HOUSTON — A baseball season is made up of hundreds of days and thousands of moments that don’t have to mean much of anything on their own. Asked how he managed to turn around a slow start that had his OPS south of .500 on May 15, White Sox left fielder AJ Pollock gave the same kind of thousand-yard stare of an answer as at the height of his struggles.
“It just doesn’t change,” said Pollock, whose seven-game multi-hit streak ended Friday night, but he still had three hard-hit balls and a three-run homer. “You just concentrate on what you’ve got to do. When you stink, people are going to talk about it. And when you’re good, people are going to talk about it. But your job is just to keep working, keep doing the stuff you think is a long-term solution.”
And so this Astros series, Friday night’s 13-3 loss (the White Sox’s seventh-straight defeat at Minute Maid Park) and the garish 10-run bottom of the sixth inning that drove it home, don’t have to mean a ton for the 30-32 White Sox. The vast majority of manager Tony La Russa’s pregame briefing was consumed with updates on injured core players like Tim Anderson, Eloy Jiménez and Yasmani Grandal, and a good chunk of the postgame was about the right hamstring that Yoán Moncada tweaked in the second inning. Any charitable interpretation of the first 62 White Sox games of 2022 is that they are still moving toward the type of team they want to be, the level of play they can achieve, the roster they would like to field. Yardstick series, like three games at the home park of the defending American League champs, are tempting to write about but are also measuring a moving target.
It’s just that last June’s midsummer thumping in Houston (a four-game sweep that began a year ago to the day) contained a lot of prescient information for the White Sox’s emphatic ALDS defeat in October. The defensive execution was a cut below that of the Astros last June, very much so last October, and the sixth inning spiraled not long after Andrew Vaughn’s throw through to third got away and forced home the first of 10 runs. Lance McCullers’ endless array of chase pitches was an abysmal matchup for the Sox lineup when they first faced him last season, again in Chicago the following month, and twice in the ALDS. He’s injured presently, but in left-handed Framber Valdez holding the Sox to just that Pollock homer in six innings, the Sox spurned their most favorable pitching matchup of the weekend; at least from an offensive perspective. For their lineup, any left-handed opposing starter is vulnerable and also a sacred opportunity.
“We were swinging it pretty well, we were able to come back into the ballgame, tie it up 3-3,” said catcher Seby Zavala, who had two hits, a run scored and was a Yordan Alvarez outfield assist away from an RBI. “And that long inning kind of took the energy out of us. It’s kind of hard to come out swinging with energy after you’re on the field for 20-30 minutes.”
AJ POLLOCK! CLUTCH! pic.twitter.com/L1fmj8FBBD
— Chicago White Sox (@whitesox) June 18, 2022
Perhaps a better summary of where the Sox sit as this June’s trip to Texas finds them is that there’s nothing this weekend can tell you that you don’t already know. Not much has changed because the White Sox have not yet replicated their 2021 form, even with signs of edging closer this week in Detroit, let alone taken the step forward prescribed after last October’s defeat. It was clearly ill-advised last June to judge a Sox offensive attack that was slotting Brian Goodwin and Yermín Mercedes in the middle of the order, but a year later the idea of the Sox lineup missing bodies and missing stars no longer scans as a temporary challenge.
Anderson returns Monday, but Jiménez probably won’t play another rehab game until then, and with Moncada and Grandal both troubled by their hamstrings, the Sox are geared to face Justin Verlander and Cristian Javier with backup catcher Reese McGuire and utilityman Leury García serving as the only left-handed presences in their batting order. That will be an issue when the Blue Jays welcome them back to Chicago next week too.
Last June, no Sox starter other than some fellow named Carlos Rodón could subdue the Houston lineup three turns through the order, and the only thing that changed in October was that Rodón’s stamina had diminished. Lucas Giolito flattened the Astros last July, in perhaps his best outing of the season. And he’s pitched a nine-inning shutout in this same building three years ago, in one of the better performances of his life. It was already apparent before the Astros lit him up for eight runs before he could record an out in the sixth, but Giolito is not right.
“This is pretty god-awful,” said Giolito, who has a 6.54 ERA in six starts since returning from the COVID injured list. “I need to execute pitches. That’s really it. I don’t have a lot of analysis. I just need to be better, that’s it.”
Giolito has some mechanical adjustments he’s been working on, and saw the fruits of Friday night in isolated components. As he had hoped for in spring training, Giolito sat 94 mph all night with his fastball and hit 96 mph at points. But it was rendered irrelevant by poor location, and in a manner that has gone against the trends of his entire career, his sharpness and command wavered after his first 65 pitches rather than settled in, and he lost control of his changeup, his most trusted offering, as the sixth inning spiraled on him.
“I have an idea,” Giolito said of what went wrong. “There’s obviously improvements to be made. But I have confidence in myself, so I need to keep grinding. I felt like with the mechanical stuff, today was a step in the right direction. When it comes to actually pitching and executing, I need to be better.”
The Sox Opening Day starter was reticent to talk about his incremental progress toward improvement because the present results are so unacceptable. But that is where he is, and ideally to a lesser degree, that is where the White Sox are, as their notes of offensive progress in June are met with even more mounting injuries. It could be where they remain this weekend.
“It’s a lot of the work you put in,” said Pollock, who as of Friday night has climbed all the way back to league-average offense. “It doesn’t just click. It doesn’t just happen in one day.”
(Photo of AJ Pollock: Thomas B. Shea / USA Today)