The Knights’ 8-1 rain-shortened loss at home on Sunday was typical of most of the team’s games this season: The pitching staff puts the club in such a huge deficit so early that the offense finds itself in too big a hole to battle back.
Coming into Sunday’s contest, however, the team had by far its best run of the season, winning six of seven.
And the formula for that success was simple: The pitching kept the team close, and the offense got a crazy number of clutch hits late.
In that seven-game span, the starters gave up a bit more than two runs a game (16 runs) while the pen was a bit better — 12 earned runs in 37⅔ innings. The numbers look even better when you subtract an 11-8 win in the middle of that seven-game streak.
(I’d list all the guys who pitched well in that stretch, but there are so many that it would be simpler to note the guys who struggled, and that is just mean.)
The offense, meanwhile, responded with several late rallies, ending the seven games a whopping 25-for-66 with runners in scoring position.
Pretty much everyone got into the act, including Jake Burger and Lenyn Sosa, each of whom hit homers in back-to-back games; along with the usual suspects, Carlos Perez, Adam Haseley, Mark Payton, Blake Rutherford and Zach Remillard.
Yolbert Sanchez and Laz Rivera contributed a few key hits as well, as did a couple of spot starters, Nick Ciuffo and Xavier Fernandez.
“They’ve come up with big hits and our pitchers are keeping us in ball games,” acknowledged hitting coach Chris Johnson. “There were a couple of games when we didn’t do too much early but we kind of got it going late. That is a testament to the pitchers. We couldn’t do that if they don’t keep the games close.
“And then we stay at it,” Johnson said. “We stay consistent with our at bats. We stick to our approach and if you do that over the course of a nine-inning game as a team, I think you break out at some point.”
What Lies Ahead?
The million dollar question, of course, is whether the seven-game stretch is a blip in an otherwise lackluster season.
Who knows, right? But there's hope because the White Sox have tweaked the composition of the pitching staff over the past several weeks, dropping or demoting underperforming guys and bringing in reinforcements (Davis Martin is back, for now, from Chicago; Lane Ramsey has come off the IL; Jason Bilous has been promoted; and Tobias Myers was claimed off waivers).
And those reinforcements include a couple of starters, which has mercifully allowed the Knights to move away from having to throw so many bullpen games. They rarely win games when they roll out seven, eight or nine hurlers a game, because a couple of guys inevitably struggle and put the team in a big, early deficit, and only the pitch clock keeps games from being a total slog.
