Seby Zavala hears about rough night from Tony La Russa

If you wanted any input from the White Sox on Lance Lynn's ill-advised 3-0 fastball to Vladimir Guerrero Jr. after Monday night's 2-1 loss to the Blue Jays in Toronto, you could only get Lynn's perspective.

"It was stupid," he said. "There's no other way to say it. I told Tony that when I got in that it was all on me. I was trying to throw a ball, and it ran back over the plate."

Tony La Russa would not share what he thought.

"I don't have any comment about how that was handled," he said.

When asked again toward the end of the session, La Russa elaborated only on his unwillingness to answer.

"No comment," he said. "I think it's one of those situations where it's right out there in front, and everyone can decide what the comment would be if I decided to comment, but I'm not going to comment."

Now, what does La Russa mean by "It's right out there in front"? Perhaps he was talking about it being a 3-0 pitch that even Lynn called a "stupid" idea that everybody was free to first-guess in real time.

Or maybe it's because he assumed everybody saw him chewing out Seby Zavala after the inning. White Sox fans watching NBC Sports Chicago wouldn't have seen it, but the Toronto Blue Jays broadcast replayed it before the start of the seventh.

The only time we've seen La Russa this angry in his own dugout was the Yermín Mercedes Incident, which was also after a 3-0 pitch. In that case, Mercedes angered La Russa for ignoring the take sign.

Here, it looks like he's saying Zavala never looked to the dugout.

The broadcasts didn't spent a lot of time showing Zavala between pitches, so it's hard to know if he never looked over, but there's no evidence of him doing so from what we could see. There was a shot of La Russa staring out onto the field, presumably Zavala's way, before the fateful pitch.

This isn't a flattering sequence for anybody involved. Whatever need La Russa felt to yell at a player in public reflects poorly on his team's preparation. Zavala deserved a scolding of some sort if nothing about "3-0 count to Vladimir Guerrero Jr. with a base open with two outs in a one-run game" doesn't generate an urge to signal the intentional walk. Lynn's the one who threw the pitch, but he had the freedom to step off the rubber and reconsider. All the safeguards broke down, and that's how the White Sox lost the lead en route to losing a third straight game.

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But there was another quote from La Russa -- an actual comment -- that was tangential to Zavala. It caught my attention, perhaps because I had a notion that I wanted validated.

When asked about his trust in Craig Kimbrel, La Russa said, "As long as he's healthy, look at what he's throwing up there. We're fortunate to have him. I mean, he had the guy two strikes, and -- I haven't seen it -- he threw a nasty ball that got by the catcher. So. I like what I see a lot."

That's a very generous description of Kimbrel's very wild pitch that allowed the go-ahead run to score.

If La Russa hadn't seen Kimbrel's wild pitch from a traditional angle, then It explains why he would use the adjective "nasty" instead of something that more accurately described how wayward it went.

But in La Russa's defense, Kimbrel threw a couple of truly nasty knuckle curves to Bo Bichette with two strikes, and Zavala blocked neither. Worse yet, he threw to first base even though Bichette was already out due to a runner already being aboard.

As Kimbrel and Zavala agreed on a two-strike sign for Teoscar Hernandez with the tying run 90 feet away, I wondered if either would have the confidence to throw another breaking ball. I'm inclined to think the answer was "no," given the pitch choice and execution. Kimbrel and Lynn's pitches are not connected, but one looks like an overcorrection of the other. Lynn didn't want to throw a strike, but missed over the plate. Kimbrel didn't want to throw a strike, and, well, mission accomplished.

Zavala entered the game with terrible blocking numbers, and they look even worse when you extrapolate his rate to 500 innings, which is the nearest nice, round number that none of the catchers has attained.

Zavala's superior receiving should make playing him over Collins a no-brainer, but his general catching of pitches is such a liability that it makes the second-best option a toss-up. As pnoles put it:

The last thing Zavala needs is a couple of glaring failures in his thought process to tip the scales.

If there's a silver lining, it's that Grandal's occasional burst of passed pitches is more forgivable when seeing what a real liability looks like. It's just up to Grandal to show his knee is healthy enough to render the conversation about his backup largely irrelevant.

(Photo by Dan Hamilton-USA TODAY Sports)