Nancy Faust, beloved fixture as the White Sox organist for 40 years, says she will be playing her swan song at the end of the 2010 season.

"It won't be easy, but the timing is just right to move on," Faust said. "Next year will be my 41st season. Never did I imagine that I would be saying that.

There was much discussion in the early weeks of the 2009 MLB season about the large number of home runs hit in the new Yankee Stadium, leading to speculation that many of the home runs were aided by strong wind currents. Or, in the lingo of baseball, the ball was "carrying well" in Yankee Stadium. All this discussion stimulated me to ask the question, "Just what is meant by 'carrying well'?" Of course, we all have an intuitive notion of what this means. We observe a fly ball coming off the bat and have an expectation of how far the ball will travel. If the ball traveled farther than this expectation, we say that the ball carried well. And of course, vice versa. But can we come up with a more precise, less intuitive measure of "carry"? It is precisely this issue that led to the analysis presented in this report.

"Former Sox pitcher Jim Parque says he's sorry he juiced, but he wants to ask you one question: What would you have done?"

A new camera and software system in its final testing phases will record the exact speed and location of the ball and every player on the field, allowing the most digitized of sports to be overrun anew by hundreds of innovative statistics that will rate players more accurately, almost certainly affect their compensation and perhaps alter how the game itself is played.

The White Sox are actually slightly up (1.7%) in attendance over 2008.

I wonder if this has anything to do with KW seemingly getting the green light from JR to add salary in terms of a front line starter -- perhaps the effects of the economic downturn haven't hit the White Sox as bad as anticipated.

Pretty interesting article at Puck Prospectus on how to quantify how much of an advantage drawing a penalty is over the length of a season. They use an example from a Hawks game where Ladd drew a penalty and at the end of the article show that Ladd draws about .4 more penalties than he takes for 60 minutes of play.

Good news for Brian Anderson. Even if he doesn't win the starting job in center field, it sounds like he's at least locked in to being the fourth outfielder when the team breaks camp and leaves Phoenix for the South Side.

Pitchers

Richard
Thornton
Carrasco
Russell
Linebrink
Jenks
Dotel
Floyd
Buehrle
Vazquez
Danks

Position players on the bench

Fields
Hall
B. Anderson
N. Swisher
J. Owens

Tentative starting lineup

Cabrera
D. Wise
J. Dye
Thome
Konerko
Griffey
Ramirez
Pierzynski
Uribe

Win and survive.

That's the White Sox's theme for the remaining 23 games this season after a patchwork lineup and the pitching of Javier Vazquez and Bobby Jenks produced a 4-2 victory over the Indians on Wednesday and kept them in first place in the American League Central.

The Sox's task becomes even tougher with the strong possibility that slugger Carlos Quentin probably won't be available until at least next week's Toronto series—and maybe much longer.

"That's our hope," manager Ozzie Guillen said of a return Monday by Quentin, who has 36 homers but has been hampered by a sore right forearm near his wrist.

Yet, here we are only five months into his Chicago career and the Sox are relying not on Jim Thome or captain Paul Konerko, but rallying behind Quentin---the main reason for their current grasp on first place. In a recent ten game stretch, the Stanford product hit .387 (12-for-31) with five home runs and 10 RBI.

"Oh, he has carried this ballclub," said Sox manager Ozzie Guillen. "A kid without that much experience in the big leagues batting third and having [the year] he has had, I never thought that was going to happen. I didn't expect this kid to be carrying the ballclub. We hit the lottery with him."