Cooper: 'We're Not Sellers'
(WSCR) With the White Sox shedding over $9 million in salary Wednesday by trading Edwin Jackson and Mark Teahen, many fans are wondering if they are waving the white flag this season.
The reality is that the White Sox are only 3.5 games back of first place in the American League Central and pitching coach Don Cooper adamantly denies that they are giving up on 2011.
"We're not sellers," Cooper said on The Mully and Hanley Show Thursday. "The move we made yesterday ... there was some payroll involved, but we're not dead in the water. We picked up a reliever. We're going to go with five starters now. We might may even think about doing something with the kid Zach Stewart if necessary to bring him up possibly. But the bottom line is this: we have a good team."
LISTEN: Don Cooper on The Mully and Hanley Show
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Coop said the addition of Jason Frasor will help greatly when it comes to saving Jesse Crain's arm.
"We need another righty out there along with Bruney and along with Crain to ease the burden more on Jesse; because once Santos became our closer, automatically Jesse had to do more heavy lifting," Cooper said. "And we want to those guys healthy and strong too. We want to sprint across the finish line, we don't want to crawl across it."
Cooper also said Frasor will help Jake Peavy.
"Now with the addition of Frasor we can go and get (Peavy's) ass a little earlier, because he's showing us that he's hitting a (breaking) point," Cooper said. "But you want to push him. You want to push him to the next level, to the next level to the next level.
"For those who haven't heard, (Peavy) had major surgery, you know, major unprecendented surgery. It's not command. It's arm strength and it's endurance."
As many members of the White Sox believe, they just need to go on a hot stretch to take over the division.
"If we have a hot week, a hot ten days, we are going to be the new hottest item on everybody's lips," Cooper said.
