I've got Josh Hamilton in my office pool.

Colin was only half right. I wasn't going to spend much time recapping the game, but I did have some stuff I was gonna write about. Unfortunately, my internet connection went down last night, and this is as far as I got.

In need of a 5th starter

Jose Contreras has allowed 63 hits in his last 37.2 innings pitched. He has a WHIP of 2.04 and an ERA of 8.60 during that stretch, a span of 7 starts. The Sox might be able to weather that suck storm if Contreras wasn't coming off a 2-year year stretch of sub-par performance (5.17 ERA over his last 460 IP), or if Javier Vazquez didn't have a 6.80 ERA over his last 7 starts, or if Gavin Floyd wasn't giving up HRs at a rate of 1.7/9IP over the last 2 months, or if Jack Egbert or Lance Broadway had established themselves as a 5th starter in waiting. As it stands right now, Broadway has a terrible hit rate (10.23 H/9) and Egbert has had a roller coaster of a season, though he now appears on the climb (WHIP of 0.97. ERA of 2.81, K/BB of 5.33 and K/9 of 9.00 since June 1).

Missing Pablo

The White Sox owned a league best 3.38 ERA while Pablo Ozuna played the role of 25th-man/rally monkey. Since his departure, the Sox have put up a brutal 6.05 ERA, allowing 6 or more runs in 5 of their last 6 games. Clearly, Pablo was the key to the pitching staff's excellent run prevention.

Abbreviated recap. I'm wiped out.

When I saw who the Sox were sending to the mound this series, I thought we could be in for a long weekend. Gavin Floyd has been giving up HRs like crazy, Jose Contreras has been anything but impressive over the last month and has been almost as homer-prone as Floyd, and most importantly, the Texas offense is the best we've faced this season. Their first 4 hitters are scary good right now.

As for the Sox other starter in this series, John Danks, I thought the kid might get a little too worked up pitching against his old team and in front of friends and family while just up the road from his hometown. And did I mention the Texas offense?

Danks showed little effect working into the 8th inning, racking up another 8 strikeouts against ZERO walks. It wasn't really until that 8th inning that he started to get hit around.

I was begging Ozzie to take him out before Kinsler's moonshot double, but after watching the bullpen's work against the Texas wrecking crew I can hardly fault him for riding the hot hand.

I don't even know who's pitching for Texas tomorrow, but if the Sox are able to win one with Contreras on the hill, this entire road trip will be filled with games it feels like we've stolen.

The tone was set for a pitchers duel early Thursday night when it became clear that home plate umpire Bill Hohn had a rather wide strike zone. Mark Buehrle and Zach Greinke took full advantage, combining for 16 strikeouts against just one walk and one run in the first 7 innings.

Jermaine Dye homered -- homered doesn't seem descriptive enough for a ball that cleared the fountains in the left field gap -- with none of those distracting baserunners in his line of sight to mark the game's only real action in the first two hours.

Things got interesting once again in the 8th inning, only this time it was the Royals staging a bizarre comeback. After giving up a lead-off single to John Buck, Buehrle induced what looked to be a routine 6-3 double play ball off the bat of David DeJesus. The Sox made the play look anything but routine, and the game turned on their failed attempt.

Buehrle reached out and got a glove on the ball, forcing Orlando Cabrera to change directions to make the initial grab, and necessitating a flip to Alexei Ramirez to turn the DP successfully. Paul Konerko was unable to handle the throw from Ramirez, the ball tricking out of his glove as DeJesus crossed first. Ramirez' throw was a bit wide at first, but not wide enough to place most of the blame on him for a poor throw, especially after replays showed a rather pathetic stretch from Konerko and his foot on the middle of the bag.

One pitch later, Mike Aviles, who is a total douchenozzle, BTW, doubled into the left field corner to tie the game. An out later, Octavio Dotel gave up a deep flyball double to Jose Guillen to put the Royals on top for good.

And then things got really crazy.

Mark Teahen realized he had gone a total of two games without homering against the White Sox, so he decided to further exploit and embarrass the Sox defense by hitting an inside the park home run, or as Konerko calls it, a stand-up double. Teahen was significantly aided by Ramirez falling asleep after receiving the relay throw. In Ramirez' defense, as the smartest player in baseball, he was probably calculating Boone Logan's FIP after the play.

Konerko's poor play, and the events that followed, should give considerable ammunition to the talk radio folk who are always looking to get rid of Konerko and/or Jim Thome. As long as Konerko isn't hitting, it's tough to argue that the Sox aren't a better club with the improved defensive alignment of an Anderson/Wise CF and Swisher at 1B. But the time to make a change isn't here yet. To quote mgl:

I am so sick of EVERYONE equating a player’s 3 month (or 6 month, or one month, or one year) performance with their "true talent" that I can’t stand it anymore.

Where do they think that we get our projection algorithms from? From real life! When REAL LIVE PLAYERS who are 33 years old hit .780 in their careers and then .577 in 3 months, they hit .740 (or whatever the number is) from then on in! We don’t just make these projections up. They are based on what players actually do, given their histories.

Konerko may be hitting .213/.319/.360, but he entered the season with a PECOTA projection of .264/.354/.483, and as mgl states, that projection hasn't changed much. Konerko's revised projection for the rest of the season is probably something like .255/.345/.470, which would figure to outpace the theoretical production of his replacements by enough to ignore the defensive downgrade.

