Those who believe managers don’t win or lose games, players do, clip and save this recap.
In a move we would have thought cordoned off in the Terry Bevington Hall of Shame, manager Will Venable triggered a puzzling chain of circumstances that saw starting pitcher Noah Schultz bounced from his Friday night start after just one out, 23 pitches — and no fault of his own:
Just one batter after pitching coach Zach Bove had trotted out to the mound to settle Schultz down after hitting Jo Adell with a pitch,
Venable did same after Schultz surrendered a two-run single to soft-swinging Angel Martínez.
Oops.
While perhaps not on par with Bevington calling to the bullpen without having gotten a reliever up warming, Venable’s boner resulted, by rule, in Schultz being forced to leave the game. Given the gaffe, it had the effect of an injury substitution, in that just-recalled reliever David Sandlin was sprinting to get warm and enter the game, as no White Sox hurler was warming with the game just 23 pitches old.
At another point in the game, or in another circumstance, perhaps Venable’s boo-boo would not have crushed so hard. But in the fumes of a sweep in Boston, with last night’s loss wiping out the bullpen (seven of the team’s eight relievers were used, covering 8 ⅓ innings), it could not possibly have been timed more poorly.
But was this loss all on Venable? Of course not, the players still have to play the game, even if they landed in Chicago at 5 a.m. and grabbed only snatches of sleep before suiting back up on Friday.
Usually when a team puts up eight runs or more in a game and wins by a hefty margin, it’s due to the whole team contributing. There are the rare occasions where a player takes over a game by himself, but that’s usually reserved for the Shohei Ohtani’s of the world. Unfortunately the White Sox were on the tail end of one of the most rare and sad butt-whooping’s a team can have: They got spanked by a nobody.
No disrespect to Martínez, but he’s hit .228 over 861 at-bats in his short career. He is not a player teams ever game plan for or fear — but that might change after what Martínez did to the White Sox on Friday night.
Of course, it all started in the first inning, when the Cleveland Guardians loaded the bases before Schultz could even get two outs. After a first strike, Schultz decided to try to slip a cutter by Martínez ,right down the middle. Even a player who can’t hit .230 can do something with that ,and his two-run single put the Guardians up, 2-0.
For the next few innings, the game was pretty boring if we’re being honest with ourselves. Unfortunately, the game was also clearly too boring for Sandlin who after being rushed in for Schultz had sat down 12-of-14 Guards to restore order to the contest. That is, until he loaded that bases in the fifth inning for … Martínez. Surely he couldn’t do it again, right?
Wrong.
Sandlin saw Schultz’s cutter down the middle bring in two runs for Cleveland in the first and wanted to see if it was a fluke or not. So the righty decided to throw one of his own, just to see which cutter down the middle was better. All fans in attendance found out pretty quickly that Schultz’s was superior, as Martínez, tonight’s Angel of Death, took the pitch 422 feet to right-center field. The bat flip that ensued was cool, and the sassing of Sox catcher Edgar Quero probably turns on the most yahoo of Wahoos fans, but the game being unofficially ended in the fifth inning was not:
When the dust settled from the seams getting knocked off the baseball, Martínez had just two hits on the night — but they were two big ones, as he brought six runs home all by himself. Both teams struck for a run in the sixth, but the game was already over at that point.
While the loss is just one loss, with Minnesota and Cleveland (obviously) also winning, this seems much bigger than that. We may be in the early stages of August, but if the White Sox fail to answer the call this weekend, the alarm bells may be going off sooner rather than later.
MVP
Braden Montgomery: 2-for-3, BB, R, RBI, K
Runners-Up
Trevor Richards: 2 ⅓ IP
Erick Fedde: IP, K
Munetaka Murakami: 1-for-4, HR, R, RBI
Luisangel Acuña: 2-for-4, K
Cold Cat
Will Venable: Little League managerial error that wasted Noah Schultz and put needless wear on his pen
Runners-Up
Noah Schultz: ⅓ IP, 3 H, 2 ER, K, HB, LOSS (3-9)
Colson Montgomery: 0-for-4, 3 K
Chase Meidroth: 1-for-5, 2 K
Brenton Doyle: 0-for-4, K
