Chris Sale was not at his absolute, truly, very best. Behind his huge strikeout total, his fastball command wavered throughout, his home run problems returned, and aaaaaaalllllll of this is pointless nitpicking since the Sox offense could do nothing at all against Ian Kennedy and the Royals.
1. Absolutely nothing, complete bupkus. Sox bats managed a single hit on Kennedy over his six, lively but erratic shutout innings. Poetically, beautifully, this single hit came from leadoff man Adam Eaton in the first inning. Eaton was caught leaning to second by Kennedy with two outs, and was picked off first to end the frame, as Robin Ventura declined Eaton’s request for a review.
2. Kennedy’s fastball doesn’t have plus-plus velocity, but as Jason Benetti noted many times, he misses bats with it in the regardless. So much so that even when he walked the bases loaded all by himself in the third inning, he was still able to weave out of it, whiffing Eaton, and running a heater up the ladder to Melky Cabrera on full count that he could only pop up to medium-right. The 38-pitch third restricted Kennedy to six innings, but it’s not like the Sox were on the cusp of squaring him up at any point.
3. Royals closer Wade Davis danced with fire–played with fire? courted fire? canoodled with fire?–for the second-straight day in the ninth inning. Eaton led off the inning with his and the White Sox second hit of the afternoon, and a one-out walk to Cabrera meant that Davis had to cut through the heart of the Sox order again with the tying runs on base, but he, uh, did that.
Jose Abreu, returned again to his previously-held status of a minor god wielding a stick, worked a fine at-bat and cracked a liner to right, but a liner that found Whit Merrifield‘s glove easily (the Royals can’t even figure out where to put all their mediocre-to-bad second baseman, for shame). Justin Morneau stepped in and got vaporized again to close the game for, again, the second-straight time. It’s still cool that he’s feeling good enough to play, even when he’s getting annihilated.
4. For the most part, Sale was masterful. In a year where he has forced observers to adjust to a new pitch-to-contact style, that was cast aside Sunday, and cast aside against a contact-oriented, if not still contact-elite Royals lineup. Sale struck out 12 and walked just one over eight innings–his fifth-straight eight-inning outing–and flashed his changeup like it never left. When the fifth inning started with a Cheslor Cuthbert single and Alcides Escobar being hit by a pitch, Sale powered up and struck out the side. When Escobar led off the seventh with a double to the wall in left-center, and Christian Colon pushed him to third with a single and no one out, Sale struck out Merrifield with a diving change, and Todd Frazier turned a hard-hit Paulo Orlando grounder into an inning-ending double play.
5. The two marks against Sale were a pair of solo home runs from Kendrys Morales to lead off the second, and Eric Hosmer to lead off the sixth. Both were seemingly first-pitch fastballs trying to get inside–Sale’s pitch to Morales clocked in at 89 mph, so who knows what it was–and both were deep fly balls that squeezed their way out without being absolutely crushed.
How do we think of these pitches? Both Morales and Hosmer are men who get a lot of money to hit balls hard, and are smart enough to know that early opportunities to jump on Sale when he’s not up to his worst tricks are not to be wasted. But for someone who flaunts so much mastery of his craft, of his domain, how do we even process such mistakes, even ones as forgivable as these? There’s almost a temptation to consider them part of the plan, as if two runs were a tax Sale knew he had to pay to fly through a major league lineup for eight innings time and again. Someone as great and as purposeful as Sale, his mistakes eventually become more interesting.
Sale has 205 strikeouts over 201.2 innings with a 3.03 ERA in 28 starts now. If he gets anything for this season, or simply for what he’s worked to accomplish for the last five years, it’s earned.
Team Record: 68-74
Next game is Monday vs. Cleveland at 7:10pm CT on WGN
Lead Image Credit: David Banks // USA Today Sports Images