1. Less than two weeks ago, our Cat Garcia profiled how much of the White Sox flat-out shocking April dominance was due to a bullpen that was pacing all of baseball in run prevention. Less than two weeks later, I’m here to look back on a week with back-to-back series losses, where the easiest culprit to identify would be the bullpen that checked in with a 8.59 ERA over six games. Though, after they gave up seven earned over five outs on Tuesday night in Texas, they were never going to look good.
Optimistically, the White Sox bullpen pre-season looked like it should be a solid unit, maybe even an above-average one. They boasted two bonafide late-inning studs (David Robertson, Nate Jones), a really shaky and wacky lefty situation (Zach Duke has developed traditional LOOGY splits since arriving here, Dan Jennings still lacks them), and a collection of right-handed sinker/splitter specialists who could be good or could spend time in Charlotte depending how their command treated them (Jake Petricka, Zach Putnam, Matt Albers). Regression from ‘Best in baseball’ was due.
Most emblematic of this is Albers, who went from magically ducking runs like a cat, to taking two losses in a week, and not by fluke, either. Now that his scoreless streak is over, the fact that his metrics (109 cFIP, 4.90 DRA) have him performing right in line with his pedestrian 4.14 career ERA make his new place as the primary seventh inning guy a little nerve wracking. A 15.9 percent strikeout rate without even his typically good groundball tendencies requires a lot of faith that he’s discovered a new path to effectiveness at age 33. Of course, he stole this role very deservedly from Petricka, and save for perhaps Putnam’s curiously low place on the totem pole, there’s not a super-qualified member of the staff ready to push Albers out.
Non team-altering, but functionally important questions like ‘who is the third-best reliever?’ are what this team is going to have to address as the standard raises from what is good enough to begin the season with, and what is good enough to sustain a playoff run with.
2. Two starts in a row with the fifth starter looking viable was just too many for the White Sox to sustain. Walking five and striking out one over 4.2 innings Sunday, Miguel Gonzalez showed how fine the line between a right-hander with a fringey fastball but decent swing-and-miss breaking stuff and a guy who walks the park because he can’t nail the corners.
Someone with poor command like Gonzalez being ill-served by a pairing with poor framers like Alex Avila and Dioner Navarro fits Mr. Musary’s theory, but the Sox are not going to happen upon someone with a big fastball on the waiver wire. Even with a trade, someone without the ability to miss bats in the zone reliably is going to need to be able to survive. Six innings would be nice, for once.
3. With three more hits Sunday, Avisail Garcia is at .269/.339/.454, but his success is becoming decidedly less power-based and more BABIP-heavy of recent. He ripped a Masahiro Tanaka fastball to left field for his one extra-base hit Sunday, but he also was at his most swing-happy and hyper-aggressive (seven pitches seen in four PA, and one of those was a three-pitch strikeout), and it’s pretty easy to map out how his opportunities for pitches to drive will dry up through this route.
For now, he’s holding on, and the White Sox offense’s pedestrian-seeming 106 OPS+ is fourth-best in the American League (helped by Todd Frazier’s 50+ home run pace), and they improbably don’t seem like the team unit that needs immediate fortifying.
4. Jose Abreu is having the most low key offensive revival this month. For May alone, he’s hitting .283/.371/.491 with a strikeout rate under 20 percent. If you had not bothered to check his stats this month until now and pegged him for an OPS over .860, you are a more observant and incisive viewer than myself. Thanks to two missiles dying at the warning track Tuesday night in Texas, Abreu has an underwhelming two home runs this month, and is somehow already seven bombs behind team leader, Todd Frazier.
Chalk it up to first impressions. Abreu emerged on the scene as someone who seemed over-aggressive in every way, but hit too many home runs for it to matter, famously clubbing 29 home runs in 82 games during the first half of his rookie season, so now, even that he’s being productive in other ways, he doesn’t look right. As a defense, Robin Ventura mentioned that Abreu is being pitched differently these days.
There’s at least a strong hint here that Abreu is being jammed more frequently now, since the first instinct with a right-handed power hitter is to stay out of the pull zone, and now a league adjustment may be at hand (as just staying away didn’t work). Now Abreu has shown himself to be an odd bird, who never really keyholes on part of the zone the way someone like prime pull-happy Jose Bautista did. He chases all over, which heightens the sense that he’s not locked in. Of course, how he did not hammer the hanger Tanaka threw him in the fifth Sunday is beyond me. Not right, but not broken is a good way to classify him right now.
5. With Abreu’s continued absence from the offensive peaks that marked his 2014 campaign, and the defensive breakthrough that Adam Eaton has enjoyed in right field–doomed backpedal during Saturday’s loss aside–the latter has emerged as clearly the best positional player on the team.
Ideal leadoff men, who pair speed on defense and the basepaths with on-base skills always typically rate as more valuable than slugging first base/DH types, but the White Sox’ struggles to find anyone who can provide solidly above-average offense has made the idea of sluggers being replaceable a strange concept on the south side. But there is simply no one on the team producing at Eaton’s level with the bat. His 133 OPS+ paces the club, he’s flirting with a .400 OBP/.400 SLG season (.303/.396/.421) and he is one of 11 qualified hitters in all of baseball with more walks than strikeouts.
If the Sox don’t collapse egregiously in the next few weeks, Eaton should earn his first All-Star Game appearance.
Lead Image Credit: Anthony Gruppuso // USA Today Sports Images
Please tell me the Sox will at least try and fix the bullpen and fifth starter!!!!!Cmon Jerry spend the money