As we discussed Thursday, Major League Baseball's attempts to goose up run scoring by limiting the pre-pitch movement of defenders has been negated by ways younger, faster outfielders can cover ground after a pitch is thrown, so the league has to look elsewhere in order to see jumps in production.
Enter ESPN's Jesse Rogers, who said the league is exploring the idea of requiring starting pitchers to complete six innings.
There are exceptions, which Rogers seemed to have to point out to everybody who responded with incredulity and anger to that one-sentence summary of the concept. It's more like "six innings or 100 pitches, whichever comes first," with additional exit ramps for ineffectiveness (four earned runs) and injury (which would require an injured list stint afterward).
That mandate basically codifies the way baseball used to operate, so the end result is far more rooted in traditionalism than other changes the league has installed, particularly the pitch clock. It would just require a massive retraining of pitchers down to the amateur level, and it requires an assumption that pitchers still wouldn't chase increased velocity to the ends of the earth, which seems like a faulty one.
But the reflexive doubt of whether it'd even be possible shouldn't deter the league from exploring it in the first place. As somebody who prefers the grind of the 162-game season to the October brand of baseball for determining the best teams, I've always had a soft spot for the No. 4 or No. 5 starter who could throw 160 innings, because it's a reflection of superior resources at a team level, and superior resourcefulness at the individual level.
It's also a role that's unique to baseball. The closest thing to it is a backup goalie, where the mindset is, "If we only lose half the games this guy starts, we're coming out way ahead." The difference is that in the NHL, the No. 1 and No. 2 goalies aren't required to make an equal amount of starts.
Open season on the White Sox hasn't closed
If you thought that Monday's Spare Parts covered all the ways the greater sports media had found ways to expound on the White Sox's historic powerlessness, think again. Like watching the White Sox bullpen in the eighth inning, the hits keep coming.
This crop of articles is less about drive-bys and more about meditations and thought exercises.
At Defector, John Wilmes wrote about the strangely satisfying experience of paying next to nothing to watch a team unmoored from all familiarity and expectations. He happened to drop in on the White Sox's surprising rout of the Yankees on Monday, but the result was secondary.
In four trips to the stadium this season, this was the only win I’ve seen. The victory meant postgame fireworks; I had forgotten what those looked like. Neither the win nor the fireworks were necessary for a good time, though. It’s easy to vibe in a stadium that feels like a big, chill bar, one much cheaper and roomier than the one the Cubs play in; it’s possible to head home smiling and unsure of who won the game. Jerry Reinsdorf has built a perfect loser hang, a place where one need not stress about accomplishment or repercussions, where no one knows your name but everyone remembers Jermaine Dye’s. All that competition junk’s been taken care of—first neglected, then destroyed, so you truly wouldn’t have to worry about it.
Over at FanGraphs, Davy Andrews takes it a step further by wondering what the league would look like if games against the White Sox were vacated. Take away the 12-1 records that both the Royals and Twins posted in their season series against the Sox, and the last wild card spot is thrown into total disarray.
In the AL, there would be bigger differences. The Guardians would own the best record in baseball outright and a two-game lead over the Yankees for the best record in the AL. The Red Sox would vault all the way into the second Wild Card spot, while the Twins would drop from the second spot to the third and see a lot of their margin for error eliminated. The Royals would go from possession of the final Wild Card spot to being the third team in line for it. The Rays, whose 2-4 record against the White Sox is the worst in baseball, would suddenly be tied with the Mariners, 1.5 games behind the Twins for the final Wild Card spot. That would leave six different teams within 2.5 games of the games either way of the final postseason berth, setting up a gloriously chaotic end to the regular season, with the playoff teams and matchups potentially changing on a daily basis.
But because the games do count, the White Sox now occupy the strange position of playing a potential spoiler every time they win a game.
The White Sox are only four losses away from blowing past their preseason PECOTA projection, so Baseball Prospectus' Patrick Dubuque already started the postmortem on how they're already 28 games wrong, with a lot more mistaking still in store. It turns out that PECOTA simply can't grasp how severely the White Sox position players are underperforming on both sides of the ball, and it leaves a helluva void in which you can lose your grip.
The 2024 Chicago White Sox aren’t real. They can’t be. It makes as much sense for a team to fail—and to be allowed to fail, on so many distinct levels—as it does for us all to be trapped inside some fever dream of James Fegan, staring with our eyes taped open at a man staring at this baseball team with his eyes taped open. Imagine being on the ground floor for this, for each blowout, each Pedro Grifol press conference, each Reinsdorf-Tennessee dalliance. If this were real, every White Sox beat reporter would be wasting away as if they’d swallowed radium.
This is the real reason James is in North Carolina this week -- not for prospects, but for detox.
