It appeared over before it started. The White Sox sent a flawed team into battle in the AL Central and it showed early. The team got off to a slow start thanks to an offense that ranked first in putting the ball in play but near the bottom of the category that counts.
April and May should have sunk the Sox, they reached as low as 9 games below .500, with 10-games under marking the line at which I was due to fire up the Blow Everything Up post. Instead they stormed back not just to respectability but vaulted into first place thanks to a soft schedule, the offense clicking and the pitching preventing runs as was to be expected.
Then Jake Peavy went down. But the Sox still won, holding onto first place for a while without him. The offense, remained a point of focus for most of us here, yet KW and company chose to add Edwin Jackson in exchange for 6+ years of Daniel Hudson.
The return to playing the American League was not kind to the Sox, the bullpen started to show cracks and eventually broke down completely, and the offense was still a concern. Manny Ramirez was brought in, but he hit only singles, and the starting rotation joined the struggling bullpen, unable to string together quality starts. All the while, the Twins played the best baseball of anyone in baseball in the second-half.
A 3-game lead quickly became a 3-game deficit, and after two key series with the Twins, ballooned to 9. The season was over. But now it's official. The Twins have won the division.
The flawed Sox are still flawed, but they made things far more interesting than I could have ever imagined on March 15th, nevermind Memorial Day. There's no way I'm going to say this was a good season, not when obvious upgrades were so easy to come by this past off-season, but I'll certainly remember this year vividly (except for those drug-hazy 2 weeks in early June) as one that was as unlikely as it was inevitable.