Danks Perfect For Five, Burres Great For Eight

While Tom Gorzelanny may have had a no-hitter through 4+ innings on Thursday, John Danks threw five perfect innings this afternoon before his bid at history came to an end. Two major roadblocks stood in the way of a potential perfect game coinciding in the form of Brian Burres completely shutting down the White Sox offense. Burres went eight innings, giving up three hits and no walks, while striking out four en route to his third win of the season. He threw 98 pitches, two-thirds of which were strikes. Danks lost the perfect game but still had a very effective outing, lasting 6.1 innings while giving up just four hits; he did not walk a batter and struck out four. Of his 92 pitches, 64 were strikes (69.5%). The game looked completely even through the first five frames as evident by the steady polygraph pace in the game graph:

After five innings, no runs had scored, nobody had been walked, and the only two hits had been singles off the bats of Jim Thome and Carlos Quentin. Danks quickly lost his perfect game and no-hitter when Adam Jones singled to start the sixth inning. Jones swiped second base and came around to score on Guillero Quiroz’s first major league home run. A tad rattled, Danks gave up a single to Luis Hernandez; after giving up nothing for five innings he surrendered three consecutive hits. He settled down after the Hernandez at-bat, though, retiring Brian Roberts, Melvin Mora, and Nick Markakis. Heading into the bottom of the sixth the Orioles had staked Burres to a 2-0 lead.

A Toby Hall single in the bottom of the sixth broke Burres’s streak of 12 consecutive batters retired but he would not allow another runner to reach base for the rest of his time on the mound. After inducing a Juan Uribe groundout to the end the eighth inning his day came to an end. The Orioles provided three insurance runs in the top of the ninth off of Octavio Dotel before Matt Albers and George Sherrill closed the game out in the bottom half of the inning. Though the White Sox did score a run on a bases loaded hit by pitch from Carlos Quentin, it was too little, too late. Joe Crede flied out to end the game as the Orioles won 5-1.

Coming into this start, Burres’s numbers (2-1, 3.63 ERA) were a bit deceiving, as his K/9, BB/9, K/BB, BAA, and WHIP were all below the league average. In fact, he had a K/BB of just 0.90, surrendering 10 walks to go along with just nine punchouts. This helped to translate his 3.63 ERA into a 4.82 WHIP. Despite all of these below average rates he completely dominated a first-place offense simultaneously bringing the Orioles into a first-place tie with the Red Sox.