The idea of playing fast -- or FAST(s) -- was that while not every White Sox player possesses foot speed, they should be able to process the game more rapidly than they showed in 2023.
That's been easier said than done. In two different innings, the Reds played the game faster than the White Sox could handle, that opened the door for talent to take care of the rest.
The box score says Chris Flexen allowed six runs over 2⅔ innings, but he probably could've gotten the game past the halfway point were he given the plus support everybody envisioned in the spring.
Instead, the White Sox's defense was exploited twice in the first three innings, and Flexen eventually broke.
Two batters into the game, Will Benson hit a blooper towards the left-field line that Andrew Benintendi didn't get to due to a slow initial read. Benson then afforded Benintendi a second chance to retire him when he stumbled halfway between first and second, but Benintendi's throw in-between-hopped Zach Remillard, and Benson only suffered moderate embarrassment for his effort. He then took third on a not-that-wild pitch that Martín Maldonado didn't block, and scored on a sac fly.
In the third, Flexen retired the first two batters before allowing a single to Christian Encarnacion-Strand, and a walk to Spencer Steer. Up came Jake Fraley, who hit a hard grounder to the right side. The ball defected off the mitt of a diving Andrew Vaughn and found Remillard, who stopped it with a slide and threw to Flexen covering first. Flexen dropped the ball, which didn't matter so much at first because Fraley was safe, but it hurt because Encarnacion-Strand never stopped running. If Flexen fielded the ball cleanly, he had an out at the plate available, and maybe by several steps. Instead, a run scored, the inning continued, and back-to-back homers by Elly De La Cruz and Tyler Stephenson ended Flexen's night.
The score eventually spread from there, so those misplays more cost the White Sox their dignity than the game. The White Sox only managed four hits and didn't draw a walk. They sequenced a couple of those hits into a run in the third inning when Remillard reached on an infield single and scored on a Robbie Grossman double that cut the lead to 6-1. The Reds still had a five-run margin, and doubled it by the end of the game.
Bullet points:
*Jared Shuster calmed the game down with 3⅓ innings of one-run ball. It didn't look overpowering, but he's 2-for-2 in such appearances.
*Justin Anderson made his White Sox debut in the eighth, walked the bases loaded over the course of five batters, then gave up a broken-bat single to Encarnacion-Strand for two more runs.
*Tim Hill's ERA rose to 10.80 after allowing two runs in the ninth, although he was robbed of a strikeout against De La Cruz that complicated matters.
*White Sox pitchers walked nine batters in nine innings, and none of the five arms used got through the game without one.
*Fraley robbed Paul DeJong of extra bases with a painful leaping catch into the chain-link fence in right.
*The announced attendance was 11,337. It looked and sounded like half that.
