Six Pack of Stats: Twins 8, White Sox 1

Well, that was a game.

López didn’t make it past the second inning, and we had ourselves a good ol’ fashioned disaster show. The Twins are going to be a bigger thorn in our sides than the Cleveland Baseball Team and the White Sox are going to need to figure them out if they’re going to be successful. There was just some bad baseball played tonight, between the throwing errors, bullpen pains, strikeouts, and botched rundown.

This graph stinks:

FanGraphs

First-inning woes

The first inning continues to plague the White Sox. The first three batters ended up on base, and López’s WPA went down to -0.09. Lopez managed to strike out Cruz and forced Rosario to ground into a double play, saving a potential disastrous inning.

A replay challenge on the double play gave us all a bit of a scare, but the review bots upheld the play and the call stood. And that was the end of the luck the White Sox had tonight.

All the other woes

The 100th pitch from the White Sox came courtesy of Ross Detwiler — in the fourth. A bad throw from third to first kept him in the game longer than he really needed to be, but luckily no more damage was done. A botched rundown in the fifth gave the Twins a run, and the lead stretched further away. Eloy blowing a catch in left happened, too.

With four errors, this did not look like the defensive team we’ve seen all season.

The Twins bullpen held the Sox to a wOBA of .182.

WPA leaders were Josh Donaldson (.207), Jose Berrios (.173), and Nick Cave (.117), showing dominance the whole night.

Steve Stone’s original phone number

Evergreen-2-5746

Sounds made up, but let’s go with it.

Deceptive power

Jake Cave’s homer in the second looked like it wasn’t going to make it out. Unfortunately, Luis Robert missed it by a hair. The ball barely cleared the fence, for Cave’s second home run of the year with an exit velocity of 101.9 mph. Pretty impressive that an 84 mph pitch can launch that far and fast. Physics is wild.

Magic number: 24

There are 24 games remaining over the next 26 days, which means the Sox have 24 games left to get it together to beat the big teams and have a shot in the postseason.

Oh, 24 is also Josh Donaldson’s number, and it was his first game back off the injured list. But that’s less magical, considering how much he helped the Twins stomp all over the Sox.

MVP

Anyone who sat through the entire almost four-hour disaster game.

Not a stat, but RIP Tom Seaver

Thanks to Brett for letting me guest over here today! Catch me over at South Side Hit Pen, trash-talking our enemies and complaining about unwritten rules.