The White Sox are in first place in the AL Central, they are playoff-bound.
The playoff rotation and the seventh-inning reliever are things Sox fans legitimately care about nowadays. Maybe it’s time to transition away from just writing about weird things that interest me and move toward cold, reasoned breakdowns about what lies ahead.
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So anyways, Tim Anderson hit a double on an 0-2 slider from Pirates right-hander Joe Musgrove to lead off the Sox’s 5-4 loss Tuesday night.
Anderson would say on Wednesday that the pitch fooled him. Watching it live, you could see Anderson recognize that he had been fooled, and you could see him adjust and flick a line drive down the right-field line. A lot happened during the process of watching a backed-up 82 mph slider travel sixty feet, six inches.
“I just threw my hands,” Anderson said. “But I was just able to stay inside the ball and was able to shoot it to right. That was one of his best pitches, that was a good pitch, and for me to be able to hit it, to make that adjustment, my hands are working. And I’m aggressive in the zone. That would’ve been strike three, so I had to fight it off some kind of way and I was able to push it to right.”
“Good pitch,” mostly reads as Anderson being polite. It was a good pitch in that it was clearly unexpected, but it was unexpected because Anderson was looking in the right place: down and away, where catcher Jacob Stallings was set up for a slider. By the time Anderson recognizes the pitch, he’s already late and recovery is unlikely.
We actually see batters realize they’ve been fooled mid-flight and drastically switch hand position plenty. It’s just that it usually does not result in hard contact. Maybe that’s the part of this that seems so unusual, more so than clearly seeing Anderson jerk his hands in.
“Bat speed is required because you need to get the barrel to whatever the pitch might be, whatever action is created, sinking or riding,” manager Rick Renteria said. “In the minor leagues and once he arrived here, he’s always been able to pull his hands in, lag the barrel and be able to use right field as well as he did and go from center to right. That ability, combined with more maturity and experience, he has put his game together.”
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Anderson has explained his longer development path to becoming proficient against right-handers versus his established run of success against left-handers as simply the difference in difficulty from having breaking balls move away from him, rather than toward him.
Accounting for that has resulted in the steady stream of micro-adjustments we see during Anderson’s plate appearances, where he’ll often shift ahead in the batter’s box when he anticipates off-speed so that he can cut off the angle of breaking pitches and still poke them to right field. Those are adaptations that took years to master.
But Renteria is right when he references Anderson’s minor-league experience since it’s a reflection of the raw hitting talent people saw in Anderson when he was hitting .240 and striking out 25 percent of the time. It’s not fair to say the expectation was that Anderson would win a batting title at some point, but guys with “plus” hit tools can lag for a while before their approach comes around. Despite touting probably one the higher strikeout-to-walk ratios of any batting champion in history, Anderson really has found an approach to match his skill set.
Nothing would really emphasize that like winning the American League batting title again, and at .350 after a 1-for-4 with a walk night in Pittsburgh, he’s locked in another battle with DJ LeMahieu (.355) down the stretch. Anderson has mostly focused on team goals, but a second Rod Carew trophy would really make this stretch of his career unassailable.
“It definitely would mean a lot,” Anderson said. “I guess it would let people know it wasn’t a fluke.”
Since his breakout season also included a seemingly unsustainable .406 batting average on balls in play, Yoán Moncada was tasked with proving that last year wasn’t a fluke as well, but the haze of his COVID-19 aftermath has replaced that with the question of when the 25-year-old will simply look like himself.
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A return to some exit velocities over 100 mph Tuesday night, and stretching a single into a second base by showing the burst to respond to a Gregory Polanco outfield error was encouraging. But an inside-out swing to spray a ball to left field Wednesday reminded most of his unique hitting abilities.
That’s a 96 mph sinker placed right on the inside corner of the plate, in a 1-0 count where Moncada is not necessarily geared up for anything specific. It’s an impressively difficult spot to beat the ball to, and like Anderson’s double, it involves tucking his hands in mid-flight, but the fastball velocity allows him to do it a lot more fluidly. Or, his ability does.
