Life In The Cell

Ouch!

It looks like Herm Schneider will be earning his keep in the upcoming days. The Sox picked up two more injuries (one minor, one unknown) in addition to Bobby Jenks and Scott Linebrink’s recoveries.

First the good news. Bobby Jenks made his return to the mound yesterday against the Royals. He pitched effectively, rolling through the ninth 1-2-3, with a K, a groundout and an easy flyout. He threw 14 pitches in total, 9 of which were strikes. The most encouraing thing though, is the return of his velocity. He was consistently around 95 MPH +/- 1 MPH on the game gun, and according to Gameday, he never dipped below 95 and reached as high as 97. That means either the TV gun was slow or the Gameday gun was hot, but either way that’s a good sign coming from Jenks. Before he went on the DL I had been wondering aloud where his velocity was and where his ability to strike guys out went. If yesterday’s game was any indication, both seem to have been found.

I will be keeping an eye out on his breaking pitches though. He threw three in total yesterday, two sliders for strikes and one curveball that missed horribly. He can be effective with only his fastball working, but he’ll need that hook if he wants to be dominant again.

Now for the wounded, the Sox lost two players yesterday. They lost Jose Contreras just before the game started.

Jose Contreras was placed on the 15-day disabled list prior to Sunday’s series finale against the Royals, and Ozzie Guillen was not a happy man.

The White Sox manager certainly didn’t find a problem with Contreras being temporarily shelved — a move made retroactive to July 18 — due to right elbow tendinitis. Instead, Guillen seemed bothered by Contreras’ attempt to pitch through the injury without informing the club

Jose has tried pitching through injury before with similar results. I unfortunately can’t remeber which injury it was, but I do recall Ozzie being peeved that time as well. This of course begs the question, how long has Jose been hurting? I hate to root for someone to be hurt or in this having been hurt, but I do hope that he’s been hurting over his last 7 starts, because he’s been gawd-awful (gawd = god with a drawl) over that span. During his last 7 starts, he’s been rocked to the tune of a 8.60 ERA over just 37 2/3 innings. Short of going through all of his starts, I can’t analyze his pitches to see where the injury may have started affecting him; I was hoping Josh Kalk’s pitch f/x tool would have a cutoff date, but it doesn’t. The White Sox seem to think that Jose’s injury is short(er) term, but if he’s out for a lengthy amount of time, I promise I’ll go through his pitches on my own and try to see if there’s a correlation between his injury and his “stuff”. Hell, if I’m bored today, maybe I’ll just do it later anyway, but we’ll see.

Jose is eligible to come off the DL on Sunday, which would be in time for him to pitch, but Ozzie shot that idea down, so the question is who will start for the Sox in his stead? Some combination of pitchers will have to cover two of his starts, at minumum. My guess is that since DJ Carrasco pitched yesterday for the Sox after Danks got chased early, Masset will fill in for Jose on Tuesday. He’s started one game this season, going 4 innings and giving up 3 runs. That isn’t good by any means, but probably on par if not better than what the Sox could have expected from Jose. He’s had three outings go longer than 3 innings and in those 3 outings, he has an ERA of 6.00. I want to hope that Masset can do a bang up job for the Sox, starting for Jose, but the fact that it’s against the vaunted Texas Rangers offense (yes, vaunted, they lead the league in runs and have the top three players according to VORP) gives me great pause for concern.

I reckon Masset’s performance on Tuesday will dictate wheter he starts again on Sunday or if it’s somebody else, like Clayton Richard, for example. Richard (thanks to South Side Sox for the detective work), has reportedly already been called up to the Big League squad. If that is true, then Adam Russell is the most likely candidate to get demoted, because I doubt they would have called up Carrasco for just one game, especially after he pitched well.

I hope that that report is true, because I’d much rather give Richard a shot than see Nick Masset take the rubber. He has pitched very well this year in both AA and AAA. In AA, he had a 2.47 ERA with a .98 WHIP 83 2/3 innings. He doesn’t strike out a ton of guys (5.7 K/9) but has a good K/BB ratio (around 4/1). He has been even better in 6 starts since getting promoted to AAA. He has dominated going 6-0 (I obvs hate W-L, but it’s impressive to win every single one of your starts) with a 2.37 ERA and a microscopic .76 WHIP. A good sign as well is that he’s only given up 4 homers all year, because of a nice sinker that he features which has helped him have just over a 3/2 GO/AO ratio. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for an official release, and here’s hoping one does actually appear, because I don’t particularly feel the need to watch Nick Masset pitch.

Finally, there’s Jermaine Dye, who took a pitch off the knee yesteday. He’s okay, he just has a bruise, so he’ll be day to day for the next few games. That means there will be an Anderson/Wise platoon in CF.