Saturday, September 17, 2022
Back to Normal
Last night, the White Sox couldn’t beat the Tigers, a team thirty-five games under .500, while the Guardians came back from a 3-0 deficit in the bottom of the seventh to beat the third-place Twins. That’s all you need to know. Those gluttons for punishment among you, read on.
The deadwood trio—Yasmani Grandal, Yoan Moncada and A.J. Pollack—went a combined 0-for-13 in a ten-inning, 3-2 loss. Each contributed a strikeout, none bigger than Moncada’s with the go-ahead run on second base in the tenth.
A raspberry while I’m at it aimed in the direction of acting manager Miguel Cairo, who elected not to bunt the free runner over to third base. Cairo said he wanted to be aggressive against reliever Alex Lange because he features a good slider. Huh? Sliders go into the dirt. With a runner on third, a pitcher will feel the pressure not to throw a pitch away, thereby doing so. That’s how the Guardians scored their winning run, by the way.
As for starter Lucas Giolito, I can’t even say his performance constituted the glass half full. Yes, only one run allowed, but that was in 4.2 innings, and he needed ninety-six pitches to get there. By way of comparison, Tigers’ starter Matt Manning threw eighty-seven pitches over seven innings. As ever with Giolito, the bullpen gets a workout.
There’s just something not right going on with the onetime centerpiece of our “rebuild.” According to the box score, it was seventy-nine degrees in Detroit at gametime, yet the sweat was pouring off of the bill of Giolito’s cap by the bottom of the second. The sweat is always pouring off of him, which I never noticed until this year. Couple that and an inability to reach 93 mph on his pitches, and you’ve got a pitcher in trouble.
Come to think of it, the same goes for his team.
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