While White Sox pitchers and catchers don't report until Thursday, Mark Gonzales let us open one present early with a sunny spring story about Jordan Danks.

Danks is in need of a good spring as much as anybody. Therefore, Danks is more ready than ever, and he has his reasons to believe he finally deserves a spot on the 40-man roster.

The strikeouts have kept him down, and he's taken steps to address it. He took extensive video courses to break down his swing, and he has worked on his two-strike approach. He also enlisted John Danks to pitch to him and share his secrets on getting his younger brother out.

That's all well and good. But this part...

When Jordan Danks arrives Tuesday at Camelback Ranch, he hopes the White Sox's coaching staff takes notice of the additional 15 pounds of muscle on his 6-foot-5 frame that could help result in a major league roster spot in the near future.

... is not good.

"Pounds of muscle" is one of those spring training phrases that signifies a player making public his dedication to improving. The problem is, in most cases, a player who has outwardly dedicated himself to improving is the same player who is in dire need of improvement.

I searched through 10 years' worth of archives for the exact phrase "pounds of muscle," and I found seven other references to White Sox who bulked up during the offseason. In every case, a worse year followed. In some cases, disaster ensued.

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While writing about Zeke Bonura last week, I had to do a little bit of research on early White Sox sluggers, since he was among the select few who could regularly reach the faraway fences of Comiskey Park.

That required stringing together some milestones in order to give him some context. Which then led me to piece together the rest of the home-run record's timeline out of curiosity.

As you'll see, the White Sox were skeptical of the baseballing craze known as the "four-bagged hit." They stopped writing it off as a fad after a few decades.

1901: 5, Sam Mertes

Let's start at the beginning. Mertes changed leagues without changing towns, jumping from the Chicago Orphans (now known as the Cubs) to the White Stockings of the newly formed American League. He led the inaugural edition of the team we root for with five homers. That's fitting, since he was given the nickname of "Sandow," a popular circus strongman at the time. "Popular circus strongman" is an awesome phrase that doesn't come up enough.

Anyway, his Baseball-Reference.com Bullpen page has a little more on him:

Prior to the 1901 season, he jumped across town to the Chicago White Sox of the new American League, and he started in the circuit's first game on April 24th. On May 9th of that year, he broke up a no-hitter by Cleveland Blues pitcher Earl Moore in the 10th inning. The next year, he played every position for the Sox, including pitcher (he was 1-0 and only allowed 1 earned run in 8 innings on the mound).

1903: 6, Danny Green

Green, like Mertes, starred for both Chicago teams, and he's got to have an interesting story. He had an OPS+ above 110 every year, but his major-league career was over after 1905 at 28. Total White Sox says he retired, but his Bullpen page says he went to the minors. While playing for Minneapolis, he was drilled in the head, and he never recovered. He died at age 39 in "an institution."

At any rate, Green hit more homers in 1903 than some later White Sox teams, including 1908 (three!) and 1909 (four!).

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In the last four installments of this series, we've looked at the clippings for two Hall of Famers (Ed Walsh, Ray Schalk) and another one who should be in Cooperstown, too (Minnie Minoso).

Today's subject, Henry John Bonura, aka "Zeke," might be equally memorable for those who watched him play for the White Sox from 1934 to 1937. The first baseman made his mark on the franchise's record books and an indelible impression on observers, although not always for the best reasons.

Why Zeke Bonura?

Before Albert Belle went and ruined all the fun, Bonura was an answer to a fantastic trivia question: "Who holds the White Sox single-season record for RBI?" He drove in 138 runs for the White Sox in 1936, and that record stood for 62 years before Belle shattered it with 152 in 1998.

It was easy to see how Belle set the record -- he also set White Sox records for homers (49) and doubles (48). Bonura, on the other hand, drove in 138 runs on only 12 homers, which is by far the most RBI for any 12-homer season in baseball history (Goose Goslin is second with 129, if you care).

Bonura was the team's clean-up hitter, and given that he batted .330/.426/.482, he deserved it. But he also scored a whopping 120 runs because Luke Appling was batting fifth and setting records of his own. That year, Appling hit a franchise-high .388, winning the batting title while driving in 128 runs ... on six homers. And yes, that's also a record number of RBI for any six-homer season (Honus Wagner is second with 126, if you care).

But Bonura was the White Sox's first real slugger of the live ball era. He set the team record for homers in his rookie season with 27 (Carl Reynolds hit 22 in 1930), and he held the record -- or a share of it -- until Gus Zernial hit 29 for the 1950 White Sox.

With his unprecedented power and a big-time personality to match, Bonura became a fan favorite on the South Side. In fact, fans liked him a lot more than his manager did, because he was a designated hitter four decades before the position came into existence.

Also, he was Italian. And this was a big deal to some people.

