Tuesday night, on the western edge of the continent, Jonathan Cannon steps into the unenviable position of trying to stop the White Sox from setting a new record for the longest losing streak in the 124-year history of the American League.
Despite the fact that he'll be backed by somewhere between zero to three runs of support of offense, and he touts a contact-heavy approach while backed by a defense that may just spurn three consecutive chances to throw out a runner on the basepaths, it's not an outlandish belief that he's the current White Sox starter best-suited to end a 21-game losing streak.
Erick Fedde is gone, greatly limiting his contributions. Garrett Crochet is rate-limited. Davis Martin has made two major league appearances in the last 18 months or so, and Ky Bush has made one fewer. Chris Flexen is a good teammate who has given his club a chance to win quite often this year, but the White Sox have lost the last 15 games in which he's pitched, and attempting to kill two birds with one stone is a tad rich given this team's noted struggles to simply hit the cutoff man. So, Cannon it is.
"He's a sneaky big physical pitcher when you stand next to him," Brian Bannister said of Cannon. "There's a lot of mass there. He's got a great pitcher's body and as he continues to figure out this style of pitching the way that Erick Fedde has, I think he's going to be a workhorse in the league for a long time."
Bannister has been open about his long-term optimism for Cannon since working with him on pitch grips both at spring training and in Triple-A earlier in the season, and the 24-year-old has a 3.36 ERA in 56⅓ major league innings since being recalled in June. Cannon has credited that to a sweeper he began developing with Bannister in the spring and improved movement on his changeup and sinker; particularly no longer having to consciously take velocity off of the latter to get the run and sink he wants. That old-school approach to sinking the ball has been swapped out for something far more new-fangled
That's a solid ERA in its own right over a reasonable sample, especially considering Cannon's only struck out 33 batters in that span while pitching in front of probably the worst defense in the league. Also, his one-inning disaster outing in Detroit on June 23 informs that his updated arsenal is fully capable of going completely haywire on him and producing meatballs.
"It's definitely very touchy and can easily get out of sync," Cannon said. "In Detroit and even at the beginning of the year, the seams get out of whack and now everything becomes hittable. It's just constant adjustments to make sure everything is moving correctly. If my sinker isn't catching, it kind of just floats and it becomes a lot easier to hit, and that's when you see a lot of fly balls and line drives, rather than ground balls."
Cannon will refer to his pitches "catching" now all the time, and it often serves as the primary barometer to whether he executed it successfully or not. In this case he means the seams catching the desired air flows around his pitch mid-flight, and producing the late movement he's seeking.
It's the language that has spread through the game as research on the phenomenon of seam-shifted wake grows. Pitchers are not throwing perfectly round spheres, but objects stitched together with raised seams that can produce unique movement effects as it travels through the air. More intentionally than ever, Cannon is focused on orienting the seams on the ball to produce an airflow that lends an apparent late movement to his pitches, which he believes is sharper than what he was producing before.
"The arsenal he's trying to throw is complicated," Bannister said. "It's not intuitive for everybody; prioritizing the seams on the baseball above velocity or other mechanical cues. At all times for a young pitcher, making sure that you're getting that late movement, the Greg Maddux, Kyle Hendricks type of movement where even if you don't have a lot of velo that day, you're able to get ground balls or weak contact, or have a lot of efficient innings that allow you to go six, seven-plus innings in a game."
While his aptitude for understanding how his pitches work certainly aided Cannon's buy-in process, the right-hander claims the mechanics needed from him on the mound are not nearly as complicated as the physics explanation needed to explain the motion on his pitches. It's just that his experience with pitching this way, what he needs to do with the seams each time is fairly new, and is still rounding into the consistency Cannon would figure to have after one, two or five seasons worth of throwing these pitches in this manner.
"I wouldn't say it's intricate, it's more just a lot of feel," Cannon said. "I think that feel comes with doing it a lot. This is really the first year that I've ever done it. I've done it like, accidentally in the past. I wasn't exactly sure how I was doing it, it was just kind of moving that way. I think the feel is definitely is starting to develop, just from starting in spring training to where I'm at now. Even with the sweeper, it got a little touchy because it's kind of the same thing. Not counting the start [on July 25] but the previous three starts, the sweeper wasn't moving as much as I would have liked. But in Texas it was a lot better. It's just constantly those tiny little adjustments."
The month of July, while quite infamously horrendous for a White Sox team that managed to win precisely zero of the five games Cannon pitched in, saw him complete six innings or more every time out. The strikeout-to-walk ratio during that time (14-to-11) would typically undercut the thrill of a rookie posting a 3.48 ERA over 31 innings, but the bulk of the production is a feature of his present style of quick and efficient out-getting, where he can repeatedly cover two-thirds of a game despite never being extended past 95 pitches.
At this point, seeing less of the White Sox bullpen is a triumph of its own. But the Sox would admit that they're building a style of pitcher who would be better appreciated on a better team.
"Even if you're giving up 3-4 runs, coming out of the game seven innings later has a lot of value for your team, especially a team that is league average or better in run production," Bannister said. "With an eye on the future, him getting a lot of these innings under his belt, understanding the adjustment he's got to make when he loses the orientation of the seams on the baseball, and he's not getting his best late movement, or one of his pitch shapes is off a little bit. He's on an accelerated path and it was a quick jump to the big leagues, particularly because he didn't pitch in this style last year and he's made a lot of changes this year. So he's still able to do that, still able to go out and compete."
Writing up a player before they suit up for a White Sox game is a dodgy bet, as the forces of entropy that have governed this season and this franchise for the last few years are always lurking around the corner. Still, in a season that will scar most involved for years to come, Cannon seems to be able to track his upward trajectory.
"I'd never heard why my stuff is doing what it was doing," Cannon said of life before Bannister. "In the past it was like, 'OK, that's good. Keep doing that.' And so if I ever lose it, I'd have trouble going back and finding it again. It would take me a little while. So now it's easier to make those little adjustments when I know exactly what I'm looking for."
