Lucas Giolito’s excellent start on Thursday gave the White Sox their first four-game sweep over the Tigers since 2005. Giolito’s 13 strikeouts marked just the second time a Sox starter has struck out at least 10 batters in a game in 2020, and it was the first 13+ strikeout performance since…Giolito struck out 13 A’s in a 2-0 loss on August 11, 2019.
More importantly for today’s Sporcle, Giolito recorded a game score of 83, the first time a Sox pitcher has done that this season. (Entering Friday’s action, there have been 16 such games in MLB this season) You know where this is going: which other Sox pitchers have logged a game score of 80 or better? That’s what today’s Sporcle is all about: since 1990, there have been 162 pitching performances that have met that 80 game score threshold. Some of the names are pretty obvious, while others are a bit more obscure. How many can you get? Good luck!
Quiz Parameters
- I’ve allotted 15 minutes for completion attempts.
- For hints, I’ve provided the date of the game, the opponent, and the game score.
Useless information to amaze, annoy, confuse, and/or confound your friends and family:
- The White Sox are 152-10 when a pitcher records a game score of 80 or better.
- Of the 162 games on this list, 54 of them were complete game shutouts.
- The highest pitch count from the games on this list is a robust 140, coming on 9/5/1995, a 2-1 win over Texas. The lowest count? A miserly 83, a 2-0 shutout against Boston on 5/22/2002.
- The team most victimized has been the Detroit Tigers, appearing 16 times on this list. Kansas City is just one behind with 15 games, and strangely, a non-divisonal opponent, Seattle, also with 15.
All data from stathead.com
(Image credit: Carl Skanberg)
154/162. Missed one recent guy.
162/162 with 8:10 left. The last guy I got was the 8/10/1993 pitcher.
157. How quickly I forgot
I got fewer than 100 — but I actually got that one! I’m actually surprised he didn’t have two, because he had that game in Boston I would have thought qualified.
Some recent names I thought folks might struggle with:
When the recent guys pitched well, their performances were so notable as to be memorable. Several of them generated cautiously optimistic discussions on the podcast.
That’s a good point. I believe pnoles might have even written (or had planned to write, at least) an article analyzing whether the Sox had found something in
Within pnoles’s article, this aside perfectly summed up the expectations some of those good performances built up :
161/162. Only miss was that stupid idiot
Boomer had 155. What a blow out. Chalk another one up for the bad guy.
One thing I love about these quizzes is that even if I don’t do very well overall, I can still get