Dorfman: White Sox Continue To Tease Fans
By Daniel I. Dorfman-
(CBS) They are the mirage of baseball teams. They give you confidence that something good is coming and then it proves to be false. That sums up the Chicago White Sox of 2011. Along with words like "lackluster" and "frustrating".
That sentence is being written today and it could have been written at any time this season.
After last night's 3-2 loss to the Yankees, the Sox are now 4.5 games behind Detroit and trail Cleveland by 2.5 games. Losing to C.C. Sabathia is going to happen. He hasn't won 16 games by accident. But the usual mental mistakes and lack of offense that are part of White Sox baseball were on full display Monday evening at The Cell. There were missed throws to the cutoff men, botched sacrifice bunts, baserunning gaffes and Adam Dunn still has all of three hits against left-handed pitching this season. So yes, the 12th ranked offense in the American League was stymied by C.C. Sabathia, but P.T. Barnum probably could have been on the mound and it wouldn't have made a difference.
(Speaking of Barnum, he claimed there was a sucker born every minute. Maybe that is not true among White Sox fans as the team could not even draw 25,000 people on a warm summer night against the Yankees.)
Just a few days earlier, there were signs of hope popping up from the Sox clubhouse. It wasn't much to build on, but after Friday's 3-1 defeat of Boston, the Sox had reached .500, they were within three games of Detroit, and they had won five of six. There was a sense they had finally put themselves in position to make a run.
"There is not going to be a big frontrunner in this division," said Brent Lillibridge, before Friday's game. "We beat up on each other too much. The Tigers are the ones we are going to have to beat and we match up really well against them. That plays in our favor."
Manager Ozzie Guillen summed it up this way on Friday: "I'm surprised at the way we are playing and I am surprised at the way the AL Central is playing. I thought this division had a lot of talent and we have not played up to our talent."
So, because the Sox are in a division filled with disappointing clubs – and that includes the still alive Minnesota Twins – math dictates there is still optimism. The relatively small margin to make up ground could easily be done because the Sox still have 11 games to go against Cleveland this year and six against Detroit. They have dominated the Tribe this year and won the last two series against Detroit, so the dangerous thing called hope (pardon me for paraphrasing a great line from The Shawshank Redemption) remains, even with all the uneven play of the Sox.
But the Sox are a club that has not won more than four in a row at any point this year and there just doesn't seem to be any indication they can play well for a long period of time. Yes, there are teams like Colorado in 2007 who come out of nowhere to finish strong and go all the way to the World Series, but those are the exceptions and not the norm.
So with 55 games left on the calendar, whatever Sox fans left will pay attention hoping the proverbial corner can be turned in the final two months and the team somehow slips to the top of the division. But the evidence on the field indicates that probably is not going to happen.
Daniel I. Dorfman is a local freelance writer who has written and reported for the New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and the Boston Globe among many other nationally prominent broadcast, online and print media organizations. He is also a researcher for 670 The Score. You can follow him on Twitter @DanDorfman To read more of Daniel's blogs click here.
