Mark Buehrle Pitches Better

Mark Buehrle has not pitched as well this season as he normally does. However, tonight he mowed down the Texas Rangers in the White Sox 8-2 victory. What was the difference? Velocity. For Buehrle, less is usually more. When he overthrows, he tends to lose movement. As Buehrle put it, "The harder I throw, the straighter my ball goes."

Obviously, this bodes well for the White Sox because they have struggled to put together strings of quality starts this year. If Buehrle is returning to his old form, as it appears, this means that the White Sox have two dominant starters at present in Buehrle and Jose Contreras, and two starters who are dominating some of the time in Freddy Garcia and Javier Vazquez. If they can get Garcia and Vazquez to pitch more conistently and get Jon Garland to revert to his first half of 2005 form, this will be the most dominating pitching staff in baseball. With Don Cooper as the White Sox pitching coach, you can expect bigger things from this staff later in the season.

Point of Clarification- By quality start, I do not mean the league definition of pitching at least six innings and allowing no more than three earned runs. That definition considers three runs over six as quality, and I do not consider an ERA of 4.50 to be a quality ERA. Perhaps they should change the name of that statistic to "mediocre start," which would be more accurate. An ERA of 4.50 is typically around the league minimum, and a pitcher should last through the seventh in a good start. Any pitcher who logs a "quality start" as it stands today has been mediocre at the very least.