After the White Sox placed Liam Hendriks on the injured list with right elbow inflammation, but before they blew a 5-1 lead in a 6-5 loss to the Miami Marlins Sunday afternoon, Pedro Grifol expressed faith in his bullpen independent of Hendriks' status:
"Obviously losing Liam can hurt any bullpen," Grifol said before Sunday's loss. "But we are better prepared than if it just happened just out of the blue. I trust our guys that we have back there. They've been pitching great baseball. They've been pitching in different roles."
Sure enough, Kendall Graveman followed Joe Kelly's lead in blowing one. Crueler still, Graveman and Keynan Middleton both gave up their first runs since April. They were due for a blip, and in 2023 White Sox fashion, they suffered them in as painful a fashion as possible.
But while Grifol's optimism aged poorly, it's correct in spirit. The White Sox bullpen had been pitching better thanks to a deep cast of contributors, and Hendriks could never be regarded as essential given the uncertainties surrounding recovery from cancer treatment. Anything he could contribute would be a bonus.
His return -- as well as that of Garrett Crochet from Tommy John surgery -- obviously made for good news, yet it made me nervous from a team standpoint because having them on the cusp of contributing would enable Rick Hahn's crippling belief that one more reliever would solve everything. I pretty much said what I wanted to say on the topic last May, when discussing how little sense it made to prioritize spending on relievers when they could be overused so easily, but because the White Sox never change, they keep old thoughts fresh:
Repeat that over the course of four acquisition periods, and games like Thursday show what it looks like when they reach the point of diminishing returns. Going back to the bullpen over and over again while slapping patches on position-player shortcomings is a defensive, conservative approach focused on preciously guarding the leads acquired. It’s great when it works, but it requires so much of the first six innings to go according to plan, and the Sox haven’t spent nearly as much time addressing the first six innings. [...]
It seems like the White Sox are chasing that 2014-15 Kansas City Royals model of success, except KC acquired Kelvin Herrera (international signing), Greg Holland (10th round) and Wade Davis (secondary player in a trade) for very little in terms of payroll dollars. The Royals paid that trio less than $10 million in the year it established itself as a pennant-winning force, while Kelly is nearly commanding that amount by himself. It’s hard for a lockdown bullpen to provide a similar boost when it gets in the way of how the rest of the team is built. Whenever the White Sox start mobilizing for more moves, I’d request that they look toward players who can’t possibly play too much.
Fast-forward a couple months, and sure enough, the White Sox acquired Jake Diekman and only Jake Diekman at the trade deadline. Skip ahead 13 months, and here's James Fegan discussing the stresses on Kelly, Graveman and the White Sox relief corps well before the first half of the season is complete.
“They all want to be out there and fight through ailments,” general manager Rick Hahn said while discussing Hendriks’ injury. “There’s no one in that room right now who feels 100 percent, and they each do what they can sort of to fight through and be available. When they can’t physically do that, there’s a level of frustration.”
The line for soreness, pain and actual injury is negotiated regularly throughout a baseball season. Shutting things down and waiting until all discomfort has subsided isn’t regularly embraced by major leaguers. Hendriks was only sidelined when his typical post-outing soreness — the kind Joe Kelly referred to after his blown save Saturday — did not subside after a day. But lingering physical issues drag at the tent poles of this White Sox roster.
We heard Hawk Harrelson say hundreds of times over his last decade in the booth that the game is a battle of the bullpens, but watching what Hahn's bullpen-first approach hath wrought, it's a flawed heuristic born from a handful of cognitive biases, namely loss aversion and serial-position effect. Defeats tend to linger longer than victories, and relievers are just about always involved in the last thing you saw. Combine those factors, and yeah, bullpens are always going to seem like they make or break the team.
It might even be true enough over a small-sample series, but over the course of 162 games, this approach is inherently self-limiting. If your team has a great offense, and a terrible bullpen, you'll have to endure your share of excessive drama and annoying losses, but the stresses are contained. If your team has a terrible offense and a great bullpen, that terrible offense will probably erode that great bullpen, and there goes the identity of your team.
Evidence of those limits: Prior to Sunday's loss, the White Sox were 14-9 in their last 23 games. That doesn't quite feel like a "tear," but that does amount to a 99-win pace. Problem is, the White Sox still scored a below-average amount of runs -- 4.3 per game, when the league average is around 4.5. In three of those nine losses, they allowed just three runs. Teams are expected to win two-thirds of the games in which they allow three runs. The White Sox are 6-5.
The Sox didn't make up the maximum amount of ground when they were pitching lights-out, and now that the schedule is toughening up, it puts the onus on an offense that hasn't been up to the task for years. They have to bank on turnarounds from hitters who may be perpetually banged-up, or the lack of a upswing from anywhere in an embarrassing division. The latter is mostly out of their hands, and yet it feels like the better bet.