sinicalypse wrote:
I've been beating the drums for Sergio Santos to close for well over a month now, and suffice to say the guy hasn't disappointed me. One of my IRC guys gave me shit last week because awhile back I suggested that he drop Brandon League for Sergio, and at the time League had flexed his save total up to 9 and Santos only had those two ssves over the last few weeks....
Now, since the time of that recommendation Sergio has given him ~10IP of scoreless 2 win 4 save 13K ball while Brandon Leauge has discovered some lost scrolls that upon reading them bestows the soul of Felix Heredia upon the reader. A week ago it was like "THANX MAN I'M LOSING SOOOOO MANY POINTS" and today it's like "ok, maybe you were right on that one"
As it's been said in here, his offspeed stuff is excellent. That last at bat was a thing of beauty... he dropped a slider in for a strike to go ahead 0-1, then he dropped another low slider for a swing and a miss, 0-2. He then went back to the well with that slider and missed to low to get the count at 1-2 and as I'm watching it I'm like "OK, the guy's going to be sitting on a fastball here thinking there's no way you come back with that slider for a 4th consecutive pitch, so drop that hook on him and end this one, otherwise you can probably jam him inside with a FB and induce a weak little ground ball out"
Sure enough, blam, say hello to his little friend and it's a White Sox Winner! That whole at-bat was set up by the fact he dropped a first-pitch slider on the outside corner for strike 1, so once it's in the hitter's head that you can get a called strike with that pitch, he's gotta try and defend the plate and when you're up 0-2 or 1-2 on them, man, that slider is good enough to warrant a swing and a miss more times than not.
In other news, Matt Thornton had me worried yet again, especially when he decided to say HELLO WORLD!!!! by promptly walking Coco Crisp, who eventually exercised his god-given-right to second base, and was probably less than 6 inches away from stealing home on the white sox... Teahan was really caught sleeping there, as he seemed to be like "Oh.... there he goes" and took an opportunity to get into better fielding position without yelling anything out... Thornton and AJ probably had to figure it out based off of crowd reaction.
Reading your post is like reading Michner ...long & fucking boring