While people are welcome to digest baseball however they please — it is, after all, entertainment — there was nothing wrong with how Renteria managed*, and there was absolutely nothing surprising about the game’s outcome.  The White Sox have traded away David Robertson, Tommy Kahnle, Dan Jennings, and Anthony Swarzak.  They’ve lost Zach Putnam, Nate Jones, and Michael Ynoa to the disabled list.  They even traded away Tyler Clippard!

*As easy as it is to roll one’s eyes at a manager aggressively playing matchups, particularly in a lost season, Aaron Bummer is potentially a long-term bullpen piece and he’s going to need to learn how to come in to face elite lefties like that.

In other words, 100 percent of the current bullpen is comprised of backups.  Other than Petricka, these were options 9-16 heading into the season.  So while the White Sox entered the year with a surprisingly excellent relief corps — a group much better than a number of teams that currently have vice-like grips on playoff spots — it has been razed in exchange for minor league talent.

It’s impressive that Rick Hahn & Co. got as much as they did for what they had, packaging Robertson and Kahnle together with Todd Frazier — a rental bat whose value was increasingly in question given the returns for similar players at this deadline — to get a Top 100 prospect in Blake Rutherford.  Even Jennings and Swarzak got flipped for potential future contributors.

But games like Wednesday are the cost of those trades.  Jennings and Clippard are hardly Andrew Miller and Craig Kimbrel, but on most nights they can get you three outs before surrendering two runs.  They’re competent major leaguers.  The relievers left in the current White Sox bullpen are either hoping to be as good as Jennings and Clippard some day or are stop gaps to get through the rest of the year. Factor in the Dodgers lineup and you’re going to get games like Wednesday, and there are going to be lots of games like Wednesday between now and the end of the year.

The triumph, rather, was that Carlos Rodon has now rattled off four straight quality starts while pitching against Cleveland, Boston, Houston, and the Dodgers — the last two opponents featuring the two best TAv’s in all of baseball.  Across those outings, he has thrown 29.67 innings with 28 strikeouts while only allowing 26 hits, 7 runs, and 6 walks.  On the down side, he did pop up two bunts, so perhaps it makes more sense to just let him swing away during his rare interleague road games.

The triumph was that Nicky Delmonico continued his blistering major league debut with two more home runs, raising his line to .396/.463/.625 in his first 54 plate appearances.  The triumph was that Leury Garcia continued his breakout 2017 season with a leadoff home run off Yu Darvish in a 2-for-5 night.

But the games aren’t all going to be the Astros series, where they bludgeoned their opponents, or held them down long enough for Yoan Moncada to perform superlative heroics.  Sometimes Juan Minaya and Jake Petricka and Gregory Infante are going to get shelled, and that’s kind of what they signed up for.

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Robertson isn’t alone in his hot start, although he has more of a track record to suggest it’s meaningful than some other players I’m about to discuss. Behind him, Anthony Swarzak, Tommy Kahnle, and Zach Putnam have combined for 34 Ks against 2 ERs and 3 BBs in 24.67 innings.

Putnam’s start shouldn’t be a surprise at this point. Over the past two seasons he has posted DRAs below 3 mixed between DL stints.  The first 8.67 innings of 2017, in that sense, are the quintessential Putnam experience, as he has a DRA of 0.98 and was just placed on the disabled list with inflammation of the elbow.

Kahnle and Swarzak represent new developments. Swarzak was fringy as a long reliever/spot starter, but is able to dial it up into the mid-to-high 90s in short outings.  While being used in such a capacity he surrendered 10 homers in only 31 innings with the Yankees in 2016, and those issues could still resurface, but a K/BB ratio of 12 does not suggest that his performance to date has been luck driven. And frankly, he has bullied hitters with his fastball in recent outings, with his streak of 18 straight batters retired broken by a weak single on Tuesday night.

