From The Bard's Room- Sox Crush Cubs, Everything OK Now

The weekend started with a shitstorm touched off by comments Ozzie made on the Mike North show about dearly departed 6th starter Brandon McCarthy, comments that said something to the effect that McCarthy was ineffective last year because he spent too much time hanging out late and getting shitfaced with his buddy Brian Anderson. Ozzie said McCarthy, "picked the wrong guy to be friends with."

These comments resulted in much harumphing and gasping about how Ozzie could say such things about one of his ex-players (never mind that he has said far worse about guys like Magglio Ordonez, who did a lot more for the Sox than McCarthy ever would have).

Meanwhile, I kept thinking that everyone was missing the point that the guy who should really be concerned about what Ozzie said was Brian Anderson, who, after all, still plays for Ozzie, while McCarthy does not. In my mind, in the span of that one radio show Anderson went from potential starting center fielder, to the state of living career death that Sean Tracey has been in since he failed to play his role in Ozzie's lover's spat with Vicente Padilla last summer.

So this got the weekend started on a bad note, and it didn't get much better when the Sox fell to 0-4 in Cactus League play after a 10-3 drubbing by the D-Backs, which saw Opening Day starter Jose Contreras allow 7 baserunners and 2 runs in 2 innings.

Saturday and Sunday brought happier news, though. First, Gavin Floyd made his first spring appearance, and held Arizona to 1 run in 3 innings in a 6-5 Sox win. Not lights out, but not bad compared to how everyone else has pitched this spring. Then on Sunday, Jon Garland rebounded from a horrible first spring outing to throw 3 shutout innings, and the Sox hit 5 home runs, including 2 by Jermaine Dye, in a 13-2 rout of the Cubs. Also encouraging in this game were the 4 innings of shutout relief by John Danks, Gio Gonzalez, David Aardvark, and Andrew Sisco.

EX-SOX WATCH
McCarthy made his Rangers debut on Sunday. He whiffed 4 Royals in 2 innings. Probably because he was drunk and it gave him magic powers.