“We saw the guy you guys have been used to seeing for a while,” Renteria said. “He’s still working. The trainers did a great job of trying to manage, strengthening his legs and control the irritation that had occurred with him. Obviously, we still have to monitor his playing time so whatever we can do to keep him out there.”
To that end, that Moncada charged and barehanded a slow roller in the fifth, before firing to first base all in one motion was less notable than the fact that he did it without grimacing or staggering afterward. It should take more than two off-days for him to completely shake off the after-effects of COVID-19, which figure to wax and wane for a bit, but the White Sox have been the best offense in the American League with Moncada reduced to a shadow of himself and fighting to provide league-average offense.
Any return to normalcy for him makes the Sox much more able to overcome their pitching foibles.
About those foibles, in some respects, there are significant issues keeping Dane Dunning from being an instant playoff starter, despite a 2.70 ERA and a 25.9 percent strikeout rate over four outings. For one, none of these four starts have come against an above-average offense, with the Tigers being the closest, and the Pirates team he shut out for six innings in an 8-1 win Wednesday being the farthest.
More tangibly, getting pulled after 78 pitches despite an 8-0 lead in the seventh was reflective of the fact that even though Dunning’s Tommy John rehab is completed in one important sense, he is still having his usage slowly ramped up and monitored closely by the organization. When Renteria talks about pulling him, it’s in terms of the restrictions the coaching staff has been given to maintaining his health. Just like when a guy is building innings in sim games, Dunning getting up and throwing warm-ups for the seventh inning was weighed just as heavily as his raw pitch count.
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“It’s kind of weird to say, but he’s kind of having his rehab outings now,” Renteria said. “Until we get a certain type of release where we understand, we’re still going to measure his workload. Once we get something that might be a green light, as long as he’s giving up six-plus, seven-plus, it was a great outing. Efficiency is the key.”
That mention of usage and arm stress restrictions might be hard to meld with pitching high-leverage games with the season on the line, but at the same time, no one outside of the Lucas Giolito-Dallas Keuchel 1-2 punch accesses the full complement of their arsenal consistently and easily as Dunning. His five-pitch plan of attack doesn’t easily fall apart, and he has multiple methods of hitting the different quadrants of the zone with the different movement profiles his pitches offer. Pitchers like him tend to die on their shield, challenging hitters in the zone and suffering hard contact, rather than doomed by walks and inefficiency.
Fittingly, after he came in with a 30.5 percent strikeout rate, Wednesday night saw Dunning dominate a punchless Pirates lineup in a new manner. After riding his four-seamer upstairs and dropping vertical sliders for loads of whiffs his first three starts, he leaned more heavily on his sinker in Pittsburgh and was rewarded with 10 ground balls out from a club he had no reason to fear in the zone. A sinking fastball and rising four-seam fastball are like a slider and curve, where it’s cool to tout a vast skill set provided the two pitches don’t blend together into one mediocre offering, but Dunning has been navigating it well enough so far.
“Being able to throw the four-seam at the top of the zone and then sink it in, or run it in when you need to, I definitely think it’s a special ability,” said catcher James McCann, who homered twice. “You look across the game and 10 years ago, everyone threw a sinker. Now it seems like everyone throws a four-seamer. So the fact that he could do both, there’s not many guys that are doing that, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the future of pitching.”
Dunning being the future of pitching reads as a lot more palatable for the pace of play than current, maximalist trends. But as has been the case all year, Dunning has barely been willing to tout his role in the future White Sox rotation, let alone the direction of pitching itself.
“I was just trying to do my job, get us to the second half of the game, and from there, let our bullpen and everybody else do everything,” Dunning said. “We have a really high, talented offense and an extremely good defense, so I try to put the ball in their hands.”
(Photo: Patrick Gorski / USA Today)