Chicago White Sox to take advantage of four day break – MLB News
It seems the Chicago White Sox have a lot to grapple with. The mounting challenges in the face of their defence’s increasingly disappointing performance and the offence’s inability to rise have brought more questions that they should have answered.
However, the four days off that the White Sox now have are meant to be sufficiently availed to be satisfactorily prepared for the game against the Detroit Tigers on Friday. The White Sox ended the last week’s encounter with outright embarrassment.
The team manager, Ozzie Guillen, who declared the performance “lousy”, the White Sox lost the game to Minnesota Twins by 6-3. This came at a time when the team has been hardly consistent over the half of the season.
The break that Chicago has, of four days, is said to be an opportunity to sceptically reassess everything to amend for poor performance. Standing third in the AL Central Standings, the White Sox have won only 44 games with .478 PCT.
“Mathematically, obviously we’re still in it,” said all-star first baseman Paul Konerko. “But we have to do a lot of things better. The way we’ve played up to this point, that’s not going to win the division.”
Among other things that have worsened the White Sox problem is the astounding incapacity of the pitchers to keep a check on the rival offence. Jake Peavy, gave up no less than 10 hits and allowed five runs in Sunday’s loss against the Twins.
“I thought physically I’d be able to bounce back better than I have, and that’s just the bottom line,” he said. “No ifs, ands or buts about it. My body has not bounced back. It’s not hard to see. I’m throwing 85-90 mph with my fastball.”
If the record is anything to go by and if a critical scrutiny of last few weeks’ performance is carried out, what comes forward is the failure of virtually all fields, from pitch to hit to defence to running.
The four days break will be used by the White Sox to invest it on devising a viable strategy to bring up their performance and become more competitive for the remaining half of the season.
The players that the team boasts are perfectly capable of demonstrating the brilliance expected of any professional team. The White Sox, of course, realise it and want to make use of it now.
As the Detroit Tigers will be putting things in order to confront the White Sox on Friday, the latter will be faced with more challenges to surmount, chief among which is the necessity of winning the series to make an ideal start and rebuild the teams’ confidence.
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