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Garland, White Sox take rubber match against Royals

Jul 1, 2007 - 11:06 PM KANSAS CITY, Missouri (Ticker) -- Jon Garland continued his dominance of the Kansas City Royals on Sunday.

Garland pitched seven strong innings to lead the Chicago White Sox to a 3-1 victory over the Royals in the rubber match of a three-game series.

Garland (6-5), who yielded just one unearned run and seven hits with four strikeouts, ran his lifetime record against the Royals to 15-5.

"I'd love to have that every time," Garland said. "If I had been able to focus like this, it might have helped me win a few more games early in the season."

The 27-year-old righthander has won four straight and eight of his last nine decisions against the American League Central Division foe.

"Anytime you can give your team consistency and win games in the division, that's huge," Garland said. "I don't know why I've done that well against them. Maybe it's because I get to pitch against them more than other teams and I know their players better, so I can make key adjustments."

After Kansas City scratched out an unearned run in the first inning, Garland settled down to retire 10 of the next 11 batters.

"He threw the ball really well," White Sox Manager Ozzie Guillen said. "He was really effective with his fastball and made some big pitches."

Garland worked ahead in the count all day, throwing first-pitch strikes to 26 of 29 batters faced.

"This shows what you can do when you bear down and work hard to every batter," Garland said.

"When Garland is on, he's going to be tough on anybody," Royals manager Buddy Bell said. "I don't think he was in the middle of the plate hardly ever."

Garland escaped his most difficult jam in the seventh when he deflected Esteban German's bases-loaded liner to shortstop Alex Cintron, who threw out German to end the inning.

"I like to think I'm a good fielding pitcher," Garland said. "It was huge and Alex stayed with it and made a good play. If he's safe they score two. That's a tie ballgame."

"I thought it got through," German said. "I hit the ball good, but he just got a glove on it."

Boone Logan pitched a perfect eighth and Bobby Jenks slammed the door in the ninth to record his 22nd save of the season.

"It's been my goal since the start of the season to close out every opportunity," Jenks said.

After getting runners into scoring position but failing to score in each of the first three innings, the White Sox broke through for a pair of runs in the fourth to chase Royals starter John Thomson (1-1) from the game. Josh Fields hit an RBI double to left and later scored on Andy Gonzalez's two-out infield single to take a 2-1 lead.

"We should have scored some more runs early in the game," Guillen said. "But we kept swinging. We know we can make it happen."

Paul Konerko led off the fifth inning with his team-leading 15th home run to extend Chicago's advantage to 3-1. Konerko reached base safely four times, drawing two walks and hitting a double in the seventh.

"Leading off the inning I figured he would try to lead me off with a fastball and I just tried to be ready," Konerko said.

Thomson pitched just 3 2/3 innings, allowing two runs and seven hits with three walks and three strikeouts.

"His (lack of control) was basically it," Bell said. "It was completely different than his first outing, when he was completely efficient, when he threw 80 (81 total pitches) for seven innings. He just threw too much pitches. We expect J.T. to give us more than four innings."

"It was an uphill battle all day," Thomson said. "I was more-or- less getting behind in counts. I don't think any of my pitches had the movement that they had six days ago."

Kansas City took an early lead when Alex Gordon's base hit plated David DeJesus, who reached base on Cinton's fielding error, in the opening frame.

"We had a few opportunities," Bell said. "We should be able to take advantage of even getting a ground ball to get in a run. Hopefully, we'll be better the second half in situational hitting."

The White Sox finished the road trip with six wins in seven games.

"This was important for us to win this series and to finish the road trip like this," Konerko said. "It was a good trip. Winning six out of seven usually is pretty good. We dug ourselves a hole early on and kind of hit rock bottom last weekend. It couldn't get any worse, so there was only one way to go from there."

"It was a pretty good job by everyone," Guillen said. "Hopefully this little run will last a long time."