After Reynaldo Lopez said the White Sox were playing like "clowns" last week, some of his teammates quibbled with how he aired it, but nobody argued Lopez's point.
The Sox responded with a respectable split against Oakland, and Carlos Rodon provided the capper with eight innings of two-run ball.
For this week's column in The Athletic, I wrote about Rodon, who is one of the few White Sox pitchers built to win now. His larger purpose in the rebuild remains to be seen, but he's tasked with being Not A Clown in the interim.
Even though Rodón hasn’t regained all his powers, he still possesses the ability to punch himself off the ropes, and he stranded those runners at second and third with an array of better pitches. Rodón couldn’t find “in and off the plate” to Barreto, but he found it against Marcus Semien, who grounded into an unproductive 5-3. He found it against Chad Pinder, setting him up for a strikeout on 97-mph high heat. He found it against Jed Lowrie, severing his thumbs with a slider for an inning-ending pop-out to Yoán Moncada.
Rodón kept the deficit to 2-0, the White Sox answered with five runs in the bottom of the fifth, and Rodon cruised to his first victory of the year.
It’s unfair to expect López or Lucas Giolito to have Rodón’s stuff or confidence at this stage in their careers, but at least they can see how a pitcher can regain control of the circumstances no matter what happened before. Ignoring previous damage is going to be a big part of the next nine baseball months.
Spare Parts
I was with Rick Renteria for most of this paragraph:
“I think his jumps over the last month, maybe six weeks, have really gotten better and back to the (Engel) everybody saw,” manager Rick Renteria said. “He really has been getting off the ball very, very well, running down some difficult plays and continues to improve with the bat.”
Except for that drop he had on the warning track against Cleveland -- a tough catch, but one a guy hitting .211 needs to make -- he's back to covering the kind of ground that made him a Statcast sensation last year. But yeah, he's still hitting .211, and the Sox now have somebody who can challenge him for that spot in ...
... Charlie Tilson, whose hit tool is helping him stay afloat (.280/.341/.317). Grounders and opposite-field shanks don't seem like a recipe for sustainable success, although a speedy lefty should have an above-average BABIP on his side. I still want to see what he looks like in center.
The White Sox just missed him, but the indefatigable Edwin Jackson resurfaced in the majors with the Oakland A's. In the process, he tied Octavio Dotel's record by pitching for his 13th team. He threw six innings of one-run ball against the Tigers, although the no-decision means he's still stuck on 98 wins.
Looking at Jackson's lengthy Baseball-Reference.com page, the White Sox may have gotten his best work.
The fact that the A's beat the Tigers after digging up Jackson supports what this headline posits. It's not an artfully written piece, but the key point is that the division is projected to lose 88 games more than it'll win, which would be a record in the six-division era, and by a large margin.
Two things I learned from Grant Brisbee's weekly column:
1) Rangers third baseman Isaiah Kiner-Falefa is catching, too, and he almost killed Jake Diekman when he threw out his first runner. (Diekman didn't realize it was the 27th out afterward, either.)
2) Former Kansas City manager Trey Hillman has this hair now.
