By Ricky O’Donnell
During Sunday night’s 13-2 beat down of the Tigers, ESPN’s venerable Peter Gammons fawned over new White Sox masher Nick Swisher, calling him a gamer and a grinder. While the two adjectives have become dirty words for stat-crunching, Fire Joe Morgan-reading baseball fans everywhere, Gammons is spot-on in his appraisal of Swisher.
Swisher is the White Sox’s best player, a fact that seems relatively clear to everyone, even if he’s only been on the team for one week. For Sox fans who have grown tired of watching Juan Uribe swing out of his shoes at chin-high fastballs the last three years, Swisher’s approach to hitting is refreshing, to say the least. If Swisher isn’t thrown a strike, he won’t swing at it. It’s that philosophy that has helped jump start the Sox offense the first week of the year.
Swisher has ignited that hot start, reaching base in nearly half his at-bats. During one stretch this week, Swisher walked six consecutive times. While hits can come and go, walks always stay consistent. If the middle of the order continues to display good power, the Sox are going to score in bunches this season. You know those Jim Thome and Paul Konerko home runs are worth more with men on base, right? No one is sure if Darin Erstad does.
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Week in Review: After dropping the first two games of the year to Cleveland, the Sox ripped off four consecutive victories. Few things are more satisfying than a sweep of the Tigers.
Week in Preview: The Sox return to The Cell on Monday for a three-game series against Minnesota. The winless Tigers will follow.
Motown Musings: Why does Detroit always seem to have the most loathsome sports teams? It’s easy to blame Isiah Thomas for things nowadays so we’ll give him some credit. The best Chicago-Detroit moment of 2007? We nominate this.
No Way Jose: In case anyone forgot, Jose Contreras still sucks. On the bright side, if John Danks and Gavin Floyd continue not to suck, then Contreras is the Sox lone sucky starting pitcher. It’s science.
Missile Tracker: The Missile is not ready for the Big Leagues quite yet. We know Ozzie loves him, but maybe a trip to Charlotte, where he can learn second base (and eventually replace Uribe), would be best for all. Maybe they can even give the kid a hot meal while he’s down there. Apparently that raft he arrived from Cuba on wasn’t equipped with an Ol’ Country Buffett. Ex-Sox pitcher Bartolo Colon would consider the slender Ramirez nothing more than a between-innings snack.
Not Sold: Isn’t Orlando Cabrera supposed to be slick-fielding? It’s no fun to say if it isn’t true. The Sox new shortstop didn’t exactly light it up defensively this week, while our old friend Jon Garland shined in his first outing for the Angels. Someone tell Kenny Williams that trading good starting pitchers for slap-hitting shortstops on the wrong side of 30 isn’t particularly smart.
Over/Under: 25. The number of pitches that hit Phillies second baseman Chase Utley last season. New Sox left fielder Carlos Quentin got hit by a pitch Sunday against Justin Verlander, but, don’t worry, he’s used to it. At Stanford in 2002, Quentin set a single-game record by being hit with a pitch five times.
Over/Under Part Two: One carton. The number of Marlboro Reds Tigers manager Jim Leyland went through in the Sox three-game sweep of Detroit.
That’s Ozzie: “The problem is these old guys think that none of the players now are better than back then,” Ozzie said, explaining why he feels Ivan Rodriguez is the best Puerto Rican-born baseball player ever, and not Roberto Clemente, as ESPN announcer Joe Morgan maintained. As always, he included a couple “FU’s” after this, which weren’t fit to print.
Beachwood Sabermetrics: A complex algorithm performed by the White Sox Report staff using all historical data made available by Major League Baseball has determined blonde goatees are totally rad, but do not correlate with increased quality of play.
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Ricky O’Donnell is the proprietor of Tremendous Upside Potential.
Posted on April 7, 2008