the White Sox were in third place in the American League Central division, nine games out of first place and one of three teams within a game and a half of the wild card lead.
They also had a .589 winning percentage, just a couple of games off the Mets’ .611 mark, and theirs was compiled against vastly stiffer competition. The Sox are a better team than the Mets, and it’s not even good enough to get them to second place in what’s traditionally been the game’s weakest division.
It’s a fairly absurd situation all around. Coming out of the All-Star break, the Sox were two games behind the Tigers, and ahead of the Twins by nine. In less than a month, the Twins have made up nine and a half games, and the Tigers have packed seven games on to their lead. What makes it all the more frustrating from the Sox’s point of view is that they’ve hardly played horrible baseball — a stretch in which a team goes 9–15 shouldn’t force them from presumptive playoff lock to scraping for second place, at least not in the American League Central.
In a situation like this, there are really two issues: What’s happened, and whether or not it can be fixed.
The answer to the first question is simple: The pitching staff has been burned out and the Sox haven’t had any production from center field.These are intricately related problems.
The main victim of burnout is the Sox’s horse, Mark Buehrle, who’s run up an 8.39 ERA since the break and has looked even worse than that. He’s a pitcher with marginal stuff who gets by throwing a wide variety of pitches, working quickly, and throwing strikes; he’s also pitched at least 220 innings each of the last five years, and often quite a bit more.While Buehrle insists his arm is sound, and there’s never a direct line to draw between overuse and a pitcher losing his stuff, his pitches haven’t been sharp for quite some time and he’s the kind of pitcher who, if he isn’t sharp, is throwing batting practice.
You see this up and down the line with the Sox starters, all of whom are renowned innings-eaters and all of whom have ERAs of 4.45 or above over the last month. Last year and this year people were skeptical about the Sox’s philosophy of trying to get 1,000 innings out of the rotation, and they may have been on to something.
The Sox’s starters have had to work harder this year because of a pair of trades meant to bolster their ranks. Last year’s center fielder, Aaron Rowand, was traded as part of the deal that brought Jim Thome to Chicago, and the team’s top prospect, Chris Young, was traded for fifth starter Javier Vazquez, one of the durable horses on which the team places so much value. With Rowand gone, the team defense, their biggest strength last year, has taken a notable hit, leading the team’s strike-throwing flyball pitchers to throw more carefully and have balls in play turned to outs less often. And Brian Anderson, the prospect the team brought up to replace Rowand, has not only been second-rate in the field, but horrible at the plate; between him and utilityman Rob Macowiak, the Sox are getting a .236 BA/.305 OBA/.359 SLG line out of center. All this is made the worse by the fact that the team’s sixth starter, Brandon McCarthy, is better than Vazquez right now, and the team would almost doubtless be better with him and Young than with Vazquez and Anderson. It was a clever sequence of moves, but may have been a bit too clever.
At this point in the season, there’s nothing, really, for the Sox to do; they face the Tigers and Twins for nine straight games starting a week from now, and they’ll have to play their best baseball of the season in those games to retain a real shot at the playoffs. There’s some shuffling they can do, but short of moving Buehrle or Vazquez to the bullpen in favor of Mc-Carthy (which simply isn’t going to happen), there’s no obvious improvement to make. Their best hope is that with wunderkind Francisco Liriano on the disabled list the Twins collapse over the next few weeks; it seems a bad bet to make.
The shame of it is that the Sox, for all their flaws, are still probably one of the five best teams in baseball, and would stand about as good a shot as anyone of winning it all if they make the playoffs. There may not be any solution to the problem of league imbalance, but when a third-place team in one league is better than the best team in the other, it’s time to start hoping that teams can get their acts together before next year and represent the senior circuit as something other than stumblebums.