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While writing Dylan Axelrod's player review for White Sox Outsider 2012, I came across a SouthtownStar article from 2009. The paper interviewed Axelrod, then a Windy City Thunderbolt who pitched his way into the Frontier League All-Star Game, and Axelrod recalled the way the Gateway Grizzlies knocked him around.

This caught my eye, because if you put me in a room with 25,000 randomly selected baseball fans, it's a pretty good bet I've seen more Frontier League baseball than all of them. The Frontier League game is a messy game, and even though Axelrod was succeeding at his last chance, he still hit Gateway-shaped speed bumps along the way.

Two years later, he's pitching for the White Sox in September, and pitching well enough to pick up a major-league win. He actually deserved two. That's kind of nuts. Prior to the season, if you were to rank all White Sox pitchers at Double-A or higher by their chances of winning a big-league game in 2012, his name would be near the bottom. But hey, there he is on Baseball-Reference.com with a perfect 1-0 record.

It's reminiscent of one year earlier, when the White Sox pulled off the Jake Peavy Edwin Jackson trade, leaving the Sox without a starter for that day's game. They called up Lucas Harrell by default -- he wasn't Charlotte's best starter, only their scheduled one. Still, he took the ball, and thanks to Daric Barton's bases-loaded fly falling short on the warning track, he pitched around five walks to throw six innings of one-run ball in a 6-1 victory over Oakland. He received a celebratory beer shower, and headed back to Charlotte the next day.

And then there's Scott Ruffcorn.

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Yesterday marked the 22nd anniversary of Bo Jackson's NFL career-ending hip injury. Bo Jackson is one of my favorite athletes of all time. He dominated everything a 10-year-old would care about. The Raiders became my football team because of Bo Jackson in Tecmo Super Bowl. One of my favorite baseball cards was the Bo Jackson Football/Baseball card that Score put out in 1990. He had the hottest shoes this side of Michael Jordan. Even when he struck out, it was exciting. Lets not forget his famous Nike ad campaign.

Jackson wasn't just hype, though. He produced. I could tell you what an amazing combination of strength and power he was, but my words wouldn't do him justice. Just take a look at some of his amazing runs for the Raiders. His 5.4 yards per carry is currently the third highest for a running back all-time. He also was a college football hero as he won the Heisman Trophy in 1985.

Bo was also very good on the baseball field. He started out a little raw, but was improving for the Royals each year up until his injury. His batting average, OPS and OPS+ went up every season he played in a Kansas City uniform. He also had the knack for the highlight reel. Here are some of his Royals highlights with stars from the era (including Frank Thomas and Robin Ventura) sharing stories about Jackson.

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Oil-disaster-sponsored trophy aside, the pulse of the crosstown series between the White Sox and Cubs weakened considerably last year. Flatlining play by both clubs left tickets unsold, and games off the national broadcast calendar.

Now we won't even have Carlos Zambrano to look forward to, as the Cubs traded him to the Miami Marlins, along with $15 million for A Guy Who Isn't Carlos Zambrano, a.k.a. Chris Volstad.

I always anticipated Zambrano starts because Big Z was responsible for two of my favorite moments of the crosstown series. Well, more accurately, it was one moment that he repeated twice -- both times, he degenerated into a 270-pound baby, leaving his teammates to answer the questions.

Unfortunately, MLB.com highlights only go so far, but we'll cope with some embedded video below the jump.

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The guy you see sliding into third is Ted Beard.

I hadn't heard of him until I saw Repoz at Baseball Think Factory post his obituary. Beard, who died at the age of 90 on Friday, was a classic minor-league star who found 100 at-bats with the White Sox from 1957 to 1958. He later served as a minor-league coach for White Sox rookie teams before retiring from baseball in 1972.

Beard was playing for the Hollywood Stars, and not the White Sox, when he slid into third during a game in August of 1953. You're probably thinking, "Those spikes are a mite high, aren't they?"

You'd be right. That slide started a brawl, which Life Magazine captures in an awesome pictorial. Beard immediately gets jumped on by the third baseman he had wronged, Murray Franklin, but later you can see him throwing a hellacious right cross.

Beard was also an army medic in the Pacific Theater during World War II, and as a member of the Pittsburgh Pirates, he became only the second player to hit a ball over the 86-foot-high right-field roof at Forbes Field on July 16, 1950. The other was Babe Ruth, and later, only Eddie Mathews and Willie Stargell would match the feat.

Beard's SABR biography says he didn't do anything nearly that interesting with the White Sox. But those photos are too incredible to ignore.

On Twitter, Chuck Garfien linked to a fun, fascinating video from the early 1990s featuring the White Sox and -- who else? -- the Texas Rangers. Seriously, did the Sox play any other teams before the strike?

The game in question is Sept. 8, 1991. Not only did the White Sox give up four unearned runs in the ninth to lose the game, but they also ended up wronged by the umpire crew, with Harrelson targeting apparent waffling by umpire Joe Brinkman.

I went to the archives for the postgame reaction, and here's what I found from the Chicago Sun-Times the next day:

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