White Sox paying price for taxing relievers to cover for starters

At this point in the season, it feels like Will Venable is competing in a particularly deranged cooking show, with the White Sox roster providing him a set of ingredients that is designed solely to torment.

You have to win a nine-inning ballgame at least six times over the next 10 games. Your starting pitchers can't go five, your multi-inning relievers aren't a great bet to deliver more than three outs anymore, and your homer-based offense is 25th in the league in September. Your time starts now. Good luck.

Venable might have run afoul of the Septimo Principle -- using a pitcher who wouldn't normally be rostered well before it was necessary in a crucial September game -- by having Chris Murphy open against the Guardians on Tuesday. But the White Sox were still one strike away from winning that game, and watching his three best relievers all lose their grips in their second inning of work reinforced the notion that Venable is going to have to get scoreless innings from unlikely sources the rest of the way.

The concurrent struggles of Sean Newcomb and Grant Taylor are a particularly demonic twist at this point in the season. Newcomb is either running out of gas or wearing a "KICK ME, REGRESSION" sign on his back. After posting a 0.00 ERA over 18⅓ innings in August, he's been scored upon in five of six September. Opponents are hitting .394/.487/.545 against him over this stretch. Meanwhile, Taylor has been scored upon in four consecutive outings, flummoxed by an increasing walk rate and harder exit velocities on his strikes.

The tough part is that either pitcher had often been doing the work of two guys in high-leverage situations of winnable games, which had effectively covered for a starting rotation that struggled to take care of even the first half of an evening. It's one thing for Venable to pull Anthony Kay after four innings before any signs of strife because he'd been getting rocked the third time through, but that puts all the stress on the back end of the bullpen to deliver, and they've been crumbling under the extra responsibilities.

At this point, I don't think Venable can assume he's getting two innings from either Newcomb or Taylor, which means that he's going to have to try to get more from other sources beforehand. I'm looking at four in particular:

David Sandlin: Between Charlotte and Chicago, he's thrown 6, 7, 5⅔ and 5 ⅔ innings his last four times out, with a Colson Montgomery error subverting his chance of throwing six scoreless against St. Louis his last time out. He's a rookie at the end of an up-and-down season, but he might be the White Sox's second-best starter, so if he doesn't stumble out of the gate, they can let him push toward quality starts.

Hagen Smith: Venable said the choice to send Smith out for a second inning on Wednesday was the one they debated most, because he'd been throwing two innings every other day, and were courting the risk of wearing him out.

They might want to back off a pace that extrapolates to 162 relief innings over the course of a full season, but given how good he'd been up until that second inning on Wednesday, he's probably the best bet for two scoreless innings to pair with a starter who isn't going to go a third time through. It just might require making him unavailable the game before.

Noah Schultz: Using Schultz is one way to do that. He threw two scoreless innings to close out Wednesday's loss on just 18 pitches, and most of his innings looked like that in Charlotte the past month as well. He's subject to contact luck in a way that Smith isn't, but when Schultz is pounding the zone and not creating his own trouble, he's a decent source for the kind of unexpected second inning that Newcomb had been providing.

Jordan Hicks: He went through a rough patch at the end of April, but he's allowed just a hit and a walk while striking out six over his last three innings, whcih have been spread out over four appearances spanning 15 days. Maybe leaning on him just leads to getting burned again, but if Taylor is overtaxed, then Hicks is the best bet to pick up the burden from the right side.

Relying on these guys for that one extra inning might backfire just the same, but the choices would be defensible, at least assuming they're as rested as September will allow them to be. The reality is until the offense starts hitting the ball out of the park again and creating the good kind of low-leverage situations, most potential pitching decisions are going to be unappetizing.