Sense of Humor Saves White Sox' Sanity
ALSO: AGING AND FRAGILE BUT MAX SCHERZER WANTS TO KEEP GOING
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Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
Depending on this weekend’s results and Monday’s makeup doubleheader between the Mets and Braves in Atlanta, this would be the sixth time two New York teams reached the postseason since 1956 though the Yankees and Mets staged only one Subway Series (2000) . . .
Baltimore’s fade from the top of the AL East is the direct result of injuries to starting pitchers Grayson Rodriguez and Kyle Bradish . . .
In the wake of Yoshinobu Yamamoto getting a record contract for a pitcher, look for fellow Japanese leagues pitching star Roki Sasasaki to become a coveted free agent this fall . . .
The Giants want to extend Blake Snell but the rival Dodgers have the riches to lure the two-time Cy Young Award winner with a fatter and longer contract . . .
Cheapskates: Pittsburgh cut first baseman Rowdy Tellez before he qualified for a $200,000 bonus by reaching 425 plate appearances (he finished at 421) . . .
If he gets two more RBI over the final five games, Atlanta first baseman Matt Olson will be the only major-leaguer with 30 homers and 100 RBI in each of the last four seasons . . .
Kumar Rocker — no relation to the infamous John Rocker — fanned seven in his four-inning debut for the Texas Rangers . . .
With Washington finally losing the fat ($35 million) contract of disappointing pitcher Patrick Corbin, will new Nats owner Mark Lerner consider bringing back Juan Soto
Leading Off
The South Side Shuffle
The White Sox finally grew a sense of humor about it. We think.
By Jeff Kallman
Cue the immortal blues and soul singer Etta James warbling “At Last.” At long enough last.
The White Sox, that band of baseball blight slouching toward a new record for getting their heads handed to them on the regular season, finally grew the one thing this month that they’d lacked sorely beforehand: a sense of humor.
It didn’t exactly begin in the top of the fifth against the almost as hapless and hopeless Angels Tuesday night. But this was one time you saw two or more players suffering a defensive brain fart without wanting to have them shot, hung, lethally injected, or forced to watch reruns of My Mother, the Car. And, without them wanting to hand you the weaponry.
At the plate: Angels left fielder Mickey Moniak. First-pitch swinging against White Sox starting pitcher Jonathan Cannon. Popped up around the plate to the right side but fair enough. Converging: Cannon, first baseman Gavin Sheets, third baseman Miguel Vargas, and catcher Chuckie Robinson. The latter three all but surrounded Cannon, who had so good a bead on it that he could have just held his glove forth.
But someone called Cannon off the play. And the ball went not into another White Sox glove but onto the Guaranteed Rate Field turf with a thump before Sheets retrieved it, perhaps a bit sheepishly.
“Folks,” purred one of the Angels’ announcing team, “that’s how you end up with a record of 36 and 120. It’s not just the dogs barking here on the South Side.”
The box score says only that Moniak got himself an infield base hit and then stole second with Angels third baseman Eric Wagaman at the plate. That’s as far as Moniak got before the side was retired. The game remained scoreless until the Angels plated one each in the seventh and eighth—before an RBI double and an RBI infield single set the table for White Sox left fielder Andrew Benintendi’s tiebreaking single.
That 3-2 score held up. Then, the White Sox performed the heretofore unthinkable: they went on to sweep the Angels to finish their regular season at home. It falls now to the Tigers to hand the White Sox that one loss that sends the 1962 Mets packing from the regular season record book.
They sure knew how to see and raise a pair of late-season foul-ups that finally began showing these Blight Sox were beginning to learn to laugh at themselves, somewhat and somehow.
Not too long ago, Vargas plowed into Benintendi on a play. Infielder Lenyn Sosa didn’t know a catcher throwing around the horn would start the routine at second base and caught it with his face. And the Guardians beat the White Sox a fortnight ago with a pair of two-run infield hits.
