Meet the Sox

Freddy Garcia

It wasn't until the All-Star break of 2006 that I realized how much of a competitor Freddy Garcia actually was.

He came to the White Sox in 2004 with the label of an underachiever.  He had a brilliant season in 2001, when the Mariners won 116 games, but he never came close to matching it.  Most figured Kenny Williams was mortgaging a chunk of the future on a middle-of-the-rotation starter when he traded Jeremy Reed, Miguel Olivo and Michael Morse for the big Venezuelan when he surprised everybody with a late June deal.

While Freddy wore the black and white, he continued his solid-yet-unspectacular performances with plenty of visual cues that he could be doing more.  He wouldn't hit 93 m.p.h. until the third or fourth inning, and opposing hitters would jump on the high-80s stuff while he got acclimated.  He called out teammates before and after games if they disappointed him, admitted overlooking lesser teams and, of course, there were the marijuana rumors.

To say Freddy stepped up in big games for the Sox would be an understatement -- he won the division-clinching game in late September, the final game of the ALDS, pitched the third of four consecutive complete games in the ALCS and shut down the Astros to win the final game of the World Series.  Boy, he looked brilliant then. 

However, those big performances also raised questions of why he couldn't do that every time out, or at least three out of four starts, and he provided no easy answers to that question outside ambiguous concepts like "focus" or "intensity."

When Freddy entered 2006 missing five miles per hour on his fastball, it looked like he was taking it easy once more.  This time around, though, he didn't get the fastball back.  Mechanically or physically, something was wrong, and Freddy had to adjust. 

Slowly but surely, he did.  The opposition hammered Freddy in the first half, grabbing way too much of the strike zone, but even while giving up a lot of hits and home runs, he managed to keep his team in the ballgame.  Freddy lived on the verge of disaster nearly each start, but he kept his ERA under 5.00 for a team that was giving him over six runs a game regularly, and he kept his head above water enough to lead the staff in wins at the All-Star break.

In the second half, Freddy still didn't have the heat, but he worked the strike zone (and the area slightly outside of it) with a whole lot more confidence.  More curveballs and sliders ended up just outside, and his fastball was effective enough inside to keep hitters honest and cut his homer rate.

Then when Freddy added a splitter to his repertoire, he became a whole new pitcher.  He flirted with a no-hitter against the Angels, then followed it up with the same exact performance (8 IP, 1 H) against the Tigers his next time out.  He allowed only one homer in his last five starts after averaging more than one gopher ball an outing, and his WHIP was close to 1.00.

There are doubts as to whether that represented a new level of performance for Freddy, but it was real during a month where big performances were needed.  Unfortunately, not enough of his teammates answered the call with him.

The final month of the season may have been ultimately fruitless, but Freddy cemented his legacy in the process.  Those who howled when Kenny brought him in howled when Kenny shipped him to Philadelphia.  They forgot about his dreadful performances against the Kansas Citys of the league and chose to hail him for the way he took it up a notch when the team needed him, and how he was one of the few worth a damn as the Sox faded down the stretch.

For Freddy, that had to be a completely new experience.  The guy pegged as chronically nonchalant earned the label of a "rock," and not only because of the resemblance.  He shed the slacker skin, because after years of allegedly doing less with more, he definitely achieved more with a whole lot less.