I wasn't concerned about how to write interestingly about a team that is 1-9, has been shutout four times in 10 games and has now committed three fielding errors in back-to-back games, nor was I worried about filling out this website with content for the projected six-to-eight weeks that Luis Robert Jr. is sidelined by a hip flexor strain.
That is until I got asked about it during my weekly Bernstein & Holmes appearance, and now the specter of doubt is creeping around every corner. I had three good interviews about Deivi García's fastballs and the weird upshoot angle he can create, but now ... well, it doesn't seem like the time to drop it. Gavin Sheets has looked better early on, but maybe a better jumping off point would be after a game where he got a hit, or someone scored a run.
What does seem worth talking about with this team?
Tanner Banks looked pretty good, right?
Tasked with opening Monday's game until trouble arrived, Banks built upon a quietly impressive spring that was also full of more bat-missing than has commonly been associated with him. The 32-year-old left-hander struck out five Guardians batters in his first two scoreless innings of work without a walk, which is promising.
That one run Banks allowed came in a third inning of work scored via an E6 on a routine grounder he induced, and that's a microcosm of how difficult it is to thrive independently on a team where everything is going wrong.
Still, Banks has struck out eight of the 18 hitters he's faced this season, after a K-rate north of 40 percent in spring. This is coming from someone who was a pitch-to-contact org soldier starter for the better part of the previous decade.
Banks doesn't see the added whiffs as a product of changing role to shorter stints, but rather the physical work that lies in having your best stuff consistently.
"It's funny, because I try to air it out every outing," Banks said. "Look at [Garrett] Crochet for example. He uses his body extremely well and can hit triple digits. He's going out inning after inning after inning and is throwing extremely hard and it's because he takes care of himself in the training room, the weight room. He works efficiently in his mechanics."
That speaks to Banks' goal more than airing it out in a shorter bursts, or harkening back to his starter days and seeking quick contact. He hit 95 mph at points of his outing Monday, but the majority of his afternoon was a mix of commanded sliders and curves that speak even more to a delivery in sync. After core velocity belt exercises led to a big uptick on his fastball and made Banks into a big leaguer, he felt his leg drive become overreliant on the training device, struggling to repeat his mechanics on the mound when he no longer had assistance.
"If you're assisted in doing something day in, and day out, and you're not doing it moderation, then your body forgets how to do those movements by itself," Banks said.
With a pared-back routine, Banks feels like he's hinging on his back hip before exploding forward and keeping his line to the plate with a consistency that eluded him in 2023.
Jordan Leasure has surely done nothing to upset you yet
The advancements in the player development industry often get a lot of credit for building players up from scratch, but it's better seen as methods to cultivate existing traits.
That becomes apparent when talking to Leasure. He describes his conversations with the Dodgers about his uniquely high arm slot as amounting to the club seeing the way he naturally threw and saying that's good, keep doing it. The same thing goes for his delivery offering elite extension where he regularly releases the ball seven feet off the pitching rubber, allowing his already above-average velocity to play up.
"I know I have pretty good extension but it's not something I think about," Leasure said. "It's what comes natural to me."
Leasure's recent build-up of a curveball as a third pitch is another example. It's early, but it's already become a pitch that can clip 3,000 RPM in raw spin, and has gained use as a soft, confounding strike-grabber amid an otherwise typical hard-throwing relief arsenal. Even if it doesn't progress beyond this, the pitch has already achieved the goal of throwing off plans to sit on Leasure's fastball or his hard, more horizontal slider.
The key was just trying to throw it the way he naturally throws everything else.
"I just try to throw it hard like a fastball and try to keep it down," Leasure said. "I had no idea that I was spinning it that much. Developing that pitch was just trying to find a good release point, throw it hard through that release point, and then it's going to do what it's going to do."
Having a set of simple, basic cues to fall back to are helpful when you're a 25-year-old rookie, finding yourself in a big league park that's chanting Bobby Witt Jr.'s name with the bases loaded.
"It's a cool moment to be in, so I definitely took a moment to enjoy it and then locked back in. Even though it wasn't a great outing, I think there were a lot of positives in it. Striking out Witt in that situation was the biggest one."
Remember Eloy raising his hands in his swing?
When Eloy Jiménez returns, he'll find a White Sox lineup as desperate to have him lock into Silver Slugger form as ever. In all of the 11 plate appearances he got in this season before his adductor strain, Jiménez was chasing less and putting the ball on the ground slightly less (literally one more ground ball would have put him over his career averages). But a signature moment (soft tissue injury while running) interfered with a proof of concept (mashing).
It might not serve as any great comfort that hitting coach Marcus Thames sees Jiménez's ground ball issues as largely mechanical, and related to being on time enough in his swing for his swing decisions to not be rushed. Since if Jiménez returns to action without a rehab stint, watching him feel his way through his timing for a series feels like a given. But it explains more why the primary remedy for Jiménez was a small mechanical tweak.
"When his hands are down here [by his waist], he's late getting the barrel around to the baseball and it causes a lot of ground balls," Thames said. "When he keeps them up close to where he wants to fire from, it'll be easier for the barrel to get on plane and that's going to help him keep the ball of the ground, and going on a line to the gaps."
