It's time to once again pretend Rick Renteria has an anarchic streak. Take this quote out of context...
'We had a nice run of guys that were going to give us an opportunity,' Sox manager Rick Renteria said. 'We just fell short.'
... and he could very well be talking about the last 10 years of White Sox baseball.
Instead, he's only talking about Wednesday night, which featured another disappointing performance by a White Sox starter, more poor plate appearances with runners in scoring position, resulting in another loss to a rebuilding team that should be in clearly worse shape than the Sox.
Ervin Santana followed Iván Nova with another start of fewer than five innings. Unlike Nova, he found footing as the game went on by throwing sliders most of the time, but he was also doing so against an offense with little to any name-brand talent.
Santana is 0-2 with a 9.45 ERA through three starts, and it's the rare ERA that features a FIP that's just as bad (9.56). That's what you get when combine a 7.8 percent strikeout rate with a 9.4 percent walk rate and four homers per nine innings.
Once the White Sox are certain that Lucas Giolito is past his hamstring issue -- it sounds like he's on track for recovery sooner rather than later -- I'd rather see Manny Bañuelos get the opportunities to fashion himself as a crafty, back-of-the-rotation starter, then get ready to turn to Charlotte for their next audition. The Sox stuck with James Shields because they were paying him for years and needed anybody who could feasibly serve as rotation depth. The third year of the rebuild shouldn't be as desperate as the second.
* * * * * * * * *
After serving his one-game suspension, Tim Anderson talked a little bit about the language that got him in trouble, which Daryl Van Schouwen related from his position as the only beat writer making the Baltimore trip:
'People don’t know what we go through as black men,' he told the Sun-Times before the Sox’ 12-2 rout of the Orioles. 'And they don’t know exactly where we come from being a black man and the culture of being a black man. What I said was one of those things that happens when black men get mad. When we’re angry, that’s like the go-to word. That lets them know that this guy is serious. It’s a culture thing. I didn’t mean anything by it, but that’s just in my language.'
At Baseball Prospectus, Shakeia Taylor zeroed in on this idea of language, and specifically how disingenuous the league comes across feigning ignorance of gray areas when it incorporates so much else of African American culture into its marketing.
For the league, Black culture is an accessory to bring in revenue and appear cool. Just one look across the league’s various social media accounts, you’ll quickly notice the use of AAVE (African American Vernacular English), rap music, and other things popularized by the Black community. MLB used Migos’ “Is You Ready” as its 2018 postseason anthem and for 2019 Spring Training, teams wore shirts and hoodies with the slogan “Whole Squad Ready” another nod to the Atlanta-based rap trio.
She goes on to embed a number of tweets from league properties with such lines as:
- "When the squad too lit."
- "What is you doin'?
- "Y'all stay wildin'"
- "Pitches Aint Hit"
This isn't to say that Anderson's use of the word needs to be encouraged or sanctioned by the league. It just didn't need to be reported in the first place, because it's not like the league releases a thorough index of every insult used in a bench-clearing brawl for the public to review. Anderson, the way he used it and to whom he used it, issued just another insult. As his former teammate Micah Johnson wrote in a tweet supporting Anderson:
In a game where failure is king and frustration is abundant, suspending people for inappropriate language will leave you with empty benches.
Suspending one of your few black players for language after getting hit (after MLB celebrated the bat flip with its #LetTheKidsPlay) will leave you with white benches.
If the league didn't feel compelled to suspend and fine Anderson, I wonder if anybody would've even known what he said. The ejection might not have been sufficiently explained, but a lot of them never are. Maybe the word would've leaked from some salty source, but then the league could've collected itself and made an effort to understand where it comes from, even if it can't be turned into hashtags and t-shirts. If not, that would've been a great time to pretend it didn't know what anybody was talking about.
By the way, Brad Keller dropped his appeal and will serve his five-game suspension, timing it with an off day so the Royals can rearrange their rotation and he will miss no starts. In terms of time served, Anderson received a harsher suspension for insulting the guy who hit him.
And here's Nippon Professional Baseball letting everybody know none of this has to be this way.
