The Skinny on Sale

 With 50 career wins to his credit, White Sox string-bean lefty Chris Sale isn’t a HOFer or the best pitcher in Sox history, but he could be when it’s all over.

Sale is on a streak that has put him in good company, Sandy Koufax to be precise.  Those two are the only pitchers since 1900 to have three straight games with twelve or more strikeouts and one or no runs allowed.  Sale has struck out 10, 12, 13 and 14 batters in his last four starts (and, this being the White Sox, he’s won only three of those games).  Sale is 26, a year older than Koufax when he started to win big and the same age as Randy Johnson when he started to figure things out.  Sox fans can only wonder, pray and cross their fingers.

For a franchise going on 116 years, the Sox haven’t produced that many great pitchers.  Five are in the Hall of Fame: Ed Walsh, Ted Lyons, Red Faber, Early Wynn and Hoyt Wilhelm.  Wynn and Wilhelm don’t really count because they spent most of their careers elsewhere.  Billy Pierce should count, only the HOF is controlled by knuckleheads.  Walsh retired 98 years ago, so who knows how he pitched.  But Faber, Lyons and Pierce fall into the same category, as near-anonymous workhorses.  Faber pitched on some bad teams in the wake of the Black Sox Scandal; when the Sox won all of 59 games in 1929, Faber was good for 13 of them.  He went 254-212 on his career.

Ted Lyons managed four more career wins at 260-230 from 1925-1946, with three years off for military service in WWII.  On the Yankees, Lyons would’ve cracked 300 wins easy.  Billy Pierce would’ve come close, too.  Everyone thinks that the Sox had great pitching throughout their Go-Go years from the 1950s into the ‘60s, which they did, but that’s not the same as having great pitchers, which they didn’t outside of Pierce and Wynn, who didn’t arrive until 1958, when he was already 38-years old.  Basically, the White Sox went to war with New York behind Billy Pierce and a band of journeymen.  It wasn’t fair, but little is with baseball on the South Side of Chicago.

Billy Pierce in the Hall of Fame along with Minnie Minoso, now, Chris Sale to follow in good time.  That’s the happy thought to propel me through a weekend series in Tampa.