We typically don't traffic in hot takes around here, but it seems like the White Sox--mulling trade offers for their few productive players, authoring their second franchise-record 14-game losing streak of 2024--are playing their worst ball of the season.
It's as much a feelings-based assessment than statistical, and there's real risk of being a prisoner of the moment when Paul DeJong makes a pair of errors in a two-run Mariners third, hastening Garrett Crochet's exit from a pre-planned shorter outing.
Part of it is that such breakdowns, frequent as they are, can immediately place games beyond the point of recovery. The same could be said for Cal Raleigh launching a 97 mph Crochet heater on the outside edge over the left field wall in the first inning, right after Randy Arozarena reached on a swinging bunt single. Either moment felt like a potential knockout blow for a White Sox offense that has scored one run or fewer 31 times this season. Instead they troubled Mariners starter Bryce Miller enough for these moments to be individually torturous, rather than just drops in the enormous bucket that is our collective ennui.
Eloy Jiménez struck the young Mariners hurler in the foot with an 110.7 mph comebacker in the second, briefly threatening to send Seattle into an unplanned bullpen day, only for Miller to recover and induce an inning-ending double play from Andrew Benintendi.
Three-straight two-out singles from Korey Lee, Nicky Lopez and Tommy Pham--all some variation of hit softly or hit on the ground--third provided an early escape to the daily shutout anxiety. But Luis Robert Jr.'s most promising offensive moment of the day was a deep fly out to right to end the threat and strand a pair.
Miller was finally chased in the seventh when Benintendi's double off the top of the right field wall was followed by a booming DeJong no-doubter to center on a 3-2 get-me-over fastball. But only time will tell if the scouts in attendance had already fled in anticipation of the rain showers that arrived in the eighth.
The blast forced the Mariners to use their real bullpen in a game they led 6-1 after four innings. And if I had to boil it down to why the Sox seem worse than ever, it's that the likes of Crochet, Erick Fedde and even Drew Thorpe of recent were keeping them competitive deep into games, and all departed early with huge deficits in this three-game sweep.
The best thing to be said about Crochet laboring through three unimpressive innings in his last outing before the trade deadline is that after two unearned runs scored in the third, he started hitting 99 mph repeatedly to close out the frame. We had the boys down at Sox Machine research work up a sample image of what society would look like if we all had Crochet's ability to respond to White Sox dysfunction by reaching new levels of human performance.
Bullet points:
*Robert reached base five times in the final game before the All-Star break. He's struck out in 24 of 41 plate appearances since.
*Gavin Sheets has reached base 10 times in the month of July (.169 OBP), with two doubles.
*The Sox have won three games this month. It's the 28th.
*Brooks Baldwin stayed on an outer-half splitter to line his fourth double of the series over Victor Robles' head in center in the fifth. He's a promising young scamp.
*Rain broke out in the eighth and remained until the finish. It did not delay the game, but did serve to cancel postgame kids running the bases. Rough news for the other young scamps in attendance.
*DeJong's 18th home run of the season means he has now out-homered all members of the 2022 White Sox. What horrors we have known.
