White Sox Might Be Staying in the Freddy Garcia Business

Every time Freddy Garcia thinks he's out, the White Sox pull him back in.

Well, maybe. Jon Heyman of SI.com reports that the team is considering bringing Garcia back for the 2011 season, which would make for a really roundabout way of staying put. The team expressed interest in keeping him all the way back at the start of the offseason, Garcia went on to be linked to just about every team with pitching needs (which means just about every team in the big leagues) and now things have come full circle.

The biggest stumbling block for the White Sox, as Heyman mentions, is that they will have one starter too many once Jake Peavy is ready to pitch again. That's not going to be until June at the earliest, however, and that leaves quite a few starts to fill before even taking into account the various anvils that can fall onto the heads of starting pitchers over the course of the season.

Garcia was 12-6 with a 4.64 ERA in 28 starts for the White Sox last season. He threw 157 innings, his heaviest workload since 2006, the final year of his first stint with the Sox. In between he bounced from the Phillies to the Tigers and back to Chicago while throwing only 129 innings over three seasons.

That kind of bounceback year makes Garcia seem like a good bet for the back end of the rotation. It looks like an even better bet when you mix in the Peavy uncertainty and the lack of another surefire rotation option to start the season. And it looks like a true winner when you factor in the way Garcia and the White Sox seem to be drawn together as inexorably as Heathcliff and Catherine on the moors in "Wuthering Heights."

Perhaps that's laying it on a bit too thick, but great love affairs can do that to even the steeliest of baseball writers.