The White Sox rebuild is dark and full of terrors, and all that matters is players with less than--let's say 75 days of service time--being productive.
So Drew Thorpe bounced back from a disastrous afternoon in Phoenix last weekend for six scoreless innings in Detroit and his first career win. Hurray! Enjoy your Saturday. Hug your family. They miss you.
A slightly less quick and dirty summary is that two below-average offenses have now been too flummoxed by Thorpe's changeup to pounce on the moments he had to get back into the count with 91 mph, and the one top-10 lineup the rookie faced introduced him to a world of pain.
Especially without Kerry Carpenter this weekend, the Tigers fit squarely into the former group. They whiffed 10 times in 16 swings on Thorpe's invisible cambio on Saturday afternoon, including a sublime sequence where he threw five in a row to strike out Wenceel Pérez for one his five punchouts. The balls Pérez spat on embodied that even when hitters can track the location, they can still be helpless at identifying the velocity of the pitch.
But the seams of how an outing like last Sunday against the Diamondback is even possible, were still visible on Saturday. Thorpe issued four walks, giving him an unbecoming 11 in 14 1/3 innings through three starts, and command outages put him in tricky spots to wriggle out of with his arsenal. It's just that he did in fact wriggle out of them at every opportunity.
A walk behind a shanked Riley Greene double gave Thorpe a tricky two-out situation in the first, but Gio Urshela chased a 2-1 changeup out of the zone for a weak fly out to put the matter to bed. Pérez tattooed a center-cut fastball for a two-out double in the fourth, and Thorpe responded with a walk and falling behind 3-1 to Jake Rogers, only to find his best located fastball of the day to jam the Tigers backstop into an inning-ending popout. A 5-0 lead probably cleared the way for Thorpe to even get a sixth inning, and he initially responded with a leadoff walk and falling behind 2-0 to Mark Canha, only for the third-straight fastball of the at-bat to induce a routine double play ball.
It's high time that every single thing stopped going wrong in White Sox land, so what better place to start than the headliner of the most important trade of the season to date. Hopefully Thorpe's mustache recovers from the resulting beer shower.
Sox hitting shook off a historically awful pace of run production a while ago, but still entered Saturday a half-run behind 29th place in baseball for runs per game. So it seems like pointless quibbling to note that they strung together eight hits off Kenta Maeda to knock the wayward right-hander out of the game before completing five innings, but piled up points on the scorecard rather than land a knockout blow.
Three-straight two-out hits from Paul DeJong, Korey Lee and Nicky Lopez was borderline heroic work in the fourth, when the Sox seemed primed to waste Luis Robert Jr.'s leadoff double (Robert himself almost wasted a drive off the right field wall, assuming it was gone). Lenyn Sosa's lineout stranded a pair of runners in scoring position, but what--did you want four-straight two-out run-scoring hits from the bottom of the 2024 White Sox batting order? Who raised you?!
And on most days, when the Tigers bring in hard-throwing Will Vest to face Andrew Vaughn with two outs and runners on the corner in the fifth, you could understand the change in velocity band to be too much to overcome. But Vaughn continued his sterling June by guiding a hard grounder through the left side to stake Thorpe to a 3-0 lead. That DeJong very much did not catch up to Vest's velocity to strand a pair of runners behind him seemed more like the cost of doing business.
It's when the "we're losing to the White Sox" portion of the Tigers bullpen entered the chat that proceedings became borderline comfortable. Lee was rewarded for a 10-pitch battle with Joey Wentz, replete with a gift strike or two, with a plate-splitting cutter that he launched out to left. Lopez hustled out an infield single that deflected off Wentz, stole second and was too rewarded when Sosa pushed a slow breaker back up the middle to plate him.
That margin was enough to remove most of the drama from the normally dramatic White Sox bullpen. Justin Anderson and John Brebbia delivered a 5-1 game to Michael Kopech, even with Brebbia getting hit around a bit for the first time all month. Kopech got two quick outs before losing the zone enough to put two runners on, induce a mound visit, and run the count full to Matt Vierling.
But that's when home plate umpire Chad Fairchild decided to return a gift strike to Lee on an outside fastball. And honestly, what a feel for the moment. Credit to Chad.
Bullet points:
*Lee has not had a good June offensively--by his standards, not White Sox catching standards--but now has reached base multiple times three times in his last four starts. He is now one behind Yasmani Grandal's home run total (8) from last season.
*Robert is 2-for-2 on stolen bases since returning from injury. Neither he nor Lopez's stolen bag drew a throw.
*White Sox starters have a 2.77 ERA and 10 quality starts over the last 15 games. That's the best mark in baseball over that span, per the venerable Daryl Van Schouwen.
*Vaughn is hitting .360/.377/.587 in June. He's swinging his way back into form. Not walking, but swinging.
