Mark Buehrle Flirts With Perfection

I hope we get to see a Buehrle vs. Greinke matchup sometime this season.

Always a pleasure to watch his starts and you know it won’t be a long game when he’s on the bump. He kept a lot of guys off balance, his change was pretty nasty tonight.

Happened to glance at a box score and whoa! OCab really tearing it up this year – but you do have to figure in his gold glove defense to really determine his true value:

.229 / .289 /.257 / blech

Makes Alexei look like an allstar. How happy am I that he was too proud to sign an extension? I can’t imagine being stuck with that contract and then having to endure two more years of that ass.

And since MB’s near no-hitter is giving me flashbacks about 2007: the greatest punter/hockey player/modern pentathlete in North Dakota history may not be long for this world:

.179/ .226 / .250/ ha!

No Sox pitcher in my lifetime of watching has made me more proud than MB. His style, his pace, his modesty. I am continuously impressed and enamored, after all these years.

OK, I’ll admit that one may be the biggest stretch of all, but it’s not totally implausible, is it? Each time a new player— especially a superstar—is pushed out of the PED closet, it means that the era in which we’ve been living is, ironically, less illegitimate than we previously believed. Why? Because the more players who are found to have used PEDs, the less accurate it is to say that anyone truly had an unfair advantage. Sure, on a matchup-by-matchup basis there were users facing non-users, but the caricature of a small group of cheaters ruining it for everyone else in the game grows more ridiculous as each new name surfaces.

Let’s face the facts: Many, many ballplayers have used PEDs in recent years. So many, that the allegation that any one user had an unfair advantage is at risk of becoming obsolete. As I’ve said time and time again, rather than demonizing these guys, calling for bans and locking the doors of the Hall of Fame, perhaps we should simply acknowledge that PEDs are best thought of as a generation’s unique playing conditions like dead balls, segregated leagues, and giant strike zones. We have no problem acknowledging that 18 wins and a 2.50 ERA didn’t make a guy anything special in 1904, so why is it so hard to come to grips with and adjust to the fact that 400 or 500 home runs don’t necessarily make anyone special today?

Have PEDs thrown us so off our game that we can’t tell the difference between a Hall of Famer and and a non-Hall of Famer? I don’t believe so, and I think that eventually the writers and historians will realize this too.

from today’s hardballtimes

And I was there, although too drunk to remember innings 3 through 8. That patio buffet and drinks is one hell of the deal boys and girls, totally worth the price. By 6:10 I had shit loads of food and 4 beers in me. And still had more than an hour of drinking time left. The downside is that right now I am suffering at work … feeling like crap.

But yeah, MB, was damn quick. I remember thinking “woah, he didn’t it even pause between the pitches”

in the postgame press conference some genius “reporter” came up with this question,“are you ever going to lose again?”, to which buehrle replied,“yeah, then i’m going to retire.” the sox should trade this loser to st. louis. everyone knows he’d rather be on the cardinals.
clearly.
i luuuuuuuuv mark buehrle.

Bob Melvin

http://chicago.whitesox.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20090507&content_id=4614902&vkey=news_mlb&fext=.jsp&c_id=mlb

After May 8’s game that year, the Sox were 1 win under .500, on their way to a season-high 4 wins over.

Please not again.

This was a comment from their site last night:

“Going back to last September Royals are now 36-19 in last 55 games. That’s a 106-win pace over 162”.

I didn’t realize that.

big up on MB but down on everyone else

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=8850

Or does it not apply? I ask because I think SSS should support this original decision:

STOCKHOLM (AFP) – A couple in Sweden has appealed to the country’s supreme court in their fight to name their baby boy “Q”, legal papers showed Friday.

Judges ruled in the couple’s first appeal in January that Q was not an “appropriate” name for a child, arguing that Swedish law forbade names consisting of just one letter.

In their written appeal to Sweden’s Supreme Court, the parents Rickard Rehnberg and Thitathorn Sukjit called on judges to reverse the previous ruling.

“There is now a child who answers to the name of Q. What does Sweden gain by forcing him to take on a new name?” they said.

Mark Buehrle retired the first 19 batters in the White Sox victory over the Tigers Thursday night. That marked the second time in his career that Buehrle had a perfect game through six innings (he retired the first 19 batters against the Indians on July 21, 2004). Only one other active pitcher has been perfect for at least six innings twice in his career: Randy Johnson.

http://whitesoxpride.mlblogs.com/archives/2009/05/pregame_odds_ends.html