By Dmitry Samarov
Sunday afternoon, while working on the picture of Jake Peavy for this column, I listened as Peavy threw three perfect innings, then gave up six runs in the fourth and was removed from the game with a pulled groin.
In four innings, Peavy demonstrated the three modes of this year’s Sox team: great, awful, and just plain unfortunate.
It’d be great if the man would stop getting injured and sustain the flashes of brilliance he’s teased us with since coming over from the Padres.
That fist-pump thing he does at the end of his delivery is pretty great and it’d be nice to see it more than a couple times a year.
What do you say about a team that sweeps the Red Sox, then drops two of three to a middling Tigers team?
They’re way out of whack, but listing the symptoms and recommending a cure are two very different animals.
Would they win a few more games if Dunn and/or Rios could manage to hit above the Mendoza Line? Sure.
Would they have a better chance if Alexei Ramirez made the routine plays as well as he does with the highlight-real ones? Of course.
And what if John Danks had won even half the starts he deserved to? Certainly.
But these are all wishes, and as the lyric goes, “You can wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first.” (“Lucky” by Mule).
It’s as if you had all the pieces of a puzzle, yet no matter how you jammed them together they stubbornly refused to form a picture.
On the North Side, the problems are easy to see. There’s plenty of blame to go around and there’s little to be surprised about. Quade seems like a nice man and I don’t envy him. His team’s a disaster and the press is already starting to turn on him.
On the South Side, who the hell knows what will happen? This is no bargain-basement squad that can continue underperforming and be allowed to keep limping along. Will they start blowing it up if they don’t change?
I feel bad for Konerko now for re-upping at a discount to stay with the team. He keeps putting up great numbers with little notice. He’s the kind of player the game is all about. He just goes and does his job. I hope for his sake and ours that the rest of the team will start doing the same.
Jake Peavy by Dmitry Samarov. (Enlarge)
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Dmitry Samarov brings you Outside Sox Park every Tuesday. You can also find his work at Hack and at dmitrysamarov.com. He welcomes your comments.
Posted on June 8, 2011