MLB: Chicago White Sox at Detroit Tigers

White Sox 8, Marlins 7: There Are Non-Shields Positives Here

The White Sox have killed their own season and they are now they are inflicting serious wounds on the Marlins’ Wild Card hopes.  In the process, we gained another datapoint in the “James Shields‘ career is over but for his contract” column.

–The Marlins certainly had the edge on paper this evening.  Adam Conley has followed up his promising rookie season with another yeomanlike sophomore effort, generally outperforming his peripherals to function as a good back-end starter.  Shields, on the other hand, has returned to his Worst Pitcher In The History of the Universe version of himself that was briefly masked by absurd luck, and he kept on doing that tonight as well.

Both pitchers wound up getting rocked.

–The White Sox offense showed up with a complete attack, pairing ten hits–five of the extra base variety–with seven walks.  Jason Coats raised his OPS 200 points in tonight’s game, including his first career home run, crushing a low-and-inside offspeed offering to left field.  Tim Anderson also had a multi-hit game and even threw in his fifth career walk for good measure.

–Shields is down to a 90mph on his fastball.  What’s more, after being staked a 4-0 lead, he got absolutely pummeled, getting abused on curveballs, change ups, and fastballs alike.  Over three innings he allowed ten hits, walked two, and struck out none.  None!

Even when Shields was going well there was no basis for it.  His command is gone, there’s no life on his stuff, his velocity is down…He’s basically where Mat Latos and John Danks were at when the White Sox unceremoniously dumped them into a landfill.  The problem is there’s no way he exercises his opt out after this season, given that his ERA keeps climbing toward 6.00 and his K/9 keeps plummeting toward 4.

$10 million owed in 2017, another $10 million in 2018, and then a $2 million buyout in 2019.

A morbid individual might compile the dead money the White Sox have paid to underwater, unusable players and compare it to legitimate free agents they’ve signed in recent years.  Perversely, the best “hope” is that there’s some sort of underlying injury that has yet to be discovered which is the cause of his ineffectiveness, rather than just being completely done, and perhaps if it is corrected Shields can recover something of his excellent career.

–The bullpen is basically built to destroy the team’s pythagorean record already.  Nate Jones and David Robertson are the Good Relievers that are used when the team is up, and with Zach Duke gone, there’s nothing else besides the long shot projects, the raw prospects, and the scrubs behind them.  Somehow, after Shields bombed out after three innings, the lesser arms managed to throw four shut out innings, which bought time for the offense to rally and allowed Ventura to deploy Jones and Robertson after all.  Jones has now thrown ten straight innings without an earned run with a 12:1 K:BB ratio over that span.

And hey! Chris Beck got his first major league win after picking a really good time to get four outs without allowing a baserunner.  In essence, other than Shields getting annihilated, the White Sox excelled tonight, and managed to scrape a win out against a good team regardless.  They will roll out Chris Sale tomorrow to try to complete the sweep.

Lead Image Credit: Rick Osentoski // USA Today Sport Images

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