ST. PETERSBURG -- It wasn't mechanics or anything physical. It wasn't his game plan or anything in how he approached the hitters.
Chicago starting pitcher Jose Quintana just needed a little bit of self-assurance.
"I threw a lot of fastballs today and I had confidence in all my pitches," Quintana said. "I needed this outing to be better than the last ones and to get the 'W' for my team."
After the worst two-game stretch of his career, Quintana looked like a confident ace again in the White Sox 4-2 win at Tropicana Field on Tuesday. Quintana allowed just one earned run on four hits over 5 1/3 innings. He struck out seven and walked four.
The results were much better than Quintana's two previous outings when he gave up 15 runs on 18 hits in seven innings, including a 10-hit, seven-run shellacking by the Red Sox in his last start. Quintana didn't make it out of the third inning.
"His mindset has been consistently the same, to be honest, the whole way through," White Sox manager Rick Renteria said. "I think the confidence he showed today in high leverage situations and throughout the ballgame actually was kind of vintage 'Q'.
"Hopefully it's a good game for him to kind of build on and keep moving forward."
"I never changed my approach but I definitely threw the ball more on the corners, especially with the fastball," Quintana said of his bounce-back performance.
Quintana's lone earned run against the Rays came on an RBI single by Evan Longoria in the bottom of the first. He put up zeros the rest of the way, including working out of a jam in the bottom of the fifth when he struck out Logan Morrison with the bases loaded to end the inning.

"He turned it up a notch," Renteria said. "He gave us a great outing as far as I'm concerned. He gave us a lot of heart and a lot of 'stick-to-it-iveness' so to speak."
Quintana, with his pitch count already into triple-digits, got into another jam to start the sixth but was bailed out by reliever Chris Beck, who stranded the go-ahead run at third.

Besides a leadoff home run by Chicago second baseman Yolmer Sanchez, Chicago's offense couldn't get anything going against Rays starter Chris Archer which led to a 1-1 tie when Quintana left the game. It was the 62nd no-decision of Quintana's career since 2012, the most by any pitcher during that span.
"We tried to score a couple so he could feel good on the mound and not have a lot of pressure," Sanchez said. "Jose's always been good. A lot of people go through tough times but he's going to be good."