KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Even as they launched two majestic home runs to center field in the top of the first inning Saturday night, more meaningful progress toward the White Sox sealing up a spot in the playoffs was taking place elsewhere. When Alex Verdugo ripped a walk-off single off Cleveland’s Bryan Shaw in Boston, it reset the White Sox division lead to 10 games and reduced their magic number to a mere 19 with almost a full month left in the season.
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Hours earlier, closer Liam Hendriks lamented the situation, saying that it would be beneficial to have the extra injection of urgency that a fight in the standings brings. He believes that might have been the difference in an Oakland A’s team that he was part of but feels was inferior on paper, eliminating a White Sox team that by its own admission had taken its foot off the gas after clinching a playoff berth with 10 games left in the season. But he stopped short of identifying the same issue with the 2021 Sox club.
“No, I think everyone has kind of learned from last year,” Hendriks said. “The way this team plays, you get the lulls, but it’s making sure that after last year you don’t put the added pressure on yourselves.”
By staving off the potential disaster of blowing two separate six-run leads in Saturday night’s 10-7 win over the Royals, the White Sox have now won seven out of their past 10, and they have re-established themselves as a winning team since the All-Star break (25-22), and yes, that magic number is down to 18.
Yet the lulls are still being fought. Three of their least competitive losses of the season have taken place in the past two weeks, mostly with Tim Anderson sidelined, but where their offense took breaks from being the world-beating unit that was expected since they added Eloy Jiménez, Luis Robert and Yasmani Grandal to a group that had managed to remain in the top one-third of the league without them. On Saturday, they were back to being world-beaters a night after looking punchless. They’ve also scored 10 or more runs in four of their past eight games.
“We feed off each other,” said Yasmani Grandal, giving a sort of explanation to the boom-or-bust nature of offense in baseball. “We’re definitely hunting out there, making sure that whenever we get into a situation, we keep riding that wave as high as we can, so we can make the inning as long as we can.”
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That shape of production shakes out to clearly above average, if not downright great, for an offense. For a Sox bullpen that aspired to be the strength of the team in spring training but is floating around an average production as a unit, it results in Hendriks lamenting his number of blown saves in a season when he’s touting a 95-to-7 strikeout-to-walk ratio and went to the All-Star Game.
It results in likely future Hall of Famer Craig Kimbrel performing his version of the “Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the TV” meme in the lunchroom at the visitors clubhouse in the Rogers Centre in Toronto, identifying on the video screen where his diminished level of riding on his back leg had thrown off the timing of his hand break. The issue had led to his four-seamer drifting from the combination of ride and running action that pitching Ethan Katz calls “the most unique approach angle in baseball” to more of simply a cutting and hard-to-control upper-90s fastball, almost akin to what Dylan Cease was struggling to wrangle in 2019.
“He’s on top of stuff, he’s an intelligent guy and he didn’t get to where he is — he’s got good stuff, but he’s also pretty smart,” bullpen coach Curt Hasler said. “Now the axis is right, now the spin is right, now the ball is traveling the right way. All those things seem to correct themselves by the mechanism, which in his case, is the back leg.”
Serving as one of the direct points of contact for the White Sox major trade-deadline acquisitions in Kimbrel and Ryan Tepera, Hasler wants to offer his two new relievers all the resources for keeping them at the top of their game that their new team has to offer; whether it’s his eyes, video breakdown or data readouts. He also wants to let two veteran pitchers who have been successful in 2021 keep doing what made them trade targets in the first place.
“The first thing you do is you listen to them and see what they have to say, because they’ve been successful for a reason,” Hasler said. “One of the questions I asked both of them is, is there one or two things I need to watch for, or understand about you — what is it? So then they tell you. That’s where you start.”
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For Tepera, who allowed a game-tying home run to Franmil Reyes in his first White Sox game after being traded at the end of July, it was focusing on a cue to take a deep breath, constrict his torso and keep his shoulder from hanging back and open as his body exploded toward home plate. And it was something he needed to focus on, if only to get his mind off getting knocked around in his first two attempts to earn the trust of his new team. It’s evolved into him now being the man who came in and quieted things down when a would-be blowout win threatened to turn into a collapse due to a pair of poor Michael Kopech outings. After pitching a scoreless inning to stem the momentum last month in a wild 10-7 win versus Toronto, he quietly served the same function and ended the sixth to maintain a 9-7 lead after a Salvador Perez home run Saturday night.
