The Royals released Jordan Lyles on Saturday. It's been over 10 months since he was losing pitcher in the last game the White Sox won in Kauffman Stadium, but it's never too late to get justice for a shocking crime.
The Sox dropped to 0-6 at Kauffman for 2024, right when their protracted struggles in Kansas City have lost most of their mystery. So far this season, the Royals are a top-10 offense and the hardest team in baseball to strike out when they're at home, and are one of the worst units in the sport and merely a top-10 offense for putting the ball in the play on the road.
It was clearly the former that greeted Jonathan Cannon on Saturday evening. Decently located sinkers, sweepers and cambios were filleted for singles, poorly located ones were pounded for extra-bases. And where the White Sox defense could offer up a curious choice not to throw to third on Michael Massey's first inning RBI triple, or an odd pursuit of a fly ball or two, they did so. With all those forces working in unison, Cannon had allowed four runs and seven hits before recording six outs.
The rookie right-hander recovered to allow one baserunner over his final four innings of work, producing a vintage 2002 Jon Garland final line, but the recovery came long after The Holmes Maneuver had been taken out of play. Tanner Banks walked in two runs in the bottom of the eighth, but only after multiple violations of Rule No. 1 by the Sox defense helped load the bases on him. Technically, Banks set up his own throwing error to Paul DeJong at third with the excellent inside move he pulled off to pick Dairon Blanco off second. It's not an AL Central game unless someone is hoisted on their own petard.
White Sox pregame notes included what seemed like a dubious claim: that the offense had hit .293/.340/.448 against Royals starter Brady Singer over their last eight encounters. That they had still only scored 25 runs over that span jibed more with the brand of non-José Abreu White Sox at-bats against Singer that immediately come to mind.
While mowing through everyone not named Andrew Benintendi initially just read as a weird wrinkle of Singer's seven scoreless innings, a one-out walk to the Sox left fielder in the fourth started a chain of events that placed Brooks Baldwin at the helm of their most promising scoring opportunity. In the box with the bases juiced and two outs, Baldwin fouled off the 1-1 hanging slider that offered a chance to vault the Sox back within shouting distance, before pulling off and swinging through a high sinker to end the threat.
Go easy on him, he's new here.
A pair of two-out singles in the seventh complicates the practice of just writing "...and Singer breezed from there." But the second opportunity for a guy called up Friday to bail everyone out just ended with Chuckie Robinson grounding out weakly to the right side to strand a pair. In a game that felt like the Royals controlled from the first 10 minutes on, Sox hitting going 0-for-5 with runners in scoring position ensured that feeling persevered.
Tommy Pham and Luis Robert Jr. both banged doubles to the wall against Hunter Harvey in the eighth, spoiling the shutout during the reliever's first inning with his new club. When you can force the opposition to warm their closer AND feel iffy about their newly acquired setup man, that's two moral victories packed into one otherwise standard-issue loss to the Royals.
Bullet points:
*Your Chicago White Sox are the 14th team in MLB history to lose 73 times or more in their first 100 games of the season.
*Sox hitting has been held to two runs or fewer in 44 of their 100 games. They've won four of those games.
*Baldwin went 0-for-4 with three punchouts, stranding five on base. It feels a little different when it's working toward something. For now, at least.
*On the Sox Machine tour of the Negro League Baseball Museum, I noticed this snippet from an old newspaper report. You're welcome.
