The Sox won their third straight game yesterday, outslugging a White Sox team which resembles a shell of its 2005 World Champion self, but that wasn’t the biggest news yesterday.

The biggest (and most surprising) news from the weekend: Jon Lester was summoned from Pawtucket to face the Indians at Cleveland tonight.  Now, keep in mind, Cleveland has one of the best, and possibly the best, offense in baseball.  This will be a very difficult test for the 23-year-old cancer survivor, as Cleveland is actually tougher against left-handers (.813 OPS) than righties (.785 OPS).  Lester, by most accounts, hasn’t regained all of the velocity he had prior to his lymphoma, and his AAA strikeout rate is down about 25% from last year.  Best of luck to Jon tonight; it certainly won’t be easy.

Lester takes the place of Julian Tavarez in the rotation, which makes sense.  In the past 3 years, Tavarez has performed much better out of the bullpen (3.51 ERA in 195 innings) than as a starter (4.95 ERA over 131 innings).  Fans will have to settle for watching him perform his Rube Waddell impersonation for a only handful of innings per week.

The big question here: where does Tavarez now fit into the bullpen depth chart?  Mike Timlin has been much maligned by myself and others this season, but he’s been pretty effective recently, with an excellent 1.085 WHIP on the year.  I still don’t believe that Timlin is as good as that number suggests, but I’d be hard-pressed at the moment to choose between him and Tavarez for one inning of work.    

The DFA’d casualty in all of this: Joel “The Walking Spelling Error” Pineiro, the front office’s $4 million dollar bullpen gamble.  Joel certainly had interesting stuff; his slider was a bonafide swing-and-miss pitch, but he just could not command it as Theo Epstein hoped he would.  In a bullpen that is surprisingly deep, Joel was no longer trusted to throw innings of importance, and now he will try to resurrect his career in another town. 

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