...the rest will take care of itself
It may as well be the White Sox mantra for the remainder of the season. It's certainly how I've been approaching their games recently. I don't care if it's pretty. I don't care about anyone's numbers. I just want to see them put some "W"s on the board.
Winning 3 out of 4 is a step in the right direction, but the ship is far from righted. When Jose Contreras struggled through the first inning after he was staked to a 3-run lead, when he allowed an unearned run in the second after the offense gave him a bigger cushion, you could feel the impending doom of another pitching meltdown. Jose didn't buckle, however. He only wilted, fighting his way through 122 pitches in 7 innings.
I'm sure I would have a different impression of Jose's outing had the Sox offense only mustered 3 runs, but they pounded out 3 homeruns in those first three innings to give Jose a comfortable working margin. It was the type of effort -- grinding through the heat to get outs despite not being 'on' -- that you expect out of a staff ace. Combined with the offense, Jose gave the bullpen a much needed rest after they nearly had to have a revolving door installed on the bullpen in Baltimore.
- Brandon McCarthy shook off his rough outing on the inner harbor with 2 innings of easy no-hit ball.
- Jim Thome missed his second straight game, making a side trip to Chicago to get a cortisone shot for tendinitis in his wrist. Herm Schneider says he should be ready to play tomorrow, but I think Ozzie'll give him another day off, just to be safe. I'd like to see Ozzie do something creative with the lineup, like DH Pablo, with he and Pods making up the Sox 1-2 punch.
- I've been meaning to post this for a couple of days, but hadn't gotten around to it. Thought some of you might like to listen to Tyler Lumsden in an interview with MILB.com after he was traded.
- We had some downtime here at SBNation thanks to the trade deadline. And we were in good company, as RotoWorld and BBTF both went down under the pressure as well. The network had a huge spike today, serving what was considered a 'normal' days load just a week or two ago in the span of a few hours as the deadline approached and passed.
The good news is, not only should we not see the loads we saw today as a network for the remainder of the season, we also added to our server capacity. There may be some additional downtime in the next day or two as some minor issues are worked out, but for the most part, we should be good for the rest of the year.