BOSTON -- The time for the Chicago White Sox to kick it into championship gear is, well, now.
But another night of baseball, the 137th of their season, passed without the White Sox taking charge of their fate. Wasting a strong starting performance by Jon Garland, the White Sox lost to the Boston Red Sox, 3-2, in 10 innings on Monday night. At least for the moment they fell a half-game behind the Minnesota Twins in the American League Wild Card race.
Out in front in the AL Central, the Detroit Tigers have finally run into a bad patch, losing 17 of their last 26 games. But the White Sox are 5 1/2 games behind them, which is exactly where they were on Aug. 13 when they completed a three-game sweep of the Tigers.
If you were to point to one area in which the White Sox have most dramatically failed to meet expectations, it would be starting pitching. But that was hardly the issue on Monday night. If the White Sox continue to get the sort of starting pitching that Garland provided for them, they would have no problems.
They would, at a minimum, be the American League Wild Card entry. They might win the AL Central. And then they would win a Division Series, a Championship Series and a second straight World Series.
Garland (16-4) has been by far Chicago's most consistent starter over the last two months. He is 11-1 in his last 14 starts, and he would have been 12-1 after his performance Monday night. At Fenway Park, against a Boston Red Sox lineup that had most of its theoretical thunder back in place, Garland was superb, allowing one run on five hits over six innings.
It's never easy against the Red Sox in this park. The Red Sox still were without David Ortiz, but they had both Jason Varitek and Trot Nixon for the first time in more than a month, and Manny Ramirez for the first time in more than a week. Still, Garland retired 13 batters in a row before being touched for one run in the sixth.
But after Garland departed, Bobby Jenks blew a save, and Brandon McCarthy gave up a walk-off homer to Carlos Pena in the 10th. Jenks' blown save was just his third in 42 save opportunities, so this can be written off as an aberration. But that didn't make this loss any easier to digest.
You keep waiting for this club to take off on an extended, consistent streak of superior play. They did it last year, and, after all, this a more powerful, more explosive White Sox team than the one that triumphed last season, with the addition of Jim Thome, and with Jermaine Dye having an MVP-caliber year.
The news on that front wasn't particularly encouraging, either. Dye left Monday night's game with stiffness in his back. Manager Ozzie Guillen said that he did not believe Dye's injury was serious, but he also said that Dye would not play on Tuesday night in any case.
What has made that stretch of outstanding play unattainable to date? Largely, it has been inconsistency in the starting pitching. Strong starting pitching, a given last year, has been an "if" much of this season. The White Sox starters had a 3.75 ERA in 2005, and the starting pitching carried them to that magnificent 11-1 postseason run.
This season, the starters had a 4.74 ERA through the first 136 games. This has been the difference between a club that could be dominant and a club that is battling for its postseason life.
If the rest of the rotation could provide more starts that even vaguely resembled Garland's work on Monday night, the White Sox would, on the available evidence, be fine. This game aside, Jenks has been very good, and in front of him, the left-right combination of Matt Thornton and Mike MacDougal has been capable. Guillen, who says "everything about this game is about pitching," believes that his starters will return to their previous, better form.
"The thing is, I don't want to get better for one day, and the next day, we don't know what's going on," Guillen said on Monday night. "I want them to remember this: No matter what they threw, no matter what we did for the first five months, I think the most important month is this one. I want them to start over, I want them to start fresh. People are going to forget what we did in April, in May. They're going to remember what we did in September."
The high expectations for the starters, set in place by last year's success, remain for Guillen.
"I expect the same way, because I think we have guys with a lot of talent," he said. "And we have five guys who can do this, and that's why I never change my mind. If I see one of those guys who we don't think can do this, he's not going to be there. We'll find somebody else. But I think that those five guys we run out there, we have a chance every time."
With 25 games remaining, the White Sox need to consistently turn those chances into something more tangible. On paper, this is still a club fully capable of another championship. But the time for moving that concept from theory to reality grows shorter by the day.
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