Coping Skills

The best thing I can say about the White Sox start is, "It's still early". Other than that, they are playing woeful baseball right now. The pitching has been just fine more or less. The Sox are 7th in the Major Leagues in team ERA. Offensively though, they have been horrendous. Simply put, they can't get on base and when they do, they can't drive guys in.

Going into today the Sox are hitting .216 as a club. The only teams hitting worse than them? The Cleveland Indians and Houston Astros. On Base Percentage and Slugging Percentage are not much better as they are in the bottom third of baseball in both categories. I'd like to think they will all eventually hit, but knowing the White Sox they'll start hitting right when the pitching falls apart. Gavin Floyd's performance today didn't help convince me otherwise.

One of the things I like to do whenever the White Sox play like complete crap like they have is to look at the stats of guys the Sox said "see you later" to over the past two years. Sort of a "woulda, coulda, shoulda" torture I somehow take pleasure in against my better judgement (Stats through Saturday).

Hitters:
1. Scott Podsednik : .439 batting average, .521 OBP, 6 stolen bases.
2. Jim Thome : .238 B.A., .360 OBP, 2 Home Runs, 5 RBI.
3. Chris Getz : (15 Day DL) .207 B.A., .281 OBP, 0 H.R., 1 RBI
4. Josh Fields : (15 Day DL)
5. Nick Swisher : .222 B.A., .378 OBP, 1 H.R., 4 RBI
6. Orlando Cabrera : .234 B.A., .224 (you're reading it right) OBP, 2 HR, 8 RBI.
7. Juan Uribe : .333 B.A., .391 OBP, 0 H.R., 9 RBI

Pitchers:
1. Clayton Richard : 0-2, 4.38 ERA, WHIP 1.38, Opponents B.A. .271
2. Nick Masset : 2-1, 9.45 ERA, WHIP 2.10
3. D.J. Carrasco : 0-0, 5.40 ERA, WHIP 1.08
4. Octavio Dotel : 1-0, 5.40 ERA, WHIP 1.00
5. Javier Vazquez : 0-2, 9.82 ERA, WHIP 1.73
6. Jose Contreras : 0-0, 0.00 ERA, WHIP 0.27 (4 GAMES NO WALKS!)

Despite Podsednik's freakish start (btw he'll return to reality soon), there's really not too many guys that were on this team in the past two seasons that Sox fans should really "miss". Juan Uribe and Jose Contreras were nice players, but I don't think they would solve the offensive problems on this team. So I feel a little better now.

At least we catch a break in the schedule next week with Tampa coming to town right? Ooops...