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Turns out my two-year-old grandson knows Chicago White Sox baseball. Every time he dropped by to watch today’s game with me he said, “Uh-oh.” His five-year-old sister just took one look and wandered away to do something more interesting, like stare at a wall.
The kids nailed it, and were it not for the Eloy extension news, it would have seemed even more dire. There’s not much good to be said about being blown out by the Arizona Diamondbacks, 11-2.
Offensively, it took a Ryan Goins opposite-field HR to break up a perfect game in the seventh. Yep. Perfect game. In spring training. By four pitchers. From Arizona. Even after the scheduled starter got pulled because he was sick.
At the time, Goins cut the Arizona lead to 7-1. The Sox added another run on a Luis González double, a ground out and Danny Mendick sacrifice fly, again cutting the lead to six, but that was as close as the White Sox would get.
At least there was the excuse that most of the batters won’t be on the Opening Day roster.
Defensively, the White Sox held former team member Alex Avila to six RBIs, some 14 shy of how many he had in 80 games all of last year. The runs came on two three-run homers, one each off potential starters Ervin Santana and Lucas Giolito. It says something about your pitching staff when the only good performance was one inning thrown by Danny Dopico, of the Winston-Salem Dopicos.
In Santana’s first real shot to show that he belongs in the rotation, he pitched better than his terrible line — eight hits, four earned runs in four innings — would indicate. The Avila blast in the fourth was the first hard-hit fair ball against Santana, as he was victimized by cheap hits and the Sox’s patented atrocious D. Stoney noticed Santana was opening up too soon on some of his deliveries, which should be fixable.
In an effort to insert one mildly-positive highlight, here’s manager Ricky Renteria pregame, talking about his expectations for Santana, as well as some thoughts on the man of the hour, Eloy Jiménez:
No errors got called in the game, but several were richly deserved, beginning with Preston Tucker doing his best Daniel Palka impression on a pop up to right. That came as an appetizer before Avila’s first homer.
On the other hand, Giolito’s line — seven earned runs on eight hits and three walks in four very, very long innings — may be better than he deserved. It’s starting to look, depressingly, like he’s ready to pick up right where he left off in 2018 — namely, as the worst regular starting pitcher in baseball.
Tomorrow’s game against Texas is set for 3:05 p.m. CT. Iván Nova is set to take on Jason Hammel, and it should be on MLB.TV.
Given you had to live through that awful game today, or if you’re lucky, just had to read through this excruciating recap, let’s leave on a note of delicious heartburn: the new food offerings at Sox Park this season:
Brb, drooling... pic.twitter.com/e31HGEemaN
— Chicago White Sox (@whitesox) March 21, 2019