Last off season, the Chicago White Sox traded away one of their (I thought) best utility players in Ross Gload to Kansas City in exchange for relief pitcher Andrew Sisco.

The move was a basic get-me-some-pitching trade on behalf of the Sox. As you may recall, the bullpen was the only part of the Chicago team that passed with flying colors in our off season testing.

Anyway, Gload was great. He was the second coming of Tony Graffanino, another super-sub that at one point was dubbed the boss-man’s favorite player (ironically, Graffanino was also traded away to the Royals).

For Sisco, the move way from KC came as a relief. Recently, he took the time to share some of his … uhm… “fond” memories of getting a shot to play in the majors in KC:

”It was always hard for me to be there,” Sisco said of the constant losing. ”And I don’t care what anyone said — if you didn’t think that way, you were being unrealistic. There’s always that few that would say, ‘This is our year.’ No, no. Especially when we didn’t make a move to change our personnel and were the same team.

Well that’s not necessarily surprising. We all know the Royals strive to hover around 60 or 70 wins a year. But Sisco has a bone to pick with the owners.

”I like being on a team that likes to win, plays together. It makes it kind of hard when you didn’t have a chance day in and day out. I don’t even blame it on any one person on the team. I blame it on management. They’re not putting the best product on the field. They’re making plenty of money in the collective-bargaining agreement and in turn not putting it into the product they put on the field.”

Sisco, 24, said a main reason no one speaks out is that the Royals’ roster is typically made up of young players.

”My first year, I was just trying to establish myself and get my feet in the door,” he said. ”But by the second year, you kind of have an idea of what’s going on and start thinking about what we should be doing and could be doing.

We all know where Sisco is coming from. A group of monkeys could run the Royals better than whoever is in charge over there now. But I’m not sure that bashing your old team is cool. Imagine Johnny Damon, or Carlos Beltran, or even Jermaine Dye saying all this. Kids these days just don’t earn their stripes (you know, if the Royals wore stripes).

Now that Sisco is back in town for a two-game series, the Royals will have a chance to put him in his place. Though, more likely, he’ll dominate the lowly Royals hitters and receive only a mild reaction from the fans.

Daisuke Matsuzaka will start for the Sox in today’s game against the Yankees. No doubt it will give the talking heads yet another opportunity to debate the existence of the gyroball, Matsuzaka’s mythical pitch.

Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci says the gyroball is just a myth, but I know he’s wrong. All he’s got to back up his argument is interviews with Sox players and coaches. I’ve got science on my side. Or, more specifically, I’ve got the Science Guy.

That’s right, Bill Nye the Science Guy says the gyroball not only exists, but it is wicked nasty. Actually, Nye says the gyroball has been around for a long time. It’s just that, until Matsuzaka, nobody has been able to throw it with any velocity.

From MSN.com:

In a sense, this gyroball thing is nothing new. In New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A., back in 1870 (as I mentioned in an earlier column), a guy named Freddy Goldsmith threw a curveball that was flat–not dropping or sinking. He threw a ball past three rods set up in a row. It passed to the left of the first rod, to the right of the second, and to the left of the third. This was before reliable video technology. He must have held the ball with his palm almost facing the sky. The thing is, when you throw a curveball like that, it goes too slowly. Modern batters have time to react and can crush it. Similarly, when most of us non-big leaguers try to throw a gyroball, a pitch with nothing but sidespin, we just can’t get enough push on it to make it go fast enough to fool a batter.

At any rate, the key to this seems to be that Matsuzaka is some kind of smooth athlete. He can throw with his wrist going all different directions and not ruin his muscles and ligaments in the process, at least so far. He’s just good at it.

So there you have it. The Science Guy says the gyroball is real. Are you going to argue with science?