What's strange is that besides the obvious disparity of the whole 'they play cupcakes and we don't' situation, everything is roses for the White Sox, and mildy worrisome for the Twins. They've had Orlando Hudson, Jim Thome, Jason Kubel, Matt Capps, and Brian Fuentes all miss games in the past two weeks due to soreness, bumps, bruises, flareups, and perhaps the blue flu. Scott Baker is going to miss his next two starts, Kevin Slowey has missed his last two starts, Nick Punto is also on the disabled list, and Justin Morneau may never play baseball again.
Meanwhile, Matt Thornton--lone All-Star, lefty-fireballer, J.J. Putz's man-crush--returned with a vengeance Sunday for the Sox, breezing through a perfect 9th where he struck out two, showed a heater that hit 98 with pinpoint location, and generally acted like two weeks off was the best thing that could have happened for him. The Sox also dodged an enormous bullet when Gordon Beckham's hand didn't shatter last week in Cleveland, and dodged a significantly smaller bullet when Freddy Garcia was announced to be ready for his next start after coming down with back spasms. Why the only way things could become more encouraging is if Jake Peavy started the next game with a robotic arm, Bobby Jenks pledged to go on a diet and revealed his hidden freezer full of Klondike bars in the bullpen as a show of good faith, and Paul Konerko wasn't missing the first game of the Detroit series with back stiffness and rendering the theme of health and positivity that I spent this whole paragraph establishing invalid.
It all seems like the Sox will continue to be hard-pressed to just keep pace with Minnesota, who tee off against Cleveland and Kansas City this week--two teams so frequently stepped on that if they actually were doormats they'd probably replaced--and will be forced to look to next week's 3-game home series versus the Twins as nothing short of a playoff. Even picking up a game a week for the rest of the season seems rather ambitious, and with the White Sox playoff odds hovering around 16%, I have to question what the realistic odds are for the team if they don't sweep the Twins. I say this not just because it sets the Twins series up to be epic, I have tickets to two of the games and need to talk myself into singular exciting events in order to get through the work week, but because 3.5 games with under 30 to go is a lot of ground to gain on a team that is simply not stopping. The Twins have played a shade under .700 ball since the All-Star break without the 2008 AL MVP, and their 3-game sweep on the road at Texas in the last week of August represented their longest losing streak since July 11th.
I say this not to crown the Twins, but to just kind of say "Hey, things are to their advantage in every conceivable way, and we kind of need to pull a rabbit out of Carlos Quentin's hair to turn the tables on this one". Maybe Matt Thornton can provide balance to the bullpen, maybe Scott Baker bouncing wildly between being a strikeout machine and being Nick Blackburn was actually the key to the Twins season and missing him will spell doom, but chances are the Sox need to make up the lionshare of their deficit in one fail, blindsiding swoop because over the long haul, we really aren't better than Minnesota.
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Filed under: AL Central, Bullpen
Tags: baseball, Matt Thornton, Minnesota Twins, White Sox
