DETROIT -- There are two sides to every baseball game, and thus two options for a sentence that encapsulates how things went for the White Sox in their supporting role in the Tigers' home opener.
You can choose between:
Jonathan Cannon is still seeking his first 1-2-3 inning of the season.
OR
Five of the last eight White Sox runs have been driven in by Brooks Baldwin, which might be kind of cool if it didn't stretch across a three-game span.
At an earlier portion of the game, after the first of Detroit slugger Kerry Carpenter's two solo homers on the afternoon, we were still workshopping Kerry Carpenter has hit the last two pitches he's seen from Cannon over the fence as an option. And while hard contact ultimately hasn't been Cannon's bugaboo over his first two starts, the extra labor that comes with putting five extra baserunners aboard over 3 2/3 innings (three walks, two hit batters) demonstrated why pitchers tend to romanticize dying inside the strike zone.
After escaping a second inning taste with danger of a two-out walk to Justyn-Henry Malloy to bring up Carpenter with two runners on, Cannon lost control of his cutter to build a deeper jam in the third. The semantic detail of hitting Spencer Torkelson with ball four is all that stood between him and back-to-back one out walks, and Zach McKinstry driving a hard grounder past a diving Lenyn Sosa followed by a slow-enough Dillon Dingler chopper to third was enough to plate them both, and a build a 3-1 Tigers lead that would undergo more lengthening than contracting on the afternoon.
"Today obviously falls on me," Cannon said. "I did not put us in a good position to win the game today. It's tough when you fall behind out there in the field, playing defense for forever. It's tough to generate offense like that when I'm walking a bunch of guys and they're having to play defense behind me for a long time."
As could become a prevalent theme until one or both Montgomeries (Montgomerii?) are up and running, an opposing right-handed starter glided through the White Sox batting order with liberal slider usage. Technically it was a dirted knuckle curve that Jack Flaherty used to strike out Luis Robert Jr. while stranding a leadoff double from Miguel Vargas in the first, but the general theme held true over his 5 2/3 innings of one-run ball. The right-handed core of the Sox lineup was defanged as Vargas, Robert, Andrew Vaughn and Lenyn Sosa combined to go 2-for-16 with a walk, and the roster lacks the lefty weapons to mount consistent threats when matchups shift the focus onto them.
"The game is not over until the last out," said Vargas, who sprinted to beat out a would-be game-ending double play in the ninth. "We are far from where we want to be. We expect more from us. We are taking good at-bats. I think the result wasn’t there. But I think if we can keep doing that, we are going to have good results."
The lone Sox run off Flaherty came when Matt Thaiss won a nine-pitch war to draw a two-out walk in the second, and improbably scored when Baldwin lifted a double over Carpenter's head in left, with Dingler mishandling the relay throw to reward a YOLO send from third base Justin Jirschele. Travis Jankowski followed it by striking out on four pitches to end the inning, so fair enough, Jirsch.
Figuring out the back end of the Sox bullpen is work enough at this point, so how they go about covering 4 1/3 innings while behind on the scoreboard is bound to have some speed bumps. Brandon Eisert came in to get the final out of the fourth and allowed three-straight hits instead, recording as many outs (4) as hits allowed to fellow lefties before giving way to Bryse Wilson's first multi-inning work of the year.
Maybe the Sox have lost three-straight. Maybe they went from first in the AL Central to last place in a matter of hours. But they did keep their swingman stretched out, which isn't irrelevant after back-to-back starting pitchers didn't get through the fifth.
Bullet points:
*AJ Hinch tried to finish off the afternoon with two Kenta Maeda innings. That along with defensive replacement Ryan Kreidler misplaying a Korey Lee drive to center into an RBI double opened the door for a ninth inning three-spot that mostly served to make the box score less garish.
*Wilson threw a 3-1 cutter to Riley Greene that's still going, but was otherwise unscored upon over his three innings and struck out five.
*Robert is an easy target for small sample overreactions, but if you told someone that the Sox aren't scoring, his 4-for-25, 9 K start is an easy place to focus, especially when he struck out to end the fun in the ninth.
"A good swing today, hit that ball really hard," said Will Venable, referring to Robert's lineout to left in the sixth. "He's going to continue to work and put balls in play hard. Maybe the last couple games he hasn't had the results, but his process has been good. He's been working really hard, and it's going to happen for him here soon."
*The good news is the Sox only need to go 19-61 to best last year's road record.
