I know it's not the best measure for a pitcher, but it is the simplest, most accessible.

I'm curious how you'll respond...

John Danks deserved better. Faced with the task of pitching the opening game of a double header, Danks was looking to go deep into the game, preserve the bullpen, and most importantly, get the W to help the White Sox avoid a 2-5 skid. He held up his end of the bargain, taking a no-hitter and perfect game through 5 innings, but the Sox offense, weighed down by three automatic outs at the bottom of the lineup, mounted nary an offensive attack against Brian Burres and the Orioles.

I think it was Hitlesswonder who expressed his concern over the lack of Danks' curveball in his first 4 games. Well, for 5 innings we saw what happens when Danks adds that curve to his arsenal, 5 IP, 0 H, 0 BB, 4 K. But when he hung an 0-2 curveball to Adam Jones leading off the 6th, he lost his no-hitter, and thanks to Toby Hall behind the plate, he lost his concentration as well.

Jones has good speed, while Hall has no arm. So Danks spent the better part of the next at-bat throwing over to first base in an attempt to prevent the inevitable stolen base. He was unsuccessful, as Jones was able to take second on a botched hit-and-run. A couple pitches later, Danks left a navel-high changeup over the plate which Guillermo Quiroz smashed over the left field wall. It was the first HR Danks has allowed this season, the first of Quiroz' career, and it immediately decided the game.

I say the game was immediately decided because Burres is left-handed and has a changeup, which he used to carve up the 2/3rds of a major league lineup that Ozzie ran out there in the opener. Much as we saw last season, the lineup is just too easy to go through when you have 3 consecutive players who don't belong in a major league lineup. Add in the rest of the team's inability to hit LHP, to go the other way, and this one was over in the 6th.

I crapped out of yesterday's recap duties, so I thought I'd make it up to you with a couple of pitching notes on the young season. What have we learned?

• John Danks has transformed himself into a ground ball pitcher with the additions of a cutter. He's not going to be channeling Chien-Ming Wang any time soon, but through 4 games he has a ground ball rate quite similar to that of Jon Garland, except Danks can miss some bats.

  Quick math might make it seem like Danks' K-rate has dropped this season (7.06 K/9 in '07 vs. 6.08 K/9 in '08), but upon closer inspection Danks appears to have retained all of his K-inducing talents. Using the raw total K/TBF (Total Batters Faced), Danks strikeout rate has declined from 17.5% to 17.2%, a negligibly small amount given the sample size of just 4 starts.

  Danks is also doing one other thing exceedingly well, unsustainably well, in fact. The White Sox pitching staff as a whole has joined him. I'd get into specifics, but I'm superstitious and don't wish to throw my jinx their way. I'm pretty sure you can figure it out for yourself anyway.

• If a pitcher signs a 4-year contract, expect him to have his starts pushed back as much as possible. Mark Buehrle is of to a rough start, and the Sox are taking every opportunity to push his spot in the rotation back, all the while claiming he is perfectly healthy. I see no reason (yet) to doubt them, and attribute Buehrle's extra rest as a means to protect their long-term investment. The Sox have been extremely reluctant, with good reason, to hand out long-term contracts to pitchers, and I assume they have some data (or at least a theory) that the extra rest will help ensure Buehrle's effectiveness not just in August and September, but until August and September of '11.

  On the mound, Buehrle has allowed a troubling 35 hits in just 22+ innings pitched, which is surprising because he looked spectacular in spring training. I think we can attribute at least some of this to bad luck, Buehrle has allowed an astounding .384 BABIP so far. But there are at least two warning signs I can see in the data from FanGraphs; 1) Buehrle's K-rate 11% is tied with his poor '06 campaign for the lowest in his career, and 2) take a look at the pitch-type data. Buehrle is throwing about 33% fewer fastballs so far in the early going, and it looks most of those fastballs have been replaced with cutters, which have almost doubled in frequency. I don't know if there's enough data from which to draw any concrete solutions, but it's something to keep an eye on as the season continues.

Kenny doesn't want any Garlands:

Williams hasn't heard any complaints from players about the energy Swisher brings to the clubhouse every day, but just in case he ever does, he offered a warning.

''It's a grinder-type attitude, energetic attitude, confident-type attitude, and if it grinds on some people, then I need to know who those people are so we can move them on,'' Williams said. ''We want hard-nosed. We want Nick Swisher times 25.''

and Coop on Danks:

"The big difference? Strikes,'' pitching coach Don Cooper said. "The amount of strikes, quality strikes. He didn't command nearly as well and wasn't nearly as efficient. He's got to stand taller and stay on his pitches longer. It was a disappointing outing. We expect more and he does, too.''

