Thursday, October 20, 2005

Bring On The Astros

The White Sox certainly have their work cut out for them. They face 3 starting pitchers that all have a lower ERA than the Sox number one starter Mark Buerhle. But the Sox do have some things going in their favor.

According to the ESPN Stats page, the Sox hit power pitchers to a tune of 273/326/446 this season compared to 256/291/429 against finesse pitchers. This is a good sign going up against some of the best power pitchers in the game (and in Clemens case, baseball history).

Another good sign are the Sox career stats against the Astros top three pitchers.

They've banged around Ol' Roger pretty well: 280/351/518 including 10 home runs. Big Frank did a lot of that damage, but Crede, Dye and Konerko have hit him pretty hard as well.

Sox batters have a similar line against Pettitte: 305/369/500 including 5 home runs. Again, most of this damage was done by Big Frank, but he has also been hit hard by Konerko and Dye.

Only Pods has had over 20 ABs against Oswalt going 261 with a double. But AJ has gone 5/8 the few times he has faced him.

One thing that is overblown, and is not much of an advantage to the Sox, is the ineptitness of the Astros offense. In fact, the inept Astros offense scored more runs per game after the All Star break than the Sox (who had the benefit, or in the case of Carl Everett the detriment, of the DH). The Astros averaged 4.38 runs in the second half while the Sox scored 4.32.

What does all this mean? Probably not much. But I know this, if the Sox continue to limit their opposition to 3 runs per game they will win the World Series. And since they have limited two better offenses in the postseason to that so far (3 rpg to the Red Sox 2.2 to the Angels) they should be able to shut down the Astros.