CHICAGO 10, MINNESOTA 1 IN CHICAGO

Date:  Wednesday, August 21.

Batting stars:  Matthew LeCroy was 2-for-4.  Denny Hocking was 1-for-3 with a walk.

Pitching stars:  Mike Jackson pitched a scoreless inning, giving up a hit and a walk and striking out one.  LaTroy Hawkins struck out two in a scoreless inning, giving up two hits.

Opposition stars:  Magglio Ordonez was 3-for-5 with a home run (his twenty-ninth) and a double.  Willie Harris was 3-for-4 with a home run, his second.  Jose Valentin was 2-for-5 with two home runs, his eighteenth and nineteenth, driving in five.  Mark Buerhle pitched seven innings, giving up one run on seven hits and a walk and striking out five.

The game:  The Twins scored first, getting consecutive two-out singles from Torii Hunter, LeCroy, and Bobby Kielty to take a 1-0 lead.  It was all White Sox after that, and it didn't take long for them to control the game.  Valentin hit a two-run homer in the bottom of the first to make it 2-1.  In the second, Aaron Rowand hit an RBI single which was followed by Valentin's second homer, this a three-run shot that made it 6-1.  The only thing even resembling a threat that the Twins had after that was in the fourth, when they put men on first and second with two out.  Harris homered in the bottom of the fourth, Mark Johnson had a two-run single in the fifth, and Ordonez homered in the eighth to close out the scoring.

WP:  Buehrle (16-9).  LP:  Joe Mays (2-5).  S:  None.

Notes:  LeCroy was again the DH, with David Ortiz out of the lineup.

Denny Hocking was again in the lineup at third, replacing Corey Koskie.  This was the second consecutive game Koskie missed, but he would be back in the lineup the next day.

The two non-regulars who started went 3-for-7 with a walk.  The seven regulars who started went 5-for-25.

Hunter was 1-for-3 to make his average .303.

Coming off a complete game shutout, in which he threw 121 pitches, Joe Mays had his shortest outing of the season.  He lasted just two innings, giving up six runs (five earned) on five hits and no walks and striking out one.  He threw 53 pitches.  It was not, however, his worst game of the season, at least by game scores.  He'd already had two worse games and had one more to come.

Hawkins lowered his ERA to 2.28.

On July 23, the Twins scored six runs on ten hits off Mark Buehrle.  In his next two games against them, he allowed one run on twelve hits in sixteen innings.  Buehrle was 19-12 in 2002 with an ERA of 3.58 and a WHIP of 1.24.  He made the all-star team but did not get any Cy Young votes.  At first that seemed odd--not that he did not win the award, but that he did even get token consideration.  It must be said, though, that the four pitchers who did get votes--Barry Zito, Pedro Martinez, Derek Lowe, and Jerrod Washburn--all had better seasons.

No player profile today.  There just wasn't anyone I felt like writing one for.  I thought about doing Willie Harris, but for whatever reason, I just couldn't make myself care about Willie Harris while I was writing this.  Maybe tomorrow.

Record:  The Twins were 75-53, in first place, leading Chicago by fifteen and a half games.