Weather: 77 degrees, clear
Wind: 7 mph, left to right
Time: 3:22
Attendance: 27,737
The South Side of Chicago is a place where people end up. They end up packing meat or assembling machinery on a line. They end up in the bar or pool hall Friday and Saturday nights and in church on Sunday morning. They end up in the hospital or jail. Sometimes they end up at the bottom of the lake, sleeping with the fishes.
The Twins blew into Chicago riding the crest of a winning home stand that saw them take two of three from the Dodgers, Brewers, and Rays. And this with a team that's still largely patched together with duct tape and baling wire. Morneau recovering from surgery. Span and Kubel nursing lower extremities. Delmon... okay, forget about Delmon, but having the others unavailable has been a big chunk of why the Twins are in fourth place, seven games back of Cleveland. You have to think had they all been healthy, they could have turned around the outcomes of several of those 19 one-run losses so far this year. But after two days of dominating the White Sox, again, the Twins end up just two wins from overtaking the Hosers for third place. In the best case scenario, the Twins would sweep the Sox while Cleveland and Detroit lose out to the All-Star break, with the Twins having gained 11.5 games on the division lead since the first of June. I won't hold my breath, but stranger things have happened in the game of baseball.
Tonight, even with Blackburn struggling to control his pitches and giving up five early runs, the Twins chipped away with single runs in the first and third. But in the fourth inning they opened fire on Gavin Floyd, who would exit the game after recording just eleven outs and adding seven earned runs to his stat sheet. The Twins, down early, came back from behind and beat the White Sox, and it really doesn't get much better than that. Shoot, if the Twins aren't careful they just might find themselves in a pennant race before this season's over.