White Sox pitchers these days have to feel something like the cavalry riders of Lord Tennyson’s vivid description of the Charge of the Light Brigade: Galloping hopelessly into a unrepentant line of cannonfire (or Cannon-fire, in today’s case) knowing that offensive support is minimal and death is more or less certain.
The Kansas City Royals lineup isn’t exactly a valley of death these days, but the situation that Will Venable threw Jonathan Cannon into this afternoon might as well have been. Dating all the way back to his college days at Georgia, 116 of Cannon’s last 120 appearances have come as either a starting pitcher (111 games) or a bulk reliever (5 games). Yet, for reasons that may become clear in today’s postgame press conference but are not so to this author, Cannon was thrown into a two-on, one-out situation in the third inning of this afternoon’s game, despite his role as opener having been seemingly planned for the better part of a week now. To be sure, some of the blame for today’s chaos lies with Sean Newcomb, who failed to retire either of the lefties that he was brought in specifically to handle. Nonetheless, it felt to me like an abdication of a manager’s top priority as an authority figure: Put your players in a position to succeed. Point blank.
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The reason I’m saying this is to ask the question: Why the hell would you take a guy who’s only ever been a starter and instead of giving him a clean inning as he surely expected, stuff him into a pressure situation that he’s actually not all that well suited for? Cannon pitches to contact, for the most part — if it were the eighth inning, you wouldn’t think of bringing him on in the same situation, because it’s one that very clearly and obviously calls for bat-missing ability.
Thrown into an entirely unfamiliar situation, surely with the added pressure of trying to make good on a major league chance that he failed to win out of Spring Training, Cannon walked all three batters he faced before being removed from the game in what the White Sox later called a “right hip contusion.”
Yet, somehow, the White Sox actually won this game.
While Cannon’s struggles may have been a consequence of his unconventional usage, Venable got away with it partly because Grant Taylor was absolutely filthy in his fourth appearance as an opener. Excitingly, the powers-that-be in the Sox dugout let him get a second inning of work, leaving Taylor with two perfect innings on his final line.
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Less excitingly, the latter two of Cannon’s three walks resulted in runs scored, which leveled the game at two runs apiece not too long after the Sox had struck first with Tanner Murray’s first major league bomb, a towering fly ball that just kept carrying until it left the yard:
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The last two walks wound up giving the Royals a 3-2 advantage, but Brandon Eisert managed to work his way out of Cannon’s jam. One must give Eisert credit where it’s due: Dropping back down to the minors after a full year spent putting up a very acceptable league average ERA in the bigs has to be tough psychologically, and Eisert responded admirably to his number being called for the first time this year.
The back-and-forth carried on for virtually the entire game. The Cannon sequence was highly discouraging, but it didn’t take long for the Sox to pick their spirits up again when Colson Montgomery found a barrel on a hanging breaking ball and turned a 3-2 deficit into a 4-3 Sox lead:
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Unfortunately, Eisert’s second inning out of the pen didn’t go quite as well as his initial relief of Cannon. After the lefty allowed two runners to reach base in the fifth inning, Jordan Hicks came on and came this close to holding the lead before Bobby Witt Jr. did what Bobby Witt Jr. does and gave the Royals a 5-4 lead:
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Apropos of nothing, when was the last time you saw not one but both teams walk in a run in the same inning? I couldn’t tell you myself, but it did happen today when John Schreiber and Daniel Lynch IV couldn’t quite find the zone enough to hold Kansas City’s lead, with the tally that would ultimately be the game-winner scoring on a White Sox-esque wild pitch:
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Meanwhile, after Hicks allowed Eisert’s runners to score, the Sox bullpen put up an incredibly game effort in holding on to a hair’s-breadth lead, with Bryan Hudson, Jordan Leasure, Lucas Sims and Seranthony Domínguez fully shutting down the Royals offense, none of them allowing a single hit in salvaging the split for the South Siders.
Given the Kauffman Stadium losing streak (12 games!) the White Sox entered this series with, a split doesn’t seem like such a terribly bad outcome after all. Last year’s Sox team didn’t win their sixth game until April 24. In 2024, it took until April 28. It was April 15th in 2023. Progress is being made! We think, at least.
The squad gets the day off tomorrow as they travel back to Chicago for a brief three-game homestand against the Tampa Bay Rays. The next first pitch — and the first pitch of Noah Schultz’s MLB career — comes on Tuesday at 6:40 p.m. Central time, and we’ll see you there!
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