April 28: Rangers 6, White Sox 5
The theme of today’s game is “delayed reaction.” By the time Jake Peavy settled down, he was already trailing 5-0, and by the time the offense started stringing hits together, it ran out of outs.
Peavy allowed five runs in the first inning during a 41-pitch disaster, walking three consecutive batters with two outs and watching them all score on a pair of singles.
Rich Harden had his troubles finding the strike zone, too. The difference was, the White Sox let him off the hook. Preceding Peavy’s bomb, the Sox had runners on the corners and one out. Paul Konerko killed it with a 6-3 double play.
That was the first of four twin killings on the night, and Juan Pierre grounded into two of them.
While Pierre continued to struggle, at least a couple of struggling White Sox picked up the pace.
Carlos Quentin rediscovered right of center, blasting a three-run homer and starting a rally with a double down the right-field line. The bottom of the order picked it up, too.
A.J. Pierzynski (who walked and singled), muscled a broken-bat over the head of first baseman Justin Smoak with two outs. Alexei Ramirez (who drew his first walk of the season) then grounded a single back up the middle to score Pierzynski.
Unfortunately, that brought the lineup back to Pierre, who bounced to short. Despite Elvis Andrus taking it on the second half, he still had enough time to gun down Pierre by a fraction of a second to win the game.
Why Ozzie Guillen didn’t pinch hit for Pierre, I don’t know. But the last-minute rally highlighted another questionable call by bringing in Randy Williams in a 5-3 game to record two outs.
Williams worked over Hamilton pretty well, but after intentionally walking Vladimir Guerrero to bring David Murphy to the plate, Williams left a down-and-away slider down-and-in instead, and Murphy singled for what turned out to be the decisive run.
Maybe Guillen was thrown off by an umpire-fueled delay on what was an obvious call. Michael Young hit a clear ground-rule double to right field that cleared the first wall, then bounced off the facing of a second wall and caromed back into the field of play. Young kept running, but umpire Ed Rapuano made an immediate correct call and nobody saw it.
That didn’t stop Ron Washington from arguing. And the umpires from talking amongst themselves for a couple minutes. And then Washington arguing for a couple more minutes. By that time, Peavy started throwing warm-up pitches, and an unhappy Guillen had to pull him.
Record: 8-13 | Box score | Play-by-play
Comments
I was pretty mad that Pierre actually got to bat, especially after he made the out. Looking back, though, I’m not so sure it was a bad decision.
Yes, I wanted Jones to hit (and then take over in LF) but Pierre didn’t have a terrible day at the plate (ok, the GIDPs didn’t help but he’d gotten on base a couple of times) but perhaps there are larger psychological factors at work here that extend beyond just this game.
Keep in mind that none of this is likely to make sense to me when I read it again tomorrow.
Letting Pierre hit shows some confidence in him, but I think this was more about not letting the younger guys hit. Jones was already on deck to hit for Vizquel, making me think that he didn’t want one of the other bench players of the evening (Beckham, Nix, and Lucy were still available) to have to hit in the potential situation that would arise should they just walk Jones for one of those hitters Ozzie had already said Beckham was off because he looked like he was mentally struggling at the plate, and a high leverage situation situation such as two on, two out, down by 1 in the 9th type deal is not the best remedy for that. Maybe Ozzie didn’t want to put any of them through that (though it occurs to me at this point that if you can’t handle that you’re gonna have a rough time in general). After getting through that 2 spot Ozzie has a bunch of hitters he’s happy to use, so he could avoid having to play any of those three younger guys.
I’m probably overthinking this though, as my first instinct was to pinch hit Jones and then Beckham if it got to that point, and let them play defense at the positions they replaced. In fact, I was ready to see Pierre replaced much earlier in the game and would have pinch hit Jones against the lefty Oliver in the 7th (Alexei on first and one out- Pierre of course went on to GIDP).
Final thought: Q is not so good at this defense stuff. I don’t buy the “Quentin will drive himself insane if he doesn’t play defense” junk- he’s driving me insane playing defense now and Dr. Jones, while not his old self, is still what looks like an average corner defender to me. It’s been a while since we’ve had one of those in right and I kind of like the idea of it. Besides, you think that PhD Jones has in defense is honorary? HEEEEEELL, NO. He wrote his thesis on getting suckers out, and graduated summa cum laude. That’s why you call him DR. Jones, doll. (He also has no time for love.)
Put Quentin on a bike. Have him write advertising copy. Give him a Sudoku book. Make him foursquare with Kotsay, Omar, and Nix. Give him an xbox. Give him a mic and let him and Hawk exchange meaningless strings of words. I don’t care- there must be SOMETHING we can find for him to do that doesn’t involve him being bad at defense.
Finaler final thought: I like watching Omar play defense.
Oh god, this, too, is too long.
[...] of Jake Peavy’s start. “The theme of today’s game is ‘delayed reaction,’ writes Sox Machine. By the time Jake Peavy settled down, he was already trailing 5-0, and by the time the offense [...]
I treasured every word.