Don't Worry. Be Happy

White Sox manager Rick Renteria told the Athletic today, “I don’t want to lose anymore.  I want to win.”  Renteria sure has a funny way of showing it.

In the bottom of the tenth inning, the Mariners’ Omar Narvaez (remember him?  He’s hitting .279 with 21* homeruns) lined a ball that hit off the top of the wall in right and bounced back onto the field of play.  Most everyone, including the Seattle broadcast crew excerpted on the MLB website, thought it was a double.  The umpires ruled it a home run, then hesitated, then ruled it a homerun.

At some point, rebuilding teams want to establish a winning culture.  The manager in this instance should’ve gone all Billy Martin/Earl Weaver, kicking up a storm the instant Narvaez moved off of second base.  Yesterday, MLB issued a statement apologizing for the “miscommunication [between umpires and Renteria that] resulted in not reviewing the home-run call on the field.”  If the manager had been doing his job and fighting to win a ballgame, the umpires would’ve been made to focus their attention, pronto.

Then, yesterday, in what was a 10-5 Sox lead going into the bottom of the eighth, Renteria had Hector Santiago go out after pitching 3.2 innings of scoreless relief.  Renteria kept Santiago in after a leadoff single followed by a walk followed by another single.  Only then did  he change pitchers.  Out of the frying pan and into the fire they went with Kelvin Herrera on the mound.  I say this because Herrera already had given up six homers in just 44.1 innings of work.  Boom.  Make that seven.  Not long afterward, the five-run lead turned into a tie.

Not to worry, because the top of the Sox order is up against 28-year old journeyman Austin Adams.  Guess what?  Adams struck out the side—Tim Anderson, Yoan Moncada and Jose Abreu—on eleven pitches.  Anderson and Moncada went down on three pitches apiece and moped their ways back to the dugout in what would’ve made me go ballistic if I ever caught my daughter doing that.  Abreu, bless him, is a professional who at least worked the count and didn’t look like a child afterwards.

As for the bottom of the ninth, Jose Ruiz pitched.  Oh, and he walked in the winning run, but you might expect that of someone with a 5.21 ERA.  Funny—or sad, depending—how four out of the five relievers the Sox used had ERAs in excess of 4.5 (ditto starter Ivan Nova).  As my friend Forrest might say, losing baseball is as losing baseball does, from the front office down to the dugout.  But, hey, it’s a rebuild, and nothing counts.  Don’t worry.  Be happy.