Game Winning Errors

Just when I thought the Sox were headed for a destiny similar to that of the Royals and Indians, they went and surprised me. Well… I wasn’t really surprised to see an excellent outing by Gavin Floyd. Or low run production. But I was surprised to see a win against the Yankees- and that’s what the Sox got. Of course, it was mostly in part to bad fielding by the Yanks, but... it happened.

Gavin Floyd gave up just one run over 6 innings and 2 outs. That alone makes me happy. That sentence probably has dual meanings. ( 1. That a successful outing is enough to make me happy and 2. I had nothing else to be happy about) He had good control of his curveball and he was using it to the point where I just felt bad for the batters. Swisher shook his head at a couple, knowing that they were strikes and that there was nothing he could do with them.

Nick Swisher made his return on the South Side today. I was hoping to send him back to New York crying. My wish was THIS CLOSE to coming true. He struck out 3 times, and 2 of those were the [bat-on-shoulder] kind. The fourth time, he made contact with a Thornton fastball and hit it out of the park to tie the game. Oh well.

Speaking of Thornton, he was allowed to close today since Bobby Jenks was out with kidney stones. I was making some clever comment about Ozzie learning from his mistakes and doing the right thing to win the game (that is, not putting a struggling Jenks out there with a game on the line) when the news trickled in that he wasn’t even in the ballpark. I guess I underestimated Ozzie’s pride. Who knows how things would have played out had Jenks been in the vicinity.

Which brings me to my next point: multiple innings of work. Thornton gets rusty when he’s overused, but I don’t see why Bobby at his best isn’t used for more than one inning. He can do it. Why not let him? I guess I’ve just meant to touch on that for a long time, but it’s as good time as any to mention it. I’ll go into more detail at another time.