By Andrew Reilly
Paul Konerko passed the 1,000 career RBI mark this weekend, forever etching his name alongside the likes of Jeff Conine, Cecil Fielder, Travis Fryman, Todd Zeile and Stuffy McInnis. Two-hundred sixty-two men have driven in such a number, yet raise the bar to 1,250 and the headcount drops to 115. Keep climbing to 1,500 and suddenly we’re talking about 50 players.
At 1,750, the crowd shrinks to 18. At 2,000, we’re down to three. A thousand batted in is a huge number, yes, but at the same time the exclusivity of even those nominally larger sums suggests a thousand isn’t quite as big as it seems. None of which should imply that Konerko’s milestone stands as anything less than awesome, but for all intents and purposes 1,000 runs batted in might be the most Konerkonian achievement of them all.

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Posted on June 22, 2009

By Andrew Reilly
It’s sad, in a way, that the White Sox won the series against the Brewers. Wholly awesome, but still sad in that wins over the Brewers, in the scheme of things, mean absolutely nothing.
Yes, the Sox move to within a supposedly decent 4.5 games of the Tigers, and yes, Kansas City and Cleveland are still pretty lousy teams, but those two things were both true this time last week, when the Sox were 4.5 games out and the Royals and Indians had long since established their respective stinkfests.
Still, there will come a lot of misguided optimism about this. Folks will say things to the effect of “If the Sox can beat a first-place team, they can beat anyone.” And this would normally be true except the Sox have proven, time and again, that they actually can’t beat anyone – especially not first-place teams, i.e., the Tigers who whooped on the Sox before the Good Guys went off to school the soon-to-be-dismissed class of the NL Central.

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Posted on June 14, 2009

By Andrew Reilly
There was a time, oh, last week or so, when things were looking not quite up, but at least away. The Sox had won some games, the two teams ahead of them started to slip a little and in Charlotte they had both a recovering pitcher and the most loudly heralded prospect the club has seen in quite some time, both ready to arrive on the big stage and solve every crisis facing Soxland. It was as though the team had finally started moving in the right direction.
Instead, of course, we see now the team might not have been hitting their stride, but actually hitting their peak, as though sometime this October as we watch anyone else square off in the playoffs, we’ll all be reduced to saying things like “Remember that one week in May where the Sox won a few games? That was awesome.”

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Posted on June 8, 2009

By Andrew Reilly
It’s fun and pleasantly optimistic to compare this year’s Sox squad to last year’s division winners, and in many ways the two cast the same shadow. A division populated with losers; a theoretically potent offense incapable of producing; weird stretches of winning games they should have lost while losing, badly, games they should have only lost in normal fashion.
And yet, all that pining for a magical non-spectacular team aside, the 2009 Sox actually share less with last year’s edition than they do with other boring, non-remarkable squads of the past decade. Imagine Alexei Ramirez in the Jose Valentin role, Carlos Quentin as Frank Thomas, Chris Getz as Willie Harris, and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim as the plain old Los Angeles Angels.
Some will cry “No!” and insist this team has turned a corner, which would be a sentiment both cool and agreeable were it not for the fact that even with their recent run of good baseball, the Good Guys still sit one under .500 and a full four games behind the Tigers. They can do some good, these White Sox, but they can dig a pretty deep hole just as well, which brings to mind something one of my college professors taught me: the good ones can get out of trouble, but the great ones kept themselves out of it in the first place.

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Posted on June 1, 2009

By Andrew Reilly
Jake Peavy sucks.
Even if he’s a great pitcher, he sucks.
Even if the White Sox Enemies List* needed an ace, he sucks.
Even if the Good Guys insist on taking this all-or-nothing thing into a weird parallel universe of all and nothing, he sucks.

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Posted on May 26, 2009

By Andrew Reilly
Are the White Sox the worst team in baseball? As of this writing, the South Siders have scored fewer runs than every other team in the American League while allowing the fifth-fewest. This suggests two things:
1. The Sox are not that good.
2. The Sox don’t lose a lot of close games.
We already knew the first part, but the second part suggests reason for optimism: if they’re at least keeping games close, it stands to reason they at least have a chance to win them. Indeed, the Good Guys are a not-entirely-terrible 4-5 in one-run games, which at least indicates competitive spirit, but posits the Sox as a team capable of standing its ground in the nailbiters yet dropping 16 of the other 27 games. To put it another way: the Sox are bad at good baseball but awful at terrible baseball. That might be the most depressing sports-related sentence I have ever typed.

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Posted on May 18, 2009

By Andrew Reilly
The White Sox won a low-scoring, close game Saturday without hitting a home run. This is perhaps the single biggest moment in recent franchise history.
It’s not that they got by through super-timely hitting or well-executed baseball savvy, and it’s not that they didn’t so desperately need the long ball, but prior to Saturday’s showing the Good Guys have been, shall we say, ill-suited to such endeavors. How ill-suited? So ill-suited they’ve won a meager two others in such fashion – one against the Mariners and the other against the Rangers, of all teams. Expanding the Sox’ means of attack must be an AL West thing.

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Posted on May 11, 2009

By The White Sox Report Staff
When a 4-3 loss is “encouraging” because it’s such a “normal” kind of loss, your team has troubles.
Especially when it’s the Toronto Blue Jays who should be encouraged.
Jose Contreras may have matched Roy Halladay’s seven innings, but Halladay picked up his fourth win.
“We know the media was expecting us to finish in the bottom part of the East, so it’s nice to fly under the radar,” Blue Jays catcher Rod Barajas said.
If only that was A.J. Pierzysnki speaking.

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Posted on April 27, 2009

By Phil Barnes
Another solid week in the books for the Sox as they finish 4-2 during two road series’. The South Siders showed their offense in the opener against Detroit on Monday, scoring 10. But Tuesday was a whole different story, getting absolutely bombed 9-0. But that is alright, fans should accept a blowout loss a week as long as they continue to play above .500 ball.
Personally, last week’s version of “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” went pretty well, so I will probably stick to this for a while until it either runs its course or I get a few e-mails from people complaining for their money back.
So let’s take a look.

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Posted on April 20, 2009

By Phil Barnes
Not a bad ending to opening week, huh Sox fans? Despite a drubbing on Friday night, coming back on Saturday and Sunday with offensive onslaughts almost entirely negated the previous work-week struggles at the plate. Instead of accidentally letting myself foreshadow the meat of this report, let’s just get right into it.
Let’s take a look at the good, the bad and the ugly, White Sox opening-week style.

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Posted on April 13, 2009