Said that day’s White Sox starting pitcher Davis Martin: “You walk that fine line of being on the edge of losing your mind—always on that razor’s edge. We’re just watching it all, and we’re like, oh my gosh, this happens and this happens. Truly, it’s so many things.”
That’s not exactly 1962 Mets manager Casey Stengel hailing incoming Polo Grounds customers, “Come an’ see my amazin’ Mets. I been in this game a hundred years but I see new ways to lose I never knew were invented yet.”
It’s not exactly Hall of Fame outfielder Richie Ashburn finishing his splendid career as a 1962 Met and observing, “I don’t know what to call this, but I know I’ve never seen it before.”
“I think if there was any other group of guys in here, it would be the most miserable existence ever,” Martin said to ESPN’s Jeff Passan. “People are like, 'Oh, how are you not losing your mind?' We're a bunch of young idiots just trying to make sure we have a job next year."
“Any losing team I’ve ever been on,” Ashburn told journalism legend Jimmy Breslin (for Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?), “had several things going on.”
One, the players gave up. Or they hated the manager. Or they had no team spirit. Or the fans turned into wolves. But there was none of this with the Mets.
Nobody stopped trying. The manager was absolutely great, nobody grumbled about being with the club, and the fans we had, well, there haven’t been fans like this in baseball history. So we lose 120 games and there isn’t a gripe on the club. It was remarkable . . . I can remember guys being mad even on a big winner.
Don’t tell that first part to White Sox infield vet Nicky Lopez. He’s been playing clubhouse DJ all season. He cranks the post-game music. He helps remind his mates what wins mean, especially when wins seem extinct enough that a three-game winning streak earlier in September feels like a World Series triumph.
So does interim manager Grady Sizemore. The one-time Cleveland matinee idol is now the family man who still looks like a matinee idol (despite the mullet) and has been nothing but a look-on-the-bright-side influence upon his players. Enough so that he’s gone from not even a consideration in the conversation for the permanent White Sox managing gig.
In fact, the man who once boasted of a large female fan club known as Grady’s Ladies now credits parenthood for teaching him “a lot of patience . . . how sometimes you have to say things over and over again.”
As a parent, it's very hard. Even after you've figured it out, you haven't figured it out. So I think the best part about where I'm at is I know that I haven't figured anything out and that every day is a new day to learn something new and to get better.”
Not once has Sizemore surrendered to the temptation to call for a rescue team to lift him up, up, and away from the disaster into which he walked when dour Pedro Grifol was ordered to walk the plank.
Sizemore’s White Sox may have a .261 winning percentage since he was anointed. He’ll be on the bridge when they pass the Mets. But he’s not going to let them go down without a fight or a smile or something, anything positive to take to next spring training, no matter who’s on the bridge.
Enough of his players won’t, either. Even if there are no Stengels or Ashburns in the clubhouse or Breslins in the Chicago press corps. (Has any Sox player hailed any reporter yet the way Hall of Famer Cal Ripken, Jr. did when his Orioles opened 1988 with what proved to become a 21-game losing streak: "Join the hostages.")
In ’62, Stengel told his New York barber, “Haircut, shave, and don’t cut my throat, I may want to do that myself later.”
Sizemore won’t even think about cutting his own throat yet. But somebody might want to counsel him on the mullet. That may yet become a metaphor for Blight Sox baseball no matter how the team finishes off.
Even if they could have gone from Tuesday night onto a season-ending, expectation-defying, record-denying six-game winning streak. They’re halfway there. But the odds still favor their passing those ’62 Mets.
There’s a piece of any truly empathetic baseball fan that wishes that they’d continue to run the table with a closing sweep in Detroit, settling for a tie at 120.
No matter how truly bad White Sox baseball was for most of this season.
Jeff Kallman is an IBWAA Life Member who writes Throneberry Fields Forever. He has written for the Society for American Baseball Research, The Hardball Times, Sports-Central, and other publications. He has lived in Las Vegas since 2007, where he plays the guitar and writes music when not writing baseball. He remains a Met fan since the day they were born.
