Drew Thorpe was supposed to face the Guardians on Thursday before the White Sox bumped him back a day, and tonight's results support the decision.
Sure, Thorpe might've been able to throw six shutout innings and pitch into the seventh against Cleveland, but calculations too complicated to explain indicate that it's more likely to happen against the second-worst offense, rather than the league's sixth-best.
True to the odds, Thorpe picked up his third consecutive win with his third consecutive quality start. He was able to pitch his game, throwing more changeups than any other pitch, but throwing enough of everything else to make himself unpredictable. His cutter was particularly useful for rebounding from a first-pitch miss. On 1-0 counts, he went 5-for-5 in evening the count (or ending the plate appearance) with cutters. On 1-1 counts, he went 2-for-3 in getting to 1-2 (the exception was a ball). Once he got ahead, he could hammer away with the offspeed. The Marlins couldn't time him, and only accounted for three hard-hit balls over 6⅓ innings.
The White Sox offense -- the only one worse than the Marlins -- only mustered individual runs in the second, fourth and fifth innings against Miami's opener strategy, but it proved to be enough.
While Luis Robert Jr. singled twice, walked twice and stole two bags, he was surrounded by a pair of hitless nights, so the White Sox didn't score in any inning he reached base. Instead, Nicky Lopez ended up having the biggest impact from the eighth spot in the order.
He put the White Sox on the board in the second when he erased the aftertaste of a poor baserunning decision by Lenyn Sosa by lining a double into the right-field corner. That scored Paul DeJong, who singled to start the inning and moved to third on Sosa's single (Sosa was cut down at second easily trying to stretch it).
In the fourth, Lopez drew a two-out walk and scored all the way from first on Martín Maldonado's RBI double. An inning later, Lopez came to the plate with runners on first and second and one out and shot a double over the head of Bryan De La Cruz in left. It bounced on the warning track, hit the top of the wall and flopped over it, resulting in a ground-rule double that kept DeJong at third, and that lack of a fourth run almost came back to haunt the Sox.
Thorpe started the seventh and gave up a one-out double to Dane Myers, who came around to score on an unusually shaky John Brebbia's watch to make it a 3-1 game. In the eighth, DeJong matador'd a routine Jake Burger grounder that should've ended the inning, and Pedro Grifol called for Michael Kopech an out earlier than he cared to. Kopech ended the eighth on one pitch, but he opened the ninth with a four-pitch walk, which eventually turned into a run when Kopech allowed a pair of one-out singles. Kopech was able to strand the tying run at second with a Josh Bell grounder for the adventurous four-out save.
Bullet points:
*Thorpe's ERA after two starts was 8.64. It's down to 3.71.
*Benintendi is hitting .140/.241/.280 over his last 15 games after going 0-for-4 with a walk tonight.
*Sosa only went 1-for-4, so his multi-hit streak ended at five games. A second bid for extra bases the other way died in Myers' glove on the warning track.