Kahnle was acquired for Yency Almonte — which is looking like it might still sting — and was always intriguing if for no other reason than that he throws really, really hard, averaging 97 miles per hour on his fastball last year.  The flaw was obvious, though, given that he walked 20 batters in 27.1 innings while y’know … throwing really hard!

He still hasn’t cracked seven innings this year, but dropping your BB percentage from 16.8 to 3.9 seems like progress.  I’m not going to call him the next Matt Thornton, but there’s no doubt that if he can keep the ball in the zone there’s the very real potential for dominance.

Ironically, with Michael Ynoa hanging in there, Nate Jones is arguably off to the worst start in the bullpen while probably being the best of the bunch. For a rebuilding team, it is weird that the White Sox may profile to have a bunch of really good relievers. But either way, it sure would be nice if they could polish up NRIs like Swarzak into desirable trade commodities to go along with their higher profile chips.

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Buying, at least in the win-now sense, has been off the table for a few weeks now, but selling has been a subject of debate yet again, with many wondering if the White Sox will receive offers significant enough to convince them to part ways with centerpiece pitchers Chris Sale and/or Jose Quintana. Deals involving those two would signal that the franchise is ready for a long-term rebuild.

Likewise, smart people like our own Nick Schaefer make convincing arguments for why the White Sox shouldn’t be sellers, and should instead keep all their important pieces around with an eye toward contending in 2017.

I’m not here to argue which direction is more logical, but regardless of whether or not the White Sox intend to contend in 2017 or go with a long-term rebuild, the one thing the White Sox should absolutely cash-in on this weekend is their bullpen.

Since a hot start that had the unit ranking among the best in all of baseball through the first month-plus, the bullpen has been an unmitigated disaster. Injuries to Zach Putnam and Jake Petricka haven’t helped, but David Robertson is having the worst statistical season of his career, Matt Albers turned into a pumpkin and the hodgepodge of characters used to fill in the holes haven’t done the trick.

Still, teams need bullpen help, and in a market where Lucas Harrell can net a return worth mentioning, surely there would have to be takers on Robertson, Nate Jones and Zach Duke. Maybe even Albers!

Investing a significant amount of money or other assets to build a solid bullpen is always a risky proposition, but it’s one good teams can justify. From a baseball perspective, it made sense for the Cubs to trade for Aroldis Chapman as he could prove vital in their quest to win the World Series.

To teams not in contention, a good and/or expensive bullpen is about as useful as (insert pun about useless things here). [Ed. suggestion: “Hope! Hope is useless”]

The White Sox are paying Robertson $11 million this year, and he’s due $25 million more over the next two seasons. Duke is making $5 million this year and another $5.5 million next season.

In baseball terms, these are not egregious sums of money, but given the fungible nature of relievers and the penny-pinching tendencies of White Sox management, they are sums of money best spent elsewhere. Offloading Robertson and Duke would, conceivably, allow the White Sox to go in the offseason with additional money they can use to improve the club elsewhere while also acquiring young players to help revitalize the farm system.

OR, given the fact that teams may be hesitant to acquire Robertson and the $25 million-plus owed to him, they could eat some of that contract in exchange for an even more highly-regarded prospect or two, something the Sox were not willing to do in 2013 when they ate only $1 million of the ~$25 million owed to Alex Rios in shipping him to Texas for Leury Garcia.

But, you might argue, if they White Sox trade their few good bullpen arms in only a semi-sell off while eyes remain on contention in 2017, how on earth will they be able to contend without anyone worth a damn in the bullpen?

This is a legitimate concern, but, again, relievers are fungible, and the White Sox have a reputation for their keen ability to identify and develop talent in the bullpen. And given their financial limitations, the reward of giving the farm system a jolt and increasing spending flexibility is worth the risk of having to rebuild the bullpen from scratch.

This is not a perfect solution to all the White Sox problems. Maybe a fire sale is worth it, maybe they should stand pat. But, regardless of which direction they go, cashing in on their expensive bullpen arms seems as worthy a venture as any.

Lead photo credit: Mike DiNovo-USA TODAY Sports