About four months after it looked to be path worth pursuing, Rick Renteria and Don Cooper finally gave into the idea of using a predetermined opener to get through a game without a credible major-league starter on Monday. The White Sox have seen the plan executed to perfection against them, but they didn't need those kind of immaculate, glorious results. They just needed competence to cross one more day off the calendar.
How hard could it be?
"Le Opener? What the hell is that?"
Designated opener Carson Fulmer gave up a grand slam after starting the game with two easy outs, Hector Santiago gave up the first of three homers to the first batter he faced, and the White Sox lost to Mike Clevinger and the Indians 11-0 in front of a national audience that quickly found something else to do. In the end, there was no difference between the opener and a Dylan Covey doomscape.
The Sox didn't really follow the instructions from Step One, because that involves a capable reliever. The White Sox instead opened with Fulmer.
There's a use in choosing Fulmer for this job. He retired all seven batters he faced his last time out, and since he'll be out of options next spring, they may as well use this last week of MLB games to give everybody every opportunity to see whether this could work. Letting Fulmer prepare for an outing as a starter (his preferred role) while knowing that he'd only throw an inning at most (the Sox' preference) is a perfect compromise on paper.
It also should've worked in practice. The Indians' lineup was ready for Santiago, so much so that Jordan Luplow, a guy who can't hit righties, was the guy who came to the plate with two on and two outs in the first. That's the kind of awkward lineup construction the opener can create, as it forces a manager to script his first six or seven plays in advance and hope that the matchups will break early. The game tilted in Rick Renteria's favor, such as it was.
Instead, Fulmer walked Luplow on five pitches, and didn't even make him swing the bat. Up came Jose Ramirez, who got into a fastball count at 3-1 and unloaded for the grand slam that sent the game on its miserable way. For those who hadn't seen any of Fulmer's previous 42 MLB appearances, he caught them up in a hurry: a flash of ability, quickly overwhelmed by disaster.
That's one more data point for parting ways with Fulmer next spring should the offseason offer no surprises, so the Sox got something out of it. If the opener crumbled because the White Sox tried to pile another experiment on top of it, you can almost credit the them for a manic episode of ambition.
Less optimistically, if the opener failed because they thought Fulmer was the best guy for it, it's just another area of baseball where the Sox executed poorly and make baseball look a lot harder as a result. And if Fulmer was chosen to sandbag the opener concept so the Sox never have to try it again, I'm ready to rip the mask off that one, Scooby-Doo style.
