To follow the last weeks of the regular season was to absorb one blow after another, but the offseason has started with an encouraging development: Dane Dunning is throwing without pain.
Dunning's season ended on June 23 after calling for the trainer in the fourth inning during a start where he'd allowed four hits and four walks. James Fegan said Dunning had felt a twinge in his elbow as a normal part of warming up, but the pain went away. On June 23, it didn't go away.
It's not there now:
Right now, Dunning is free of pain. He threw his first full side session Monday, more than 14 weeks after his initial injury, and sprayed 25 fastballs with no issue other than an acceptable lack of command. After a slow and cautious return, the White Sox are determined to get him some innings in instructional league to test out that his elbow responds well to game stress before sending him into a restful offseason.
“He’s bouncing around with a lot of energy and is optimistic that things are moving in the right direction, which they are,” said player development director Chris Getz. “We’ve got it mapped out where certainly we’re going to incorporate all of his pitches and really make sure he’s getting a healthy amount of work so he can comfortably go in the offseason in preparation for next year.”
That's not to say it won't return, and there's the possibility it can come back with a vengeance. But given that Michael Kopech is out until 2020 and Alec Hansen is a mystery, the White Sox could use anything it can get from that caliber of pitching prospect.
In unrelated White Sox news, they outrighted Dustin Garneau to start the 40-man roster pruning. It's now at 39.
Spare Parts
So it appears Javier Baez's attempt to plant the flag before the start the postseason didn't take. Baez tried -- he delivered the game-tying RBI single in the eighth that briefly whipped the crowd into a frenzy -- but the Cubs couldn't score, and that was the story of their season. They posted zero or one runs in 40 games this season.
I participated in the season-ending roundtable at FutureSox, where I had to spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about Gavin Sheets.
The Twins' new front office might've wanted to fire Paul Molitor after an underwhelming first half of 2017, but a late surge and a wild card spot made it difficult. After a disappointing 78-win result this season, Derek Falvey and Thad Levine are going to pick their man.
At least Molitor got Joe Mauer's potential last game right, although the White Sox also get credit for cooperating.
The Dodgers are the latest team whose dealings in the international market have risen above the others into overly egregious. It doesn't help that the evidence accusing Los Angeles of shady operations in Latin America comes from ... the Dodgers themselves. They rated their corruption in an easy-to-read chart:
— One particularly remarkable document shows that Dodgers executives in 2015 went so far as to develop a database that measured the perceived “level of egregious behavior” displayed by 15 of their own employees in Latin America. That is, using a scale of 1 to 5—“innocent bystander” to “criminal”—front-office executives assessed their own staff’s level of corruption. Five employees garnered a “criminal” rating.
