It appears the 2017 White Sox (59-88) cannot actually hit like immortal gods of baseball forever. For the first time in six games, they did not record 10 hits, and for just the second time in seven games, they lost, 3-2 in Detroit on a walk-off Mikie Mahtook single off Juan Minaya in the ninth.
Despite a rally of dribbled singles from Avisail Garcia and Matt Davidson to tie the game in the eighth, the Sox never showed the offensive might to back up another encouraging effort from Carson Fulmer, which along with Yoan Moncada’s home run, is probably the only long-term takeaway from Friday’s affair.
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107.6 mph: Exit velocity on Moncada’s bullet to right field off an Anibal Sanchez low fastball in the third. Sanchez had been fooling Moncada with changeups up to that point in the night, but changeups have to work off the fastball, and Moncada certainly got a hold of the one fastball he saw. Moncada has now homered in back-to-back days, and from each side of the plate. He might turn out OK.
16: Consecutive games reaching base for Moncada, who didn’t so much reach base as circle them in the third inning. He is hitting .286/.392/.556 during this streak with four home runs.
64.8 percent: Strike percentage for Fulmer over his last two outings, both of which have lasted six innings, with just one run allowed each time. To boil things down to an impossibly simple level, Fulmer has the stuff and life on his pitches to be a real handful when there are two strikes, or even one strike, or any count where he can’t be keyholed. More importantly, and much improved from his nine-strikeout effort against San Francisco on Sunday, he threw first-pitch strikes to 15 of 23 hitters, which allowed him rack up quick outs with his running four-seamer and to get into the fifth before he issued his first and only walk of the night.
8 of 9: Quality starts out of total starts for the last run of Fulmer, Lucas Giolito and Reynaldo Lopez, with the only exception being when Giolito was driven out after 5 1/3 innings last Friday. You will recall that Giolito got ejected for arguing that it should have been a strike ‘em out, throw ‘em out to end his night, which had it been the case, would have made it nine out of the last nine for this young trio.
14/4: Strikeout-to-walk ratio for Fulmer over his last two starts. Nine strikeouts and three walks was more fun to watch, but five strikeouts and one walk — which he delivered Friday in Detroit — is more becoming of an efficient starter.
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16.1 percent: Swinging strike rate for Fulmer’s cutter on the night, which became his primary non-fastball offering, but also took some of the function away from his four-seamer. Fulmer went on top of the zone with his cutter in a way similar to how he ran up his fastball against the Giants, which looked weird but seemed to work.
10: Games in the hitting streak of Kevan Smith, who has the lighter offensive numbers of the platoon with Omar Narvaez, but has nevertheless helped stabilize a position that many expected to be one of the worst units in the league simply due to the lack of experience. But he came into Friday night perfectly middle of the pack at eighth in the American League by wRC+.
100 percent: Stolen base percentage for Jose Abreu this season, after he swiped his second bag of the season in the sixth as Nicky Delmonico struck out on a 3-2 high fastball. He had not successfully stolen a base in 2015 nor 2016. One hundred percent is also the rate of f-bombs caught by the famously sensitive Detroit field mics.
54: Starts for Sanchez since the last time he’s struck out 11 batters in a game. You could argue that he eventually had to do it again sometime, but given that the Tigers had removed him from the starting rotation at the beginning of the season, they likely did not believe this themselves.
(Top photo: Raj Mehta/USA TODAY Sports)