With a promising start having led into an actually good one, Clay Buchholz will take the mound Monday night looking to prove his resurgence is for real against the White Sox.
Neither game was exactly dominant, but after allowing three runs in the second inning of his first game back from the disabled list, Buchholz has now fired off 11.2 innings of two-run baseball, striking out just four, but walking not a single batter and most importantly of all managing to throw strikes with some finesse, rather than simply lobbing easy targets over the middle.
Ideally, against a strikeout-heavy Chicago lineup, we'd see him miss a few more bats along the way. When his changeup is on--and it's perhaps the absence of that changeup more than anything else that left Buchholz so vulnerable in the first two months of the season--it's the kind of pitch that makes batters look bad when they swing, not when they take. But after the way his season started, even a solid-if-uninspiring outing would be a reassurance that, regardless of what Buchholz we have now, the 6.50 ERA disaster is in the past.
First pitch is at 7:10 p.m. ET with broadcasts on NESN and WEEI.