White Sox name Carlos Rodon Opening Day starter

GLENDALE, Ariz. — Carlos Rodon was named the White Sox’ Opening Day starter Monday, 10 days before the team’s first game of the 2019 season at Kansas City.

For the Sox’ big-bodied left-hander with the lively fastball and nasty slider, it’s a nice first-time honor for which he deserves to take personal satisfaction having battled various arm problems after the Sox plucked him with the third pick in the 2014 draft. When they did so, both team and player envisioned this becoming a reality one day.

Rodon, 26, earned it upon returning from shoulder surgery in June of last season and pitching like an ace during the months of July and August. He was 5-0 with a 1.84 ERA during that stretch. A dramatic fade in September – 0-5, 9.22 — didn’t cost him the nod he received from manager Rick Renteria at the Sox’ spring training complex late Monday morning.

“He has worked very, very well this spring,” Renteria said. “He continues to move forward. He’s happy, healthy and climbing as [pitching coach Don Cooper] likes to say.

“He has been looking very, very good. Solid, loose and confident. Let’s hope, knocking on wood here, ‘Los is set up for a nice year.”

Rodon will be opposed by Royals right-hander Brad Keller.

Rodon probably knew, like everyone else, that this was coming. Reynaldo Lopez was the Sox’ best pitcher last season, his first one as a Sox, going 7-10 with a 3.91 ERA in 188 2/3 innings and the team leader in Baseball Reference wins above replacement (Rodon was fourth). But Rodon, drafted and developed by the Sox, has been around longer and possesses, as first-year Sox catcher James McCann says, “Cy Young type stuff.”

McCann should know. He caught Cy winners Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer and David Price with the Detroit Tigers.

Right-hander Ivan Nova pitched the Pirates’ opener last season but was acquired as a strike-throwing, innings-eating veteran to fill a void left by James Shields, who started the 2018 opener by default in a rotation surrounded by unproven young righties Lopez, Lucas Giolito and Carson Fulmer and veteran Miguel Gonzalez.

That Rodon goes into 2019 as the declared “staff ace” in the third year of the Sox rebuild also speaks volumes about how far it has to go. Rodon, 26-29 with a 4.01 career ERA, has a ways to climb to meet expectations, the Sox rotation needs to climb along with him, and the entire pitching staff is not a playoff caliber unit. The rebuild has significant hurdles to get over for the Sox to compete for multiple championships on an annual basis, the stated goal of general manger Rick Hahn in all this.

How far are they away? Most experts view the Sox, who have finished fourth the last five seasons and fifth the year before those, trying to compete for third place this year.

If Rodon has the kind of season they believe he’s capable of, maybe they’ll pull it off. And who knows, maybe he’ll become the first Sox to start consecutive openers since Chris Sale in 2013 and ’14.