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Tonight's Carlos works quickly, hopefully gets a lot of ground balls, and puts an end to the White Sox' 10 game winning streak. He'll be facing a guy who Lou Piniella managed for his first four seasons in the major leagues -- if you can wake Lou up, maybe he can tell his hitters what to expect out of Freddy Garcia.
I never did get a chance to post anything about the atmosphere in the stands at yesterday's game, given the Zambrano story that dwarfed everything else. Actually, things seemed quite calm. There were no fights, as far as I could tell, and with the Cubs out of the game early, Sox fans seemed almost ... well, I guess "pitying" is the best word I can think of. It would be nice to end that streak tonight; remember, the last team the Sox lost to was the Cubs.
If you missed the tweets from earlier, I posted this FanShot about an hour ago; Jeff Stevens has been sent back to Iowa and Chicago-area native Brian Schlitter promoted to give the Cubs a fresh bullpen arm. Schlitter will have to be added to the 40-man roster, which currently stands at 39.
Today is the 50th anniversary of Ron Santo's major league debut in a doubleheader in Pittsburgh; Santo went 3-for-7 in the DH with five RBI and the Cubs swept the eventual 1960 World Champions.
Finally, as I mentioned on Monday, tonight's game will be the 20,000th game in Cubs franchise history; they will be the first team to reach that milestone (the Braves, 34 games behind, will get there around the end of July). The Cubs won the last major milestone, game #15,000, the second game of a doubleheader on September 3, 1978, 4-2. It would be nice to win this one, too. And quietly.
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An 8-3 record with a 4.75 ERA screams out "high run support", and sure enough, Freddy Garcia has the 10th highest run support in the American League, surprising from a team that's 10th in the AL in runs scored. Garcia's pitched pretty well lately: 5-0, 3.74 in his last five outings. He has not faced the Cubs since 2007; the Cub he's faced the most is Alfonso Soriano (5-for-20); Aramis Ramirez is 5-for-12 against Freddy, but none of that seems to matter with A-Ram this year.
Carlos Silva had a solid outing against the White Sox on June 12 at Wrigley Field, but suffered his first loss of the year due to, oddly enough, no run support; Silva's been at or near the top of the NL in run support this season. With his 3.01 ERA, he's pitched well enough to win in almost all of his 13 starts. He'll need to be again -- the Cell has not been kind to him in his career (6.57 ERA in nine starts).
Today's game is on Fox. NYY/LAD and BOS/SFG are the other games; this game will be seen in the following areas: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky (except Lexington), Minnesota, Missouri (except Joplin and Kansas City), Dakotas, Wisconsin, Grand Rapids, Marquette, Traverse City, Cincinnati and Dayton. Here is the complete MLB.com Mediacenter for today.
Baseball-reference.com game preview
Please visit our SB Nation White Sox site South Side Sox.
Today's first pitch thread will be up at 6 pm CDT, and the overflows will post at 7, 8 and 8:45 pm CDT.
Discuss amongst yourselves.