“It just kind of resets my core to where I don’t have to work as hard to pronate and I kind of stay on line better, and I don’t have to really get out of whack as far as, a lot of times I get too quick to the plate and I almost fly open,” Tepera said of his breathing. “I obviously talk to Katz and Hasler about what I’ve done and what I’m thinking. But at the end of the day, it’s my career and I’ve got to be on top of the key things that I have changed this year.”
It’s their careers to maintain, but when things feel like they are spiraling out of control, it can be on Hasler and Katz to help pitchers find the reason amid the disappointing results that sink below their personal standards. Aaron Bummer getting three nondescript groundball outs in a scoreless eighth inning played a large role in Saturday’s victory calming down from the white-knuckle drama it threatened to be at times. And since Bummer’s 72.6 percent groundball rate is the highest in baseball among relievers with over 40 innings pitched, it’s what he’s been doing all season. But control problems, wavering velocity, surprise hangers from the otherwise wipeout slider he’s developed, and just general wonkiness have clouded that to the tune of a 4.27 ERA from a trusted setup man.
“He’s not happy that his FIP is this but his ERA is this,” Hasler said of Bummer. “But it’s also we’re also trying to explain to him that you keep doing things you’re doing, things are going to bounce your way. You keep throwing your sinker where you are supposed to throw it, you get in the counts you’re supposed to get into, use the breaking balls, the swing-and-miss, the strikeout rates that you’ve got going, things will turn around.
“We have confidence in Aaron Bummer. Aaron Bummer is going to be fine.”
A similar process will have to take place with Kopech. After getting abused by bad two-out bounces and Salvador Perez launching a three-run homer on a fastball that wasn’t even a strike in the fifth, he followed it up by throwing an actual mistake to Carlos Santana for a no-doubt solo home run in the sixth inning Saturday night. Another blowup outing, after his first such game of the season in his final appearance of July, gives Kopech a 12.07 ERA in his last 12 outings; including four home runs allowed in 12 2/3 innings. And this is despite his velocity ticking up down the stretch. The two fastballs Kopech allowed home runs on Saturday night were 97 and 99 mph. If the enemy is the Sox adding extra pressure on themselves, Kopech’s famous levels of self-scrutiny could work against that, but the White Sox don’t see it that way.
“I look at it as him being very competitive with himself, and that’s in a weird way, a good thing,” Hasler said of Kopech. “He does move to the next day. I just looked at his being hard on himself is he’s really freaking competitive. He doesn’t like if the glove is here and he misses the glove. He’s not happy about that. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you don’t allow it to affect the next pitch.”
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Amid the team battling the sense that there is little to play for over the final month other than the sake of playing well, the White Sox bullpen is fighting to live up to the expectations they set for themselves, or the expectations that their names and track record carry. But the Sox coaching staff just saw that urgency play out in the best way with their most accomplished reliever. For Katz, knowing when it was time to step in and give input to someone like Kimbrel could be as simple as watching him play catch, seeing his dissatisfied reactions with the movement of his pitches, and offering to look into it.
“The thing with Craig is he’s always looking to get better and feeling things out and looking for any sort of support when it comes to his stuff, when he feels off,” Katz said. “So it’s just a matter of trying to get him back when he feels off, and maintaining that when he’s right.”
So in the seventh inning Saturday night, with the Sox still nursing a two-run lead, and having allowed two home runs to Perez amid a season of him annihilating fastballs from their pitching staff, Kimbrel was tapped for action. While he has already admitted that adjusting away from closing has been a strain that he’s working through, Kimbrel nevertheless struck out the first two hitters he faced before Nicky Lopez was fooled by a curve that he served into left field with a check-swing bloop. The fluke occurrence set up the disaster scenario of Perez stepping in, with 40 home runs, knowing that his 41st would tie the score and finish erasing a six-run deficit. Instead, Kimbrel struck him out with three twisting knuckle curveballs in the dirt, the final one set up by the only fastball he threw — which nearly dotted the outside corner for strike three as is.
Afterward, manager Tony La Russa revealed the encounter to be of their design, which doubled as a crucial show of trust in Kimbrel’s work.
“Craig had to be the guy to face him.”
(Photo of Craig Kimbrel: Jay Biggerstaff / USA Today)