The White Sox brought the proverbial knife to a gunfight by opening the Houston series with a bullpen day and backing it up with Dylan Covey in the second game, and it went about as well as anybody could expect. The White Sox lost both games and haven't so much as led a game at any point, yet the pitching staff has a surprising amount of dignity intact.
They've held the league's hottest team to an ordinary eight runs over two games, and Rick Renteria didn't need to exhaust his entire bullpen to keep the games within reach, as Evan Marshall and Kelvin Herrera weren't required. Maybe that isn't entirely good news -- Herrera's performance after his back spasms has been abysmal -- but when the smoke cleared, only Jose Ruiz needed to be swapped out for a fresh arm.
But maybe the past tense is premature, because here comes Iván Nova, who has been more susceptible to the short start than anybody. He's allowed 10 homers over 47⅓ innings, which is another way of saying he's allowed 10 homers over his last 25 innings, because he kept the ball in the yard in each of his first four starts.
That's three of five spots that are exceptionally vulnerable right now, leaving the White Sox rotation in its shakiest state since 2002, and quite possibly 1998. Dylan Cease might be able to plug a gap sooner rather than later, but that still leaves two other ones with no readily apparent solutions, and some assumption that Nova and Reynaldo López are better than they've shown.
That's why I don't get why Renteria is so averse to an opener, especially when Dylan Covey -- somebody who seems to pitch respectably for four innings more often than not -- might be ideal to try after somebody else handles the top of the order in the first.
Back on Saturday, Renteria said:
“For me, if you use an opener, it’s just potentially a bullpen day,” Renteria said. “I think that openers, and this is just one man’s opinion, speaks to the state of your pitching staff in general. I think most people that are solidified in their starting rotation don’t even think about it, to be honest.”
If "Ryan Burr-led bullpen day followed by Dylan Covey and Iván Nova" doesn't yet register as a situation that requires hazmat suits to contain, then perhaps Renteria will never consider an opener. That's a problem, not because the opener is an easy quick-fix, but because it indicates Renteria will never avail himself to all potential solutions, and the White Sox will likely never be so talented as to run themselves. Starting pitcher stability and team health were the pillars of their last identity, and neither are guaranteed to come back. There's "Ricky's Boys Don't Quit," but that might just mean they trail in more games than most.
My guess is that Renteria is trying to cling to all semblance of normalcy until June 3, when the first of six off days arrives on the June calendar. The White Sox never play more than six games in a row between then and the All-Star break, which will hide a lot of pitching staff desperation no matter what kind of ERA it sports.
Alas, there are still 12 more games before any break arrives. If this turn through the weak three-fifths doesn't cause a collapse of the roster's infrastructure, the next one might. I'm guessing Renteria treats the opener as an admission of failure, but he'd only be doing so on behalf of the front office. It only turns into Renteria's failure if he doesn't make all reasonable efforts to circumvent it.
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Postscript: In Tuesday morning's recap of the reheated beef between Adam Eaton and Todd Frazier, I omitted the line where Eaton said, "I'm a 30-year-old man with two kids, got a mortgage and everything." Eaton talked at length, and I didn't want to quote the entire article, so I picked what I thought were the most pertinent passages before the fair use doctrine came into play.
But that line certainly registered with Frazier, who opened up on on the matter Tuesday afternoon.
“That’s Adam. That’s him. At the end of the day, you think about what a man really is. You settle stuff out in the field, you don’t really talk about it. That’s basically what I do. I mean, back in the day, that’s how I usually settled it. I didn’t really want to talk about it, but I heard what he said. Didn’t really bother me that much, but at the end of the day, you ask guys when I played with the White Sox in 2016, ask all 23 of those guys, they know what happened. For him to even talk after that, I don’t know how you talk after that. That’s basically all I’ll say after that. Men usually settle it out on the field, they don’t need to talk about it. He started it coming at me with that kind of, ‘I’m a man, I got a mortgage I’m paying, two kids.’ Pay off your mortgage, I don’t know what to tell you.”
Eaton thought Frazier's response gave him the opportunity to stress a supposed obsession, likening Frazier to an "old girlfriend" who is living in the past. And maybe there's something to it, except...
Dan Bernstein, who often alluded to Eaton's unpopularity on the South Side without coming out and saying anything, came out and said something on Tuesday. The 670 The Score host called Eaton a "fake nice guy" and offered some details on the clubhouse dustup:
It all stems from ill will between the two as White Sox, with Eaton the sore loser of an alpha male locker room stand-off. With veteran shortstop Jimmy Rollins let go after 41 games -- still a long enough stint for Rollins to have been the driving force behind Drake LaRoche's ouster and publicly clash with tightly wound infielder Brett Lawrie -- and no other English-speaking position player seeking to step into a leadership role, Eaton decided he'd try to fill the vacuum.
It should be noted that this was after Eaton had appeared on 670 The Score to lament bizarrely that the team had "lost a leader in Drake" when the boy was removed, and plenty of members of the White Sox organization were listening.
Frazier, who just happened to have the locker next door, called out Eaton for being a phony and made it clear that he lacked the standing in that room to be taken seriously as a leader.
Given that Eaton was one of the few White Sox players performing on the field, it didn't seem like others had the standing to knock Eaton's standing, which is the kind of circular-firing-squad logic that helped drag down the 2016 White Sox. That said, if Eaton is the kind of guy who will pretend to have a mortgage in order to mount a high horse, I have a much better idea of where the "phony" label comes from.