Not much went right for the White Sox and John Danks on Wednesday night. Danks was pulled with 1 out in the third when he forced Ozzie's second trip to the mound of the inning by walking in a run ushering in Masset time.

Danks failed to make it through the lineup twice, facing only 16 batters in his outing. Of those 16, he walked 3 and struck out two. Simple math tells us that 11 balls were but into play, with 7 of them finding a soft spot in the defense. All 7 hits Danks allowed were singles.

Rounding up Danks outing is a simple one. He was falling behind hitters, and paying for it. When he wasn't falling behind hitters, he was unable to put them away. The Twins didn't really hit him hard, but he was visibly out of sorts with the number of piranhas circling the bases.

Nick Masset came on in "relief" and quickly turned a bad situation worse, clearing the the bases of inherited runners and allowing the games first extra-base hit. After limiting damage for a few innings, allowing the Sox to briefly make a game of it with solo homers by Nick Swisher, Paul Konerko, and Joe Crede, Masset blew up in his fourth inning of work. He walked Delmon Young -- No easy task. Delmon entered the day without a walk in his last 97 trips to the plate -- after being ahead 0-2, then gave up a grand slam to Jason Kubel on the next pitch.

The Twins had scored just 23 runs in their first 8 games (2.75 R/G), yet managed to score 5 runs in an inning twice Wednesday. Not surprisingly, Masset was involved in both innings.

Trivially, the Sox have yet to have a lead after the 3rd or 4th inning this season.

* * * * *

Ozzie Guillen has remained true to his word. He's got it turned up to 11, continuing to call out umpire and Sopranos reject Phil Cuzzi.

"I don't like that guy behind the plate, and I'm going to let him know," said Guillen, during his pregame meeting with the media. "It's one reason if you don't like me as a man and what I do, I respect that. But if you don't like me, and all of a sudden you're going to take it out on my players, you're wrong.

"That's unprofessional, and I just let him know I didn't like him the first day I saw him, and I think he feels the same way about me. Every time he's behind the plate, we might have a problem. We might. We have. I think the last couple times behind the plate, we have a problem."

Ozzie must have known the Sox were gonna stink up the joint Wednesday, so he decided to take the heat off his players. That Ozzie, he's sly like a, well, like a something.

* * * * *

Andy Sisco, obtained from the Royals before the '07 season in exchange for Ross Gload, will undergo Tommy John surgery. Of all the moves Kenny Williams made last off-season, the Sisco deal was on the one I liked best. I thought acquiring a high-upside arm in exchange for a perennnially underutilized career back-up was a great move. Of course, I was basing that assumption off Sisco, who lacked in minor-league seasoning, spending all of 2007 in the Charlotte rotation. The Sox put him on the 2007 opening day roster over Boone Logan, and he never settled into a role.

Sisco was always a bit of a long-shot to succeed, but the Sox, like the Royals before them, never seemed to be focused on the long-term with Sisco. With the injury, Sisco is probably done with the Sox, and maybe done with baseball altogether. He'll be out of options next year, so if the Sox elect to keep him (doubtful) he'll have to go straight from the DL to the bigs with only a rehab assignment to get things straightened out.

In short, adios Andy.

I very quickly went through the Gameday data and used my own interpretation of the numbers provided -- John Danks doesn't throw an 83 MPH fastball -- to come up with this brief chart of Danks' pitch types by inning Thursday.

Danks' only two strikeouts of the game came in the 4th, where he used just 9 pitches to retire the side. He struck out Jason Michaels on an inside cutter and caught Asdrubal Cabrera looking at a curveball.

Yes, that headline is definitely tounge-in-cheek. I thought it was funny that both Gonzo and Cowley posted about it the 5th inning at about the same time Pete and Option27 were sounding off in the gamethread. That was about the same time I was able to tune in (fast game), so I could just as easily be blamed for the jinx.

I was able to catch a little bit of good John Danks, a little bit of the wild Danks, and too much of Jermaine Dye costing him runs in the outfield. Good Danks seemed to have his cutter working pretty well, actually he had everything working pretty well.

I think Danks GO/FO ratio of 12/6 would have been his best mark of all of last year, but the no-longer-available MLB.com 2007 gamelog and the differences between GB/FB and GO/FO make that difficult to say with absolute certainty. What we can say for sure is that, at least after one start, it appears that Danks has matured a little bit and his new cutter has allowed him to shift from being such a predominately flyball pitcher.

