Two seasons in a row, the White Sox have won first prize with their fifth-starter acquisitions. In 2021, they brought back Carlos Rodón for $3 million after non-tendering him earlier in the offseason, and Rodón finished fifth in the AL Cy Young voting. A year later, Johnny Cueto joined the team in mid-May and nearly qualified for the ERA title despite that missing month and a half.
The Sox didn't exactly shoot 100 percent, because Vince Velasquez was the White Sox's first attempt at back-end adequacy in 2022. Still, even if you count Velasquez's salary toward the quest, they've gotten 9 bWAR of pitching for about $9 million over the last two seasons. That kind of return rate would set off Ponzi alerts if the Sox tried guaranteeing it.
That said, they'll have to try, and Ken Rosenthal and James Fegan say the White Sox are looking at Mike Clevinger this time around.
There's reason to buy into this, because the White Sox had an interest in Clevinger during the 2020 season, according to Rosenthal during that time. Clevinger ended up going to San Diego in a nine-player deal, and the Sox ended up trading for the other pitcher they sought during that window:
Probably the only way for the White Sox to get Clevinger from an AL Central rival was to overpay, but one Sox official said the Indians used the Sox as a stalking horse, never intending to trade him within the division. Another Sox official took a more measured view, saying the outcome was what he anticipated from the start, knowing the Indians probably did not want to spend the next two-plus seasons facing Clevinger in the AL Central. The White Sox, unwilling to make a deal they perceived as shortsighted, also balked at the Rangers’ price for [Lance] Lynn, which various clubs said included at least one elite young player.
(Rosenthal went on to say that other teams thought the White Sox wanted to trade Michael Kopech to Cleveland, as Kopech had opted out of the season. The White Sox denied it then, but it doesn't look so outrageous now.)
Anyway, Clevinger's San Diego career was a bust. Arm problems limited his availability down the stretch of the 2020 season, after which he had his second Tommy John surgery, which cost him all of 2021. He then returned with a pedestrian 2022, posting a 4.33 ERA with just 91 strikeouts over 114⅓ innings. The 18.8 percent strikeout rate was a dramatic drop from his peak of 33.9 percent in 2019.
The first place to look is fastball velocity, which rose and fall with his general fortunes:
- 2017: 92.6
- 2018: 93.8
- 2019: 95.5
- 2020: 95.2
- 2021: n/a
- 2022: 93.5
But his slider also took a major hit in effectiveness, per Statcast's run values:
- 2017: 11
- 2018: 14
- 2019: 11
- 2020: 4
- 2022: -6
He made some attempts to compensate over the course of the 2022 season, with a cutter gaining some prominence in the first half, then a sinker emerging in the second half. Curiously, the pitch identification systems disagree over the second pitch, at least after the All-Star break. Statcast says he threw it almost 19.8 percent of the time, which would've made it his second pitch, while Pitch Info limits it at 13.4 percent, good for a distant third.
He looks like a kitchen-sinker right now, which means he'd be a fitting replacement for Cueto in terms of arsenal. The catch is Clevinger struggled over the latter half of his 2022 workload, so while he threw all of his pitches against the wall, it's not clear which ones stuck:
- First 12 outings (11 starts): 60.1 IP, 49 H, 7 HR, 16 BB, 59 K, 3.13 ERA
- Last 11 outings (11 starts): 54 IP, 53 H, 13 HR, 19 BB, 32 K, 5.67 ERA
That latter line would've looked far worse had Clevinger not closed out his regular season with six innings of one-run ball against the White Sox on Oct. 1. The one run was a second-pitch homer by Elvis Andrus, after which Clevinger recorded 18 outs over the course of 64 pitches.
But even when looking at his first half, it's hard to size it up with much confidence. Besides returning from the UCL repair, he opened the season on the injured list with a knee sprain, suffered a triceps strain in May, then tested positive for COVID in June. Ideally, his best stretch of work wouldn't include so much starting, stopping and slow-rolling.
That said, if Clevinger were a stabler presence, then he wouldn't be in the White Sox's sights. If they're looking for a signing that would merely complete a rotation instead of rearranging it, Clevinger would fit the bill. If Clevinger managed to resemble Rodón or Cueto in terms of impact or reliability, the rotation would rearrange itself in due time.
