And amazingly, that happened

It took Sean O'Sullivan 24 starts in his career before he had an outing where he didn't yield a run, then today in his 25th, he did it again. Before this morning I had completely forgotten that he ended the 2010 season with three consecutive quality starts, ugly as they were (13 walks, 7 K's) he somehow only gave up only 3 runs in 18 innings.

Date	Opp	Rslt	IP	H	R	ER	BB	SO
2010-09-23	CLE	W 4-2	6.0	4	2	2	4	3
2010-09-28	MIN	W 10-1	6.0	5	1	1	6	1
2010-10-03	TBR	L 2-3	6.0	2	0	0	3	3

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So I guess today's start shouldn't have come as a complete surprise, except of course, it did. O'Sullivan was dreadful in spring training (12 IP, 8 ER) and so utterly unimpressive in his first two appearances (4 IP, 5 ER) this year that the thought of him in the rotation irritated me immensely. Then he pitched 5 shutout innings and all was momentarily forgiven, that he did it against a team that might be the worst in baseball takes some of the shine off it unfortunately.

It doesn't seem quite fair that this start falls in the serviceable category but calling it an almost quality start seems hollow. And again it was against the Mariners, so there's that.