Sox Win Another Series

Detroit 0 White Sox 8
On the mound...
Jon Garland was dominating once again, although as another blogger put it, the Tiger's played like a defeated team with a plane to catch. Still, 4 hits with just one walk in another complete game shutout against one of the better hitting teams in the division is worth writing home about. Garland has equaled last years total for wins out of the 5th starter spot with his AL leading 5th victory Sunday and dropped his ERA to 1.38. He was given AL pitcher of the month honors today.
At the plate
The bats showed some life once again, scoring 2 runs in the 4th, 5th, and 7th innings, and single runs in the 2nd and 3rd. The Sox also have been showing more patience at the plate and have been drawing more walks, which is promising after hearing Ozzie's comment on what advice he would give to his hitters. (Something like keep your head down, swing at the first pitch and hope to get lucky) Hopefully the Sox can carry it over to their upcoming series against KC, the cellar dwellers of the central division.
Media Bias
Being a Sox fan in Chicago, you get used to being slighted by the local media coverage. That has become expected and accepted. But when national outlets refuse to give credit where credit is due, it bugs the hell out of me. (I know, I know, its only April, but as they say, pennants can't be won in April but they can be lost) Aaron Gleeman over at Hardball Times is the latest to join my shit list. He completely missed the boat on the fact that the Sox reworked their offense for mainly 2 reasons...1)waiting on the 3 run homer and moving guys station to station hadn't gotten us anywhere 3 years in a row, so they wanted to become more balanced, to still have some power but add more speed and "grinders" as KW would say....and here is the main reason that very few in the mainstream media seem to grasp 2)To free up payroll to reallocate a more even split between pitching and the line up. In past seasons something like 75% of the Sox payroll went to position players. By getting rid of the $8M that was due to Carlos this season (who is hitting at a .220 clip with only 3 HR's for the Brewers) and not resigning Mags, they were able to reinvest that money into the pitching. Our problem in recent seasons has not been our run scoring ability, it was the amount of runs we were allowing. The Twins have scored less than us in each of the last three seasons I believe, yet they finished ahead of us each season. The reason being that they allowed less runs than they scored, which we have not done in any of the past three seasons. There are two ways to look at how to win a ballgame. You either have to score more than the opponent, or you don't allow them to score more than you. The Sox are finally trying to not allow the opponent to score more than them, rather than trying to slug their way to 8, 9, 10 runs every game. So all you Pale Hose fanatics out there, lets give KW some props for waking up and realizing that pitching wins, not the ability to go out and embarrass people once a week by scoring 10+ runs.