Glendale gets the W, mostly without White Sox

Glendale Desert Dogs 6, Salt River Rafters 5

Blake Rutherford (rf) 1-for-4, R, BB, K (.194 BA, .710 OPS)

Yeah, sometimes these updates are wafer-thin. But hey, there are only two left!

Rutherford was the only White Sox player in action tonight. He’s been almost exclusively in right field and exclusively batting leadoff since the Fall Stars Break. That hasn’t been performance-driven, given that .194 batting average, so the guess here is the plan all along was to get Rutherford some leadoff time in the fall. If I recall my minor league updates accurately, it seems Luis González was the more frequent leadoff man for Birmingham this season ... with Rutherford never getting any time in the No. 1 spot.

OK, so with nothing else to talk about, I screengrabbed BRuth’s 2019 stats at Birmingham:

Yo, I was right: no games batting first this year. But, check it out: Rutherford kicked ass when leading off an inning this year: .341/.408/.477! So while the very few hits Blake has this fall have usually gone for extra bases, it seems to me the White Sox may be priming him for some leadoff work in 2020. We’ll see eh?

OK, tomorrow night, same two teams, Glendale heading up to Peoria, and hopefully there’ll be more to talk about.