There may come a point when it's time to remove Konerko from the lineup altogether, but it's not tonight, no matter how much it might feel like the right decision this very second.

*****

BTW, here's Jim's opinion: SoxMachine: To the official scorer's phone!

There's no such thing as a routine victory for the White Sox anymore, or at least it seems that way. For the second straight night, the Sox pulled out a victory over the Royals in a game it looked like they had no business winning.

Javier Vazquez followed up Jose Contreras poor start with a stinker of his own, allowing 11 hits and 6 runs before being pulled with 2 outs in the 6th. He allowed the first 3 batters of the night to reach base safely, and had the Sox in a 1-0 hole before he retired a batter. That hole grew to 5-0 before the Sox got their first hit in the 4th inning.

I'm not sure what's wrong with Vazquez. I assume there is something mechanically wrong (or at least that's my hope), because he's recorded a quality start in just one of his last 7 starts.

Carlos Quentin had the Sox 2nd and 3rd hits of the night with two 2-runs homers to bring put them within a run after the 6th. From there it would turn into a battle of bullpens. And even though the Sox are a man down, that's still advantage Sox.

Things really got interesting in the 8th. With the Sox still trailing by a run, Jermaine Dye at the plate, and Quentin and Orland Cabrera occupying 1st and 2nd, respectively, Cabrera stole 3rd easily. One Star Sudoku easy. Dye, perhaps distracted by Cabrera's ridiculously large jump, swung at what should have been ball one, and glared down to third base. He struck out one pitch later and again stared down Cabrera at 3rd as he walked to the dugout.

Jim Thome picked up a single through the shift to drive in OC, tie the game, and pick up JD. When OC returned to the dugout, however, he didn't receive a warm welcome from everyone. I made sure to watch as OC entered the dugout because I could already sense something brewing, but I never saw JD, who might have been up the tunnel in the clubhouse at the time. At some point during the next at-bat, Comcast's cameras caught OC yelling from one end of the dugout, and being physically restrained by Dewayne Wise and Jose Contreras. A moment later Jermaine Dye walks into screen, exchanging words and pantomiming a swing or a slide, or something, anyway.

I don't really understand what JD was complaining about. Sure, he may have been distracted by Cabrera's steal. Sure, he was in an 0-2 hole. But the tying run was only 90 feet away, and he had a chance to drive that run in without a hit. In fact, the value of a runner on 3rd base shown through immediately following the confrontation, as Ramon Ramirez balked in the eventual game-winning run with Paul Konerko (0-4, 4K) at the plate.

The Jenks-less Sox bullpen rebounded from an off-night with a stellar 3.1 innings of 2-hit baseball. Adam Russell, who has pitched in a grand total of 3 high-leverage situations this season, picked up his third victory*, while Octavio Dotel got an opportunity to pick up his first save of the year. Dotel needed just 10 pitches to strike out the side, as the Sox escaped with their 7th straight victory over Kansas City.

They're not all pretty, but they all look the same once they end up in the 'W' column.

* Russell needs to pitch more. He's an automatic victory, or the opposite of complete game by a Sox starting pitcher.

On a day when the White Sox added an infusion of slow at the expense of their grindiest offensive force, it was Alexei Ramirez, the smartest baseballer since Yaz, who made two heads up plays with his feet to give the Sox a 13-inning victory over the Royals.

It wasn't pretty. In fact, I compared the back and forth action to a retarded kid punching one of those inflatable clowns only to get knocked over himself when the clown rebounded. The Sox won, so I'm not quite sure if they're the short-bus rider or the latex inflatable, but I'm not sure it matters. I'll take any win that puts the Sox 15 games over and at a new high-water mark for the season.

Jose Contreras had himself all sorts of troubles early on, and the extra-inning bullpen continued allowing baserunners like crazy. The poor Contreras outing put the Sox in a 4-1 hole early, and 5-3 deficit late, which the Sox offense was able to claw out of against the Royals bullpen.

The Sox bullpen began with 4 innings of 1-hit, no run ball from Boone Logan, Octavio Dotel, and Matt Thornton, which allowed the Sox to take a 11th inning lead. Actually, a variety of events helped the Sox take that lead; a favorable strikezone, a blown interference call, and a 2-run sacrifice fly to be exact. That's right, thanks to a collision on a wet outfield and the wheels of Alexei Ramirez, AJ Pierzynski got credit for the incredibly rare 2-run sacrifice fly.

There's really not much else to say about the play. AJ hit it far, Alexei ran fast, and the Sox scored two runs. It was as spectacular as a sacrifice fly can be, but it's still not exactly exciting to be writing about 90 minutes later.

Ramirez was once again in the middle of the Sox 13th inning rally, hitting a 1-out single and scoring the eventual game-winning run on what was effectively a hit-and-run (though I thought it was a straight steal live) by Orlando Cabrera.

The story of the game, however, will be Scott Linebrink's blown save. The outing sucked, and there's not much I can say to defend it. But I don't think his recent struggles--He's allowed a run in each of his last 4 outings--have anything to do with his recent change in role. From my view from the safety of my mother's basement, where I hear the media spread is much better than KC's, it has everything to do with a REALLY poor changeup and an inability to put hitters away.

Ozzie has said he'll turn to both Thornton and Dotel in the 9th if he needs them later this week, and I can't blame him. The other day, I said I would go with Thornton as my closer in Jenks' absence. But I hardly think Linebrink's return to Earth is anything worth getting worked up about. There's no closer controversy on the southside.