110

I'm glad I said something nice about Jose Contreras in yesterday's Update, before he went out and threw an eight-inning, no-run, one-hitter in a Game 2 win over the Tigers. Contreras was making his first start for the White Sox since returning from Triple-A Charlotte, where he had exiled himself in order to regain his pitching touch. It appears to have worked as Contreras limited Detroit to a double and a walk and faced only 26 batters, two over the minimum for his stint. The usually reliable Matt Thornton gave up a meaningless home run in the ninth to make the final score 8-1.

The Sox offense -- missing so often lately that their faces have appeared on milk cartons -- decided to show up. Scott Podsednik hit his first home run of the season. That means he won't be repeating his 2005 feat of homering in the World Series (walkoff homer in Game 2) after going homerless in the regular season. Pods was the only player in baseball history to pull that off, and was the only player to hit two homeruns in the post-season (Game 1 of the ALDS against the Red Sox) after failing to hit one during the season. Alexei Ramirez got the Sox off to a lead with his fifth home run of the year and collected three hits. (He also had two hits in Game 1.) The Missile raised his average to .261 and has gone from anemic to bad to decent and is on his way to good. Jim Thome deposited one in the seats for his 10th of 2009 and 551st overall. Even Gordon Beckham got on base via a walk. While he went 0 for 3 to keep his batting average at .000 (0 for 13), he raised his on base percentage to .071 and finally played in a win.

Game 1 was a different story, however. It doesn't take much to set off Ozzie, but even the calmest of managers would have exploded like Oz did after the Sox committed three errors, including a ninth-inning boot by Josh Fields that led to the Tigers' winning run in a 5-4 loss. Clayton Richard was trying to make it easy for Ozzie to replace him in the rotation with Contreras by giving up three runs in only 4.2 innings. Five hits and five walks is not the way to get it done, unless your mission is to go back to the bullpen. Hey, the Sox are so desperate for pitching that they signed Freddy Garcia to a minor-league contract. The winning pitcher in the World Series clincher has already been cut from the Mets Triple-A affiliate in Buffalo this year, so he's probably not the answer, but Kenny Williams is pulling out all the stops now.

The split with Detroit leaves the Sox where they started the day -- in third place, 4.5 games behind the Tigers. The Magic Number does fall to 110, and there are three more games left in the series. A sweep of those three would move the Sox to within 1.5 of Detroit, not a bad result considering how poorly the Good Guys have been playing. Go Sox!