56 at Guaranteed Rate Field Saturday afternoon, making him the 11th White Sox player to receive such an honor. That is not why this game is important. What will happen next? Just five more outs.It takes a lot going right to get 27 outs without allowing a baserunner. Look on the broadcast, and you won’t be able to find the moment — the camera had so much else to focus on. That battle, at least, is already won.
But there was a player who wasn’t on the roster, who wasn’t supposed to be there on the field. A perfect game has never ended a pitcher’s career, or marked the culmination of a team’s season.
Even when the basic structure is always the same, even when the entertainment value is sub-par and the product unsatisfying? I just kind of let it go. "I haven't had too much success on the road against these guys and I was lucky to get a win. We don’t know, yet, what will happen in the postseason — but we’re not there yet. It can be the only thing that gets you out of bed in the morning, sometimes, that banal drive towards continuity. Sometimes it takes a lot going right to get any outs at all.And after that home run in Game 5, in the maelstrom of flying bottles and people storming the field, shaking the stadium down to its concrete foundations, somehow, only a single player was ejected. It was disappointing, of course — for Buehrle, to whom the milestone was most personally meaningful, but perhaps more so to the rest of the team, the batters who felt they had let him down.No-hitters, perfect games — these, too, are strange in-between moments, self-contained interstitials. Six outs. "It worked well enough Friday to give him his 26th career victory against the Twins, his most against any opponent. With a win today and a loss from the Kansas City Royals, they could guarantee home-field advantage through a hypothetical ALCS. This is not that moment.
He hasn’t said anything about it. Six outs to get to 600, to 200 innings — to 3000 innings, spread with shocking consistency over 15 consecutive seasons. Just as well as he knows the moments of triumph, of curse-breaking and championship, Buehrle knows these moments.
That battle, at least, is already won. And then life goes on.
They clinched the division a few days ago, a postseason berth just before that — an August and September that, homer by homer, hammered two decades of futility into the dirt. Hopefully one day it just kind of got forgotten, and five years down the road (people said), ‘Where’s that Buehrle guy? Part of it has to be the simple impulse to find out what happens next. I haven’t talked to anybody. "Buehrle said that for nearly all of his career, that curveball was in the 70 mph range.
But could a 32-year-old who is having one of the best seasons in his career really walk away?Nobody in a White Sox uniform has done that since Dave Lemonds in 1972.
Brooklyn will throw out the ceremonial first pitch Saturday before the White Sox … When he got going in the later years, as he did in stretches of 2014 and 2015, it was hard to imagine him putting a full stop on his career at all.In 2002, in his final game of the season, Buehrle was four outs away from becoming the first White Sox pitcher to win 20 games in almost a decade.
I want to know if this guy will get better or worse, if that team will finally get over the hump. As far as the 2015 regular season goes, and as far as the 22-year Blue Jays playoff drought goes, the story is done — we know how it goes. I want to know who will win, to understand how they got there, how others are planning to get there in the future.