Allowing fewer flyballs will be key for Danks if he hopes to reduce his homerun rate (28 in 139 IP) from last season. As a general guide, about 11% of flyballs go over the fence. Danks HR/FB was 13.8% last year, allowing 28 HR in 203 flyballs. If he's able to increase his groundball rate, while simultaneously regressing to the more normal 11% HR/FB rate, he'll take a huge step forward to becoming an asset to the staff.

As an example of Danks homer-proneness, in his 26 starts last season, he had just one in which he pitched more than 6 innings and gave up 0 HR, as he did on Thursday.

In the field, Danks was helped by a good play from Nick Swisher catching a long drive as he smashed, almost Rowand-like (not enough broken bones), into the left center field wall on one of the two really well hit balls against him on the day. The other well hit ball flew just over the outstretched glove of Jermaine Dye -- that's two outstretched gloves of Dye vs. three Crede pops it up on the young year -- allowing Travis Hafner, who walked on 4 pitches (bad Danks), to score from first on Ryan Garko's double.

Later in the inning, Dye and Swisher would collide on a routine pop-up, which surprisingly yielded a disagreement in the Sox television booth. DJ thought it was Jermaine's ball, with Hawk arguing, correctly, that the center fielder is the field general, and if he calls you off you back off.

Ozzie made one of those moves that looks smart when it works, but could have lit up the phone lines had it backfired, bringing in Octavio Dotel to face Casey Blake, who took Dotel deep in Opening Day's pivotal at-bat. It was as if Guillen was saying to Dotel, 'I believe in you' as he made the call over Scott Linebrink, who was also working in the pen and worked a perfect eigth.

Offensively, the Sox still have me worried. Joe Crede and Juan Uribe provided all of the the offense on two solo homers. Carlos Quentin got his first start of the year, going 1-4, but grounding into a double play one batter after AJ Pierzynski's poorly executed sacrifice attempt.

I'll reserve railing on the offense for another day. For now, it just feels good to get that first win out of the way.

*** CSN will replay the game at 7pm and 1am ***

I was going to sit down and write a top 10 list -- Top 10 reasons to watch the White Sox this season, or something like that -- but it looks like Jim beat me to the punch with his 10 post-spring training concerns.

As I noted in the comments section over there, I would have added Bobby Jenks to the list. We spent much of our time prior to the '06 and '07 seasons discussing Jenks' lack of spring velocity and conditioning, only to have him come through with solid seasons even without the 100 MPH heater that he swears he still has. It's almost all superstition that has me wanting to add Jenks to the list, but there's a little bit of me who's worried about those poor spring peripherals.

Anyway, no Top 10 list for me. I'll just do some 14-hours until first pitch rambling and call it a post.

Ramblin' time

• Let's start with optimism... With the exception of his penultimate spring outing, John Danks has taken a step forward. The cutter seems to have added the groundball to his skillset, and if he can throw strikes, he'll have a surprisingly good year. Surprising in that he beats all projections and ends up as an average or better pitcher.
• The same goes for Jose Contreras. He's got more velocity than he's had since May '06. He's coming over the top more. His fastball seems to have more movement than it did last season. It just looks like he's returned to being an asset instead of a liability. I expect either he or Danks is going to have a very good year, a solid #3 type year, with the other falling into the solid #4 category of average innings eater.
• With Buehrle and Vazquez as known quantities atop the rotation, that leaves Floyd, whose spring has caused me to lose some of my optimism. He had a much better spring than last year, and he doesn't seem to be afraid of the zone. But that still doesn't seem like enough to be anything more than below average starter who gets hit too much and gives up too many HRs. Of the three question marks in the rotation, Floyd seems the most likely disappoint.
• Nick Swisher is leading off and playing left field (unless Ozzie changes his mind, again) against Cleveland Monday. Last year it was Pablo Ozuna. I'd say that's an upgrade.
• I've got a bad feeling that Alexei Ramirez will have a .270 OBP after 120 at-bats before the Sox start to question their decision to bring him north.
• I've got a worse feeling that those at-bats are going to come at the expense of Brian Anderson and Carlos Quentin, each of whom seem on the cusp of reaching their once highly regarded potential.
• Charlotte has too many major league caliber players, which wouldn't be a problem if Chicago didn't have too few.
• This post contained no mention of Nick Masset.

I could go on. And I probably will later. But we're a little more than 13 hours from first pitch, and I need some sleep. Go Sox!