Jeff Kallman is an IBWAA Life Member who writes Throneberry Fields Forever. He has written for the Society for American Baseball Research, The Hardball Times, Sports-Central, and other publications. He has lived in Las Vegas since 2007, where he plays the guitar and writes music when not writing baseball. He remains a Met fan since the day they were born.
Cleaning Up
Almost 41, Max Scherzer Will Take Big Pay Cut To Keep Pitching
By Dan Schlossberg
Had Max Scherzer stayed healthy this season, the Texas Rangers might have been able to defend their unexpected world championship of 2023.
Sadly, that was not the case.
The veteran right-hander will finish this season on the injured list with a hamstring issue, certainly ending his season and probably ending the career with the club.
Free agency beckons and the three-time Cy Young Award winner figures to have plenty of suitors — even though he’ll turn 41 next July.
The oldest American Leaguer not named Justin Verlander, Scherzer made only nine starts this year, pitching 45 1/3 innings — the first time since his 2008 debut that he’s pitched less than 145 1/3 in an uninterrupted season. His average velocity was down to 92.6 mph and his record was 2-4 with a 3.95 ERA.
Injuries certainly interfered. He never fully recovered from off-season back surgery, then had nerve irritation on his throwing hand and triceps even before the hamstring started barking.
He says he wants to pitch next year but could wind up in St. Louis, his home town, or even with one of his former teams in Detroit, a sudden contender, or Washington, where a flock of talented youngsters seem ready to take flight.
An eight-time All-Star with three Cy Young trophies and two no-hitters on his resume and two World Series rings in his possession, Scherzer has more than 3,400 career strikeouts and is virtually certain to wind up in Cooperstown. The 6’3” right-hander has 216 lifetime victories but wants to fatten that total.
He’ll have to take a sizeable pay cut, however, as even Steve Cohen wouldn’t come close to repeating the $43.3 million per annum that lured him to Queens on a two-year deal. The Mets eventually traded him to Texas, paying the Rangers a hefty sum to assume that contract, with the Rangers sending blue-chip infield prospect Luisangel Acuna — a surprise September star this year — the other way.
Should Scherzer leave Texas, he would have recorded a 3.57 ERA in 88 1/3 innings during his time with the team.
He still sports a lifetime earned run average of 3.16, compiled during a 17-year career that spanned both leagues. Scherzer also has a 10.7 ratio of strikeouts to walks.
Former AP sportswriter Dan Schlossberg of Fair Lawn, NJ is the editor of the forthcoming Here’s The Pitch 2025, to be published Nov. 15. He covers baseball for many outlets, including forbes.com, Memories & Dreams, USA TODAY Sports Weekly, Sports Collectors Digest, and this newsletter (weekend editions). E.mail Dan via ballauthor@gmail.com.
Timeless Trivia: Acuña Brothers Make Big Impact
If not for Aaron Judge hitting an AL-record 62 home runs in 2022, Ohtani would probably win his fourth straight MVP award this season . . .
Acuña had been hoping to repeat but lost his chance when he tore his left ACL while running the bases in Pittsburgh May 26 . . .
In the interim, Acuña’s younger brother Luisangel has been a godsend to the Mets after star shortstop Francisco Lindor, an MVP candidate himself, was sidelined with a sore back earlier in September . . .
A third and younger Acuña brother, Bryan, is an infielder in the Minnesota Twins organization and reputed to be the best of the bunch . . .
There’s even a fourth brother, Kenny, who is not yet old enough to be drafted . . .
Dad Ronald Acuña, Sr. played in the minor leagues but never reached the majors.
Know Your Editors
HERE’S THE PITCH is published daily except Sundays and holidays. Benjamin Chase [gopherben@gmail.com] handles Monday and Tuesday editions, Elizabeth Muratore [nymfan97@gmail.com] does Wednesday and Thursday, and Dan Schlossberg [ballauthor@gmail.com] edits the weekend editions on Friday and Saturday. Readers are encouraged to contribute comments, articles, and letters to the editor. HTP reserves the right to edit for brevity, clarity, and good taste.