Mark Buehrle worked quickly, his defense made some great plays behind him, and the offense looked like it had a plan against Derek Lowe to give the White Sox their first road victory in June.

The Sox road woes started with well-pitched games lost on walk-off homers thanks in large part to the lack of clutch hitting, and only got worse as they got completely pantsed in the weekend games at Wrigley. So, it was a nice surprise to see the Sox hitters have a solid plan of attack early against Lowe. The first three batters loaded the bases with hits back up the middle as Lowe tried to establish his sinker. Lowe limited the damage by striking out Jermaine Dye, who got his revenge with an 8th inning HR, on a series of sliders, allowing a sac-fly to Nick Swisher and throwing the ball anywhere near the plate to Pablo Ozuna. Even though the Sox only scored 1 in the first, it was nice to see the run come from having a concrete plan against an opposing starter.

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Last week when I mockingly asked what's wrong with Mark Buehrle, I was not so subtly referring to the improved defense behind him. Buehrle is the Sox most defense-dependent starter, and he didn't have much support in his first handful of starts this season, as demonstrated by this BABIP chart below.

Tuesday night, however, the Sox played impeccable defense, turning 3 double plays, one of which was spectacular, and turning a couple of hard hit balls (along with nearly all of the softly hit ones) into outs. Buehrle took advantage of an occasionally wide strike zone to help record his 1000th career strikeout and to notch his third game (first victory) of the year in 2:10 or less.

• Orlando Cabrera had himself a night. He scored the game's first run, then drove in the Sox second run with a clutch 2-out hit following a Buehrle sacrifice. And even though he was credited with his 3rd error of the season (perhaps unjustly), he had a fine day in the field as well.
• Cabrera's fine play at SS was overshadowed the amazing double play courtesy of Alexei Ramirez, who ranged into short center field to make a sliding grab of a ducksnort then wheeling around to catch Matt Kemp roaming too far off first base (video).
• Dewayne Wise should expect to keep playing after a 3-4 night. He fell only a HR short of the cycle, and though he might not be spectacular at anything, it's nice to actually have a credible threat off the bench. A bench of Hall, Uribe, Wise, and Anderson isn't bad at all. Ozuna, on the other hand...

• Hopefully Useful Google Doc PF/x table
• THT PF/x Averages
• BP PECOTA Card
• Fangraphs Card
• THT Card

Well this is kinda boring.  This will be the third straight pitcher with the same approximate sinker/slider/change repertoire. The problem so far hasn't been getting hits.  We managed 10 in the Sunday abomination and 11 in the game before, BABIPing over .300 in both games.  The difference was the batted ball types.  Marquis couldn't keep the Sox bats in the yard, ceding two HRs and two doubles.  Dempster, on the other hand, allowed zero HR and, to use the old Sports Center euphemism "scattered" his 10 base hits.  The other issue is K/BB ratio.  Dempster ceded a lone walk and K'd 4 and Marquis did likewise.  That's the sort of thing that suppresses both batting average and on base percentage.  In the second game, it's likely the thing that kept the offense from reaching the tipping point.

For what it's worth, I checked out how each individual batter in our usual lineup performs against sinkers and there just wasn't enough of a sample to make reasonable conclusions.  Crede has done well and everyone else was more or less limited to singles.  Again, not enough data to draw conclusions.  On to Mr. Lowe.

His sinker is a real man's sinker.  Doesn't break 90 on average, but he's kept his line drive rate below 17% since 2004, when he gave up 17.3%.  That also happened to be the last time he had an xFIP above 4.00.  He cut his walk rate by about a third and bumped his K rate a bit and has since been, if not an ace, then a superb number 2.  He's one of the few in the league that has demonstrated an ability to control his BABIP and he allows walks at about the same rate as Javy has historically.  In addition to all that, he pitches in Dodger Stadium, which suppresses HRs more than all but 6 stadiums in MLB.  That, of course, will only come into play if we actually hit some fly balls.  Lowe is allowing significantly more than 20% fly balls for the first time in his career (well since '02 anyway, which is as far back as batted ball data goes).  Now he's at about 25%! 

Like most slider/change pitchers, Lowe saves his change as an out pitch against lefties.  Against RHB, the out pitch is the slider.  His slider gets more whiffs than both Dempster and Marquis and his change is better than either of the two Cubs pitchers.  He'd get more K's, but he works quickly, going only 3.67 pitches per batter.  It's going to be a struggle even to get his pitch count up.  I'm going to try not to think about the odds that OC and AJ go back to back one pitch at bats at least once this game.