White Sox stun Tigers with improbable comeback

So far, so good for the White Sox in their three-game set with the Detroit Tigers. The South Siders have taken the first two games, and they prevailed, 7-6, in dramatic fashion Wednesday night at U.S. Cellular Field.

Detroit appeared to be cruising toward victory, up 6-3 in the eighth inning. Heck, the Sox had two outs and nobody on in the bottom of that eighth inning, but six straight hits off Tigers reliever Joba Chamberlain turned the game around.

Micah Johnson and Adam Eaton hit back-to-back singles to set the table for Melky Cabrera, who couldn't have picked a better time to hit his first home run in a Sox uniform. Cabrera turned on a 2-1 slider from Chamberlain, knocking it over the right-field wall for a three-run blast that tied the game at 6.

Surprisingly, Detroit didn't seem inclined to remove the rattled Chamberlain from the mound. The rally started anew with a single by Jose Abreu, who advanced to third on a single by Adam LaRoche. That set the table for Avisail Garcia, who put himself in an 0-2 hole by swinging wildly at a couple of Chamberlain sliders. But after a couple foul balls and two pitches out of the zone, Garcia found a 2-2 slider to his liking and lined it into into center field for an RBI single that gave the Sox a 7-6 lead.

Garcia also played a key role in protecting that lead in the top of the ninth inning.

With one out, Sox closer David Robertson gave up a single to Nick Castellanos. James McCann followed with another single to right, and pinch runner Andrew Romine scampered from first to third. Garcia fired the ball in quickly to try to get Romine at third, which wasn't going to happen, but Garcia hit the cutoff man, shortstop Alexei Ramirez, who cut the throw and fired to first to get McCann, who had rounded the bag too aggressively. 

After Abreu put the tag on McCann, the tying run was still on third in the person of Romine, but two were out. Robertson retired Jose Iglesias on a routine grounder to Johnson to secure the win and his fifth save in as many opportunities.

With the win, the Sox (10-14) are still five games behind Detroit (17-11) in the AL Central, but hey, it's better than being seven games back -- as the Sox were when this series began.

Cubs did well at bottom of pitching market

It's easy to roll your eyes and think of Edwin Jackson when talking about the Cubs' big free agent pitching additions last year. Kyuji Fujikawa's contract might not inspire the same belly laughs as Jackson's pact, but it probably gets a guffaw.

Despite those big misses higher up on the free agent food chain, the Cubs actually did pretty well in cobbling together reclamation projects.

Scott Feldman was the obvious winner in the retread lottery. For a modest one-year, $6 million deal after an injury-stunted year in 2012, the Cubs got 91 good innings (3.46 ERA) before spinning him for Jake Arrieta and Pedro Strop.

Strop showed a marked improvement in his command once arriving at Wrigley Field, and might be a solid addition to the Cubs' bullpen. Arrieta posted only a superficially good ERA (3.66), but at least gives the team a low-cost option for the back end of the rotation, or maybe another bullpen piece if shift to relieving can help him harness his control problems and home run tendencies.

The other retreads the Cubs tried out didn't pan out nearly as well. Scott Baker (1 year, $5 million), who had done plenty of good work with the Twins, never got healthy enough to contribute. Carlos Villanueva (2 years, $10 million) did what he's always done, which is pitch well enough as a low-leverage reliever, not so well as a starter. Dontrelle Willis was sent packing after spring training.

If you think one out of four on those kind of projects is a bad rate of return, you're wrong. Especially for a team like the Cubs, which didn't block any real prospects from their rotation by doling out innings, or waste any staggering amount of money.

(To help put the money in perspective, the money givein to Feldman, Baker, Villanueva and Willis was less than what the $16.8 million paid to Carlos Marmol the last two seasons.)

It's all worth considering as the Cubs haven't been linked in rumors to many big free agents this winter, but have been linked to a few names like free agent Joba Chamberlain, and trade targets like Nationals pitchers Drew Storen and Tyler Clippard.

Once the dust settles, with the Cubs still looking to fill out a rotation and closer spot, there will probably be other names. And why not? For a team with job openings that doesn't want to commit another colossal contract blunder, taking a chance on a player that's fallen on hard times can be a cost-effective way to build value for an organization that sorely needs to do just that.