by Sean Kane
Juan Uribe and his regal goatee are the best thing that the Sox could have hoped for down the stretch. Starting the year, no Sox fan would have told you that the key moment would have happened at the end of July when we realized that “GoldenTee” was the man on the hot corner.
I remember sitting at game against Cleveland in June, up around section 526 thinking, “Man, Crede is in a contract year. How much is it gonna’ cost to lock that down?” He was hot, a third baseman that made White Sox fans love everything happening on the left side of the field in combination with Carlos Quentin being the most underrated thing in baseball coming out of Arizona. The glove of Joe Crede was like a wall and our ground ball pitchers, like Marky Mark Buehrle, loved that security. Buehrle loved it so much he won every game he started in June and had an ERA of 1.60. John Danks floated down to 2.10 that same month. It seemed like, with that defense, all we had to do was hit a few homers, coming from anywhere in the lineup, and we could win big games. We did, too, sweeping both the Cubs and Twins.
Then comes July, things start slowing down and sure enough Crede gets sent to the sixty day DL on the 25th. Who waltzes in but the Golden Boy himself. We were skeptical: the bat, the feet, the beard. Plus, who could replace Joe Crede down the stretch?
