Life In The Cell

Just What the Doctor Ordered

The Sox’ 5-1 victory over the Tigers went according to plan:

Quality Start, Check

Minimize bullpen usage, Check

Finish the game in under 5 hours, Check

Win the game, Check

The first two were completely dependent upon John Danks, while the latter two were undoubtedly accomplished with great help by John Danks.

Coming into this series, perhaps right there on par with getting a series win, was my desire for a quality start for John Danks. I was afraid that there was a chance that he was hitting a wall, much as he did last season. In the first half of 2007, he had an ERA of 4.62 which is better than league average for the year (4.74), but after the All Star Break, Danks just floundered. In his 14 post-ASB starts, he posted a craptastic 7.11 ERA (nope no sponsorship tie in for that crap). Part of it was that the league had caught onto his game, while the bigger part was that he just didn’t have the stamina to last the full season.

Entering 2008, Danks put on 15 pounds of muscle to help him over the long haul. The added strength and experience seemed to pay off as he posted a stunning 2.67 ERA before the All Star Break. The second half kicked off much as the second half did in 2007. Prior to tonight’s performance, he had posted a 7.88 ERA. Obviously with using only one start as evidence, it’s impossible to say, “Hooray, there’s no chance of a 2007 repeat!” It does, at least, reassure us that the Danks from the first half hasn’t completely abandoned us. Prior to July 12th when he kicked off a string of 4 straight UN-quality starts, Johnny gave up fewer than 4 runs in 16 of his 17 starts. The odd start out of the 17 was a game where he gave up 4 runs. Amongst that 17 game run, he had 11 quality starts, which goes to show, a quality start is close to the norm for Danks. So much so, that I have dubbed the term the John Danks Special (which I will use as often as possible, because I’m quite fond of it) which is when a starter (namely Danks) goes at least 6 innings but less than 7 and gives up 1 or fewer runs. Tonight was the 8th John Danks Special of the year for him and hopefully an indicator that more are on their way.

Danks’ QS tonight ensured that the bullpen usage was kept to a usage which was a must after the the very extended effort they had to go through last night. DJ Carrasco came on with 2 out in the 7th to relieve Danks and proceeded to retire the only batter he faced. Octavio Dotel came rolled through the 8th before handing the ball to Jenks. I have minor quibbles over the bullpen usage, though, as I said in the Live Blog, the ends may very well have justified the means. I, first off, would have liked Danks to finish off the 7th. Yes, it would have eliminated his John Danks Special, but at the time it seemed like he would be able to handle that one last batter, even after giving a cookie to Sheffield. My second quibble was that Dotel came in the 8th. I thought Carrasco would have been able to handle the inning. He looked good today and he looked good the prior night. I wanted Dotel available to pitch in the final game of the series in the liklihood that Jenks would be unavailable after pitching 2 straight games. I guess in a 2-run ball game, you want to get one of your best relievers in there to bridge the gap to the closer, so I can see why Cora/Coop went with Dotel, so I won’t complain about it too much. My question now is who is and who isn’t available for tomorrow’s game? I’m guessing Dotel and Jenks are out (though I could be wrong), and there’s the potential that Thorndogg is out after pitching so much on Tuesday.

Basically, everything I wanted to happen in this game happened, which puts the White Sox in good position to go for the S-word, which, if executed properly will allow the posting of the BROOM PIC!

(For those of you who don’t quite follow that joke, back at this site’s first incarnation Chi-Sox Blog, I used to almost solely do game recaps and with any recap I did that was the final game of a S-word, rhymes with cweep (that’s creep with a lisp), I would post this one picture of a broom. At the start of the season, this picture was posted quite frequently, but as the season wore on due in part to the Sox not playing as well and me having to turn the recaps over to the other writers as I had a busy summer, the pic rarely appeared. We would all get our hopes up for it and it seemed invariably the chance would fail. Anyway, it became a running joke not to jinx the fleeting chance of a S-word, because we all wanted to see that crummy pic of the broom.)