Out of the Fire: Mariners at White Sox Series Preview
The Mariners avoid the heat and head to Chicago for a three-game series against the White Sox.
It feels like the White Sox have been cursed by the injury bug even worse than the Mariners, losing three of their daily producers in Eloy Jiménez, Luis Robert, and Nick Madrigal to season-ending or long-term Injured List stints. According to Baseball Prosepctus’s Injured List Ledger, the White Sox have actually been one of MLB’s least-injured teams in raw numbers; they just have the largest amount of star power that’s been affected. The Mariners, on the other hand, haven’t lost as many stars, but are hanging out with the league-worst walking wounded of Toronto, Tampa Bay, and the Padres for the league’s most significant injuries thanks to the haunted sixth starter spot and your run-of-the-mill crummy luck. Just remember, no matter what happens in this series, we win the IL Olympics.
Despite the injuries, the White Sox have played extremely well over the first half of the season, sitting atop their division with the best record in the American League, non-AL West edition. Cleveland is nipping at Chicago’s heels, but there’s a big gap between those two teams and the rest of the division thanks to Minnesota’s surprising downward spiral. With Cleveland, trailing the White Sox by just two games, enjoying a soft part of their schedule with back-to-back series against Minnesota and Detroit, the White Sox will look to maintain their lead in the division despite a challenging road trip that saw them swept by the surging Astros last weekend.
Even without Jiménez, Robert, and Madrigal, the White Sox lineup has been fairly potent. They’ve received admirable contributions from their replacements, though clearly not up the level expected from those three stars. The trio of Tim Anderson, Yoán Moncada, and José Abreu have done a lot of the heavy lifting to carry the rest of the offense. Yasmani Grandal probably deserves to be mentioned alongside those three but his offensive contributions are a little harder to parse. His slash line sits at a totally wacky .172/.383/.401; he’s walking in over a quarter of his plate appearances, striking out in another quarter of them, and nearly half of his hits have gone over the fence. He’s really embraced the three-true-outcomes aesthetic of the modern game by simply trying to crush strikes over the fence while avoiding swinging at pitches out of the zone.
Probable Pitchers
The Mariners faced Carlos Rodón in his first start of this season. His four-seam fastball averaged 95.4 mph in that start; it’s now averaging 97.2 mph in June. Both marks represented the highest average velocity he’s ever had in his career. After dominating the Mariners across five innings in that opening appearance, he went out and threw a no-hitter in his very next start and has been one of the very best starters in the American League ever since. The offseason work to get into better shape and clean up his mechanics has paid off with all that added velocity. He’s posting career-bests in nearly every single meaningful pitching category and has finally fulfilled all that promise he had as first-round draft pick back in 2014.
Over the last few years, Lance Lynn has perfected his fastball-heavy approach. He added a cutter to his repertoire back in 2017, the year after his Tommy John surgery. His usage of that pitch has steadily increased each year since, and he’s now throwing it around a third of the time this year. All those extra cutters have come at the expense of his sinker, which has now become a secondary option for Lynn to generate contact on the ground. His entire approach revolves around playing all three fastballs off each other so that the batter can’t guess which way the pitch will break. The whiff rate on his four-seamer is one of the highest in the game and opposing batters have collected a .244 wOBA against his trio of fastballs this year, a career-low mark.
It’s weird to say that a former Cy Young-winner is the weakest link in the White Sox rotation, but that just speaks to the ridiculous quality of their staff. After his award-winning season back in 2015, Keuchel has settled in as a good, not great starter who relies heavily on contact management. And with such a contact heavy approach, his success is often tied to the quality of the defense behind him and good batted ball luck. His elite groundball rate has slipped a bit in recent seasons as he’s started to move away from his diving sinker and throw his cutter a bit more often. He’s also throwing his excellent changeup far more often since joining the White Sox but those changes to his pitch mix have resulted in the lowest strikeout rates of his career.
The Big Picture:
Despite the Mariners’ recent hot stretch, the AL West becomes more of a two-team race every day, with Houston playing some utterly dominant ball lately, winners of their last eleven straight. The A’s have gone just 6-4 over the same stretch but remain just two games back of Houston, and the second-place Athletics actually have a better record than the first-place White Sox. Other than the surprisingly dominant Giants, the top of the AL West has the best record in baseball. Speaking of the Giants, they most recently finished a game with the Angels where Giants fans seemed to outnumber Angels fans in Angel Stadium two to one, Ohtani started and gave up just one run over six innings, the Angels forfeited the DH so Ohtani could hit (he went 0-for-3 with two walks), the game went into the 12th inning tied 1-1, Angels pitcher Griffin Canning played left field, and the Angels wound up losing 9-3. So, just normal stuff. The Mariners remain two games ahead of the Angels, and the Rangers remain in third place in the 2022 Draft Order contest, edging out Pittsburgh but well behind Baltimore and Arizona, the 1927 Yankees of losing.