Of Course They Swept the Twins

One of the most trying and emotionally draining baseball seasons keeps chugging along for White Sox fans everywhere. The team, fresh off a home spanking from the mommies and daddies of the American League, aka the Red Sox and Yankees, boarded a plane to Minnesota to play a Twins team that has completely and totally dominated them over the past 2 seasons. How bad has it been? How about a 28-6 record and 9 straight series wins? Yeah, that's pretty dominate.

Sox fans everywhere were prepared for Ozzie to sing the Twins' praises about how well they play after losing another series to them. They were ready for the all too customary combination of not hitting with men on base/the bullpen blowing a late-inning lead/routine plays turned into errors. For many, this was the weekend for them to break free from baseball and switch their focus to the NFL and, lest we forget, fantasy football drafts.

But wait! This is the 2011 White Sox coming off a six-game losing streak. It makes perfect sense that they would go to Target Field and not only sweep the Twins in a three-game series for the first time since 2004, but they would completely flip the script on how the games were played. What's that you say? You don't believe me?  OK... Over the three games, the Twins committed more errors (five) than runs (four) and drew only one walk. The Sox hit 7 home runs to the Twins none, stole more bases than them (5-1), outscored them 18- 4 and hit .290. I know, I know... where has this been all season!

So where do we, the Sox fans, go from here? The growing optimism has been allowed to crawl back into our minds. The Sox sit a mere 3 games under break-even and 5.5 games behind the first place Tigers. They get to play a bad Baltimore team while Detroit and Cleveland get to beat up on each other. Once again the club has drawn us in and given us a glimmer of hope to believe that they will finally put it together and win a chunk of games in a row. And once again, probably at this exact same time next week, I'll be writing about how the Sox played like garbage during the week and did something over the weekend to make me believe they will come out of it.

Sometimes I wish the AL Central wasn't so bad and the Sox were realistically eliminated last month. It would be so much easier on my sanity and ulcer.

But what fun would that be?

~Poljak