Idiots Write About Sports

What kind of moron writes things like this?

• Boston over Chicago in five. Count on Ozzie Guillen doing at least half-a-dozen things to squander this series.

Man — they should never let that guy post on a sports weblog ever again.

Although in his… OK, my defense, I had just gotten back from a week-long trip to the Windy City that happened to coincide with the stretch of games where the White Sox nearly gacked away their once-formidable lead over the Cleveland Indians. The local papers had more or less concluded that Chicago’s first-half run had been a mirage (though considering that my local paper of choice, the Chicago Sun Times, leads off its sports section on most days with a discouraging word or two from the unrelentingly pissy Jay Mariotti, perhaps I should have taken the doom-and-gloom talk with a metric ton of salt). Plus, I stayed with my Uncle Carmen, a lifelong Sox fan, who spent substantial portions of our visit, outlining just how exactly the Pale Hose had wronged him, their other fans, and probably all of humanity. Notably:

• the offense was prone to A’s-like spurts of inefficiency;
• Jon Garland was a lucky bum whose true colors who were coming out in the heat of the pennant race;
• A.J. Pierzynski? Double bum; and perhaps most convincingly,
• the manager was, quite possibly, insane.

Well, Chicago did a pretty good job refuting those bullet points during its playoff series with the Red Sox (and indeed, the five games leading up to the ALDS, if you want to get technical about it). The offense may have trouble plating runners every now and again, but none of that was in evidence in the Boston series. All that Garland-for-Cy-Young talk earlier this season may have been patently silly — there’s more to pitching than a gaudy win-loss record, folks — but a 3.80 defense-adjusted ERA and a 50.3 VORP are nothing to sniff at. Meanwhile, Pierzynski, with his .444, two-homer performance in the first-round, seems to be angling for that postseason hero plaudit. (Beware of celebratory groin punches, White Sox!)

As for the manager, he may well be crazy — see: barking at umpire during Game Three — but Guillen certainly didn’t do anything to squander his team’s chances against the Red Sox, apart from maybe one or two “you’re giving up outs now?” bunts. Guillen gets a lot of undeserved praise for turning the White Sox into a small ball team (they mix in a healthy dose of high on-base-percentage and timely homers to make up for the occasional strategically shaky stolen base attempt or lamentable bunt), but the one area he’s really shined in this season is handling both his starting pitchers and his relief staff. (This is not an original theory: I first saw it advanced on one of the many baseball blogs I read, but I can’t for the life of me remember which one it was. The likely culprits are Baseball Prospectus (either Joe Sheenhan’s column, something by Jim Baker, or one of those Prospectus Notebook columns), Baseball Musings, or, quite possibly, USS Mariner. If you’re the architect of this unconventional notion of Ozzie Guillen’s managerial skill, please step forward to claim your prize… which is our hearty congratulations for being so astute.) And that skill was on display particularly in Games Two (the Bobby Jenks’ two-inning save) and Three (Hola, El Duque! Como esta usted?)

So that’s how I horribly misjudged the Chicago White Sox and their playoff fortunes. As with most things in life, I blame my uncle and Jay Mariotti for steering me wrong.

Of course, there is another factor that helped one pair of Sox best the other: luck and timing. As in, Chicago had both this week, and Boston had neither.

Excluding Game One, which was just an old-fashioned whooping, we could just as easily be sitting here awaiting Game Four of this playoff series with Boston holding a 2-games-to-1 edge. Game Two could have easily gone Boston’s way if Tony Graffanino fields a ground ball cleanly and David Wells doesn’t hang a curve ball to Tadahito Iguchi. In the sixth inning of Game Three, Boston found itself in a bases loaded, nobody out situation with Jason Varitek sitting on a 2-0 count — if the Red Sox mix in a base hit or even a deep flyball in the subsequent pop-up/pop-up/strikeout series of at-bats, it is — as the cliche goes — a whole ‘nother ballgame.

Boston simply didn’t hit this series, or at least, didn’t hit enough with men on base. Take home runs — Boston only hit three of them in this series (all in Game Three) and each were solo shots. That’s negating a pretty big edge that Red held over White. And I don’t imagine, if we played this particular series under the same circumstance again and again, that a Boston power outage would happen too often. So let’s not dismiss Boston as some sort of postseason unworthy — they were a solid team that had a really bad week. Unfortunately, that bad week occurred in early October instead of during a late May away series in St. Petersburg.

Which I think is important to remember as people are falling over themselves to declare the White Sox a team of destiny right now. The Angels or Yankees might have something to say about that in the next round of the playoffs, don’t you think? Certainly, Chicago is a very good team — much better than I expected heading into the postseason. But the same flaws that were so apparent just a few weeks ago in my uncle’s basement could reappear at any time — which is my way of saying that I’ll wait a couple weeks before Ozzie Guillen gets my vote for baseball genius.

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