A miserable forecast prompted the White Sox to postpone tonight's game with the Phillies, turning Tuesday into a straight doubleheader starting at 3:10 p.m. CT.
Such doubleheaders are probably going to be more frequent this season since every team plays each other. In this case, the White Sox are done with the Phillies for 2023 after Wednesday, all future off days will have to be reserved for games that truly can't be accommodated by immediate twin bills, and the weather looks perfectly playable for the remainder of the series.
A two-for-Tuesday sounds like the last thing Pedro Grifol needs, given that the White Sox bullpen has melted into an unrecognizable blob. Like I told Josh on today's podcast, you may as well remove names and numbers from the jerseys in the bullpen, because they're being used interchangeably in search of any kind of solution. It's a good thing Grifol is already bald.
I'm practicing what I'm preaching in the chart below. The White Sox have used 11 relievers, and you'll see the leverage index for each reliever compared to his counterpart the season before, scrubbed of the identifying information. (If you're unfamiliar with leverage index, it measures the importance of a relief situation. The higher the number, the more critical the appearance.)
| 2022 | Rank | 2023 |
|---|---|---|
| 1.90 | 1 | 1.84 |
| 1.51 | 2 | 1.81 |
| 1.31 | 3 | 1.64 |
| 1.25 | 4 | 1.37 |
| 1.15 | 5 | 1.36 |
| 1.13 | 6 | 1.30 |
| 1.08 | 7 | 1.29 |
| 1.03 | 8 | 1.28 |
| 0.99 | 9 | 1.15 |
| 0.85 | 10 | 0.86 |
| 0.80 | 11 | 0.68 |
Basically, the White Sox have three relievers who have experienced the average LI of a closer, and then three to five more guys who get the kind of work usually reserved for a seventh-inning man.
Of course, the small sample of a new season skews the right column, but that's also kinda the point. Tanner Banks is No. 1 with one whole appearance to his name, and he went from pitching in Charlotte to the eighth inning of a tie game against Baltimore on Saturday. At 1.28, Keynan Middleton is running a higher LI in 2023 than Reynaldo López in 2022 (1.21), simply because he struck out three of the four batters he faced in his debut. The White Sox are so desperate for help that they're promoting barbacks to managers after one shift, no offense to barbacks.
Fortunately, they're entering a series against one of the few teams that's making an equally big mess of the big workloads they've been asked to carry.
ERA: The White Sox bullpen is cursed with a Boeing ERA (7.57), which is easily the worst in baseball. The Phillies bullpen has an ERA of 6.83, which is easily the second-worst ERA in baseball.
Walk rate: The White Sox and Phillies are tied for 28th behind Oakland at 14.3 percent, which is an average of one walk every seven batters.
Batters faced: The White Sox have faced 272 batters, the sixth-highest total in baseball. The Phillies are third with 286.
The tale of the tape is a tattered one:
| Bullpen | IP | ERA | H | R | ER | HR | BB | K |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| White Sox | 54.2 | 7.57 | 70 | 49 | 46 | 6 | 39 | 62 |
| Phillies | 59.1 | 6.83 | 69 | 50 | 45 | 10 | 41 | 64 |
And the Phillies have joined the White Sox in having their relievers throwing in situations they shouldn't be:
The man who has saved more big-league games than any other active pitcher stepped onto the warning track as “Welcome to the Jungle” blasted on the ballpark speakers. It was a fitting entrance for an accomplished reliever such as Craig Kimbrel. Except the Phillies trailed by five runs and most of a sold-out crowd meandered toward the exits on a Tuesday night in April. An inning earlier, people had chucked dozens of dollar hot dogs at each other. So, really, there was nothing left here.
I guess you can give the White Sox a point for having had Kimbrel, rather than simply having him, but neither team holds the advantage in isolation. The question then becomes whether one team has an offense that's better suited to exploit a pitching staff's inability to throw strikes, and that's not abundantly clear, either.
The White Sox lineup is running one of the league's worst walk rates as usual, with its 6.6 percent ahead of only the Rockies and Diamondbacks. Yet Philadelphia is only four spots ahead of the Sox at 7.3 percent. The Phillies have the league's second-highest OPS at .812, but that's attributable to the league's highest BABIP (.371, or 33 points ahead of the second-place Braves).
Both teams swing. Both teams chase. Both teams are making ordinary contact. Add it all up, and it's easy to understand how both teams have the same 6-10 record. That makes this a fascinating series, especially relative to an interleague set for mid-April, simply because it seems impossible that a team as extreme as the White Sox would find a way to meet its match, yet here we are.
